I. 
On the Run

	“Dhiaoc, wake up!”
	My head flew up, striking the curved boards behind it with a painful thunk. “Damn it, Aine--”
	“You have to get on deck, they need you, it’s an emergency--”
	Just as I was getting to my feet the floor lurched and sent me sprawling on my stomach toward the other side of the hold. Fortunately whatever cargo I’d landed on was soft--fabric or something like that. Could have been worse.
	“It’s always an emergency,” I grumbled, disentangling myself from the bales and finally achieving verticality. “I keep telling them I can’t do anything about the weather. I wish I thurking could.”
	“It’s worse than that,” Aine shouted, groping back toward the ladder. I grabbed my light globe and followed her. From the motion of the boat’s hull, which until a few moments ago I had had the misfortune to be trying to sleep in, I could tell that once again we were making our way through a storm. 
	“See if I ever get back on the ocean again,” I muttered darkly.
	“It’s not the ocean, dhiaoc. It’s just the river.”
	“Well, it feels like the ocean.”
	“I know,” Aine said, grabbing the ladder. “But that’s what I’m saying, dhiaoc, this isn’t normal.”
	Aine shinnied up the ladder as if she were walking across a meadow; it took me a little longer to drag myself ungracefully up to the hatch, where I was greeted by a faceful of river water flying across the deck and into me.
	Another violent pitch nearly tumbled me back into the hold, but I had learned a few things in the past week or so. I eventually got myself up onto the deck and almost into an upright position. The thing was slanting too badly to make me feel safe standing all the way up.
	“Look!” Aine shouted, pointing upward. 
I looked.
	That it was raining buckets, or that there was lightning and thunder even though it was too early in the season for it, didn’t surprise me. I was used to that. It was the masthead being on fire that was new.
	“So what about it, shriia?” Fili, the captain, appeared at my elbow, rain slicking his hair down against his skull and running in streams off his oilskin. “Anything you can do about this?” 
Considering the situation, he was remarkably calm; even his usual lack of tact had a businesslike and dispassionate quality to it. 
“The fire I can put out,” I said. “The trick will be getting up there.”
	“Better hurry,” he said. “It’s spreading.”
	Fili headed toward the bow to direct the rest of his three-man crew. And there I stood, staring up through the rigging at the top of the boat’s single mast, around which a sputtering halo of orange flame was churning against a black and dripping sky. Above the patter of the rain and the shouts of the sailors I could hear the creak of the ropes as the boat pitched on the water and the top of the mast swung violently through the air.
	“Thurk ME,” I said. 
	I unpinned my undone hreapa, which I’d had wrapped around me for warmth, and handed it to Aine. “Don’t let this go overboard.”
	“Dhiaoc, be careful,” she cried as I approached the mast. “It’s not like climbing a tree--it’s dangerous--”
	“I know,” I called back. “But I got these poor bastards into this, and now I have to get them out of it.”
	I’d been watching the sailors do this, so I had some idea of where to start. But it was a lot harder than it looked. My arms are fairly strong, but my body’s not a feather, and even if the mast had been standing still it would have been an effort. With the boat swaying like a twig in a river it was much harder. And the ropes looked sort of ladderlike when the crew was swarming all over them, but under my feet and hands they suddenly turned into a net bent on ensnaring and strangling me. It wasn’t a very big boat--the mast was only thirty or forty feet up, and the rigging was simple enough with the two main sails and the little jib up front. But after about ten feet, the boat zigged when I zagged, and my foot came down on nothing. 
	My hands tightened convulsively around the ropes they were clinging to as the rest of me swung out over the open water. For an instant I enjoyed the sensation of flight, which would have been more enjoyable if I hadn’t also been enjoying total body-freezing panic. And then my body slammed back into the network of ropes, around which I wrapped my legs. 
	I thought I’d be all right to go on after a moment, but I wasn’t. Looking down made me nauseous; looking up paralyzed me with fear; and every nerve in my body was telling me that if I moved either of my hands or my feet it would be my last action in this mortal world. I opened my link to Aine, who I could see through the ropes and the rain looking up anxiously at my swaying form.
	<Aine.>
	<Dhiaoc, are you all right?>
	<No. You’re going to have to get me up there.>
	<What?>
	<You sail, you know how to do this. Project into me and get me up there.>
	<But--I--dhiaoc-->
	<Just like we practiced in tutorial. Come on, I know you can do it.>
	<But supposing I drop you?>
	<Supposing you don’t?> She was still terrified at the prospect. <Look, the chances of you screwing up and causing me to plummet to my death are a lot lower than the chances of me screwing up and falling right off this mast. So get cracking.>
	<All...all right, dhiaoc.>
	I dropped the barriers, as well as I could while I was still focused on clinging for dear life to the ropes I was crawling on. I felt the link deepen and spread, and her energy radiating through me, down into my arms and legs. <Have you got me?>
	<I...I think so.>
	<Try moving me.>
	One of my hands unwrapped itself from its grip and clenched again around one of the upper rungs of what was starting, gradually, to seem more like a ladder.
	<So far so good.>
	<Don’t look down, dhiaoc.>
	I looked up. Slowly at first, and then with more assurance and speed, my body began to move toward it.
	It’s strange having someone else move your body. It’s not like with a possession--there isn’t that sense of being cut off, frozen into a corner of your mind and paralyzed behind some kind of glass wall. You’re still looking out through your own eyes, and you know that your body is still there for you, should you want to use it. But at the moment I didn’t. I was trying, as hard as I could, to relax and do nothing, and forget that I was actually still living inside this thing that was climbing without my telling it to toward the snapping, smoking flames trailing in tatters off the end of that spar.
	<It’s getting hot, dhiaoc.>
	<I know. We need to be closer.>
	<How close do you--FNAA!>
	I felt my whole body tighten as the ropes suddenly gave way underneath me, then tautened again with a jerk. I was still looking up, but I’d been working so hard at not caring what happened that it was a moment before I realized that the flames had finally gotten down to the ends of the rigging, and one of the ropes had burnt through. The others were still attached, but they wouldn’t be for long; and once they went, the whole net would fly into the river (if I was lucky) or  more likely onto the deck below.
	<Dhiaoc, what do I do? What do I do?>
	<You’re asking me?>
	<You’ve got to get off, the thing’s going to-->
	<Well get me over to the mast, then, I’ll climb up that. There’s cleats.>
	It was, of course, easier said than done--but Aine had panic on her side, and it wasn’t long at all before I’d spidered over to the edge and was dangling off the ropes with the mast just out of arm’s reach.
	<Come on, Aine, jump.>
	<I can’t.>
	<You can do it, Aine.>
	<I can’t. What if you fall?>
	<Trust yourself, Aine. I trust you.>
	There was a pause. <You really mean it?>
	<For Idair’s sake, Aine, of all the stupid questions-->
	Without waiting for me to finish, she flung me through the air at the mast, which my arms wrapped around as my lower body smacked into it.
	<OW!>	<Just remember, Aine,> I sent, as my feet found the cleats and I was once again moving upward. <This hurts me more than it hurts you.>
	The heat was palpable now, as I hung there just under what had at one time been the lookout’s nest. It was just a skeleton of charred wood now, which would break if I tried to grab onto it. The fire had already made a black, ashen ruin out of the top of the mast and was working its way smokily down to where I was hanging. The rain was retarding its progress somewhat, but I still wouldn’t have long before the ropes burnt through or the sails caught.
	<Well.> I looked up. <Now the unfortunate thing is, I’m going to need my hands free.>
	<You can’t hold on with just your legs,> Aine replied. <Tie yourself with something.>
	<Such as?>
	She thought for a moment. <I’ll throw you up a rope.> My head turned as she looked behind her for one.
	<BACK OUT FIRST!>	<Sorry!> I took control over my body as she withdrew into the speech link. It was lucky I’d reminded her; her next move was to go trotting up the deck toward a rope coiled up inside a barrel, and I might well have gone trotting off with her into thin air. Her differentiation still wasn’t good enough to have her doing two things this complicated at the same time.
	Which left me clinging to the mast under my own power while she sorted things out down there. To keep my mind off the various other problems, I started assessing the fire situation. It wasn’t all that big; hot enough to the touch, but not white-heat like you get at the hearts of some conflagrations. This was just ordinary burning wood, and it wouldn’t have been at all worrying, if only I hadn’t been trying to do this thirty feet in the air during a thunderstorm on a river that was behaving for all the world like the breakers off Naucht Point.
	<Got the rope.>
	<Toss it up here,> I said, gingerly letting go with one hand.
	She had to try it a few times, but eventually I was able to grab the end as it swung past me. <Got it. Now, I’ll bet money you’re better at knots than I am, so...>
	Aine was already working on it. In a moment she was back in business, passing the rope around my waist and tying the knot behind the mast with confidence and speed. <Sound as a bell, dhiaoc.>
	<Back on out then. Keep the vision link open, though, you should see how this is done.>
	I was back in charge. That didn’t make me feel a whole lot better.
	I lifted my hands off the mast, pulling my own fire out of them. And then I stuck both of them into the hottest part of the flame.
	No matter how many times you’ve done this, it’s hard not to flinch. There’s something very counterintuitive about shoving your poor flesh into the middle of a roaring flame--even when you know, as I do, that your fire will protect it. And it did; the flames swarmed over my hands, but they couldn’t get through my own fire to the flesh. As they ran up my arms my own fire beat them to it, so that within a few moments I looked as if I had on a pair of elbow-length orange-red and very angry gloves.
	I lifted my hands out of the fire and held them stiffly out from my sides, away from my body and pointing down to the water on either side of the ship. I’d have to do it carefully to make sure I didn’t hit the boat, but that wouldn’t be a problem. Fire is the one thing I can throw with deadly accuracy.
	The fire shot in an arc from each of my hands, sizzling through the wet air onto the dark surface of the river. Before it had hissed out in the water I had my hands back in the flame collecting another spurt. You have to do this quick, so that the fire doesn’t have time to spread. Otherwise, you can get stuck drawing and firing and drawing and firing without ever making the thing smaller. But if you get your hands back in there before the fire’s had time to find more fuel, you diminish the flame with every draw. Until finally you’re looking at nothing but coals, glowing red through the streaks of ash.
	“Look alive out there!”
	It was Fili, shouting at Manaan, who was staring up at me as I shot another two fistfuls of fire off the mast and into the water. His eyes followed the flames as they fell like falling stars through the driving rain. And Fili was right, we’d all be a lot better off if Manaan and Kimin and their boy of all trades, who usually saw to the cooking and the cargo but was now pressed into service baling water off the deck as it sloshed in, stopped watching this performance and paid attention to working the boat.
	“Sweet Iandar’s trousers!” shouted Kimin, who was at the tiller.
	I didn’t look down, but I knew what he was probably reacting to. The fire I was drawing off the mast would go out as soon as it hit the water; but the shri fire I’d used to draw it wouldn’t. So by now, there must be half a dozen little balls of fire bobbing in our wake, floating along on the surface of the river. It’s a strange thing to see a river burn--or what looks like a river burning. Especially if you’re not used to it.
	Losing that much fire was taking its toll on me; I could feel my strength weakening with each draw. Fortunately the fire was now out, aside from that glowing red core of coals above me. This was the more complicated part. Instead of drawing this last remnant, I would have to settle it--put the fire back into the matter it had burst out of. And that would take a while.
	I won’t bore you with the details; it’s a matter of technique and perseverance, and it’s not exciting even when you’re doing it. The drama of firefighting is all in those first few minutes. But this, the tedious part, is also the most important; if you don’t do it right, the fire will just break out again. And it is gratifying, at the end, to see the red turn back into brown, and the coals become the splinters and spars they once had been. The lookout’s nest was, of course, toast. But aside from that one rope, the rigging was more or less intact; and it hadn’t caught on the sails. It was out; and it hadn’t done any permanent harm.
	<Idair and Cailte, Aine, I think we’re through here.>
	<And the rain’s stopping...I think.>
	I couldn’t tell whether the raindrops were pelting me any less frequently than before, but at least it wasn’t thundering. I untied the rope, and with Aine’s help began my shaking descent to the deck.
	Aine waited until I was actually standing with my feet on the planks before withdrawing. When she did, I felt my legs suddenly waver under me. It seemed like it took almost as long to stagger out to the taffrail as it had to get down from the mast. I stood next to Kimin, whose eyes were still on the trail of floating lights I’d left along the river behind us.
	“Shriia?”
	He had been going to ask me something, but the look on my face stopped him. 
	“Shriia, are you all right?”
	I sighed, leaning shakily on the rail.
	With his eyes still on me, I spent a few moments collecting my strength. Then I stretched my hands out back over the expanse of water that was snaking into the distance behind us.
	“Mo linn agam!”
	Fourteen balls of fire shot through air, darkness and falling rain over the taffrail and into me.
	The shock knocked me back onto the boards. Kimin looked as if he would like to help me up, but he was afraid to let go of the tiller, and I couldn’t blame him. The water was still heaving, even though the storm was finally, definitively, abating.
	I lurched back to the mast to see how Aine was doing. She was exhausted too, leaning back against one of the omnipresent barrels and taking long breaths.
	“You all right?”
	She nodded.
	“Thanks, Aine. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
	Still too winded to speak, she looked up at the sails above us. She’d been acting the whole thing out with me--feeling it less than I was, of course, but enough to take a lot out of her. And the added fear of doing something wrong and sending her diaoc to either a watery or a splintery death must have made matters worse.
	Pushing myself up against the foot of the mast, I decided it was time to make a few calls.
	<Harani.>
	<Theamh? Is it you? I can hardly read you.>
	<Yes, it’s me. Sorry the signal’s weak, it’s a long way and I’m tired.>
	<Uh oh.>
	<You can see it coming, can’t you?>
	<I can’t see anything coming, Theamh.>
	<You know what I mean...>
	<Well, go ahead and give me your location.>
	<Not sure exactly, but we passed the Turned Corner this morning, so we should be well into central Amst.>
	<And you’ve had...?>
	<Another storm--with lightning. Struck the mast, as a matter of fact; I was just up there putting it out.>
	There was an amused pause. <Now that’s the kind of thing that makes me miss vision, Theamh. I’d have given a lot to see that.>
	<It was certainly a performance.>
	<Was Aine laughing her head off?>
	<Not really--she was the one moving me.>
	<Whoa. Talk about your trust-building experiences.>
	<Anyhow-->
	<Anyhow, it’s the same answer, Theamh--no, that’s not normal weather, not for that region and this time of year. There shouldn’t be thunder here, even, for another couple of months; to have it rolling around up in Amst is really wrong.>
	<So something is rotten in Rainmaking, after all.>
	<Sadly, yes.>
	<And you’re no closer to finding out who it is.>
	<It’s a lot more complicated than you’d think, Theamh.>
	<All you’d have to do is touch her-->
	<You can’t just go around touch-testing everyone you work with. It’d create a huge stir, and there are enough rumors flying around the City anyhow. I can tell you a few folks who aren’t on the dark side, but...>
	<How are things down there?>
	<Business as usual, to the casual observer. I’ll tell you, though, I’m worried about Slythe. She wasn’t built for this kind of strain.>
	<You think Barant’s figured out we turned her?>
	<I have no idea what Barant’s figured out. That’s one hard woman to read.>
	<So is Slythe still...>
	<She’s still running errands for Barant, and reporting them to Morat. So far Morat’s been afraid to try to stop anything--soon as Barant figures out she’s being contravened, it’ll be a split second before she knows by who. No wonder the poor woman’s worn to a shadow.>
	<And what about the election?>
	<Morat’s standing against Barant. With the two of them in it there were no other nominations. Of course everyone on our side who knows what’s up will vote for Morat, and all of Barant’s little minions will vote for Barant. But the others--well, you know how they are; Barant makes friends, and Morat doesn’t. I was talking to Pridh the other day and she said the word among the scoili is-->
	I had to head her off; if you got Harani started reporting gossip it could take you all week to be done listening. <Listen, Harani, about this weather-->
	<Oh, of course, what do you care about any of us small fry when you’re off on your Big Giant Quest to do battle with the Dark One?>
	<Harani-->
	<I’m joking, I’m joking. Theamh, I can only really tell you one thing that’s any use and you’re not going to want to hear it.>
	<Tell me anyhow.>
	<Rainmaking is local work. You can’t change weather in central Amst from an apartment in the City; you need to be there on the land and in the air.>
	<So you’re saying...>
	<Whoever’s doing this is somewhere in Amst. Probably not too far from where you are.>
	<Which means we have corruption at the provincial level.>
	<They said you were smart.>
	<Unless it’s a dark user doing this.>
	<Theamh...it’s definitely a dark user. The only question is whether this dark user is also in the Order.>
	<I keep forgetting.>
	<If you were here, you wouldn’t.>
	I could feel the anxiety under the mask of humor. Harani was good at hiding her feelings; she’d learned it early, when her sight had started to fail her. But this catastrophe was worrying at her as it was worrying at Lilea and Morat and Dalen and Slythe and Eunem and Cualha and everyone else who knew that things had gone wrong at the heart of the Order. To be trying to conceal your knowledge, when your vows require you to tell the truth at all times and in all places, is an excruciating thing. Someone was going to snap, soon, and then things would start heading toward confrontation and conflagration. And I didn’t want that to happen when I was stuck over the border and couldn’t do anything to help.
	<Take care of yourself, Harani. Watch your back.>
	<Watch your own.>
	I closed the link. The rain had finally ended; the stars were appearing timidly through rents in the breaking clouds, and the mood on deck was significantly more lighthearted. Kimin and the boy were already up working on the masthead, with much less hesitation and much more agility than I had. And Aine was looking more like herself and less like a wraith.
	“Who was that, dhiaoc?” she asked.
	“Harani.”
	Aine nodded. “Is it what you thought?”
	“I think it must be.” I sighed. “We can’t go on like this. It’s not fair to them.”
	She seemed to agree with me, much as I knew she hated the thought of doing this journey overland. “You’re right, dhiaoc.”
	“I’m going to go talk to Fili.” I heaved myself to my feet. “I’m sure he’ll be thrilled.”
	Fili had never been keen on taking us on board in the first place. There was the usual resentment about our not being paying customers, plus the additional personal dislike he had conceived for me when I failed to save his wife during the Long Slow Burning four years back. He’d said he was over it, and that he owed me the favor for trying, but I could tell he was still angry. I blamed myself too, even though I knew that it was just a case of bad timing. His wife had been afflicted early, before I knew what was causing it. By the time I’d worked out a way to heal the victims, she was already too far gone; and it burnt his heart out to see men and women who were much sicker than she’d been when I got there recover when it was too late for her.
	But he’d taken us on, because Manaan had talked him into it. Manaan was from Cacht, originally, where his father had the misfortune to be one of the thralled. Him, I’d fixed up right as rain along with the rest of the victims, so Manaan’s feelings about me were much less ambivalent. He and Kimin both had been pleased to have us, since we’re thought to bring good luck, and sailors, as Aine told me, are a superstitious lot. But once we’d gotten out of the Vicinity, we’d brought them nothing but bad. Rough weather, turbulent water, and now a lightning fire. 
	“Fili?”
	He turned around from whatever he was attending to by the bowsprit. “Thanks for putting it out, shriia. You’ve saved us a lot of bother doing that.”
	“Yes, and I’m about to save you more,” I said, looking into his hard blue eyes. “I want you to put us ashore at the next possible opportunity.”
	His face didn’t change, but he didn’t give the response I’d expected. “But you’re a long way yet from Amranth, shriia.”
	“I know, but we can’t stay here. We’re bringing danger to you.”
	From under his light yellow eyebrows that keen stare fixed me. “So that’s where this weather came from.”
	“I wasn’t sure of it before, but I am now. Once you put us off this boat, it’ll be smooth sailing for you.”
	“And a hard road for you,” he answered.
	“I can’t deny it,” I said. “But it’s only right. You didn’t ask for this.”
	He was watching me, and I wasn’t sure he couldn’t read me. I don’t mask very well, unless I’m trying. But if he was, I couldn’t have told you what he was reading to make him change his mind. And yet there wasn’t the same anger and mistrust on his face that I’d seen before.
	“Someone’s chasing you?” he asked.
	“Yes.”
	“Someone dark.”
	“Yes.”
	“So if we put you ashore,” he said. “Won’t that be serving the Dark One?”
	“I--I don’t know, Fili, all I know is it’s already taken you twice as long to do this leg of the journey as you thought it would, and while I’m on this boat you’ll be lucky if it doesn’t get worse.”
	He considered this for what seemed like a long time.
	“We’ll take you to Amranth.”
	“Fili--”
	“I heard the story,” he said. “I don’t waste time listening to the repeaters, but Manaan does. He’s got the whole thing down--how you found the boy, and how they rewarded you for your pains.”
	I waited to see where he was going with this.
	“Have to say I didn’t hold with any of that conspiracy stuff. It seemed like there’d have to be some simpler explanation.” He looked up at the stars, now burning bright above the mast as if nothing had ever happened. “But it’s clear someone or something else thinks you’re right. And I’m thinking if you’re right, you better get up there.”
	“But you’re risking the lives of your crew, your boat, your cargo--”
	“The boys are with you to the end, shriia.” He was clearly, as far as he was concerned, approaching the end of this conversation. “If what you say is true, this is a fight for every man, woman and child to be in.” He nodded, convinced himself and sure he’d convinced me. “We’ll take you to Amranth.”
	“If you’re sure,” I said, reluctantly.
	“Sure.”
	“All right then,” I said. And, as it occurred to me, “Thank you.”
	Without acknowledging me, he went to help Manaan with the rigging. I stumbled back to Aine. The deck was still rising and falling like the ribs of a sleeping giant.
	“Here,” Aine said, handing me my hreapa.
	I looked to the east. Sure enough, it was getting lighter.
	“Well,” I said, “at least there’s plenty of water within easy reach--” There was a crunch behind me as a chunk of charred wood fell from above. “And plenty of ash.”
	“Idair’s ways are mysterious,” Aine answered, with a bit of a smile.
	The sense of humor was coming along nicely. And she’d just proved to me that her projection abilities were now up to the professional standard. She was getting closer; and she’d learn a lot on this trip, whatever else happened. Probably we’d be ready to start her hreapa by the time we got back. Assuming either of us survived.

	In the broad, bright sunlight of afternoon, that seemed much more likely. I always felt better in hreapa than out of it; I’d sleep in the thing if I could, especially on trips like this. And the rain had cleared up, and didn’t seem to plan on coming back; the sky was bright blue with inoffensive puffy little clouds dotting it here and there. Either we’d finally left the jurisdiction of whatever traitor was working against me, or she’d simply thought of a better way to get to me. I was amusing myself by thinking about what it could be as we slipped down the river between ranks of trees. Here, the banks sloped too steeply to make them useful as farmland, and the forest had been allowed to stand thick and undisturbed. Now and then we’d see signs of human habitation--a boat moored to a post stuck into the bank, the smoke of a chimney rising off in the distance--but that happened less and less often as we moved further in. The more southerly forests are mostly tilu; it’s a wood much prized by builders, so there’s more commerce, and the people who live there build houses and form villages. On the first leg of the journey, hardly a day passed when we didn’t see a crew out there, disentangling a fallen trunk from the undergrowth and loading it onto a sledge. But up here, where it was colder, it started to be more oak, which is less profitable. Tilus grow fast; the trees we were sailing through were probably only a hundred years old or so, but they looked as if they’d been there since the dawn of time, and saplings that had been planted at my birth were already tall enough to shade houses. Oaks take so long to grow that the forest dwellers don’t have the heart to cut them; there are folk tales about terrible revenge taken on people who have. I don’t believe them, myself. Geniuses, sure; they’re placid enough if you treat them well, but when a river fights its users, it’s not pretty. But even supposing trees have geniuses too--and why shouldn’t they, really--what could they do? A tree can’t uproot itself and stomp out to a woodcutter’s house with an ax, especially if it’s already been cut down. Idair did say that all things are possible, but that’s something I’ve always found hard to imagine.
	But then the forest I lived in wasn’t like this. At night the woods around my clearing were dark enough and forbidding enough. But there was something different about these trees. They were bigger, and knottier, with longer arms thrusting their dark fingers into the sky above us, thick with leaves that looked as if they had never sprouted and would never turn--as if they were eternal, as if they’d always nodded from the same branches and always would. More than that, though, there was a different quality to the light and air between and among them. A sense of--I wouldn’t go far enough to call it personality. History, maybe, is a better way to put it. The residue of presence, like a scent lingering in the air after someone’s been and gone. These were trees that had seen things.
	Not that the tilu forests down south hadn’t. But the City had only existed for a few hundred years. When the provinces first formalized the federation, they created the City from--more or less--scratch, intending it to be common ground. The Vicinity is still a strange place that way--it isn’t, properly speaking, a province, and loyalties are a little less specific and a little less fierce. People will tell you that they chose the site for the City because that was where Idair first appeared. That, of course, is a lie; the City is where it is because it’s where the five provinces come together. We don’t know where Idair appeared. Because you can never be certain sure, we could never endorse one spot over another as the “real” place. So it’s not worth the time and effort to try to guess.
	It seemed to me, as I looked into those trees, that she might well have turned up among them. The place seemed dark enough. I could imagine, if I lived here, regularly getting to the point where I might start arguing with the powers that be, even if I was unclear as to exactly what those powers were. And that was what brought her here, in the beginning--someone, or maybe more than one, of her children demanding to know why the world had been made so badly, with pain and death and fear and misery lurking in every corner. And she’d come to us to try to explain. And found out, as her children found out, that an explanation will only carry you so far, that when it really counts what you need to be armed with is not a theory but burning and, if necessary, blind faith, and the courage and love to carry it forward.
	A thudding sound above my head interrupted my daydream. The sails, which had been straining full-bellied from their spars, were starting to flap lethargically in the waning breeze. Aine, who was running around near the tiller with Manaan doing something useful, was already looking up at the mast, apprehensively.
	“Ah, the wind’s a fickle bitch,” Kimin called out, mounting the rigging to adjust the sails. Manaan laughed; Aine didn’t. After a moment a thought seemed to strike him and he looked down at me, apologetic. “Beg your pardon, shriia--”
	“Please,” I said, sitting down against the gunwale. “I’ve said worse.”
	Only partly reassured, Kimin turned back to his work. It’s hard for people to get used to me. Aine, who was now finished with whatever task she’d been accomplishing, came to sit near me.
	“Well, we wanted it quieter,” she said.
	“And now that’s what we have,” I answered.
	We watched for a while as the sails flapped less and less vigorously.
	“The Tsraid runs north-south,” Aine volunteered. “The current’s against us.”
	“I know that much,” I said.
	“Don’t worry, shriia,” Manaan called cheerfully. “She does this to us sometimes. We’ve got oars.”
	I sighed.
	“You think it’s more...more of the same?” Aine asked.
	“You’re the sailor, Aine. What do you think?”
	She looked around pensively.
	“I think this weather hasn’t made sense since we left the Vicinity,” she said.
	I nodded. “I’m trying not to feel like the earth itself is conspiring against me, Aine, but...”
	I trailed off, looking up at the sails, which now dangled limp and useless. Fili emerged from the hold, and began cursing, quietly and with precision.
	“So she...whoever she is...is slowing us down.”
	“That, certainly,” I answered, drawing my hands inside my sleeves with a shiver. “But...”
	I thought better of finishing, but Aine was not to be deterred. “But what?”
	“It occurs to me,” I said, “that without the wind...well, if something was chasing us, we couldn’t go very fast.”
	Aine became quiet.
	“Fili!” I called, after a moment.
	“Yes, shriia?”
	“Have you had protections done on this thing?”
	“Of course, shriia.”
	“How long ago?”
	“About two years, I think,” he answered. “Bought her a year and six months from this day,” Fili said, patting the mast. “The owner said she’d just been protected. I paid extra for it, so it better be true.”
	“Fili, do you mind if I ask you something?” I said, getting up and walking over.
	“Depends what it is,” he answered.
	“Why did you pay extra money for something you could have one of us do for free?”
	He shrugged. “I’m a busy man,” he said. “If I can save myself the aggravation, why shouldn’t I pay for the protections with the boat?”
	“Well,” I said, “because it’s selling shri, but I suppose there’s no reason that should bother you.”
	Fili looked at me sharply. “You don’t mean it was wrong, shriia?”
	“I just meant--well, never mind, Fili. You didn’t mean harm. Thanks.” I walked away to the hatch. <Aine, help me out with something.>
	She followed me. <What is it?>
	<Wait here.>
	Down in the hold, I found my traveling bag and extracted the black velvet pouch that I kept the cieridh in. I undid the drawstring and took out the ball inside it. The vigils were still in there, each giving its quadrant of the ball its particular color and intensity. 
	<Come on, friends, time for a little exercise in the open air.>
	I took the cieridh out of the bag and up the ladder to where Aine was waiting on the deck. Aine was a little nervous when she saw what I was holding, but she didn’t draw back or turn pale. She was getting used to them, slowly.
	“Fili!” I called. “I’m going to let the vigils out for a bit, is that all right?”
	“Fine,” he said, and turned back to calling directions to the boy, who’d gone up into the rigging after something or other.
	<Take a little stroll, folks. But don’t go far. And nobody touch the ropes. That means you, Zott.>
	Four streams of colored flame issued gently from the four quadrants of the cieridh. Phredi floated gently in the air above us; Shaineen stretched herself up next to the mast, apparently needing to be the tallest thing around; Jayla bounced slowly along the deck in her yellow globe and Zott, heeding the letter but not the spirit of my command, began snaking through the spaces between the ropes, sending the boy flying down several rungs of the rope ladder. He caught himself on near the bottom, with a shriek.
	<Zott, come here!> He obeyed, bristling back from the mast toward me. <Back into the cieridh, my friend.> There was a moment of resistance. <Don’t make me thrall you.> He returned to the ball, slowly and with what in a human I would have called insolence. <You can come back out when you behave yourself and not before. The rest of you, have fun.>
	Kimin, having recovered from his fright, was staring openmouthed at the other three as they cavorted around the deck. So was Fili, who had evidently given his assent without fully considering the question. 
	“Sorry,” I called. “They’ve been cooped up for a while, he’s just in high spirits. You all right?”
	The boy just shuddered. Fili frowned in my direction. 
	“Are those things dangerous?”
	“Yes,” I said.
	I turned back to Aine. <Keep an eye on the others for me.>
	I climbed back down the ladder, then pulled the hatch closed after me. 
	It was dark in the hold, but a small light globe was enough to show me the way around. And now that we were becalmed, there wasn’t much motion--just the start and stop as Manaan and Kimin pulled at the oars. Up past the partition was the galley, where they were sitting clutching the wooden handles and pulling back on them.
	“Afternoon, boys,” I said, passing through.
	“Come to help us row, shriia?” Manaan bantered.
	“I might later,” I said. “Your quarters are up here, right, under the front deck?”
	Manaan smiled at my failure to remember the vocabulary. “That’s right, shriia.”
	“Don’t mind if I just duck in there for a moment? I’m testing something out.”
	“Of course,” Kimin said, with a bit of a blush.
	I crawled through the opening into what Aine informed me later was generally called the forecastle. It was a little more amenable to human habitation than the cargo hold, but not by much. I sat up against one of the walls and raised the cieridh.
	<Tabhair, mo sielnai.>
	For a split second I was gratified not to hear a response. Then there was a sizzling rip, shouts from both Manaan and Kimin, a stuttering jolt as their oars stuck in the water while they, no doubt, flailed in panic, and the vigils shot through the opening behind me, shining protectively around my disappointed form.
	<Well done, my friends. Back into the cieridh.>
	They returned to the ball without a murmur. They don’t spend much time wondering why I ask them to do things; logic is not their strong suit.
	I crawled back into the galley, where Manaan was trying to comfort Kimin and settle both their oars at the same time. 
	“Sorry,” I said, holding out the cieridh. “I should have warned you. I’m sorry. They didn’t hurt you, did they?”
	“No,” Kimin said warily, returning to his oar.
	“You were testing something out?” Manaan asked.
	“That’s right.”
	“What did you find out?”
	“Well,” I said, on my way back to the hold, “for one thing, your captain’s been had.”
	“What do you mean?” Fili was protesting as I emerged from the hatch, having returned the vigils safely to their bag.
	“If you had them, they wouldn’t have been able to go to her,” Aine explained, still a little timid in the face of his brusqueness but plodding doggedly through her explanation. “They’re spirits too, even though they work for her. If your protections were working--”
	“Shriia,” he barked, turning to me. “Your apprentice here is telling me I’m out here in the Tangled Wood without protections.”
	“She’s right,” I said. “Protections are supposed to keep out anything that’s not alive. Well, the vigils aren’t; and they got through that closed hatch like it was an open window.”
	“But--but the owner told me--”
	“Well, the owner was lying to you, Fili,” I said, trying to sound patient but not succeeding. “That’s why you shouldn’t pay for shri. Anyone unscrupulous enough to sell it probably hasn’t got it. Idair’s teeth,” I went on, a little irritated as I contemplated the danger I was in. “You would think our giving it away for free would cure people of trying to buy it--”
	I stopped in mid-rant. Fili looked mildly surprised that I left the sentence dangling, but I suppose by now my acting strange seemed normal to him. I felt Aine’s stare resting on me, but didn’t answer it. There was a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, too, as I savored the irony.
	“Can you put it right?” he finally asked.
	“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. Having anticipated the question, I started rummaging through my bag, which I’d brought up with me. Aine waited for me to find the bottle. When I didn’t, she leaned forward anxiously.
	<Don’t tell me I forgot to pack it.>
	<You didn’t, dhiaoc. I saw you put it in. I’d have reminded you, otherwise.>
	My hands were now digging nervously through the contents, groping and moving on and returning to search the same ground. The bottle wasn’t there. Even when I emptied the bag onto the deck, shifts and all, there was still no bottle. The branch was still coiled up in the bottom of the bag; but without the water it was no use. And, much as I didn’t want to believe it, the water had disappeared with the bottle.
	“What is it?” Fili finally asked.
	“I’m missing something,” I said, looking moodily at the little heap of my belongings piled next to the empty bag. “Something important.”
	In the silence, I started repacking the bag, my motions a little more emphatic and decisive than usual.
	<Could it have fallen out?>
	<I’d have noticed...I would think.>
	<Have you used it for anything since...>
	<No. It should still be where I packed it. I suppose it might be rattling around in the hold somewhere...>
	A search of the hold turned up nothing. When I came back out onto the deck, the sun was already getting low. Fili was looking up at the reddening sky, his hands clasped behind his back. The boy was at the tiller, although since the boat wasn’t traveling very fast he hadn’t much to do. Down in the galley Manaan and Kimin were still working the oars, in a desultory sort of way.
	<I don’t think it fell out, dhiaoc. Why should it? You’ve been careful with your bag.>
	<I know, Aine. It’s just that if it didn’t fall out, then...>
	She looked back at me, understanding my meaning but not my hesitation. I’ve had to do a lot of things, in my career, that went against my grain, but I was discovering that this was harder than most of them.
	“Fili...”
	“Yes, shriia?”
	“I hate to bring this up,” I said. “But...if we’re going to do the protections, before nightfall...and based on the evidence, I’d say we’d better...”
	“Yes?”
	“Well, we need to find this thing that I’m missing...and...”
	I couldn’t do it. Years of reaction and resistance and mortification made it impossible for me to come right out and accuse the crew of having stolen it. All my life I’d heard people complain about servants stealing. I’d seen my mother harass one of our new girls, picking and picking at her until she finally broke down and confessed. And she had stolen the bracelet or pendant or whatever it was; my mother found it in her things. But the small, cruel anger, the meanness of my mother’s attack on her revolted me then; and it revolted me now, even though this was quite a different thing.
	“And what, shriia?” Fili prompted.
	Aine, not having been raised by my mother, stepped into the breach. “It’s not that she would suspect any of you of her own accord, Aiv, but there it is--the bottle’s gone, and--and someone has to have taken it.”
	As I expected, Fili bristled sharply at this. “My crew has more honesty and better sense than to steal from a shriia,” he snapped.
	“It’s not stealing, exactly, this,” Aine answered, quailing just a little before Fili’s anger. “It’s not like the bottle is worth anything. It’s not that we think...”
	Fili turned away impatiently and flung open the hatch. “Manaan! Kimin! Out on deck!”
	I felt even sicker as I heard them clattering toward the ladder. Manaan had worked hard on Fili to get me on this boat and now I was going to accuse him of petty theft--or, to put the right color on it, outright betrayal. I looked out to the stern with an unhappy sigh.
	The boy was still there, although the boat wasn’t going much of anywhere. Zott’s little love-tap didn’t seem to have harmed him at all, although he did seem nervous.
	“Fili,” I said as Kimin’s head appeared in the hatch. “How long has the boy been with you?”
	“The boy?” He shrugged. “We picked him up in the City.”
	“Really.”
	“He wants to learn the trade, and he works for his board,” he said. 
	“Is that usual?”
	Fili almost cracked a smile. “Not since they organized it’s not.”
	“You wanted us, captain?” said Manaan, tumbling out after Kimin.
	“The shriia here--” he began, darkly.
	“Tell me something,” I said to Manaan. “The boy--did he sign on board with you before or after you left to come find me?”
	“He’d come around looking for a berth that morning,” Manaan said, with an amused glance in the boy’s direction. “Fili didn’t fancy paying the going rate...”
	“...and then after you convinced him to take me on board, he came back to Fili and said he’d work for keep,” I finished wearily.
	“How--” Manaan laughed. “Oh, that’s right. You’re a shriia.”
	“At least now I know why he’s been avoiding me,” I said, heading out toward the tiller. 
	Fili called after me. “You don’t think he--”
	“Oh, don’t I,” I called back over my shoulder.
	When I turned around, the boy was climbing up onto the taffrail.
	“Child, I just want to talk to--”
	He disappeared, followed by a mournful splash.
	“Oh, come on,” I shouted, running to the railing and bending over it to look for him. His head broke the river’s surface several feet behind the boat. “Come back to the boat, child, I’m not going to hurt you.”
	The boy’s hands were churning the water around him. He was faced toward the shore, and appeared to be headed there. But he wasn’t moving very fast--except insofar as the current was pushing him faster than it was pushing the boat, which was now drifting along with him.
	“Don’t be an idiot, Hiene,” Fili shouted, having reached the stern a few moments after me. “Come back here.”
	The water around him became more turbulent as his head bobbed.
	“Look, there’s nowhere for you to go, so why don’t you just come back?” I called.
	“Dhiaoc,” Aine said, quiet but urgent. “I don’t think he can.”
	She was watching his progress, or lack thereof, toward the bank, and she was clearly forming a low opinion of his swimming abilities.
	“Well, Aine,” I said, turning to her. “Do you swim?”
	She shook her head, embarrassed.
	“Fili?”
	He shook his. Manaan and Kimin followed suit.
	“I’ll point out the ironies when I get back,” I said, climbing over the taffrail.
	The water was cold, although it wasn’t any colder than the Ubh had been. And the current, while definitely tangible, wasn’t dangerously strong. The boy, when I reached him, was still flailing. It was just the panic that comes to people who aren’t used to it, the shock of realizing there isn’t a floor. And of course he’d been agitated before he took his dive off the stern, so no wonder he wasn’t approaching this rationally.
	“It’s all right,” I called out once I reached him. “Just relax, I’ll tow you in.”
	He looked at me in panic and started thrashing faster.
	“Get away from me!”
	“Look--Hiene--whatever your used name is--” His breathing got even shallower and more rapid, if that was possible. “If I leave you to your own devices, you’re going to drown just out of sheer incompetence. Stop thrashing and let me tow you in.”
	“N--no--”
	“I’m not going to hurt you. I’m a shriia.” He shook his head. “Look! See the hreapa?” I lifted one of my arms; the water ran off my hreapa as it slid down toward my shoulder. 
	This just seemed to convulse him worse. It’s hard to read someone you don’t know, especially when the fear of death is overshadowing anything else. But a picture was starting to form.
	“Child,” I shouted at him, “whoever told you I was dark was lying.”
	He gasped and began thrashing faster. 
	“I don’t have time for this,” I said, grabbing him by his sodden shirtfront.
	He fought me at first, but once I had him turned around and was towing him by the back of his collar he seemed to accept his fate. Or maybe he was just too tired to thrash any more. Either way, by the time we made it back to the boat he was pretty quiet, and when I tied the rope Aine threw down around his waist he didn’t struggle. They hoisted him up without too much trouble. I was a little harder to heft.
	But eventually there I was, standing by the rail, with water pouring off my hreapa and making a huge puddle around me on the deck. The boy was propped up against the railing, even damper than I was, looking up at me with his mute terrified eyes.
	“So,” I said, as I looked around at Aine and the others. “I’m the only person on this boat who doesn’t sail...and I’m also the only one who can swim?”
	“That would seem to be it, shriia,” said Manaan good-naturedly.
	“Why?”
	“If you’re a good enough sailor, you shouldn’t ever have to be a good swimmer,” Aine finally blurted out.
	She looked anxiously up at Fili, who nodded. “Your young one’s right.”
	I turned away from them and sat down facing the boy. I was mad as a wet hen and I probably looked like one.
	“Look, Hiene,” I said. “The wind’s dropped, we’re moving at a crawl, and while I was out swimming for your sorry gleacha, the sun’s sunk even further. Dark will be falling soon, and once it’s dark, well, nobody can be certain what the future holds, but I’m pretty sure that the reason we’re sitting here drifting in the current is that someone really nasty plans to send something very dangerous up this river after me. So we can’t run, and there will be no place on this boat for me or anyone else to hide, because the mastermind in charge of this fine craft wouldn’t trouble to see to the protections himself.” I wasn’t, for the moment, worrying about Fili’s reaction to this speech. “And I can’t do them, because I don’t have my bottle of uisce slainte.” He swung his head away from me. “So if you can tell me where the damn thing is, you can make everyone on this boat a lot safer.”
	He looked at me, untrusting.
	“You still think I’m dark, don’t you.”
	He nodded.
	“My saving your life, that doesn’t cut any ice with you.”
	He just stared at me.
	“Someone told you I was dark and that you could serve Idair and thwart the Dark One by taking that bottle out of my bag and doing who knows what with it.”
	He sat unmoving.
	“Don’t bother with him, shriia,” Manaan said, angry. “I’ll find it, if it’s still here.”
	He was off into the hold. Aine came over to talk to the boy.
	“Hiene,” she said, kneeling down near him. “Why do you think she’s dark?”
	His eyes turned darkly to me.
	With a muttered curse, I got up and left them to their conversation.
	My mood worsened as the sun began to burnish the leaves of the trees on the left bank. Aine finally came up to the bow with her report.
	“Whoever talked to that boy scared him good and proper. He’s even frightened of me.”
	“I’d give a lot to know who it was,” I said grimly. 
	“Well, he’s not talking,” she said. “I wonder if he’s--you know--under the influence.”
	“I don’t know,” I said. “Possible, I suppose. To me, he just seems like a scared kid.” 
	“Here it is, shriia!” Manaan shouted.
	“Hot damn!” Aine followed me back to the hatch, where Manaan was brandishing my little heptagonal glass bottle. My initial enthusiasm was dampened somewhat when I noticed that the stopper was missing.
	“Found it in the food locker,” he said proudly, handing it to me.
	“Thanks, Manaan,” I said. It looked empty, but of course that was normal.
	I stuck a finger into the bottle. I didn’t feel water.
	“Uh oh.”
	“What’s wrong, shriia?” Kimin asked anxiously.
	I shook it over my palm. A few tiny droplets fell out of it, twinkling in my hand.
	“Well,” I said sadly, scattering the drops onto the deck. “Thanks for finding me the bottle, Manaan.” I tucked it into my bag, pulled the string closed, and walked away.
	You can’t get very far away, though, on a boat that size. And Aine was behind me soon, worried. I think she was bothered that I hadn’t said something more caustic.
	“So he emptied the water out?”
	I nodded.
	“Can’t you...just...spell a new batch?”
	“Sure I can,” I said. “If I start now, it’ll be ready in about a week.”
	“Oh,” she said.
	We stood side by side at the prow, leaning on the rail and looking into the dusk gathering to the north.
	“Pop quiz, Aine,” I said cheerlessly. “How many different kinds of spirit have increased access to and power over our world after nightfall?”
	“Fifty-three,” Aine answered, promptly but without enthusiasm.
	Stripes of ruddy orange still ran like the rungs of a ladder out to where the reflection of the dark trees swallowed it. But they would be gone soon, with the sun.
	“You’re a sailor,” I said. “They’ll listen to you. Get everyone together down in the hold and get them rowing as hard as they can.”
	“They’ll be safer there?”
	“Marginally.”
	“You’ll come with us?”
	I shook my head.
	“Then I’m staying here.”
	“Oh, no you’re not.” She opened her mouth. “I may get you killed eventually, but I’m not going to do it right now. Go down into the hold with the rest of them and keep them at the oars. If you don’t they’ll panic at the first sign of the battle and there’ll be no escape.”
	“But--”
	“I’m going to invoke diaoc privilege in a minute, Aine.”
	She saw I was serious, and I think that scared her more than anything else had.
	“You’ll be all right?”
	Under her fragile confidence and that young, growing courage it was still there, the fear, the hope and the faith that I could protect her against anything.
	“Idair’s on my side,” I said, evasively.
	“Tell me what’s happening,” she finally said.
	“I’ll keep the link open if I think it’s safe.”
	She went to talk to the others, and I saw them open the hatch and disappear, one by one. Aine pulled it shut after her. I walked over their heads to the stern.
	My hands gripped the railing. My hair still hung limp and wet around my head, and my shift was damp under my hreapa. I hoped it would all make me a more unappetizing target. The last streaks of yellow and orange burnt into gray, and darkness fell on the river.
	It seemed like a long time that I stood there, listening to the ploc and pull of the oars and the sounds of the night insects and the birds of prey. So long that when I first saw the white figure coming through the trees on the bank, I almost didn’t remember that I was looking for trouble.
	It was a woman, in a long white gown, with dark hair. That much I could tell while she was still in the trees. When she emerged onto the bank, brushing that dark hair back from her face with one hand, I got a better look at her as the boat pulled sluggishly up the river. High cheekbones, dark eyes, with a firm proud chin. Heartbreakingly beautiful, moving with the glide of an otherworld thing between the dark tree trunks. And I knew, even as I recognized the features, that it wasn’t, couldn’t be her. But I was so fascinated by the vision that I didn’t realize what she really was. Until I saw, dancing on the ripples coming into the shore, the flickering reflection of a cluster of yellow lights.
	The sight of those yellow flecks dipping and twinkling on the river’s surface paralyzed me for a moment. Then I crossed my arms and touched the marks.
	<Aine?>
	<Dhiaoc?>
	<Ask Fili if he can’t get this thing moving any faster.>
	<What is it?>
	<Lurers.>
	There was a muffled commotion under the planks, and the oars began working overtime.
	The woman on the bank watched the boat’s progress. And then, she stepped off the bank and onto the surface of the water.
	It was a struggle, as I saw her pacing toward me with a speed that belied the slowness of her tread, to remember that this thing had come here to kill me. Because she was, really, so beautiful--even not looking like herself, even with the hazy halo of the other world blurring her edges. Hard to bring the energy into my hands, to brace myself for the moment when the vision would explode into a hundred fanged things that had crossed over in search of prey.
	Floating in the air now off the stern, it beckoned to me with one white-draped arm, calling me out into the darkness above the water.
	“You better believe I’m smarter than that,” I said, with a little laugh.
	Here’s a tip for anyone who may find herself in this sort of situation: never mouth off to a crowd of lurers.
	The transformation was so quick my eyes didn’t catch it. I saw the vision, and then I saw a cluster of bright yellow lights spinning toward me with the speed and threat of falling rocks.
	Zott wrapped his blue fire around me, but all it did was slow them down. They were through the screen and on me in an instant.
	My first impulse was to let go of my shoulders and start swatting at them. There seemed to be a hundred of them, and they were all over me--skimming angrily along the hreapa till they found some exposed skin to sink their sharp, burning spikes into. But something told me that was the wrong thing to do. I hoped my instinct was right. I’d never fought lurers, in this world. Nobody had. Or at least, nobody’d done it and lived.
	I felt them taking a purchase on me--through the gaps in my hreapa along my arms, in my neck. They stuck to me like burrs, the bite and the burn increasing as I tried to bring my energy into my hands.
	Eight or ten of them had spun down the skirt of my hreapa and had finally figured out how to duck under it. And through my shift, I felt them sinking their spurs into my legs.
	Don’t panic.
	<Dhiaoc? What’s happening?>
	Don’t panic.
	<Dhiaoc!>
	<Still alive, Aine.>
	I shut the link down. One of the lurers, having fastened itself on my hand, now tugged at it, trying to pull it off the mark. And in a minute, it was going to succeed.
	With a roar of pain and anger, I forced myself to flashpoint.
	“Close your eyes!” I shouted, out of habit. But there was no one looking at me.
	When the white fire burst out, the lurers on my hands flew off, spinning lopsided in the air as their singed and broken spikes dragged them down. The white streaks snaked over my arms, up to my head, and down to my feet, sending startled yellow globs shrieking off me into the air. I was free of them. For the moment.
	The fire kept them at bay, but the air around me was full of hovering globes, the swarm of lurers washing the deck in their sickly and jaundiced light. They were waiting for me to get tired. And once I had to call the fire back, they would descend.
	I shot spurts out from my hands, striking around me. Each lurer I hit--and I hit several--recoiled back into the air and eventually into nothingness, returning to the ether to wait for another chance at another victim. But there were still a dozen buzzing around me, and I was weakening fast. I’d have to either withdraw the fire soon, or crumple onto the deck in an unconscious heap. Either way, they’d be on me again--and I doubted I had the strength for another try.
	With my back to the gunwale I kept firing, having at the moment no other plan of action. As I swerved around to fire at one hovering behind me over the water, one of my bolts raked along the railing, leaving a trail of dancing red flames in its path.
	Forgetting for the moment about the lurers, I dipped a canful of water from a nearby barrel and threw it at the railing. A lurer, caught in the path of the flying water, spiraled unevenly away from it. Water fell with a splash on the railing. The flames hissed out into damp ash. 
	The sight of the smoking railing, and the bright yellow lights pulsing over and behind it, flickered in front of my eyes. I was failing.
	I touched the marks and brought the fire back. My strength rallied. The lurers paused a moment, expecting perhaps a trick. In the long, slow instant before they returned to the attack, I watched the water streaming off the railing, falling more slowly now through the empty space underneath it. That was about the only space around me, I realized, that wasn’t jam-packed with angry lurer.
	<Aine.>
	<Dhiaoc?>
	<Remember this for posterity, in case I don’t make-->
	I didn’t have time to finish the sentence. A dozen angry yellow lights came stabbing down at me through the air.
	They’d learned the weak points now, and they hit with might and accuracy. Four of them had their teeth in my left arm, and were dragging me by it across the deck; another four had my right and were pulling me in the opposite direction. I spun around, able to fight their pull but not break their hold, spiraling in lopsided curves back to the gunwale. 
	My head snapped to one side as the one on my neck began throwing its weight around. If my arms hadn’t been pretty much immobilized I think I would just have broken, started thrashing them around trying to beat them off me. I got a tilted, lurching view of the water past the railing, then swiveled uncontrollably back toward the mast. 
	It came to me then, at some level beyond speech and behind thought. I knew, in every fiber of my body, with a certainty beyond truth, that this was a death fight. My left shoulder wrenched itself as the lurers gave my arm a twist. They were going to tear me like a roasted calf.
	With a final effort, I threw myself backward against the gunwale. Pushing off with my legs--the only part of my body that was still under my control--I flipped myself backwards over the gunwale and into the water.
	I didn’t hit cleanly. But the sting of entry and the painful twist of my neck as I struck the surface were nothing. What mattered was that when I finally opened my eyes underwater, I didn’t see anything glowing. They hadn’t followed me into the river.
	Moving just enough to keep myself fully submerged, I gathered what strength I had left. Not enough to reveal again. But enough, maybe, for a few bursts of ordinary fire.
	It was very dark under there, but the light from the lurers, who were all hovering over the water waiting for me to emerge, sent a diffuse, murky light through the gloom. In it I saw a dark shape that had to be the hull of the boat, pulling away from me. I stroked after it.
	<Aine.>
	<Dhiaoc? What’s happened?>
	<Can you tell the boys to stop rowing?>
	<Are they gone?>
	<No. But I need them to stop rowing.>
	<All right.>
	The boat’s motion slowed down. I backed myself up against the keel, then brought my head and one arm through the surface. 
	Five short spurts burst from my hand to nail five of the first lurers who went for me. I had to fire them again before they disappeared. Their friends, hanging back to see the outcome, shot forward once they deserted the field. I took a deep breath and sank again.
	There were seven still out there. Plenty enough to rip me limb from limb. And there was a limit to how many times I could do this. I was already running out of air.
	Breaking the surface again, my back still against the wooden planks of the hull, I dispatched another four with the strength of desperation. The other three swung bristling up after them, getting within an inch of my face before my head went under again.
	This was too much. My legs were refusing to work for me; my chest was raw with the effort of my breathing and the fatigue from every muscle stretched along my poor bones was feeding the panic in my racing heart. My held breath fought against the cage of my ribs, trying to force me back up into what my body, I’m sure, thought of as safety. But I didn’t have the energy yet for another shot. I couldn’t go up there until I did.
	My lungs burned with mutinous fire. Shot or no shot, I was going back to the surface.
	Three of them, out there, not two feet away from my streaming eyes and gasping mouth. I heard myself grunt as I fired what I knew would be my last volley.
	I hit once. Twice. Three times. One disappeared; one spun weakly up away from the water and away from the fire. And one came searing through the air toward me.
	It gripped me by the throat. My head snapped back as it began pulling up, throttling me in the process. By itself, one lurer wouldn’t be enough to tear me. But if it lifted me out of the water, it could use gravity and the weight of my body to snap my neck.
	My body finally decided that drowning was a better death. With one last wrenching effort, I pushed myself back under the water’s surface, tunneling as far as I was able through the darkening waters toward the river bottom.
	What I was going to do when I ran out of air was a question I didn’t have an answer for. And down in the depths, with the fish and weeds rushing past me in the current, I was starting not to care. It wasn’t a bad place, the river. Murky, dark, slimy in spots, but quiet. Nothing burning. A peaceful way out of all this.
	Down here the light from the remaining lurer couldn’t reach. But there was a glow up ahead, blue-green and faint. The phosphorescence of fish, or eels; that cold slick fire we’ve never found the trick of that glistens along the backs and around the gills of some of our deepwater fish. A watery, flickering unsteady vision, but a beautiful one, it seemed to me, there at the end of my tether and probably the end of my life.
	If I’d been thinking clearly, I would have consoled myself that a person in my physical condition and present predicament could expect hallucinations. But when I saw that the phosphorescence ahead of me was forming the shape of a human head, it seemed natural to me. It was a dark head, the lines of jaw, brow and nose suggested by glimmering streaks of that blue-green light, the shapes between them formed out of water as deep and black as the water suspending me. Dark, and much larger than my own poor head. But the blackness inside those faintly glowing irises didn’t frighten me, somehow.
	Who are you?
	Perhaps this was the otherworld. Maybe I was dead already, and this dark head with its hair of weeds streaming phosphor was the guardian of the gate to the other place.
	Theamh ni hUlnach, I answered.
	I know your name.
	It was liable to be the last moment of clarity I had, in my life. But it came to me.
	I helped your sister Ubh, I sent back.
	I couldn’t see its reaction. My vision was going grainy, dissolving in trickles of gray and black sand.
	Help me.
	The darkness closed on me.

	I realized, when my eyes opened, that I wasn’t dead after all. At least I hoped not, because Aine was bending over me.
	“Dhiaoc?” she asked, afraid to believe her eyes.
	“Still alive,” I croaked.
	The noise of three people suddenly letting out their bated breath made me turn my head. Fili, Manaan and Kimin were crouched around me in various attitudes of anxiety. I turned my head back to Aine, only now starting to feel the boards of the deck underneath me. I was flat on my back in a pool of water, with a wet rope coiled loosely nearby and Aine, her shift clinging in damp folds to her soaked body, chattering in the cold as she tried to smile at me.
	“How’d I get out?” I rasped. My throat was still raw.
	“I called and you didn’t answer,” she said. “I came out on deck and I saw you bobbing in the water. I--Manaan came with me, and we fished you out.”
	Manaan was dry; Aine wasn’t. Probably he’d been on the other end of the rope.
	“I thought you didn’t swim,” I said.
	“I do now.” 
	There was a small, suppressed chuckle from Manaan. Aine grinned, briefly. 
	“I’d laugh too,” I said, “except it would hurt.”
	“You hadn’t swallowed any water,” Aine said. “You were still breathing. I don’t know how.”
	I gave sitting up a try, and then went back to lying flat on the deck.
	“The genius,” I said.
	Behind me I could feel a change in the three sailors. More interest, more apprehension.
	“I saw it, down there at the bottom. It must have brought me safe up.”
	There was a long, thoughtful silence.
	It was broken suddenly by the sound of Manaan’s feet, pounding across the deck toward the hatch.
	“Where are you--” Fili called out.
	“To give Hiene the hiding he’s wanting,” he shouted.
	“Manaan, don’t--”
	He was already gone. I tried to get up, but I only managed to pull myself into a huddled-up ball on the deck. Aine stood up. “Stay here, dhiaoc, I’ll talk to him.”
	She slipped down the ladder after him. Fili and Kimin crouched down near me.
	“What was he like?” Fili finally burst out.
	“I--it’s hard to explain,” I said. “It was like something you see in a dream...”
	“But--but--tell us,” Kimin pressed. “Whatever you remember. Please.”
	Fili’d been working the Tsraid for years; Kimin probably for at least as long. They knew more about the genius than I did; they’d spent all that time reading his moods, judging his tempers, propitiating him however they could. But they still wanted to know what I’d seen, even though my vision was probably much less real--at any rate much less useful--than the knowledge they’d already gained.
	“A huge, dark head, with streaming weedy hair,” I said, dully. “Shadowy and indistinct. But...” I looked up at their anxious faces. “Kind enough, it seemed to me.”
	Kimin sat back on his heels, with a smile. Fili didn’t smile, but I could tell he was pleased.
	<DHIAOC!>
	<What is it?>
	<It’s the boy--there’s--there’s a-->
	Muffled as it was by the boards, I could still hear someone’s scream. The boy’s maybe; or Manaan.
	<Is he alive?>
	<It’s banging his head against the--dhiaoc-->
	I tried to get up, but my legs just wouldn’t do it. 
	<Listen to me, Aine, you have to act quick, all right?>
	<All--all right-->
	<Is there any water near where you are?>
	<I--I don’t see any.>
	<Then grab the boy and bring him back on deck. Get Manaan to help you.>
	“What is it, shriia?”
	The sounds of struggle were already audible. Fili and Kimin rushed to the hatch. In a tangle of confused limbs and accompanied by a cacophony of shouting voices, the boy was pushed, pulled and otherwise hauled up the ladder and onto the deck, with the one last lurer still buzzing angrily from its perch on the boy’s limp neck. The men flung him onto the deck and then recoiled to the extreme edge.
	“Aine, get some water!”
	She ran to the barrel and filled the can.
	“Douse the thing with it.”
	Aine dumped the water over the boy’s head and neck. The lurer spun off it into the air. I had managed to scrape together enough for one burst.
	“Teir abhaile!”
	I hit the thing smack in the middle. It recoiled up toward the mast, spinning faster.
	“Dhiaoc...” Aine said, her hands beginning to shake as it recovered and dived for us.
	My next shot knocked it out of the sky and into--wherever. Next week, maybe. At any rate, it disappeared.
	“It’s all right,” I said. “That was the last one.”
	The boy lay where he’d been thrown, paralyzed with the terror it had put into him. Then, slowly, he pushed himself up on his hands and away from me, backing up against the opened hatch door.
	“Are you all right, kid?”
	He nodded, putting his shaky hands up to his bruised neck. 
	“You want to tell me, now, who it was that put you up to this?”
	He shook his head.
	“You’re still afraid of me?” I asked.
	There was a long silence while he stared back at me. Finally, he shook his head.
	“So. Now you’re afraid of her.”
	He nodded.
	“I’ll tell you who you should be afraid of,” Manaan growled at him.
	“That’s enough.” Fili cut him off sharply. “Boy. Look at me.”
	Hiene looked up at him, scared.
	“I knew you weren’t worth a living wage,” Fili said, his anger cold and sharp. “But you’re not even worth your keep. You’ll go ashore at Dunta, my lad, and you’re not coming back on board.”
	He nodded, resigned. As his fair head hung in defeat, I heard a sniffle. He wiped his nose on one sweating hand and began to cry.
	“Oh, that’s enough of this,” I said, suddenly angry. “Let the boy stay, Fili, it’s not his fault. We’re leaving at Dunta anyway.”
	“But shriia--”
	“But nothing. This is not a safe way to travel. Not for you, not for us.” I stood up, shakily. “Thank you all. I wouldn’t still be here without you.”
	I looked around the ring of somber faces. Above Manaan’s thoughtful eyes, his brown hair stirred in the breeze.
	“Wind’s coming back,” Kimin remarked.
	Manaan ran to the tiller. Fili and Kimin went to see to the sails. I started forward, slowly.
	Aine ran up as she saw me swaying, and put one of my arms around her shoulders.
	“Careful, dhiaoc. All right.”
	I slid more than climbed down the ladder and crawled into my little sleeping space. I started the undoing, mechanically.
	“Dhiaoc, are you sure--”
	“I’m tapped out, Aine,” I said. “Hreapa or no hreapa, I’ve got nothing left. If anything comes, I won’t be able to fight it anyhow. So I may as well try to get some rest.”
	She watched me moving slowly, the fatigue and the pain obviously coming through in every gesture I made. When I had finally disentangled myself from my wet shift, she handed me a dry one without saying anything. Evidently too disturbed by the extent of my exhaustion to feel her usual embarrassment.
	I leaned against the curved hull, closing my eyes. “You’re worried.”
	“I--I am, dhiaoc.” I didn’t look at her, but I could feel the stare.
	“You’re right to be,” I answered. “Except for that time with Lythril, that’s as close to dead as I’ve ever been.”
	I opened my eyes. She was still watching me, and her eyes were starting to shine with tears.
	“You’ll be all right,” she said. 
	“Tomorrow, remind me,” I finally answered. “We have to talk about what to do if I’m killed. We don’t have a plan for that, and we should.”
	The tears spilled out of her eyes, but she didn’t say anything.
	“Good rest to you, Aine,” I said, and pulled my hreapa around my shoulders.

II.
Collateral Damage

	The sun rose the next morning over the broad and smiling face of the river, shining down between the wooded banks onto a world that gave no sign of having ever harbored anything that wished us ill. Of course the stretch of river that had almost swallowed me had been left far behind during the night; I’d slept like a dead woman, but Aine hadn’t, and she told me the wind had kept up steady. So by the time I was done with haons linn we were, as Kimin informed me, almost on top of Dunta.
	Aside from Amranth and Mypril, northern Amst hasn’t got much in the way of urban development. The landscape isn’t congenial to it--too wooded by the river, too steep and rocky in the mountains. So small as Dunta is with its 1000 people, it’s a big deal in that region. The river takes a sharp bend there, and a long time ago it managed to carve out, and then recede from, a wide crescent of cleared land, covered in silt several feet deep. It’s the one place in Amst where you can farm worth a damn, and it’s built itself quite a little business as a trading post. 
	Once I had my hreapa on I went up to the prow to watch for the town. Aine stayed aft by the tiller, sulking. We’d had our little chat about contingency plans, and she’d been displeased with the outcome. She wanted, of course, to continue on without me, in the event. After a long time of unresolved argument I finally told her that it would be suicide and I categorically forbade it. I was her dhiaoc, so she assented, but it was chafing her.
	Busy with my own worries, I didn’t spot the town in the distance until Manaan pointed it out to me. Fili pointed the prow in toward the bank and we slipped across the river toward the nest of wooden piers, moored boats and wooden buildings spread out along the edge of that crescent.
 	Kimin and Manaan climbed aloft to furl the sails. I watched the town get closer, more slowly now. It was a pleasant sight, the boats bobbing in the harbor and the wood of the piers creaking with the shift of the water, the morning light glinting off the windows in the shops and shipyards that lined the bay. The boat cut quietly through the ripples, the gentle slap of the water and the sounds of canvas and rope breaking the silence.
	“Seems like a quiet enough place,” I called up to Manaan, who had done with the sail and was sliding down the mast.
	He looked out over the water, then hurried up to the prow.	
	“It is quiet,” he said, worried.
	The piers were closer now, Close enough that we should have been able to hail someone on them and get him to help tie up the boat. Except that there was nobody there. Not a single soul, on the piers or on the boats, or--that we could see--on the beach. 
	“Hi!” Manaan shouted. “Is anyone there?”
	His voice echoed across the water, dying in the silence that greeted it.
	“Hey!” he repeated. “We need a hand here!”
	Still no answer. Fili, now concerned, bellowed out from the stern.
	“Dunta harbor!” he shouted, his voice cutting farther and cleaner than Manaan’s. “This is the Bright Hair, coming in to port! Somebody answer us!”
	Far away, beyond the piers, I heard the slam of a wooden door. A lone figure emerged from one of the shops and stood peering into the distance toward us.
	“Hey there!” Fili called. “What’s going on? Where is everyone?”
	The figure leaned forward, then suddenly broke into a run, charging up the pier with an urgency that boded no good.
	“Bright Hair!” he shouted, the voice coming faintly across the water. “Is that a shriia you have on board?”
	“Yes,” I hollered back.
	“Thank the Spirit!” he shouted. “Throw me your tow rope, I’ll make you fast.”
	Once he got closer I could see that he was an older man, past the midpoint but not yet feeble, with a day’s beard still on his cheeks and one of those shapeless cloaks they wear in Amst wrapped around his tall, spare frame. Fili brought the boat about while Manaan tossed him the tow rope. He could hardly wait for us to get the gangplank down before rushing up it and on board. 
	“Eildon, my man, what’s--” Fili began, but he rushed right past him toward me.
	“Shriia,” he said, out of breath from the running and shouting. “Come quickly. It’s horrible.”
	Whatever “it” was, it had scared him stiff. I didn’t ask for particulars.
	“Aine!” I shouted, grabbing my traveling bag. “We’re needed here. Let’s go.”
	Now that there was something to be done, she got over the sulk with astonishing rapidity. “What is it, dhiaoc?” she said, trotting up.
	“Come with me,” Eildon said, and started tugging me down the gangplank.
	“I’m coming,” I answered, jogging after him along the pier toward shore. “But will you at least tell me what’s happened.”
	“Last night,” he panted, pausing for a moment as we clattered off the pier onto the beach. “Last night--there were--ah, name of the Spirit.”
	He gave up talking and kept running, leading us through the streets behind the quay toward the town center. There was still nobody to be seen. The houses, many of them, stood gaping with open doors, and there were signs along the street of recent passage--things dropped, muddy prints of feet and hooves. But still no people.
	Here and there, as we passed through the streets, I saw a face peek out surreptitiously from a curtained window, then draw back again. So those who had not, somehow, vanished were hiding. “It” must have been horrible indeed.
	“Friend,” I shouted after him as we sped around the green and toward the farmland that lay beyond the town, “where are all your people?”
	“That’s what--last night--there were--missing--” He suddenly veered off the street onto a path that led between two farms into the woods. 
	“Who was missing?”
	“People.”
	This was far from illuminating. We followed him for a while without becoming any the wiser, past the farmhouses and into the trees beyond. As we got further into the woods, I could now hear voices--other people, a lot of them. Talking, some of them. But mostly, they were crying. Hard, with the trauma of sudden, unexpected shock.
	“They were missing,” our guide repeated, slowing down as he got winded. “This morning--we went in search--and we--we found them.”
	With an inkling of what I was about to find suddenly coming to me, I ran past him over the hill.
	I was looking at a clearing--a big one, that had to have been man-made. Someone must have been planning to build out here. And the clearing was filled with people, sitting or standing at the edges, all in attitudes of shock or grief or just frozen horror. In the middle, surrounded by a border of grass and fear, lay strewn the broken pieces of--something.
	Joints of meat, was my first thought. That a butcher shop had exploded, perhaps, and littered the place with these blood-smeared things. But of course that’s not what had happened. Those were human limbs strewn liberally around that clearing, ripped from what had used to be human bodies. A lot of human bodies. All destroyed now, dismembered, scattered grotesquely over the gore-clotted grass.
	I said nothing. I was as struck dead by the sight as they must have been, when they’d come upon the bodies that morning. Eildon, behind me, had nothing to add. The noise of the weeping continued. I was so transfixed that I didn’t even think to wonder where Aine was until I heard her scream.
	Behind us, hands clutching her head, she was staring with round, fixed eyes at the clearing, and screaming with the terror I’d heard in my own cries the night before. I called her name, but she didn’t hear me. Instead, she tottered forward past me toward the pile, backing up suddenly and flinching at something invisible. 
	“Name of the spirit,” she gasped. “Name of the spirit.” Her arms flailed. “Dhiaoc, do something! Stop them!”
	Before I could answer, she was sobbing it out again. “Stop them, dhiaoc! Stop them!”
	“Aine, it’s too late--”
	She turned her head toward my voice, but whatever she saw it wasn’t me. Those eyes couldn’t be missing me any more completely if they were closed.
	“Where are you?”
	“Close your eyes, Aine.”
	“Dhiaoc, where are you?” She spun around back to the clearing. “Where are you? Where are you?”
	“Aine, listen to me!” I shouted, aware now that the people had turned their heads to look at us.
	“I can’t see you, dhiaoc!” Her panic and terror awoke memories in the others, and the weeping broke out with fresh vigor. “Where are you?”
	I grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around, staring into those blank eyes. “Aine. I’m right here. Can you feel me?”
	She nodded, still terrified, shying away from nothing like a spooked horse.
	“Close your eyes.”
	“It’s--they’ll--”
	“Trust me, Aine. Close your eyes. Close your eyes.”
	She nodded, and squeezed them tight shut.
	“Keep them closed,” I said. “All right now. Listen to my voice. That’s what’s real It’s morning, the sun’s out, nobody’s being attacked. I’m standing right in front of you.” She nodded. “When you open your eyes, you’ll see me. Ready?”
	Fearfully, she opened her eyes. This time, they saw me. A sigh of relief shuddered through her thin frame.
	“Oh, dhiaoc. I’m sorry. I--I saw.”
	“I know.”
	She turned her head toward the clearing. One hand flew up to her mouth as her face paled and her eyes teared.
	<Dhiaoc--I’m--I think I’m going to be sick-->
	<Run for the trees.>
	She ran. I looked at the people, grouped haggardly around that circle of rent pieces. Aine’s fit had attracted their attention to me, and they had strangely begun to go quiet, their sobbing replaced with an unnerving and expectant stare. They were waiting for me to do something. When it seemed as if there was nothing I could do that would mean anything.
	From the knot of people nearest the bodies I saw one break off and head toward us--a man in his forties, by the look of it, dressed hurriedly in his trousers and boots and cloak. “Shriia!” he called as he approached. “Are you coming here?”
	 “Am I needed here?” It was grotesque, repeating the formula in this horrible setting, but the response was automatic. When I saw him taken suddenly aback I hurried onward. “Idair strike me, of course I am. I’m sorry, I just--”
	He nodded, seeming now to have understood the gaffe. “I’m called Virmant, and I...my wife is town leader.”
	“And your wife...”
	“She...she’s...missing.”
	He said this faced away from the bodies, but I knew he knew she was among them.
	“I’m truly sorry, Virmant.” 
	“Our shriia, also, is missing,” he went on, not acknowledging the condolence. “When we first noticed them absent, we summoned her in the night, and she went to look for the missing ones. She never came back.”
	If that was so, she was probably up there with the victims. Torn apart like I would have been last night, if they’d had their way.
	“So tell me what you need,” I said. “Someone to do the departures, obviously. That I’ll do.”
	“Thank you, shriia.” He looked back at the group, most of whom were looking at us now, haggardly, as if waiting for something. “And...I think it might help, you know, if you could...talk to them, or something.”
	I wasn’t at all sure it would help, but if he asked I was bound to do it. And on the off chance that it might, it was worth a try. They were all staring at me anyhow.
	I walked through the groups of waiting people to the border of cleared grass around the scene of carnage. It was still cold up there in the mornings; the debris was filmed with clammy dew, and skin, where it could be seen through torn clothing and drying blood, was purple and blue. I had seen death before, even seen torn bodies and ripped-out organs before. But never this much in one place.
	When I turned away from it they were all looking at me, waiting, the heldback sobs audible in their ragged breathing.
	“Women and men,” I said, my voice coming back strange and flat in the silence. “I’m--I’m a stranger here, and you don’t know me. My used name is Theamh ni hUlnach. I just--I came too late to save. But whatever help I can give, it’s all yours, while you need it.”
	A few of them nodded. No one spoke. That labored, painful silence continued.
	“There’s--no way for this not to be horrible,” I said. “I have nothing to say that will make this anything other than a great evil and a terrible wound. I can’t--some things words don’t cure.” More silent nodding. “But if--I could ask some of you, who haven’t lost a lover, a parent or a child today--if there are any out there who haven’t--to help me,” I said, tentatively, “we can at least prepare the poor dead for their journey home.” 
	As I felt that sickened horror turning at last into grief, my own tears started coming. “This is a terrible thing to ask, I know. But I don’t know the dead. I’ll need your help.”
	A man holding a young girl in his arms stood, handing the girl to the woman next to them. “Tiom mac Liadh, shriia. I claim this duty.”
	As he passed through the silent crowd toward me, a gray-haired woman closer in got up to follow him. “Cailte ni hIlian. My hands are yours, shriia.”
	Two boys of about thirteen and fifteen followed her toward the center. “Devan and Milhat, shriia,” said the older, indicating what seemed to be his younger brother. “Our family has been spared, thank Idair. We’re yours.”
	“Aine ni hEmer.”
	Heads swiveled back to look at her as she came forward, still pale and a little shaky but determined. “I’m all right now, dhiaoc. I want to help.”
	Seeing the little group gather, and seeing me bend to start talking to them, the others moved their attention elsewhere. The talk and the crying broke out again around us.
	“Here’s how it is,” I said, low so as not to be heard by the others. “It looks to me like nobody fled--like they were thralled or close to it, right up to the moment of attack, and offered no resistance. So you shouldn’t have to go far afield to find the pieces.” Sweat broke out on the two boys’ foreheads. “I know, this is unspeakably awful, but it has to be done. So try to fit nearby limbs to nearby bodies. Only look further if that doesn’t work.” They nodded. “We’ll need something to cover them in, so that maybe at the end they’ll look something like humans.”
	“I’m tailor here,” Cailte said. “There’s stuff at my shop; I’ll send my girl for it.”
	“Good woman.”
	“Who did this, shriia?” she asked, before turning to the task.
	“I’m assuming it was lurers,” I said. “It has all the hallmarks.”
	Aine nodded. “It was them all right.”
	The woman nodded grimly. “That I can see. What I’m asking is...” She looked at me keenly. “If they were thralled...who thralled them?”
	“That’s an excellent question,” I said. “When we’re done here, I’ll be wanting to talk to you and a lot of other people about that. Meanwhile...the sooner we’re done with this gruesome business, the better.”
	As they set off, I took Virmant aside. “How many are you missing?”
	“Sixteen, including the shriia.”
	I took a look around. There were enough.
	“We can assume at this point,” I said, “that anyone missing was killed.”
	He swallowed, nodding.
	“I think maybe it will be best,” I said, “if people go home, until we’re done here. It will do no one any good to watch this process.”
	“I agree, shriia.”
	“So if you can get them to go back to their homes, and pick out...what they want to send them home with...” I said, tentatively. “I mean, unless you think it would be better to wait--”
	He shook his head suddenly. “No, no, do it soon. No need for us to be looking at this any longer than we have to. Tonight, at sundown, you think?”
	“That’s what I was thinking. Have them gather on the green about an hour before sunset, we’ll walk from there.”
	Virmant straightened his bowed shoulders. “I’ll get them home safe, shriia.”
	However he did it, he did manage to get the crowd moving out of the clearing, slowly and brokenly. I began doing my unpleasant duty.
	It was a long, ugly process. Since I didn’t know anyone, I had to go by clothing and general physical type, which involved looking a lot more closely at these horrid things than I wanted to. Aine was even more at a loss than I was, but she kept at it, determined not to be defeated by this. These bodies had stopped actually bleeding, but much of the blood hadn’t dried; and after a few minutes we were a grisly sight, stained and marked with the blood of the victims. It could have been worse; most of them hadn’t been decapitated, and as I had predicted, the limbs generally hadn’t fallen very far from the trunk. But even when we had collected a body together, it didn’t look that much better. And then there were those moments, like when Aine and one of the boys were looking at two almost identical left legs and wondering which went to whose corpse...things you wanted to laugh about with an insane laughter, except for your horror and shock. It was too absurd to be real, too real to be funny, too funny to be true. And yet, somehow, it was really happening. 
	I lifted my head from the fourth corpse I had turned my attention to to see Aine picking up a scrap of white cloth that was poking out of the reddened mud. The scrap, as it turned out, was attached to a much larger, irregularly shaped white sheet that had been trodden into the ground by the panicked victims.
	<Is this...?>
	<It must be her hreapa,> I answered. <Put it up somewhere out of harm’s way, we’ll burn it with her when we find her.>
	Aine took it off to hang over a nearby tree limb. Cailte’s apprentice finally came back, staggering under several bolts of red cloth. Cailte walked away from the woman she had been attending to and began laying it out on the ground, cutting it with her shears into shroud-sized pieces.
	“Cailte,” I said, wiping the sweat off my forehead with a bloodied hand, “you know we’re just going to burn it.”
	“I know, shriia.” She guessed the unsaid thing. “It won’t ruin me. And anyhow, if I want to be ruined it’s my choice.”
	It was a significant expense, that stuff. Red sheep are the hardest to maintain and breed, and red wool is rare and costly. Normally, the departed’s family has to take up a collection to afford the departure dress, which has the added cost of the tailor’s last-minute labor. But it’s an expense no family spares, even though it’s not necessary for the ritual. Cailte knew nobody would be ready or able to come up with departure dresses for these dead, and she was running herself into debt by giving them the next best thing.
	“Your young one,” she said, slicing through with the shears. “She’s got the gift?”
	“Ghost vision,” I answered.
	Cailte nodded. “Then it’s a bad place for her, this.”
	“It’s a bad place for everyone.”
	Tiom, having finished with the body he was attending to, approached me flanked by the two brothers. “That’s all of them that we could find, shriia.”
	“How many?”
	“Fifteen, all told.”
	One missing still. “Including your shriia?”
	He shook his head. “None of us could find her,” he said. “Between the three of us we’ve identified all the dead, but she’s not among them.”
	“Maybe they drew her out farther into the woods,” I mused.
	Cailte nodded, sighing. She looked down at the miserable object I had just finished with--the body of a once-burly man in middle age, his hair still curling in black profusion even if the rest of him had lost its vigor. Cailte took up one of the pieces of red cloth and laid it over him, covering all but the head.
	“Malrin,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “We never know what’s coming to us.”
	“No,” I answered dully.
	“I saw him yesterday--just yesterday, at siulin,” Cailte went on, her brow wrinkling as she tried to grasp it. “And I said, ‘What are you doing here, Malrin? You’re healthy as two horses.’” She sighed, turning away to the next body. “And poor Julnai here, who was flirting with him like she always does, and will never do more, now...”
	Another rectangle of red cloth fluttered down out of the air to cover the woman’s ravaged body. I could almost see the two of them, now that their wrenched limbs and torn trunks were covered, standing conversing on the green, waiting for the shriia, innocent of any knowledge of the harrowing death that was coming for them.
	“Cailte,” I said, calling her back as she was moving on.
	“Yes, shriia?”
	“Yesterday was siulin here?”
	She nodded. “I have a view from my shop window. I’m a bit of a gossip, they’ll all tell you...but these two, everyone knew about them but them. We were waiting to see it happen, and everyone wished it even though his father--”
	“This one here,” I said, pointing to a girl of twenty who lay nearby, waiting for her red shroud. “Was she at siulin too?”
	Cailte nodded. “To ask about her father, again. He’s been poorly for years, and she could do nothing for him, but Yleana kept asking...”
	“Come with me,” I said, walking among the bodies that had already been collected. “Tell me their names and where you saw them last.”
	She looked down at the faces, while I knelt to close their eyes for them. “Kriana, I saw her last at the reading...”
	“Was she at siulin too?”
	“Let me...yes, she was. And there’s Wolit, last I saw of him was on the green, being given a talking to by his wife...poor woman, she’s back home now with their sons...”
	“And he was on the green because he was waiting to see the shriia?”
	She nodded. “Does that mean something, shriia?”
	“Maybe.”
	I looked over at the tree branch where the sodden hreapa was hanging. It was actually far less sodden, now--the mud and blood and other debris was sliding off of it, dropping to the grass as the white weave glared in the sun.
	“Where does your shriia live, Cailte?” I asked, my eyes still on that shining hreapa.
	“About five miles up the path toward Amranth. She’d been planning to build here, to be closer to town.” She clucked her tongue. “Poor thing.”
	“And what’s her used name?”
	“Gwilna ni Bhatan. A local girl made good--well, an Amranth girl, anyway. She did have those city tastes, and I never much cared for her, truth be told, but she kept the weather good and the crops fine...”
	“So she’s a rainmaker, is that her thing?” I asked, finding it hard to believe that I could sound this calm. Aine, who was watching me closely, seemed to be even more surprised. Since she could see, as I could, where this was all heading.
	“Yes, that’s mostly what we need out here,” Cailte went on. “She knew enough, you know, about possession and birthing and all; kept us clean, and all that. But she trained in rainmaking.”
	I sighed.
	“Tiom, Devan, Milhat,” I said, “I wonder if you would help me with something. You too, Cailte.”
	“Anything,” Devan answered.
	I bent over one of the bodies as if consulting their opinion on it, and dropped my voice as low as it would go. “You asked me who thralled them,” I said to Cailte. “I aim to find out. But you know, shriias, we’re no good at subterfuge.” They nodded. “If what I think happened is true, these people were thralled by a dark user who led them out here and offered them up as prey to the lurers. If she’s got sense, she cleared out as soon as she got them here so the lurers wouldn’t turn on her. And since sunrise the place has been occupied. But she’ll want to come back and harvest the bodies; and she’ll know we’re burning them by sundown.”
	“You want us to guard them,” Tiom whispered.
	“No,” I said. “That’s exactly what I don’t want you to do. If we leave them unattended she’ll show herself. So here’s what I want you to do. Aine and I will go down the path to town, as if we’re headed there. Then we’ll swing back around through the woods to watch from outside the clearing. After we’re out of sight, I want you all to leave too, and talk about how we’re all going to assemble in the town square and process out to the clearing for the funeral just before sundown. If she’s watching, she’ll assume we’ve all gone there and think she has a clear field.”
	Tiom and Devan nodded. Milhat shook his head.
	“I’ll explain it,” Devan whispered to him.
	“Milhat, I want you to go into town and find Virmant. The rest of you will circle around and watch from the woods with us. Milhat, when you bring Virmant back, bring him through the woods and not up the path--and wait in the woods, until you see what happens. Can you do that?”
	Milhat nodded. “Rely on me, shriia.”
	“I will. Now. We’re all set?”
	They nodded. 
	“All right then. Let’s set the trap.”
	
	Woodscraft is not my strong suit, but Aine managed to fix us up a very effective sort of hunting blind behind some bracken in the trees north of the clearing. The boys and Tiom had gone, but we didn’t see them return. Aine opined that they had, and were just good enough at concealing themselves to escape our notice. I believed it. In Amst, they know forest better than anyone.
	Which is why we didn’t see her until she emerged into the clearing. Whoever she was, she had a cloak wrapped around her. Under the cloak it was hard to tell anything except that she was furtive, and tentative, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to do this. But after some hesitation, she knelt down by one of the bodies, and flipped the red cloth back to expose the abdomen. A knife glinted in her hand, then plunged. And then before I could move, I heard a roar of rage from the opposite side of the clearing, from which Virmant exploded. 
	She spun around, raised a hand, and stopped him in his tracks, frozen. I parted the bracken and began creeping slowly up on her. 
	I had a good view, over her shoulder, of his terrified face. When she stepped forward to offer him something, however, I couldn’t see what it was. Until he raised the hand that was no longer under his power, and I saw the knife in it. With the point toward his own throat.
	Abandoning my plan of stealth, I darted forward, yanked her head back, and put a hand around her throat.
	It hurts less when you’re expecting it. But it still hurts like a bitch.
	She collapsed onto the ground with a scream of pain, while I staggered backward, struggling against my own. The shock broke her hold on Virmant, who flung the knife away into the trees and backed up to a safe distance. 
	As she was staggering to her feet, the hood of her cloak fell back, revealing a face lined with hauteur and a head of black wavy hair pulled back into a bun with a silver chain around it. And below that, of course, the silver chain around her neck.
	“Gwilna!” shouted Virmant, stunned.
	She raised a hand toward me. I just laughed.
	“You’re going to try that tarbhfnaa on me?” 
	Her eyes narrowed apprehensively. “Who are you?” 
	I smiled.
	“I’m Theamh ni hUlnach,” I said. 
	Her whole face crumbled.
	While she was in disarray, I shot a blocking burst at her. She put up no resistance; the fire conformed itself to her body in seconds, sealing her off briefly and then sinking invisibly into her. I could hardly believe it had been that easy, but I could read nothing off her when I tried, and a number of insults I sent out to her met with no response either verbal or otherwise. 
	“You can come on out,” I called. “She’s blocked, unless she’s faking it.”
	Aine emerged from the trees first; her entry gave the others courage, and my four accomplices snuck out into the clearing, staring at both of us with a mixture of extreme curiosity and abject terror.
	“Why should I?” Gwilna bit off. “I’m safer this way.” When she turned on me, it was with a face I thought, but couldn’t be sure, was hiding a desperate fear.
	“So,” I said. “You’ve failed, and she’ll be coming for you.”
	“I throw myself on your protection,” she said, her face still fallen.
	Around us the six witnesses watched with their breath caught and held.
	“Marbhfeicann!” I shouted, grabbing her by the cloak and throwing her to the ground. “Bosca na fnaa! Puit na dhubh aon!” She flipped on her back and scuttled away from me, apparently terrified by my sudden anger. “You throw yourself on my protection!” I bent down and hauled her up by the cloak, dragging her back to the body she’d been violating and pushing her head down to about six inches from the body’s. “Admire your handiwork, killer of women, blood-eating bitch that you are!”
	The fixed, filmed eyes of the corpse looked glassily up at Gwilna’s. “Who was protecting her, Gwilna?” I said. “Who was shielding her when your mercenaries came for their payment?” 
	I heard a little cry of epiphany from Aine.
	“Name of the spirit!” I threw her back onto the ground. “Fifteen of your own people! How could my sorry life be worth that much to anyone?”
	Gwilna knelt among the bodies, her hands behind her back, looking up at me.
	“I throw myself on your protection,” she repeated.
	I watched her, angry as ever. Of course she knew she had me. Now she’d appealed to me I couldn’t deny her, knowing that to abandon her to her fate was the same as serving her a death sentence. But I did not want to be going over the border with this kind of baggage.
	“Give her to us, shriia,” Virmant said menacingly.
	“Nobody deserves death,” I warned.
	“Easy for you to quote the texts!” he shouted, his anger now expanding to include me. “Your wife isn’t lying here!”	“No,” I said, quietly. “You’re right, she isn’t.”
	“Every thurking week,” Varmint shouted at her, as she flinched. “Every thurking week she met you in the square and she brought you into this town. And it made her happy to see you coming,” he went on, his voice rising as the grief mixed with the anger. “Because she thought you were going to help her people!” 
	The vernacular became insufficient for his emotions, and he lit into her in Amstic. It’s a variant of Old Tongue, so I could follow it well enough, but I would never have been able to produce curses in it as fluent and pungent as this with such speed and ingenuity. I doubt I could have done it in any language, really.
	<Morat.>
	<Theamh? Where are you?>
	<I’m in Dunta, and have I got a story for you. What do you know about Gwilna ni Bhatan?>
	<I remember her getting her orders about ten years back,> she answered. <One of Cualha’s, and not one of the brighter ones, as I recall. Even for rainmaking, where they don’t come that bright.>
	I let this pass. <Well, she’s found a calling more suited to her talents, evidently.>
	I told her the story. Cailte, seeing Varmint start to slow down, stepped up to the plate and pitched in, doing the language proud. Tiom and the brothers looked on, interested but realizing this was a league they weren’t qualified for yet.
	<That’s the most horrifying thing I think I’ve ever heard of,> Morat said.
	<Well, now she’s thrown herself on my protection. What should I do? I can’t take her along, that’s insane.>
	<Dump her off at Amranth, let the shriias there handle it.>
	<Do we know who’s true up there?>
	Thoughtful pause.
	<I think they’re all sound,> she finally answered. <There was that thing with haons linn, you know. That was only a year ago.>
	In Amranth, there’s a tradition dating back from the siege whereby all the shriias working in the city go up to the battlements on the city walls to do haons linn together. About a year and a half ago, when tourist traffic started to really pick up there, some enterprising Amranthians had hit on the idea of charging the Cretids for seats with a good view of the ritual. It caught on quick, despite the difficulty of persuading Cretids to get up before sunrise, and it wasn’t long before the Order realized what was going on and that, essentially, these people were selling shri. There were fights with the city leaders, and fights with local businesses who had become dependent on the tourism and who, for their own reasons, pretended not to see the harm. Finally, the local council up there voted to stop doing haons linn in public. That rattled the citizenry so badly that their Seat passed a law making it illegal to pay to attend a shriic ritual. The Cretids, of course, don’t care; they get fined and sent home, it’s nothing to them. But the law also punishes those who try to sell tickets with exile. Which dried up the market fast. Now the shriias are back doing the rite, and the Cretids mainly sleep late, and everyone’s happy.
	So she was right, that was a sign that things were right in Amranth. Of course, as I now knew only too well, a lot could change in a year.
	<Well, so I just take her to Amranth under my protection?>
	<And then hand her off. Cera’s very good; look her up first.>
	<All right. It just--it’ll be hard, having to stand the sight of her.>
	<I know.> Another thoughtful pause. <So you think she offered them those victims as payment for attacking you?>
	<Yes. Probably it was a package deal--the ones I dealt with were to have me, and their 200 little friends would get the Duntani. They’re like that, you know--communal, and all that. When it comes to preying on us.>
	<So lurers don’t like water.>
	<Good to know, isn’t it? Tell a friend.>
	<Do you understand this, Theamh?>
	It wasn’t a kind of question she was used to asking me. But she, like me, was staggered by the spectacle of a shriia not only turning, but turning into this. To kill fifteen of her own people just to get to me--even as an assassination, it was horrendously sloppy and wasteful. It suggested either that Morat’s assessment of her intelligence was right, or that human life really didn’t matter a damn to her. And I couldn’t tell, any more than Morat could, how you get there from here.
	<No, Morat, I don’t.>
	<I keep hoping. Idair with you, Theamh...travel carefully.>
	<I will.>
	I returned my attention to Gwilna who, if this could be credited, was now actually crying.
	“Oh please,” I said, as she lifted her wet face to me. “Don’t tell me you’re still capable of remorse.”
	She looked away from me at the bodies she’d had butchered. Whatever she felt, it was blocked, and all I could tell was that she was far, far away.
	“I throw myself on your protection,” she repeated, her voice ragged and hoarse.
	“As you know damn well,” I said, “I have to give it to you. At least until we get to Amranth, where I’ll be turning you over to the tender mercies of the local council.”
	I could feel Virmant’s heavy glare on me, but I tried to take no notice. Of course he didn’t like to hear me promise to protect the woman who’d butchered his wife in the most horrific manner imaginable. But he knew as well as she knew that I couldn’t let her be killed, if I could help it. 
	“Thank you,” she said.
	I gritted my teeth.
	“Being under my protection means you’ll do what I tell you,” I said. “If you go against me I’m in my rights to withdraw it.”
	She nodded.
	“And the first thing you’ll do,” I said, “is deface that.”
	I pointed to her hreapa. Her chin began to quiver again.
	“Aine, go get that rag off the tree and bring it over here,” I said.
	 As the others watched, Aine took the hreapa off the tree and brought it over. I spread it on the ground next to one of the bodies. Gwilna remained kneeling, looking down at it with tears in her eyes.
	“Go on,” I said. “It’s not like there’s a shortage of ink around here.”
	The others looked puzzled, but she and Aine knew what I was talking about. Aine craned her neck forward, watching with horror but also with that uncrushable curiosity. She’d never seen this happen before. Neither had I, actually. I knew about this ritual because they taught it to us, but in my memory nobody had ever had to do this.
	Gwilna reached, reluctantly, into a dark red puddle where blood had pooled and clotted. With two fingers of her right hand, she traced the words on her hreapa. She had to dip into the puddle several times, because the blood wasn’t very fluid and the letters had to be retraced often. But eventually, there it was, plain as anything, the blood becoming brighter red as it sank into the weave. Her name, and underneath it her crime. Feicidh me marbh. I have killed.
	If it hadn’t been the blood of one of her own victims, it would have slid right off. But when I picked it up, the letters didn’t run. Gwilna sniffled loudly when she saw that. It was over now; her hreapa was just a strange-looking cloth that would dirty and tear like any other piece of laundry.
	“Gwilna ni Bhatan, the blood has spoken,” I said. “You have long since ceased to be a shriia. You will never be one again. You have made an enemy of Idair.”
	I walked over to Virmant and presented him with the stained hreapa. My hands, still smeared with blood, left smudges on the wool. He took it, looking at me uncertainly.
	“As town leader, you have custody of this proof of her guilt,” I said. “To do with what you see fit. Technically speaking, I have to relinquish all responsibility concerning her legal prosecution to you and the secular authorities,” I went on, more conversationally, “but if you want my advice...”
	“Of course, shriia,” he said mechanically.
	“I wouldn’t make this known until after the departures. This is the time for love and grief. The rage can come later.”
	He nodded. “I think you’re right, shriia.”
	“I’ll meet you in the square as I planned. Right now, I need to put Gwilna somewhere where she’ll be safe.”
	“Come on then,” he said hoarsely to the others, folding up the hreapa and stuffing it under his cloak. “Back to town, I have things to do.”
	They walked away down the path. I turned back to Gwilna.
	“Let’s find you a nice tree to hug,” I said.
	We walked her far enough into the forest that she wouldn’t be visible from the clearing. Pushing her against the trunk of an oak tree, we brought her hands around it to the other side and I pinioned them there, leaving a wrap around both her wrists. It was much less energy, and since I was already expending some keeping the block up it made sense. I’d be doing a lot of burning at sundown.
	“If you’ve got sense, you’ll be content to stay there,” I said. “If you bolt, I withdraw my protection. At which point, I think between Lythril and your erstwhile clients your death will be pretty much assured.”
	“I won’t stir,” she said.
	There was something about the way she had capitulated to me so quickly and so utterly that sickened me more than anything else I’d seen.
	“Come away from this,” I said to Aine.
	Leaving her there in the trees, we set off for town.
	<How did you know it was her, dhiaoc?>
	<Cailte saying that victims had been to siuilin was the first clue,> I answered, treading wearily onward. <But it was the hreapa that decided me.>
	<What about it? It was still working, when-->
	<That’s just it. When you die, your hreapa dies with you--all the magic goes out of it. Hers was still proof, so she had to be alive somewhere. Put it all together...>
	<And to read it you don’t need shri,> she answered.
	<You’ve done well, Aine,> I replied. <I know how horrifying that vision must have been.>
	<Thank you, dhiaoc.> And, after a pause, <It was.>
	We kept on, as the sunlight slanted through the trees. The worst was over. But there was plenty bad yet to come.

III.
Nothing and No One

	“You’re not sleeping,” Aine said.
	Indeed, she was right. I was crouched by the campfire in my shift, my hreapa wrapped around my shoulders, staring into the flames.
	“Neither are you.”
	“She seems to be all right,” Aine said, nodding at Gwilna.
	Gwilna lay on her side a few feet from the fire, her knees drawn up and her wrapped hands tucked under her cheek.
	“I suppose this is how it works,” I said. “Gwilna kills 15 people and sleeps like a baby. Meanwhile, just thinking about the departures is keeping me up. As we used to say in the scoil, sometimes it sucks to be good.”
	Fifteen bodies, laid out under their red cloths, and one by one the people coming up to send them home. They estimate that for every person who dies there are at least seven who knew her well enough to really grieve. So that was a hundred and five, just among the near and dear. And in a town the size of Dunta, everyone knows everyone at least casually. It had taken two hours just to get to the firing. Fifteen piles of objects, heaped on their breasts--as I went around to fire the bodies I would get, in the second before the flame took, flashes of the things people had left with them, and it was that I couldn’t get out of my mind. Not knowing who any of these people were, and still seeing, in those inscrutable objects--a blanket, a necklace, a pot of flowers, an ordinary tin pitcher--the stories that would burn up with them, the thousands of daily actions that had worn meaning into these common things...thinking about all the stories I didn’t know, that had ended now.
	“You were good with them,” Aine said.
	I shook my head. “I can’t do this like Lilea does. You should watch her do a departure sometime, Aine. I think sometimes that if I could do it I’d trade my gift for hers. What she says matters. I--nothing I can think of to say, at a time like this, makes a difference.”
	“Still,” Aine said, flicking a piece of bark into the fire. “What you said to that little girl--Manelt--that mattered.”
	That was another image that wouldn’t be leaving my head any time soon. Virmant, before the ceremony, had brought her to see me--his oldest daughter, a roundish child with limp brown hair and a pale face. About eight years old, and not ready to lose her mother. She asked me where her mother had gone, and I had to tell her I didn’t know.
	“I couldn’t answer her question,” I said.
	“Not that one,” Aine replied. “But it’s true--what you said--about love outliving us. I think--you know--that is what she meant, about how nothing and no one is lost forever. You love someone, and then the love lasts, even if you go...and that person loves someone else...and it goes on and on, outside us and beyond us.”
	I shrugged. “I hope it, anyhow.”
	“You’re still damp,” she said, after a silence.
	It was cold now at night, but I’d certainly been toasty warm in that clearing, walking among the rows of bodies firing them one at a time. After the first two they couldn’t hear my words over the noise of the flames, but I went on saying them anyhow. Slan abhaile, Malrin mac Dhuna. Slain abhaile, Julnai ni Vhirid. Until I felt like a blacksmith, a glazier, standing there in the middle of a huge furnace, sending more flame out to catch onto more bodies and send up more heat into the night sky. The wind, blessedly, stayed consistent, and the spark and the smell blew away from the spectators. By the time I stepped back I was drenched in sweat and the air above the flames was rippling and buckling. They watched it with the dumb amazement that comes with a disaster this size, as if they were watching a pillaged city burn. And in a way, they were. Patch all those departure speeches together, and you had the history of Dunta, going back fifty years and more. All of it, up in smoke.
	“I know,” I said. “The fire will keep me from catching cold, I hope.”
	“Not if you don’t sleep,” she said.
	Amusement broke through my numb sense of despair. “Yes, mathi.”
	Aine dropped her eyes, embarrassed.
	“It’s all right,” I said. “I was only teasing.”
	“I took care of four of my brothers and sisters,” she said. “It’s made me bossy. I’m sorry.”
	“Don’t be.” I lay down on one side. “You still miss them, your family?”
	She stared into the fire. “I do.”
	“Why do you never say so?”
	Her eyes flicked over to me, embarrassed.
	“Say it, Aine. You’re in the habit, you may as well get used to offending people.”
	“It’s--I just--” Her hands withdrew into her sleeves as she scooted toward the fire. “I feel--it’s not right, I know, but I feel--I feel bad for you, your not having any brothers and sisters, and your mother being...being...”
	“Who she is?”
	Aine nodded. “And I don’t want you to feel worse...”
	“Don’t worry about me, Aine,” I said. “I’ve gotten used to it. I used to like hearing about your family,” I went on, closing my eyes. “It made me happy to know there were other kinds.”
	“Really?”
	“Really.” I settled myself into a comfortable position. “Tell me what’s up with them. I know you’re still talking to them every day, I see you do it.”
	“Well,” she said, a little taken aback that I could tell, “right now, the big question is seanmathi, they’re trying to get her to stop coming with them to harvest the seaweed, she had a fall last month but she’s stubborn...”
	I fell asleep listening to her. I didn’t suppose she would mind. The fire would burn out eventually; it was ordinary. And she’d watch to make sure it didn’t catch on anything. She was a very conscientious camper. I had vague dreams at first about the ocean and seaweed and arguments with stubborn old women, but eventually then dissolved into the more usual nightmares, except this time they were tinged at the edges with the red flames of death and departure. 
	<THEAMH.>
	I was relieved to be awakened, even if it was by Morat. <Morat. What time is it?>
	<Grinth is dead.>
	Time not to bother with trifles, obviously. I rolled over and sat up, blinking into the ash of the campfire. <When?>
	<Just now. Lilea watched her out; she had a clean exit.>
	<Thank Idair.> Gradually I began taking more stock of my surroundings. <You don’t think they--rushed her?>
	<I know we were counting on another week--but I don’t think so, Theamh; it was just her time. Bad timing for us, but-->
	<Oh fnaa.>
	<I beg your pardon?>
	“Aine!” I called, as I noticed the lack of a sleeping form to my left. “Where the hell is Gwilna?”
	It was then that I noticed the lack of a form, sleeping or otherwise, across from me.
	“Aine?”
	<Theamh, what’s wrong?>
	From behind one of the trees, I heard a painful moan. I pulled out a light globe.
	<Morat, talk to me later.>
	<Theamh, this means the election is set for the next full moon. That’s eight days from now. It’s not enough time.>
	<Yes, I know, Morat, but I went to sleep with one apprentice and one dark user and now I’m missing both of--oh wait.> Moving around the tree, I discovered Aine, flat on her stomach in the leaves and dirt. When I touched the back of her head, I felt wetness and a swelling.
	<What’s happened?>
	I rolled Aine over. Her eyes fluttered open as one hand flew to the wound on the back of her head.
	“Are you all right, Aine?”
	She brought her hand back in front of her face, looking at the blood on her fingers. “What’s--what happened?” She sat up, bending over her knees. “My head hurts.”
	“Someone whacked you, with something big.” I pulled the restorative out of my bag and opened it. “Here, have a swig of this, you’ll feel better. Let me see where she hit you.”
	<Theamh?>
	I’d forgotten about Morat. <I found her, she’s all right.>
	<Who is?>
	<Aine. Listen, Morat, I appreciate the urgency of the situation, but-->
	<Call me when things are calmer up there,> she said, the snap coming through even in her head voice. <This is a very serious development. And it’s not the only one.>
	<I will. I’m sorry, Morat, it’s just-->
	<Never mind. Take care of yourselves.>
	She closed the link. Aine was feeling more herself now, enough to start apologizing. “I’m sorry, dhiaoc--I should have been paying attention--”
	“What’s the last thing you remember?” I had now dragged the water jug over to her and was sponging off the blood with a rag. 
	“I came over here to--to--you know--”
	“Void--”
	“--yes,” she admitted, reluctantly. “And I turned around to take hold of the tree...and that’s it.” She stood up, not too shakily. “I guess that’s when she hit me.”
	“She’s even dumber than I’d given her credit for,” I said. “Why in the name of all that’s stupid would she cut and run after making such a huge deal of throwing herself on my protection?”
	Aine looked back at me, at a loss. “Maybe Lythril came and got her?”
	“I suppose we could hope for that,” I mused. “Still, whacking someone upside the head with a blunt instrument is not really her style. And besides, if she was going to come through here and start whacking people, I can’t see her passing up the chance to whack me.”
	She smiled a little bit when I said “whack,” the absurdity of it coming home to her. “Maybe she was scared to whack you,” she said, the smile reappearing. “Maybe she just thought she’d whack me and it would be sort of like whacking you, only less dangerous.”
 	I smiled too. “No, whoever whacked you whacked you because you were awake. I was asleep, so I didn’t need whacking.”
	Aine laughed. I was about to, and then the smile suddenly left my face with a rapidity that clearly alarmed Aine.
	“What is it, dhiaoc?”
	“If it was an enemy, no matter who it was, she’d have taken a shot at me,” I said. “I was asleep and out of hreapa. And she’d’ve done a lot more than hit you. Whoever did this only wanted Gwilna.”
	She stared back at me with horrified eyes that showed me she’d followed me there.
	“Quick! Where would they take her?” I demanded.
	“How should I know?”
	“Come on, I’m a city girl, I don’t know about these things--”
	“Oh, and I do?” Aine shouted, that bump on her head obviously irritating her still. “Oh that’s right, I forgot, we kill each other all the time, we’re temperamental like that, we Jiprani--”
	“All right!” I shouted, holding up my hands in surrender. “I’m sorry, Aine. Name of the spirit.” She withdrew, ashamed of her outburst. “A little touchy, are we?”
	“I’m sorry, dhiaoc--I shouldn’t speak to you like that--”
	“It’s all right, it was my fault. I guess stress brings out the Ulnach in me.”
	“Oh, don’t say things like that about yourself, dhiaoc,” Aine protested, sincerely horrified.
	“Think with me here,” I said, trying to bring us back on task. “Where would they take her?”
	“Somewhere outdoors,” she said.
	“The town square?”
	“I’d think they’d be afraid,” she said. “To stain it like that--”
	“The clearing?”
	“Yes!” Her eyes lit. “Oh, wait. No.”
	“No,” I agreed. “Not with the ashes still there.” It was another long moment before I had another thought. “I’ve got it. The river.”
	I pinned my hreapa around my shoulders with one hand, grabbed my bag with the other, and went crashing through the undergrowth with Aine behind me.
	<I’m sorry, dhiaoc. I should have known. I can’t see why I didn’t hear them coming.>
	<Don’t blame yourself. They say up here the only thing an Amstian can’t surprise in the forest is another Amstian.>
	<Gwilna’s an Amstian.>
	<Yes, but she’s from Amranth, evidently. City life must have blunted her edge.>
	It was a hard run, through the woods with only the bouncing, erratic glow of the light globe to break the darkness. They had a head start, and they knew the terrain; the only thing I could hope for at this point was that they decided to torture her for a while first. Which struck me, as I panted through the cold night air and the deserted town, as a really depressing thing to be hoping for.
	We could hear the shouting before we got to the pier. But I was still surprised by the size of the crowd--there had to be at least two hundred people, packed onto the surfaces of the linked piers, all facing toward the river. Or, more specifically, the end of the pier that stuck out into the harbor. Fili and the boat were long gone; there was nothing out there but open water. Over their heads I couldn’t see what was going on, but I could make a guess.
	<How are we going to get through, dhiaoc?>
	“People!” I shouted.
	My voice carries, but not enough. And in this hubbub, I didn’t even get noticed.
	“Come on with it!” someone in the back, close to us, shouted forward. “How long can it take a person to tie a knot?”
	That decided me. I pulled a fireball out of my hand and sent it whizzing along the pier, about an inch above their heads.
	It wasn’t a kind thing to do to a bunch of people that had been terrorized by lurers so recently, but there was no time to worry about civility. People dove in opposite directions, away from its path, clearing a narrow space through which Aine and I forced ourselves. A number of onlookers fell into the water, to be helped back onto the pier by their neighbors as I broke through the last rows into the empty space on the end of that long pier.
	Gwilna was still alive, although she was most definitely not well. Her stained hreapa had been wrapped around her  and tied so that it pinned her arms to her sides; her hands were bound in front of her and the rope from her hands passed to her feet. She lay on her side like she was a calf trussed for slaughter. From her ankles the rope ran along the pier, knotting finally around the ends of a net which held a large and, no doubt, sufficiently heavy boulder. Virmant was standing on the other corner, having just finished tying on the weight. My fireball bobbed gently on the water behind them, giving each of them a faint, ruddy nimbus of backlight.
	“What are you doing?” I shouted in the comparative silence that had fallen.
	“Go on from here, shriia,” Virmant warned. “We have no quarrel with you.”
	“This woman is under my protection,” I said. 
	“You want her dead just like we do!” he shouted.
	The crowd sent up a roar of affirmation. I turned around, and saw that Aine had been trapped in the middle of it; the path must have closed up before she could barge all the way through. She looked frightened, and I couldn’t blame her. With so many people crammed together on such a small platform there was no room for her to move, much less intervene.
	“I don’t want her killed,” I said.
	“Who cares?” shouted someone from the crowd. “Drown her already!”
	With the crowd screaming behind him, Virmant lifted the boulder. I could see his arms shaking with the strain, as he swung it behind him. Gwilna squeezed her eyes shut in terror.
	“Mo linn agam!”
	As the boulder flew out, my fire flew back, hitting the rope as it paid out and burning through it instantly. The boulder sank untethered into the water, and the black end of the rope trailed harmlessly off the pier.
	Behind me I felt the disappointed crowd surging forward, that blood cry rising from all its throats.
	“Stay back!” I shouted, flashing a spurt around me that cleared an arc. “You’re not going to do this!”
	“The hell we aren’t!” someone shouted back.
	“Leave it alone, shriia,” Virmant said, stonily. “This is a local matter, and doesn’t concern you.”
	“Death is not local!” I answered. That seemed to puzzle them enough to fall quiet for a moment. “Look. I know, if there was ever a person that deserved a horrible lingering death, it’s her. But Idair told us that nobody deserves death.”
	“Idair never met this bitch!” shouted a woman from the back.
	At least there was a laugh after that. But it didn’t change the fact that I was facing two hundred people who had come out there with murder in their hearts. The fact that I recognized many of them from the ceremony that evening only made it more frightening. I was standing with my back to the river in front of a mob of strangers trying to defend the life of a woman who had betrayed their trust, poisoned their lives and mangled their loved ones. I had to be nuts.
	“This is not right,” I said.
	“Thurk right!” shouted a young man, followed by a roar of assent. “Virmant, throw her in or I’ll strangle her with my bare hands!”
	“You’ll have to get through me first,” I growled back.
	“So be it!” he shouted.
	The roar this time was a little weaker; the idea of attacking a shriia was hard for them to get their minds around. But I had the sense that it was getting a lot easier.
	“All right!” I yelled back, taking a stride forward. “Come on if it means that much to you! Come on, let’s see you strangle me with your bare hands!”
	He was not forthcoming. Virmant stepped toward me.
	“Shriia, we have no quarrel with you,” he repeated. “But her fate is sealed.”
	“Then so is mine,” I shouted, more for the crowd than for him. “I will not let you do this while I am in life and if you try to do it I will fight you until you kill me. Not because I give a rat’s fnaa about Gwilna or her welfare,” I went on, rounding on the crowd. “Not because I would shed a single tear if I heard a pack of lurers spread the tattered shreds of her body over the forest from here to Amranth. I’ll do it because life is sacred, and because with every evil done against it the Dark One’s power grows.”
	“It grew in her first!” someone shouted.
	“And you’re ready to spread the infection!” I shot back. “You think the Dark One will miss this sack of garbage once her corpse is rotting in the river? She’s already marked her down for extermination. The Dark One doesn’t believe in giving second chances.” A whimper from Gwilna confirmed this assessment. “But why should the Dark One trouble herself to kill this worm when she can get you all to do it?”
	“Enough!” someone roared. “Push her off if she won’t shut up!”
	There was a confused movement forward, but the crowd’s will wasn’t yet united, and they stopped short. 
	“Be reasonable,” Virmant said, starting to worry. “You’ve done your duty speaking against it, but it won’t change anyone’s mind. Go on before you get hurt. For Idair’s sake,” he cried, looking back at her. “How could she possibly be worth it?”
	“She isn’t!” I shouted back. “Don’t you understand? It’s not her I’m fighting for.”
	“Well then who is it?” from the crowd.
	“You,” I said. “This is not you. This is not what you want.”
	“What do you know about us?” roared an old man standing behind Aine. “Galla na siudh!”
	And as the crowd shouted its agreement, I remembered that I was, indeed, a foreigner from the south, and that this was Amst.
	“I know that eight hundred and ten years ago Dunta was a town of three hundred people, and two hundred and fifty of them marched through the forest to fight with Amranth against the Cretids,” I said.
	This actually seemed to stop them. Nobody shouted anything at me when I paused.
	“I know that ninety of Dunta’s children fell in the mountains above Amranth, and that twenty of her daughters were shot dead as they fired down at the enemy from the city walls. I know that every year, in the fifth week of the cold season, you celebrate the feast of Tertia ni hAlam, who starved to death during the siege because she wouldn’t eat while her people were hungry, and who your children call Bean ag an Pioll because she stuffed her hreapa with straw to keep them from seeing that she was wasting away. I know that Amranth lasted the siege out because Duntani like Dorel mac Phiersin smuggled food and water to them through the Cretid lines. I know they say that when Dorel was captured by the Cretid scouts, and they told him to obey and answer their questions because he only had the one life, he said, ‘If Idair had given me twenty, you could take them all before I would say a word that would hurt my people.’”
	They were watching me now, not exactly with me, but interested. Enough to want to see where I was heading.
	“I know that in the terrible days at the beginning of the time we know, when the Cretids wanted to extinguish what little fire was burning here among us, Dunta gave its life and soul to keep the struggle going and the truth free,” I called out. “I know that no one loved our land and Idair and our people with more passion and power than the Amstians did. And when it came to a fight, there was no one stronger or surer or readier to die. That’s what I know about you.”
	Before someone could answer me I started in again. “It’s been three hundred years since we were at war with the Cretids,” I said. “But there is a war starting, right here, right now. Between Idair and the Dark One. That massacre in the clearing was the first strike.” This, they seemed to agree with me on; at least it was received in silence. “We plant our seeds and we live our lives and we think it was always like this but the Dark One has ruled here before and she wants to rule here again. She’s out there grinning at us and with every death that grin gets a little wider and with every hand that murders in hate or every heart that turns to stone or every home where love vanishes up the chimney like smoke her power here grows. The fields sit smiling behind us and the river winks kindly before us but we are at war,” I repeated, the tears coming. “Fighting to save what Idair gave us before the darkness takes it all. And if all the grief and love that went up to Idair with those fires tonight falls back to earth as poison and hatred, then the Dark One is master of this field.” 
	They were watching me now, quiet enough to let the noise of Gwilna’s whimpering and the lap of the water through. 
	“We are at war,” I repeated, slowly. “The last one, maybe, that we’ll have the chance to fight. Do you want them to say, eight hundred and ten years from now, that it was at Dunta that we lost the war?”
	There was a murmur from the crowd. I kept going.
	“Do you want them to look back at this night and say, yes, that was it, that was our chance, and it went into the river with Gwilna?” Aine still looked pretty scared, but I wasn’t sure I wasn’t making some headway. “Because if that’s what you want, then come up here and kill her. You’ll have to kill me first, of course,” I rushed on, my voice rising, “but you know what, that’s all right, because this is how I want to go. On my feet, in battle, with fire in my hands and my back to the wall, fighting for Idair and what I love!”
	It came out unexpectedly, with a conviction that startled even me. The crowd remained where it was, seemingly rooted. At any rate, nobody stepped forward. Virmant stood where he’d paused behind me, with nothing to say.
	“Or do you want them to say, when they speak of the massacre at Dunta, that you saw the snare spread for you,” I said, quietly. “That you closed your gates on the Dark One, and kept your hearts clean until the siege was lifted. That with the loss and the grief still bleeding inside you you fought on anyway. And that it was here, at Dunta, when you made the terrible sacrifice that had to be made so you could bring love and compassion alive through this evil time, that the tide turned, and the long slow victory began.”
	I didn’t know what would happen when I stopped talking. I don’t think they did either. Certainly Aine didn’t. But she managed, somehow, to shove her way through the people between us, as if now that the crowd was no longer roaring with one voice it was somehow less serried and dense.
	Virmant looked troubled to see her coming forward, and seemed not to know what to do with his hands. She saw that, and made the same deduction I did. With a hand fingering the wound on her head, and her face wincing from the pain, she turned back to the crowd.
	“If you try to kill my dhiaoc,” she said, “you’ll have to kill me too.”
	Standing up there in her youth, with the wound they’d given her still open, she looked more vulnerable than ever--like she could be snapped in half with one good twist. But perhaps that’s why people began to shift, restlessly, and to wish that they had somewhere else to look.
	“And of course,” she added, “if you succeed, and kill both of us, then Gwilna won’t be blocked any more.”
	I hadn’t thought to point this out, and it obviously hadn’t occurred to the rest of them. I wondered if it had even occurred to Gwilna.
	There was movement in the crowd, but not forward. People at the edges, near the shore, started drifting back from the pier onto the beach. They were less sure, apparently, that something interesting was going to happen, and starting to move on home.
	Virmant turned to Gwilna. “And what about justice?” he said, bitterly. “Is she not to suffer?”
	“If she had fifteen lives she couldn’t suffer enough to make this just,” I said. “Justice was not invented for things like this. Iandar meant well, but this is out of his league.”
	“So what, we just forgive her?” he demanded.
	“Oh, thurk no,” I said, genuinely taken aback. 
	There was some scattered laughter. I’d forgotten they weren’t used to me yet.
	“I just met this woman yesterday and already I hate her with a hatred normally reserved only for Lythril, the Dark One, and certain persons who have betrayed my trust in a particularly horrible manner. I haven’t forgiven her, and for Idair’s sake anyone would have to be stone cold crazy to suggest that you should. But--I mean--look at her.” Gwilna raised her head off the boards, her face the color of whey and drained with fear and exhaustion. “If you’re going to the dark side, go in style. Not by drowning this broken-down water-veined whore of the Dark One who can’t even shoot a sitting duck without taking out half a town in the process.”
	Aine turned to look behind us. The sky was beginning to gray out.
	“Look,” I said. “Dawn’s coming.”
	I unpinned my hreapa, squatting down on the pier and laying the brooches out in front of me. I reached into the bag and took out my tin of ashes.
	“Any of you who want to stay for haons linn,” I said, “I’ll be glad to have you with me.”
	I turned around. The sun was coming up over the river, so I had to do it all with my back to the crowd. I knew Aine was sitting behind me, watching, and that Gwilna was still lying on the deck where she’d been thrown, her eyes following me. Aside from that, I wasn’t paying attention. And when I’d made the marks, and scattered the river water around me, I turned around. There were only a handful of people still there. Virmant among them. And Devan and Milhat. And Cailte.
	“Well,” I said, working on the rope. “You won’t die today after all.”
	Aine watched, thoughtful. Virmant was still there on the pier, his face unreadable. 
	“Some hell of a knot you made here, Vir--FNAA!” My hands brushed against her ankles, sending both of us into separate convulsions.
	“Dhiaoc, are you all right?”
	She’d seen it before, of course, but I’d been braced then; it had hurt, but it hadn’t reduced me to clutching my stomach and gagging as I waited for my body to stop screaming. At least Gwilna was suffering with me.
	“Be careful, damn it!” Gwilna snapped, as soon as she was able to talk.
	“Shut up or I’ll just pick up the rope and drag you behind us,” I choked out, waiting for the burning to stop. When I’d recovered, mostly, I returned gingerly to the knot. “Now will you thurking hold still, before--” Her legs jerked; my hands pulled away. “You’re doing it on purpose, you bitch!”
	“It hurts me too, you know,” she said petulantly.
	“I’ll do it, dhiaoc,” Aine said, trotting up.
	I squatted down next to her while she went to work. Her hands worked fast, but I knew she was nervous. This was as close as she’d ever been to a dark user. Virmant looked on, rubbing one broad hand across his jaw.
	“Does it really hurt that much?” he asked, grudgingly.
	All three of us just looked at him.
	Aine finished untying her feet. I grabbed the hreapa and pulled it off her. 
	“This is Dunta’s,” I said, throwing it at Virmant. “Burn it, wrap fish in it, do what you want. At any rate, I never want to see the polluted thing again.” I picked up the end of the rope, which was still pinioning her hands behind her back. “I don’t want to see this polluted thing again either, but there we are. On your feet, inion na mhada.”
	She got up without giving me any trouble. Virmant stepped up into our path as we started down the pier.
	“Shriia,” he said.
	I waited.
	“She’s worked here for eight years,” he said. “She named all of our children.”
	Gwilna smiled at him. “That’s right,” she said. “They’re mine now, at any time, anywh--”
	“SHUT UP!” I yanked on the rope so it bit into her wrists; she stopped. “You’re blocked. You couldn’t thrall a squirrel, even if you had named it. And you’re going to stay blocked until either we exile your sorry gleacha or the Dark One feeds you to the pit creatures.” She looked down, crestfallen. “Understand this, Gwilna. No matter who you dress up as, you’re still just a pathetic little bug making yourself feel big by doing harm. Stop trying to impress people with your Lythril act. You can’t pull it off.” I turned back to Virmant. “Truly, as long as she’s blocked, your children are perfectly safe. And while she’s in country, someone will be blocking her. The Order can promise you that, at least.”
	He nodded. “All right then, shriia.” Another pause. “I wouldn’t--I wouldn’t really have let them kill you.”
	I sighed.
	“If they’d wanted to,” I said, “you couldn’t have stopped them.”
	He glanced down at the boards of the pier, and then out to the river.
	“You all did right, in the end. That’s what matters.”
	Virmant nodded, still not looking at me.
	“It is a victory,” I said. “Even though it doesn’t feel like it.” And, as he didn’t answer, “Idair with you, Virmant. I’m sorry for all of this.”
	We walked down the pier, onto the beach. The others had all dispersed, back to their usual occupations. Gwilna trailed behind us at the end of the rope, quiescent now.
	<She seems docile enough,> Aine began.
	<I think she’s one of those who follow the strongest,> I answered. <Right now, that’s who I am.>
	<You were amazing, dhiaoc.>
	<Please don’t, Aine.>
	We passed through the town again. Quiet, almost normal-looking. Getting back to business, the battle over.
	<Where did all that come from?>
	I sighed.
	<You remember you said, that time, that you wished you could have met Istria,> I finally answered.
	<Yes.>
	<Well, now you sort of have.>
	We walked on through the fields to the forest.
	<So it’s true, really,> she said.
	<What is?>
	<Nothing and no one is lost forever.>
	We had come onto the clearing now. It was blanketed, in the middle, with a layer of black ash. We can get the fire hot enough that everything, more or less, burns. But the ash is still there, dark, pungent, reminding you that it will be a while before the earth absorbs this death.
	<From all that way, from wherever she is,> Aine went on. <She’s still fighting for you.>
	<I’m lucky,> I finally answered. <I knew that, from the beginning.>
	“All right,” I said out loud. “Let’s move. Sooner we get to Amranth, the happier I’ll be.”

	It wasn’t until we got back to the clearing and picked up the rest of our things that I remembered about Morat. We packed up and moved out in silence.
	<Morat?>
	<Theamh. I trust now is a convenient time.>
	<I’m sorry, Morat, but things got pretty evil here last night.>
	<So what else is new.>
	<That’s what I’m asking you.>
	<You know Barant is doing Grinth’s departure.>
	<What? Why?>
	<She asked for it. What could we say? ‘No, we don’t want her engulfed in the flames of perdition’?>
	<Well...I’m sure it won’t...Idair’ll take her in, won’t she? Anyhow?>
	<I suppose. But this is getting on my nerves.>
	<What did you mean, about there not being enough time?>
	<I’m making headway here, but not fast enough. If we have a vote in eight days, I think it’s going to Barant. It’s not right, damn it.>
	Even if things weren’t as they were, I suppose, it would have bothered her to be losing to Barant. <Well, you know, Morat, if I didn’t know what I knew, I might vote for Barant too. She’s smart, she’s a good listener and she’s easy to work with-->
	<And that makes her a good head.>
	<No, not by itself, but face it, her reputation is as big as yours and she’s put in just as much service to the Order as you have, allowing for her having joined the Council a few years later. These people out in the provinces, Morat, they don’t understand what’s at stake here, they think this is just an ordinary election and they’re figuring, ‘Well, what does it matter, they can both do the job.’>
	She paused for thought as we pushed up the path between the trees.
	<You are right, I can’t attack her on her record.>
	<So there you are. I mean, the only real reason for anyone not to want her as head is that she’s black at heart and a menace to society. But since, things as they are, you can’t say that...>
	<What about my record?>
	<What do you mean?>
	<This is what I called to ask you about. The full-Council debate is in five days and she’s going to come at me everything she’s got. So I want you to tell me all the reasons you can think of not to vote for me.>
	This gave me pause. <Why me?>
	<Because you don’t like me.>
	<I--I wouldn’t say I don’t like you, Morat-->
	<You have before.>
	<I know but...I mean, not that you care, but I do like you, now.>
	When she answered, I couldn’t tell how she felt. <You do.>
	<I do.>
	<Why?>
	<Because...well, I guess because...how weird.>
	<What’s weird?>
	<I didn’t notice it happening, but...I think I’ve forgiven you.>
	“Who’s she talking to?” Gwilna whispered to Aine, as she noticed me slipping into abstraction.
	“Shut up and keep moving,” Aine said, sharply.
	Gwilna was surprised; so was I, but Morat returned to claim my attention. <I’m glad to hear you say it, Theamh.> And, after a moment, <I have to say I’d given up hoping.>
	<I didn’t realize you were hoping.>
	<Anyway, back to the point-->
	<But it is the point, kind of, Morat. You admitted yourself, that time, that sending us in after Lythril at that age was an error in judgment. I guess that made a big difference, to me. Anyway, it’s the only thing in your career that went wrong enough spectacularly enough to be worth bringing up against you. She could say it proves that you let your emotions cloud your decisions.>
	<And I answer?>
	<That you realize that now, and that you learned from the experience--and that, as long as you’re talking about it, Barant gave her full, free and enthusiastic consent to that project, which is how I came to be embroiled in it, so if what happened to Istria is your fault, what happened to me is hers.>
	<And that’s it?>
	<Well...I mean, she might also get into it with you about the way you handled our...uh...>
	<Your affair.>
	<If you want to call it that.>
	<What do you call it?>
	<I don’t really call it anything, Morat.>
	<But she was involved in that too.>
	<That’s the way to think. Basically, anything about us and that history that she brings up will have a stinger in its tail to be turned on her. Now, aside from that, there are just the more amorphous people-skills things...>
	<What things?>
	<Never mind.>
	<Go on, Theamh. This is for the future of shri. My feelings are irrelevant.>
	<Well...do you promise not to get angry?>
	<No.>
	<All right then...well, first of all, you intimidate people.>
	<I do?> She seemed genuinely surprised. <How?>
	<I don’t know,> I answered. <You just do. You should hear how Aine talks about you. You have the entire scoil terrified. I think maybe it’s because people can tell how dedicated you are. They know you’re in a class by yourself that way, and for some reason it scares the hell out of people.>
	<Istria seemed to stand it all right.>
	I forbore to answer, but she detected the silence and pressed me on it. <You mean she was scared of me too?>
	<Are you kidding? She stayed up nights trying to figure out what was going on in your head. Granted she might have done that with anyone, but...yes, she was scared of you. So was I. I still am.>
	<And it’s too late to change that...>
	She seemed sad about it, as if she was just starting to realize the distance she’d kept, what she had lost along with the respect and the obedience she commanded.
	<So you make it a selling point,> I replied, trying to cheer her up. <Grinth was like that too. I mean, dialogue and consensus is all very well, but the Order benefited a lot, I think, from having someone at the head who could just haul off sometimes and say, ‘We’re doing this because it’s right, end of story.’>
	We went on like that for some time, me coming up with personality flaws and her figuring out how to turn them to account. She accepted my assessment of her own character with the same pitiless objectivity that she turned on Istria when she was her student, agreeing where she saw it too and asking strategic questions. Finally, this bizarre and yet somehow interesting conversation wound down and we moved on to other topics.
	<How’s Slythe holding up?>
	<That’s the other development,> she answered. <She’s not.>
	<What do you mean?>
	<She’s cracking. Flying into tears in committee meetings for no reason, making elaborate and obvious efforts to avoid Barant. People are noticing.>
	<Barant included?>
	<Theamh, Barant is not an idiot. She knows damn well that she’s lost Slythe. The only reason she hasn’t confronted her is that she’s hoping, given time, that Slythe will somehow give away the rest of us.>
	<Well, what are we going to do?>
	<I was going to see if you had any bright ideas,> she said.
	<Alas.>
	<Actually, you’ve already given me one, at least.>
	<Really? I didn’t notice. Which one?>
	<I’ll tell you later.>
	<I don’t like the sound of that.>
	<I’ll be back in touch. Meanwhile you keep moving. If something does go wrong down here, we want you over the border before it happens.>
	<But-->
	<But nothing. You can do a lot more good up there than you can down here. How’s your prisoner?>
	<Quiet enough. She’s evidently more scared of our dark friends than she is of me, but if that means she behaves herself that’s all right with me.>
	<Keep your eyes open, Theamh. Safe journey to Amranth.>
	<Idair with you.>
	The terrain was already starting to get more rugged--steeper inclines, rockier paths, places where little rivulets had worn the path into mud. And it would only get worse as we got closer to the mountains and Amranth.
	<So what’s going on, dhiaoc?> Aine asked.
	<Everything and nothing,> I answered. <Things can’t hold like this for long, Aine. Something’s going to break, soon.>
	<We better walk faster,> she replied.
	So we did.

IV.
Visit Historic Amranth

	By the time we emerged from the forest to the foothills, I was in an extremely bad mood. Three days of hard hiking will do that to you, even without a dark user along for the ride. Aine tried to keep our spirits up, but you can only play word games and Who Am I for so long before you start wanting to kill people. And then there was Gwilna.
	So it was a good sight, the little houses spread out over the rolling hills, and the mountains rising up behind them. And, perched up there at the top of Mount Ros, the city of Amranth tucked inside its high gray walls.
	We stood for a little while looking at the vista--the first one we’d really come upon, our route having generally been through thick woods with poor visibility. Mount Ros isn’t really three miles high, but it looks it because it’s the tallest peak in this part of the range; down around Mypril there are higher ones, but then that’s why the Cretids decided not to try for Mypril. Amranth is the beginning of what they call the shoulder of the range, where the mountains start slouching toward the sea and the eastern coast. 
	“Here we are, Gwilna,” I said. “Home sweet home.”
	Gwilna looked up without much affection. It occurred to me that she was essentially returning to her home town in disgrace, and that having people who’d known her growing up find out that she’d turned would probably sharpen the sting. Which cheered me up a little bit.
	I’d undone the rope after the first day, keeping her hands wrapped behind her back. It was an effort, but since I was already expending a lot of energy on the block, the restraint was a drop in the bucket. It would be a huge relief for me to be able to hand her over to someone else. At the beginning I hadn’t noticed it, but the drain was constant, and I was tired of patrolling the boundary to make sure she hadn’t breached it.
	So as we pushed on through the farms at the base of the mountains, I wasn’t paying too much attention to my surroundings; mostly I was coveting the bath and meal we could look forward to at the Amranth pharc, assuming that all was well up there. As we walked through little towns I would have a vague impression of cobbled streets and buildings and crowds of people doing their business, and then we would be back in the farmland. If people recognized Gwilna, they kept their distance.
	I broke out of this contemplative state when I heard Aine calling me from further back than she should have been. Turning around, I saw that Gwilna had stopped walking and was sitting on a milestone by the side of the cobbled street. We were passing along the main thoroughfare of Eala, one of the larger towns which backed up almost right to the foot of Mount Ros. A little ahead of us there was a group of about 20 people, all clustered around the fountain and listening to someone who was declaiming at them from his perch on one of the benches. I wondered what they were doing there, but the main thing on my mind was getting Gwilna moving again. 
	“Gwilna.” I said. “Get up, we’re not there yet.”
	“No,” she said. “I’m tired. I’ll probably die of exhaustion as it is. If you make me walk more I’ll be sick.”
	“What do you think, Aine?” I asked. “Truth, or tarbhfnaa?”
	“Tarbhfnaa,” Aine answered, matter-of-fact.
	“See, you are useful for this, at least,” I said, turning back to Gwilna. “Hanging out with me all the time, she doesn’t get much chance to practice truth detection. You, however, offer a veritable feast of bad faith, misrepresentation, half-truth and complete hogwash. So thank you for providing that pedagogical moment. Now get the hell up.”
	“Make me,” she said, surlily.
	“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
	She looked at me, mistrust in her eyes.
	“I’m not going to start with the cursing you out and calling you a bitch and figuring all the various things I would do to you if I weren’t a shriia,” I said, keeping my tone as even as possible. “I’ve gotten tired of that, even if you haven’t.” She dropped her eyes. “So it’s come to this: either you get up and walk with us, or I wrap you and walk you myself. And you better believe that if I’m the one setting the pace, you’ll be moving at a pretty good clip.”
	With an exasperated sigh, she got up.
	“Yeah, I know, I’m no fun any more,” I muttered, setting off again.
	<Dhiaoc,> Aine said, as we approached the crowd at the fountain. <What did you mean by that?>
	<By what?>
	<About being no fun any more.>
	<The dark heart is a strange place,> I answered. <Here I’ve been ripping her head off about five times a day, and it takes me three days to figure out she actually enjoys that.>
	<She enjoys it?>
	<I know, it’s weird, but I swear if you look at her...she backs down like a whipped dog, but there’s pleasure in her eyes, somewhere. It’s creepy, really.>
	Aine’s shoulders shuddered briefly. To me, Gwilna was by now simply a pain in the gleacha--a spoiled child who had to be watched, and who had to be goaded into cooperating with us, but who was more of an irritant than a threat. Aine had never been around a dark user before, at least one she knew was dark, and she was still afraid of her. Not with the kind of terror she used to show around the vigils, but a general uneasiness and tension that showed me she always had one eye on Gwilna and that she believed her to be capable of anything.
	I, personally, didn’t believe her capable of much. It was true she had killed all those people, but she hadn’t done it herself--and I suppose it was because I had the experience Aine didn’t that I saw the vastness of the atrocity as a sign that she was incompetent rather than powerful. If Lythril had done this she would have done it swiftly and silently, and if she’d promised victims to the lurers nobody would ever have found them. But more likely, she would have found a less expensive way to do it. Gwilna’s assassination plot had shown a hunter’s ingenuity, combined with what to me was an unfathomable disrespect for human life. But as far as mindstrength, skill, craft, power...she was not in Lythril’s league.
	“Shriia! Shriia, oinach!”
	I stopped, startled, and found the source of the call. It came from the young man who was standing on the bench, talking to the group gathered by the fountain. The people gathered around him were looking in my direction, as indeed he was. They didn’t seem to be worried about Gwilna, which had been my first thought. The general mood among the group seemed to be festive, although my sense of that might have been influenced by the fact that so many of them seemed to be wearing clothes with red trim or red accents. 
	I looked around, but I was the only shriia in the vicinity, and the man who had called me was motioning me over with a smile that seemed inconsistent with his request. I sighed. 
	<You better stay here with Gwilna,> I told Aine. <If she acts up, just call me. But if we don’t have to get into who she is and what she’s doing here, that’ll be for the best.>
	Aine gulped and nodded. I walked over to the fountain.
	“...of our community life,” the man was saying to the group as I approached. “When they get their orders they take vows of celibacy, mercy, and honesty. Which means they’re not allowed to eat meat, for instance, or to lie.” 
	The crowd had generally been watching him and nodding, but as I approached I saw their heads turn. Those who’d seen me nudged others, and by the time I had reached the bench the man was standing on, I was uncomfortably aware that they were all staring at me. And I could hear them, too. Finally, I get to see one. This should be interesting. Is he going to interpret for us?
	“Shriia,” he said, bowing. “I’m Failte, Failte mac Bhord.”
	“Theamh ni hUlnach,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
	“You’re Theamh ni hUlnach?” he repeated, his eyes lighting up. “Really?”
	I looked at him, without affection.
	“I mean...of course you are.” He turned away from me back to the crowd, excited. “This is a very unexpected bonus. Theamh ni hUlnach is a celebrity. Among us, anyhow.” As he beamed back at me, I noticed that he was not explaining why I was famous--which the crowd was remarking on too, silently. “What brings you here? I thought you were in the City.”
	“I work in the Vicinity, but I’m on a mission,” I said. “Amranth is on the way. Might I ask--”
	“Theamh’s traveled a long way to be here,” he explained to the crowd, who nodded. “Of course, where you come from it wouldn’t even be a day’s journey, but for us to go from the City to Amranth takes...well, at least a week, wouldn’t it? How long has it taken you, shriia?”
	“Two weeks to get upriver to Dunta and another three days overland to this particular spot,” I said. “Of course it took longer than usual what with the Dark One working against me. Failte, I don’t want to get unwarrantedly snippy with you, but--”
	One of the people in the crowd had raised her hand--a woman in a beige dress under a jaunty red jacket. Failte cut me off. “Yes, Linn, you have a question?”
	“Can’t she use magic to travel?”
	“Well, what about it, shriia?” he asked, turning to me. “Can you?”
	I looked from him back to the woman, who was waiting eagerly for the answer. Her accent was strange, and there was something wrong with her hair. It was dark near the scalp, and then it became a kind of rusty orange color streaked with brighter red. She was looking at me so eagerly that I decided to answer her question, although I deliberately addressed her instead of Failte. 
	“The Order can transport people through space but it requires a huge group effort and we can only do it on very special occasions,” I said. “Failte, you called me over here. What is it that you need from me?”
	“You see,” he said, turning evasively to the crowd, “shriias are servants of the people, so they’re bound to help anyone who asks for it. Even though she’s not from here, she answered me because as a shriia her people are everywhere. That’s what I meant about them standing for all of the ideals and beliefs that we hold most dear. Wisdom, compassion, honesty, and democracy too--”
	Failte. 
	He heard me, I could tell, but he pretended not to. Another woman had raised her hand.
	“Yes, Allie?”
	“How many shriias are there in Ideire?”
	Failte, I’m in a great hurry. Tell me what you need or this is going to get ugly. 
	“Well, I think there are somewhere between five hundred and a thousand, right now,” he said. “But Theamh here can tell you more accurately. Shriia--”
	“Failte,” I cut in. “You see that woman sitting over there, next to my apprentice?”
	He looked; their eyes followed him.
	“That’s Gwilna ni Bhatan,” I said. “She used to be shriia for Dunta. Four days ago she lured fifteen people out into the woods at night where they were ripped to pieces by a pack of lurers. I’m taking her down to the Pharc to be dealt with. I interrupted this important journey so that I could come over here and give you the help you asked for. So for the final time, do you actually need something, or am I just here to amuse your Cretid friends?”
	He had gone pale at the mention of the lurers, but he was trying not to show any of that to his audience. Shriia, these people are visitors. For the country’s reputation, can’t you try to be a little friendly to them?
	“What are lurers?” asked a young girl, who was holding onto her mother’s red skirt.
	“Nothing, pumpkin,” the mother answered, hoisting her child into her arms. “They’re just imaginary monsters, like I told you about. People here believe in them, but they’re not real.”
	This was more than I could stand. Failte, you have five seconds to tell me exactly why you need my help. Five.
	“But if they killed all those people,” the child said.
	“That’s just a story, sweetie. They died some other way, and this is how they explain it.”
	Four. 
	“So what was it, eh, Failte?” barked a man standing near them. “Wild animals, or what?”
	Three. 
	“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not aware of the details. News doesn’t travel quite as far or as fast down here, I’m afraid.”
	Two. 
	“How far is Dunta from here?” asked the mother, now getting anxious. “Are the killers still on the loose?”
	“Oh, no need to worry about that,” Failte rushed to assure her.
	One. 
	“Time’s up, Failte,” I said, as he turned from her to me.
	“I called you here because...because...because I need to know something,” he said, desperately.
	I folded my arms. “Know what?”
	As Failte was obviously at a loss, the woman with the child spoke up. “With all of these people being killed, like you said--are we safe?”
	She was addressing me, so I turned to answer. “Safe is a relative term--”
	I stopped. And Cretid though she was, she could tell I was disturbed by something.
	“What is it?” she finally asked, suspicious.
	“You’re wearing a departure dress,” I said.
	Her dress was solid bright red, with yellow and orange threads embroidering flames around the neck, and the sleeve ends and skirt hem cut into curved points meant to represent fire. 
	“Is that what this is?” she said, sounding rather pleased. “What’s a departure dress?”
	“It’s what you wear when you’re dead,” I said, curtly.
	She looked back at me, hostile now. “It’s not a crime up here to wear one while you’re alive, is it?”
	“So Failte,” I said, rounding on him. “You called me over here to be a prop for your little guided tour, is that it?”
	He didn’t answer, but his eyes dropped.
	Aine, who had been watching all this, got to her feet in anticipation of the explosion.
	“Are they paying you money for this?”
	Failte was silent. But one of the men in the back of the crowd piped up.
	“Hell yes,” he said. “And through the nose, too.”
	“It’s not like I’m asking you to make fire for them, or anything--” Failte began.
	“You little--” I began, rounding on him as Aine steeled herself.
	I took a deep breath.
	“I’m in a hurry,” I said. “You accosted me and claimed my help without a legitimate reason. I am therefore continuing on my way. May you and your paying customers have a pleasant afternoon here in scenic Eala. Don’t forget to show them the monument to the victims of the Scarcity.”
	I walked off as fast as I could, ignoring what I heard from the others as I left. It was true, I had been rude. But I’d had cause.
	“Come on,” I said, passing Aine and Gwilna.
	<You were very restrained,> Aine said, as they picked up the pace.
	<Mathi always taught me not to fight in front of strangers.>
	<Strangers?>
	<Cretid tourists. I knew there was a trade in Amranth but clearly I didn’t realize how far things had gone.>
	As we toiled up the path through the hills, Gwilna’s shoulders jerked. She was trying to move her arms, but the wrap was still holding around her wrists. I saw what it was--the hood of her cloak had fallen down, and now the chain around her neck was visible. Well, let it stay visible. It would save me some explanation.
	“What in the world...”
	I looked up the path, where Aine was pointing. Headed in single file down the steep, twisting path was a train of donkeys, each linked to the one behind him by a rope. A young man of about twenty-eight was leading the first donkey by his bridle, stepping nimbly down the path as if he’d been walking it since birth. Perched atop each donkey was a Cretid, or at least what I assumed were Cretids. They were dressed in traditional Amstian garb, the kind worn for joinings and other family celebrations. Their guide, since that’s what he seemed to be, was wearing something a little more fashionable--the loose trousers that had started appearing in the City a few years ago, under a black openwork tunic that let his green undershirt show through. 
	“Life to you, shriia,” he said, touching his lips and pulling over to one side. I bowed and made the sign, but by then he was staring at Gwilna, not me.
	“Gwilna!” he shouted, shocked.
	The donkey stopped short, stopping the others short. The Cretids lurched precariously in their saddles, radiating anxiety and irritation.
	“Kehan,” Gwilna muttered, dropping her eyes.
	“You...you...” Gwilna twisted her head away from him. “You’re wearing the chain? Gwilna?”
	Since she didn’t answer, he looked to me for confirmation.
	“Yes,” I said. “She’s as dark as they come.”
	He stared at her for a long moment, I thought more sadly than anything else.
	“What’s the holdup?” shouted one of the men on the donkeys.
	“What happened?” Kehan asked me. “I mean...how did you come to find out?”
	He was one of us, and he was asking a direct question.
	“She delivered fifteen of her people to the lurers,” I said.
	“Great Idair’s wrath, why?” he answered, horrified.
	“It’s a long story,” I said. “She was trying to kill me, and she used lurers to do it, and she had to come up with a way to pay them--”
	“HEY!” came another cry from another donkey-mounted Cretid. “We’re paying you by the hour. Are you going to stand there all day?”
	Morons.
	It came from him, not me, as Aine recognized. She was getting better about identifying head voices, although it was still an uphill battle.
	Anyhow, she’s dark, I answered. But she’s blocked, so she can’t do harm. Did you know her?
	We’re cousins, he replied. On mathi’s side. Only her mathi married well, and mine didn’t.
	“What’s going on?” came another voice.
	“Oh, it’s another damn inspection or something,” said the first man. “Here!” he shouted. “You in the dress!”
	Excuse me. I looked back at the man, a massive and balding fellow who looked almost too heavy for the donkey underneath him. “Are you speaking to me, friend?”
	“Jak, don’t,” said a woman mounted on the donkey right behind him.
	“Is there some kind of a problem?” he went on, ignoring her.
	“There’s all kinds of problems,” I answered. 
	“I thought so.” With great difficulty, he swung himself down from the donkey.
	“Jak really, it’s not such a--” the woman began, but he was already bearing down on me. 
	Why was she trying to kill you? Kehan went on.
	I’m on a mission that some people don’t want to see completed.
	They call me Kehan mac Chaitin, he replied. My mother is sister to Batan. This...it will hurt her, to hear of this.
	Tell me where she lives, I’ll call on her if I have time. 
	Thank you, shriia. Our house-
	“All right, what’s the matter?” Jak, since that seemed to be his name, blustered up between us, hands in the pockets of his red-trimmed trousers. “Why aren’t you letting him pass?”
	“Do you mind? We’re talking,” I said. Say it again? Mr. Tact here distracted me.
	It’s in the Dry Quarter, opposite from the spring, on--
	“Listen, let’s just cut through the tarbhfnaa here,” said Jak. “I’m sure whatever regulation he’s breached, it can all be straightened out.” He took one hand out of his pocket, keeping something folded up inside his reddened fingers. “Here, we’re all friends, and I know you’re just doing your job...” 
	His other hand reached out and took one of mine, bringing it forward with the palm upward. I was so stunned by this affront that the other hand had almost swung over to deposit its secret burden in my palm before I realized what was happening.
	“Get that away from me!”
	I jerked my hand violently out of his grip. The coins, released from his opened fingers, fell onto the stones of the path. I drew back from them with a very loud curse.
	The Cretids on the donkeys sat up and looked interested--some of them, also, amused, but most of them offended. Aine, who had greeted the appearance of the money with an audible gasp of horror, glared at him with that sudden anger I was becoming more familiar with.
	Before she could speak, however, Kehan turned on his client.
	“Mac na mhada gan hriina,” he said, dark eyes snapping under his brown hair. “Can you not see she’s a shriia?”
	“Of course she is, why else would she be in our way?” he shot back. “If it’s not one thing with these people, it’s another--”
	“Jak, please,” said the woman, plaintively.
	“I’m so sorry, shriia,” said Kehan, turning back to me in mortification. “Please, tell me anything I can do for you.”
	“It’s not your fault, Kehan.”
	“Are you going to let us through, or aren’t you?” demanded Jak.
	“Take your money and get back on your donkey,” Kehan said, sharply. “We’ll move when I’m ready.”
	Grumbling, Jak bent over to collect the coins he’d dropped.
	Please, shriia, ask something of me. I exposed you to this terrible affront. 
	We’ll be staying at the Pharc, I hope, I answered. Come and visit us; bring your mother if she wishes it.
	With pleasure, he answered, casting a baleful glance back at Jak. “Idair with you.”
	“And you too.” Our procession filed up past the donkeys, the Cretids staring down at us as we walked. Aine heard the same thing I heard--the verbal equivalent of gawking, mixed with various comments about how trying things were in a developing country like this one, and how it was amazing that they invited tourists down here if they were going to treat them this way.
	As I reached the vacant donkey--Jak was still behind us, puffing up the hill--Jak’s consort put a hand on my arm. I pulled involuntarily away from the touch, but stopped. Her hair was frizzled around her head in strange, short, tight little curls, and it looked sad--as if it were tired of curling, but couldn’t stop. The wrinkles around her eyebrows gathered together as she met me with a pained expression.
	“I’m terribly sorry,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “I want to apologize for my husband’s behavior.”
	“I hold no grudge against you,” I said. “Enjoy your visit.”
	She still seemed very concerned. “It’s only that he doesn’t understand,” she said. “He thinks you’re like the border guards.”
	I fixed her with what I fear was a very unsettling stare.
	“So bribing the border guards, that’s worked out all right so far?”
	She withdrew in confusion, but her mind answered the question.
	“Thank you, that’s very interesting,” I said. “Consider us even.”
	<What border guards?> Aine asked, as we picked our way past the donkeys.
	<She must mean the shriias up there at the entrance point.>
	<And he’s been bribing them?>
	<So it would seem. A useful piece of information to have.> 
	<I still don’t think it was worth the insult,> Aine responded, kicking a rock angrily out of the path. 
	<I must say, there are times when you wish you could just haul off and turn someone into a frog.>
	<Could you?>
	<I could, but of course we’re not allowed. Unless circumstances warrant it.>
	<Didn’t those?>
	<Now, Aine. If I went around turning everyone who made me angry into a frog, the place would be hip-deep in amphibians.>
	At least it made her laugh. Gwilna looked at her, peeved at not being able to get the joke. Being blocked was getting to her, and much as I hated her I couldn’t blame her for that; it’s terrible to be suddenly the prisoner of your own skull, especially when you’re a bitch like Gwilna.
	“Here we are,” I said at last, looking up at the gray stone walls thrusting up from the rocks. Aine and I craned our heads backward to watch them shoot toward the sky, impressed and a little intimidated by the suddenness and steepness of their ascent. The place, itself, looked aggressive--high, forbidding, bristling with parapets. Defensive architecture, but with a challenge built into it. Designed and constructed by people who knew this was a weak point and were trying to compensate.
	There was only one gate to the city--these great iron double doors that opened onto the path we were climbing. Talk of opening another gate facing north, to make things easier for the tourists, had as yet gone nowhere. The memory of Cretid invasion is fresh in these parts, even though it’s also several hundred years old.
	Clustered by the side of the path, which got wider near the gate, was another group of Cretids listening patiently to another declaiming guide. As we approached the gate, I saw him motioning them to be silent. I pretended not to notice.
	“...custom that’s been followed since even before the time of what we call the Cretid Wars, and which you call the Secession. Each of those doors was made in a single iron cast, is forty feet high and weighs approximately...”
	I stopped about ten feet in front of the gate and raised my eyes to the little square window that seemed to be about half a mile above it near the crenellated ramparts.
	“Theamh ni hUlnach sues for entry,” I shouted, loud enough to carry.
	A woman’s head and shoulders appeared in the window, leaning out to talk to me. “I am Adra ni Chirin, keeper of the gate. Where have you come from?”
	“From the City.”
	“Which city?”
	“The City. The big one.”
	She laughed. “Apologies, shriia, but people don’t often come that far to get here.”
	“Well, after doing the trip I can see why,” I answered. 
	“And I hear the weather has been very strange down south,” she said.
	“Yes, well, I think things will go back to normal now,” I answered.
	The Cretids, who could tell that we were departing from the script, became restive. With what I thought might be a sigh, but was too far away to be perfectly audible, she resumed her official tone. “Who do you bring with you?”
	“This is Aine ni hEmer, my apprentice...” Aine and Adra acknowledged each other. “And this bit of dreck here is Gwilna ni Bhatan, former shriia of Dunta.”
	“Former?” Adra asked, then leaned forward as she caught the glint of the chain around her neck. “Oh, don’t tell me it was her behind that massacre?”
	“All right then, I won’t tell you,” I said.
	There was a long, thoughtful pause on her part, and then she resumed. “What is your business here?”
	“To drop off Gwilna with your shriias, so that they can deal with her as they see fit, to rest ourselves a while before we start on the rest of our journey...and while we’re here, to visit a few of those natural wonders and points of historic interest for which Amranth is so justly famous.”
	There was a pause while I guessed she was stifling a laugh. When she asked the next question she was in deadly earnest.
	“If it comes to a fight, who will you fight for?”
	I answered with the same seriousness. “For Idair, the right, and what I love.”
	“Amranth opens her gate to you,” Adra called back.
	Adra’s head withdrew into the windows. The Cretids watched with excessive interest as the bolt drew back and the iron doors swung sonorously open. When they were wide enough to admit us, I led Aine and Gwilna through the gap, followed a minute later by the Cretid and his tour group.
	“Well,” I said. “Let’s see if I can find us the Pharc.”

	It took a while. Unlike the City, Amranth is older than the order. And, because the walls haven’t changed position in the past nine hundred years, growth has meant making the streets narrower, the buildings taller, and planning impossible. The Pharc was stuck out by the walls in the Damp Quarter, so named because of the rain, mist and wind that blew in over the walls from the lake. Nobody had wanted to build there, before, because it was so raw and cold in the winter. Which meant that by the time we found it, we’d already seen a lot of Amranth.
	Their Pharc was gray stone like the walls and most of the buildings, and with only five points. Like the city, the Pharc was both aggressive and defensive, its points bristling out into the quarter but its back up against the city walls. And you could understand why, looking at the groups of Cretids that were wandering around among and between the different points, stopping to listen to their guides talk or poking their heads into the windows that had been opened for the afternoon air.
	“Here’s the Raed,” I said, approaching the third point. My eyes, however, were riveted on the second one, which was their shriin. Like ours, it was lined with glass windows on both sides. Unlike ours, it contained a large group of Cretids, wandering around, squatting down on the dais, putting their hands up to shade their eyes as they peered through the windows. A child of about six was breathing on the glass, tracing letters in the fog that formed there.
	Aine and I stood for a few seconds watching this amazing spectacle. Then I swept over the cobbles toward the pane that the child was pressing his nose against.
	When he saw me coming, he stood up, leaving the imprint of his nose and mouth on the glass, and began waving at me through the window.
	“That’s not allowed!” I shouted, trying to indicate the letters he had been forming on the window. Of course now the mist had evaporated, but the prints of his fingers were still there.
	The child turned his head, but only to speak to a woman standing by the dais, who came running over. She was wearing a beige natural-wool dress under a jacket in town-leader blue. But she was most definitely a Cretid.
	She squatted down by her child, looked up at me, and waved.
	I waved back. “Stop writing on the window!” I said, articulating the words as obviously as I could.
	Her smile widened into a patronizing grin, and she continued waving. With a look over her shoulder, she beckoned over a tall man in a green shepherd’s coverall and what looked to be their daughter, who looked very out of sorts. It would have been attributing too much sensitivity to her, probably, to assume that her surliness and general air of irritation was related to the fact that her parents had her wearing a First Blood fancy dress. But she was about thirteen, and she was clearly having none of this.
	The mother pointed at me, and I could see her mouth forming the word “shriia.” The daughter looked unimpressed. The father leaned forward, peering at me. Now other Cretids were coming over to see what they all were looking at.
	“This is insane,” I said, watching the crowd cluster.
	The mother, still not reading my lips, bethought herself of an experiment. She stepped up next to her child, breathed along the window, and wrote “Hello!” in the steam. At the bottom of the exclamation point, instead of a period she drew a circle, adding two dots above a semicircle to the inside. I wasn’t sure what it meant but I was sure my patience was wearing thin.
	“No!” I called, as loudly and distinctly as I could, waving my arms in what I thought was a prohibitory gesture. “No writing!”
	Now there was a whole line of gawking faces behind the mother and her family, some pointing at Aine, some at me, and some at Gwilna. The father rapped on he glass with his knuckles, waving at me with a cheerful smile when my attention turned in his direction.
	“Wait here,” I said, stepping off toward the door at the end of the point.
	By the time I had it open, the crowd had followed me down and were waiting for me.
	“Hello,” said the mother of the initial culprit. “I’m Ely Hunden, and this is my son Eandi. Say hello to the lady, Eandi.”
	“Hello,” he said.
	“We’re visiting from Cretid City,” she said. “What’s your name?”
	I drew back, amazed.
	“You can’t seriously expect me to tell you that,” I answered.
	She looked confused. Her daughter opened her mouth for the first time in a noisy and pointedly exasperated sigh, rolling her eyes.
	“You have to say used name,” she said, adding a muttered and martyred “God.”
	“You watch your language, young lady,” said the father sharply. “We’re in a place of worship.”
	“Yes, you are,” I said. “That’s why I came in here. If you would please tell your son not to write on the walls--”
	“Eandi!” snapped his mother disapprovingly, turning on him.
	“I didn’t, mommy!” he protested.
	She turned back to me. “I’m so sorry. I thought we’d taken his crayons away from him, but--”
	“Crayons?” I asked blankly.
	“Where was he drawing?”
	“On the window...over there, where  I was standing...”
	She looked. “But there’s nothing there now.”
	“I didn’t mean,” I said, now grasping the nature of the confusion, “that your son had been leaving permanent marks up there. He was writing his name in his breath--”
	“I told you, mommy,” he said, with the hurt pride of the young. “I was just writing with my finger, invisible.”
	“Well, that’s all right then,” she said.
	“No,” I answered. “No, it’s not all right. You see, this is what we call the shriin, and we don’t let people write in it. At all. Whether they’re using ink or not.”
	Must be a taboo, her mind said. Like with the money.
	“I’m terribly sorry,” she said. 
	“You ought to put up a sign,” her husband went on. “How are we supposed to know?”
	“If we put up a sign,” I said, slowly, “that would be writing, wouldn’t it?”
	While the father was deciding whether he would voice the many thoughts I could hear leaping to his mind or remain reticent and polite, the mother reached into one of her jacket pockets and pulled out a small cloth-bound book, flipping it open.
	“It doesn’t say anything about writing here,” she said. 
	My silent, angry gaze fell on the cover. It was a picture of the island, with a large red arrow stabbing toward Amranth and the lake, below a string of square black printed letters. Doing Ideire on 10 Cretinias A Day.
	“Friend,” I said, “may I see that for a moment?”
	“Sure,” she said, handing it to me.
	I turned to the page she had opened. The first thing that leapt out was a bold header reading “The Pharc: The Cheapskate’s Best Friend.”
	My eyes skimmed over the page. ...lodging at the guest house is free of charge, but the plumbing and bedding will be comfortable only for travelers as self-denying and masochistic as the shriias themselves...refectory serves free vegetarian meals, which make up in quantity what they lack in taste...forbids them to accept money, there is no charge for visiting the parts that are open to the public. Don’t forget to stop in the shriin, where the shriias gather regularly to worship the fire goddess Idair...might be lucky enough to see them ‘making fire,’ if you happen by on the right night...how this ‘fire’ is made. Experts  say that it’s either an optical illusion or the creative use of combustibles. There’s plenty of room to hide things up those sleeves...will usually answer your questions if you’re persistent and polite. They’re more knowledgeable than most tour guides, and of course much cheaper...Every morning, if you’re up early enough, you can see them file out onto the walls to pray to the sun...
	I held it out to her as if it were a dead weasel.
	“Please take this out of here,” I said.
	“What’s the matter? Does it offend Idair?”
	“It offends me, at any rate,” I said.
	“Now look here,” said her husband.
	“Mom, let’s go,” the daughter put in.
	“It’s not our fault we don’t know all your rules. We’re strangers here. My wife is only trying to be polite--”
	“Is there a problem, friend?”
	The voice belonged to a shortish, stocky woman in a hreapa that fit a little snugly to her aging body, who had approached us during this conversation. Her face looked pleasant enough, but there was a suggestion of fatigue about it, as if she were trying to take an interest but it was almost impossible.
	“I was trying to explain to them about writing,” I said, handing the other shriia the book.
	She took it and turned it over, looking at the cover while she brushed an escaped strand of black hair behind her ear. She was turning gray; salt and pepper were still fighting an equal battle, but pepper would be losing in a year or so.
	“Ten Cretinias a day,” she said with a sigh. “Last year it was five.”
	“What a difference a year makes,” I said, with feeling.
	She handed the book back to the mother. “Please don’t be offended,” she said, her voice modulating politely. “But the rules are very strict here. Writing can only be brought in or done in here as part of a ceremony. We believe that the place has power and that it might attach itself to the writing. I know you didn’t mean any harm, but I really must ask you to take this outside. There is a box by the entrance where you can deposit this and any other texts or items with writing on them that you may have with you.”
	“Of course,” said the mother, deferring to her quiet authority. “I didn’t understand.”
	“She didn’t make it very clear,” said the father, glaring at me. “In fact, she’s been very rude to us.”
	“Has she?” the other shriia said. Repressing a sigh, she turned toward me. “I’m sure she didn’t intend to be.”
	You wouldn’t say that if you knew me, I thought at her.
	What’s your used name? she answered.
	Theamh ni hUlnach.
	That expression of infinite boredom evaporated instantly as her eyes lit. “You’re Theamh ni hUlnach!” she said, speaking out loud in her excitement. “I’ve been waiting for you. I’m Cera ni Mhaick. So that’s her, out there on the cobbles?”
	She pointed through the window to Gwilna, who had turned her back on the gawking audience.
	“That’s her,” I said. “She doesn’t look like much, does she?”
	“Let’s go.”
	As we were turning to leave, the father piped up. “Here! What about my wife’s apology?”
	Cera swung around on them with new energy. “Take that book out of this place and then piss off. We’ve got work to do.”
	Leaving the Cretid family gaping behind her, she moved with me out to the door.
	Have you read what that thing says about us?
	To my sorrow, she answered, opening the door. It’s not the worst, either. You should see ‘Let’s Go Amranth.’
	Aine turned toward us as we approached, and Gwilna looked around after her. Her eyes widened in terror, and she looked away.
	“Inion na mhada!” Cera shouted, bearing down on her. “Look at me, you pitiful dust-eating adder!”
	Gwilna turned her head back, trembling in anticipation. Cera, upon seeing that terrified guilt that had so gotten on my nerves, fetched her a stinging crack across the face.
	Aine ran to Gwilna; I went to help Cera up. 
	“Name of the spirit,” she gasped, as I lifted her back onto her feet, taking one of her hands just to be sure she hadn’t been faking it. “They do pack a jolt, don’t they?”
	“Tell me about it,” I answered, glaring at Gwilna.
	The tears of pain running down Gwilna’s cheeks seemed to incense Cera even more, but she refrained from further violence. “Let’s get her inside.”
	Aine pushed Gwilna ahead of us into the door between the Raed and the Shriin. They’d built theirs with doors between the points as well as at the ends. In many ways the design of their Pharc made more sense.
	The corridor we found ourselves in was dim, lit only by light filtering in from the doorways. 
	“It’s dark in here,” I observed.
	Cera pulled out a light globe. I pulled out one of my own. 
	Not over-subtle, are you? Cera sent me, leading us down the corridor to the door to the Raed. 
	About as subtle as a slap in the face, I answered.
	With a laugh, she opened the door. We walked through into the main council chamber.
	Gwilna stopped dead when she saw what awaited her. The entire Amranth Council, it looked like, was ranged along the walls, looking sternly down on us from their benches. Cera strode into the middle of the floor.
	“Sisters of the Northern Star, I present Theamh ni hUlnach, who has done us the service of flushing this rat out of her hole,” Cera said.
	“We have heard the story, from your report to the Council and from those who have friends or relatives in Dunta,” another woman answered. “Part of the story has it that you prevented the Duntani from drowning this baggage in the river?”
	“Yes, that is true,” I said.
	“At some risk to yourself and your apprentice,” she went on.
	“Some.”
	“You should know,” this woman continued, a spark lighting her dark brown eyes, “that the fosterers of central Amst are already making their students memorize what you said to the crowd. Theamh ni hUlnach’s Speech from the Dock, they’re calling it.”
	“Oh dear,” I said, mournfully.
	The laugh broke out again when they saw my discomfort--a laugh of recognition. We live with the knowledge of consequence and the burden of meaning, but it takes a long time to get used to seeing your words treated this way.
	“It’s a good speech,” Cera said. “Something to be remembered by. I, I am afraid, will be remembered in this for having the unfortunate distinction of being Gwilna ni Bhatan’s naming shriia.”
	I moved to one side as Cera stood opposite her, bending all the weight of her considerable displeasure on Gwilna’s drooping shoulders.
	“Let’s see what you’ve made of yourself,” she said.
	Her hand shot out and unclasped the fastening on Gwilna’s cloak, pulling it off her. Gwilna stood exposed in her chain and her dark robe, flinching under the scrutiny.
	“The Disciplinary Committee of the Council, down in the City, has already met on your case,” Cera informed her. “It was decided that I should block you permanently.”
	Gwilna’s eyes widened. “That’s illegal!”
	“No it isn’t,” I said. 
	“But...but you never blocked Lythril!” Gwilna cried. “Even after she was convicted!”
	“Lythril was never a shriia,” Cera said, with an unfriendly smile.
	“It was explained to you when you got your orders,” I said. “Of course I suppose you weren’t thinking, then, that you’d need to know this, so I see why it might have slipped your mind. But when you enter the Order, you waive your right to spiritual privacy, and, to a lesser extent, your rights to psychic integrity. All of which means, in ordinary terms, that when one of us goes bad, the Order can take unilateral action, on certain fronts. This is one of them.” Gwilna turned back to me in terror. “Clean out the attic, Gwilna, you’ll be spending a lot of time in there.”
	“No!” she shouted. “You--you can’t do this--you can’t--” 
	“We can,” Cera said. “On my count, drop the block and I’ll pick her up--”
	“NO!” Gwilna dropped to her knees in front of Cera, who looked down at her with disgust. “Don’t do this to me! I’ll--I can’t live like that, forever! I’ll do anything!”
	“There’s nothing you can do to bring those people back,” Cera spat, as her colleagues nodded.
	“Anything!” she shouted. “I’ll do anything--I’ll tell you anything. Anything you want to know.”
	There was a pause. I felt them all considering this offer.
	“Would you tell us, for instance,” Cera mused, “who--”
	CERA, STOP!
	She heard me; so did everyone else except for Gwilna, who looked around in puzzlement at all the attention focused on me.
	I know it’s irregular, Theamh, but if she can tell us--
	Cera, the disciplinary committee--how was the vote split?
	It wasn’t, she answered, still surprised but willing to believe I had a point. It was unanimous.
	There are two people left on that committee, I answered. I’m pretty sure Barant is dark, and I know Morat isn’t. It should have been split. 
	She accepted this without comment. So then why would she vote to block her permanently? You’d think she’d want us to turn her loose.
	Look at what’s happening, I answered. You have to report back on this to the Council. If you decide to ignore their order for the sake of learning what she has to tell you, they’ll know you know there’s corruption on the Council. That’s what this is about. Barant doesn’t care about Gwilna, she’s food for dogs as far as they’re concerned. She just wants to know how much you know.
	And it’ll be a lot safer for us if she doesn’t know that, Cera responded. Because we know a lot, in our own small way. I’ll be wanting a chat with you about that a little later on. She sighed. But wouldn’t it maybe be worth it to know what she knows?
	From what I’ve seen, Barant doesn’t tell her lackeys much.
	Smart move, when you consider the lackeys.
	Cera, who had kept her glare fixed on Gwilna during this conversation, raised her hand. “The Council has pronounced your sentence,” she said. “And I am going to carry it out. On my mark, Theamh.”
	“Mo linn abu!” I called.
	My blocking fire leapt out around her. I readied myself to withdraw it.
	“A haon, a do, a tri!”
	“Mo linn agam!” I shouted.
	My fire flew back to me, leaving Gwilna visible for a split second before Cera’s enveloped her. She fought this time, flashing her own fire out, but she was no match. Cera had the experience, the skill, and the knowledge of her name. It was over in about ten minutes, and there she was, still kneeling on the floor, sobbing as the last of the little white flames receded into her body.
	“It’s over,” Cera said. “Puela, you can bring in Batan now.”
	“Oh NO,” Gwilna cried, more terrified than ever.
	The door to the chamber opened, and one of the younger shriias moved forward, supporting a woman of about sixty on her arm. She was well dressed, with gray-white hair swept up and held in place by one of those nets. And she looked angry.
	“Well,” the woman said, after the shriia had withdrawn. “My heart breaks to think I lived to see this day.”
	“Mathi,” Gwilna said miserably.
	“You’ve blackened our family name and mine,” her mother went on, her voice shaking with anger. “All the hopes we had for you, all the pride we took in you, you’ve spoiled it all. Your stepfather is nearly dead with the shame of it.”
	Gwilna kept weeping.
	“Coming here, I met with Ranein,” she went on, Gwilna whimpering as she recognized the name. “Who had heard, through some gossip chain, about this disgusting performance. And I had to sit there while she sympathized with me about the terrible humiliation and disappointment I must be suffering. And while she went on about how providential it was that her Deran had never joined with you after all...” Gwilna’s shoulders jerked. I undid the wrap on her wrists; she was harmless now, and I knew she wanted to cover her face. Which she did.
	“That woman never thought you were good enough for her son, even if our money was,” her mother went on, tears in her eyes and a flush staining her wrinkled cheeks. “And now after all this time to find out we don’t have a shriia in the family after all--we have a feicann dubh, a murderer, a worker of evil--”
	“What do you care?” Gwilna suddenly shouted at her, her voice raw. “Is that all that matters to you, what that snotty old bitch thinks of our family?”
	“So that’s why you did this,” Batan  said. “To get back at me.”
	“I can’t watch this,” I burst out, suddenly rounding on Cera.
	Batan paused in her harangue. Cera looked at me keenly.
	“Could I wait outside, or something? Until all this is over?”
	“I think it’s over now,” Cera said dryly. “Batan ni Thikai, the Order took your daughter from you, twenty years, four months, and one week from this day. Today, the Order gives her back. Will you take her?”
	Gwilna waited, looking down at the floor, her chest heaving.
	“No,” she finally said. “This monster is no daughter of mine.”
	Cera’s eyes dropped, and when she lifted her face to Batan sadness had replaced the anger.
	“Batan ni Thikai,” she said, quietly. “Think carefully before you say that that’s your answer. She’s done evil and done wrong. But she’s your child. And Dunta is going to try her, so she may not be in country long. This is the last little time you may have to spend with her. I’ll ask you the question again. Will you take her in?”
	“You can ask it as often as you like,” she said. “I won’t have this creature beneath my roof, and if I never see her again it will be too soon.”
	She turned around and left, leaving Gwilna kneeling on the floor with her head in her hands.
	“Well, Gwilna, age has not sweetened your mother’s temper,” said Cera frankly. “Puela, is there anyone else from her family waiting out there?”
	“I’ll have a look,” said the younger shriia.
	<Well, what do you know, Aine,> I observed, as I passed a hand over the back of my sore neck. <We found a mother worse than mine.>
	<I’m not sure about that,> Aine answered. <I think I’d have to see them together.>
	Puela returned. “Kehan and Caitin are out in the hall,” she answered. “They came to see Theamh, apparently, but they’ve agreed to come forward.”
	“Bring them in then,” Cera answered.
	Kehan came in, an arm around his mother, who looked about ten years younger than Batan and a good bit more sprightly. He nodded to us. 
	“Kehan mac Chaitin, and Caitin ni Thikai,” Cera said. “The Order has cast Gwilna out and blocked her permanently. She is no longer, and will no longer be, able to work magic. She has the deaths of fifteen people and we do not know what else on her conscience. She is a nasty little slug, and that is an incontrovertible fact.” There was some subdued laughter from the more irreverent of the councilors. “However, she is also one of Idair’s children, and she is being turned out of her home and out of her profession without the full use of her mind and without a coin to her name. Her mother has refused to take her in.” I saw Caitin’s face cloud with anger. “You are not her closest kin and this is not your duty. I ask because Idair sowed compassion in all of our hearts. Will you take her in?”
	Kehan and Caitin looked at her for a long time, probably conferring over a link.
	Caitin finally turned to Cera. “I knew her well, back in the old days, before Batan joined again and got too good for any of us,” she said. “Sack of garbage that she’s become, she was a bright little child, on her good days. I will take her in.”
	I felt the tension in the room ease up. Gwilna looked up, too drained to be happy about this turn of events.
	“The Order gives her back to you,” Cera said. “Dunta will come looking for her when they are ready to try her. Until then, she is in your care. May she become, one day, a friend again to Idair and her children. If she does, we will have you to thank for it.”
	“I hope for the same thing,” Caitin said gravely. “Come, Gwilna.”
	Kehan bowed as Gwilna stood up, and the three of them left the chamber. The doors closed behind them.
	“Have we any more official business to transact, Sisters of the Northern Star?” Cera asked.
	The assembly shook their heads.
	“Then we end this session here,” she said. “Muile, you’ll file the report as usual?”
	Muile, or so I supposed she was, nodded. The others stood up and came down off the benches. I noticed, with a little trepidation, that they were surrounding me and Aine.
	Your apprentice, Cera sent, drawing me a little to one side. She can be trusted?
	With my life, and with much more  important things, I answered.
	Cera nodded to the others.
	“Puela ni Bhierunt,” said the doorkeeper, extending one hand toward me. As I took it, she popped fire out of the other one.
	“Good to know you, Puela...”
	“Muile ni Sheal,” said the next woman, repeating the gesture.
	And so on, until I had touched all of them and seen them make the fire. Fourteen including Cera, and all true. It was a heartening thing, even though the atmosphere was heavy and somber, as we felt the weight of the peril around us and the sadness of knowing why we had to do this.
	“Wow,” I said. “Fifteen true shriias in one place. Hard to believe, in these rotten times.”
	“It’s the tourist trade,” quipped Muile. “How could any of us backslide, with the cost of treachery and faithlessness daily parading itself before us?”
	“You might think she’s joking,” Puela added, “but don’t. I tell you, we’re living through the second siege of Amranth. And I’m not sure we’re going to last it out.”
	“Not as long as they’re bribing shriias at the entrance point,” I said.
	“So you’ve heard about that,” Cera sighed. “How did you come to find out?”
	“I had a little run-in with one of your guests,” I said. “Big red-faced man, impatient and obnoxious with it--”
	“Jak Rount,” Cera guessed.
	“Ah, so you’ve met him too.”
	“Alas,” she answered. “The borderers, you see, they come here from other places. The guard at the entrance point was changed two years ago. And what a thurking change.”
	From their faces, I got the feeling that for Cera profanity was still a treat reserved for special occasions. “How many are posted out there?”
	“Only two. But that’s two minions of the Dark One we don’t need,” said Goeri, an older shriia who had followed the discussion with displeasure. “It was subtle at first, but they’ve gotten a lot bolder recently.”
	“I don’t think it’s them,” Puela put in. “It’s these Cretids. You can’t make them understand the value of anything, least of all secrecy. They come down here expecting to bribe us...”
	“Where did they come from?”
	“Ygren’s from out in Kengda, and Hlos is from somewhere near Naucht Point. They were both practicing around Linn Agam until Barant moved them to the border.”
	 “Ah,” I said, turning to Cera. “So that’s why you weren’t surprised.”
	“Theamh tells me Barant’s dark,” Cera said. They nodded. “Have you tested her?”
	“No,” I answered. “But I’m as sure as you can be without having done it.”
	“Puela,” Cera said. “Run out and get Theamh and her scoilin here--”
	“Aine,” I said.
	“--Aine, then,” she said. “Get them something from the refectory, will you? We’re going to be here a while, and they look hungry.”
	Aine and I settled gratefully onto the floor, while the others settled near us, forming a circle. Cera and I looked at each other across the floor.
	“You know, you were right,” Cera said. “That night in Dunta. This is a war.”
	“Well,” I answered. “I guess you all are the cavalry.” Cera smiled. “I’m glad to have met you.”
	She nodded, feeling the heaviness of the burden I had been carrying, at the same time as I felt it, truly, for the first time.
	“So tell us what you know,” she said.
	
	“I’m sorry about the guest house,” Cera said, as we followed her over the roof. She had been surprised that I looked as rested as I did, although Aine showed signs of having spent an uncomfortable night. “We keep making it more and more bare-bones, in hopes it’ll discourage the Cretids. But as you see...”
	“It’s all right, I’m used to it,” I said.
	Cera could read enough from me, evidently, to know not to ask. “The reason we get up early is so we can ring the city,” she said, indicating the others who were walking along the ramparts, barely visible as whitish blurs in the gray before dawn. “We stand in a ring around the walls and we all face out. I’m leader, so I’ve got the eastern exposure. We’re all linked; we start when I give the signal. You’ll have to watch for the gesture.” I nodded. “You have your own ash?”
	I smiled. “I never leave home without it.”
	“Is there anything else you need from us while you’re here?”
	“I’d like to feed the vigils, if you can spare it,” I said. “You never know when you’ll next get the chance.” She nodded. “And if you’ve got any uisce slainte...”
	“Of course.” She looked back at me. “I’d like to meet them, your vigils. I hear you have an interesting crew.”
	“You all hear a lot, for a fairly remote outpost,” I said.
	“Morat and I studied together under Leoma,” she answered. “We still talk. She’s told me a lot about you. And about...”
	She trailed off.
	“About Istria,” I finished.
	“Why not take that lookout over to the right,” she suggested, indicating one of the crenellations. 
	I walked over to the niche--the square bracket of a fortification, just wide enough for a body. I saw the others spreading their hreapas out over the walls, so I did the same. It made me nervous having it hanging there so far above the ground, but it’d be on me soon enough. I set the bowl of ash and the bottle of water on the ledge, hoping I wouldn’t knock either off.
	From the corner of my eye I saw Cera raise her arms. I raised mine, and the song began.
	I couldn’t see the others, since I had to face out. But I could hear them, all singing the same words and the same tune from different points on the walls. It was confusing, because the sound came staggered; the others were linked through the mind and could keep themselves in time, but I found I was thrown off by the lag from the farther shriias. And there were probably one or two so far away that I couldn’t hear them. But even though the echo was confusing, it was also reassuring. One voice taking it up as another faded. The sound going on, even after the singing stopped. Overlap, continuity, community. What I needed.
	And when I turned around, instead of my bedroom I saw the others, scattered along that winding stone path, looking across the city at each other. Buoyed up, from what I could tell, with the same feelings I’d had--the knowledge of each other’s strength, of the beauty of working together, of having brought a good thing into being.
	Behind me, from far away, I heard a faint percussive sound. I turned to look over the edge. Down on the hills below, clustered at the end of the path that led to the gate, was what were now instantly recognizable to me as a group of Cretids, this time without their tour guide. And they were applauding.
	The sigh I heaved was outdone in weariness and heaviness by the one I heard Cera exhale as she contemplated this spectacle. “Another day begins,” she said.	
	“Tell me something,” I replied. “Why are they wearing our clothing--and why is it all festival garb?”
	Cera laughed dryly, leaning on the parapet into the breeze. “Most clothing up in the Cretid Nation is made with proscribed materials,” she said. “The Seated Leaders of Amranth decided that the easiest way around this would be to require all incoming Cretids to wear native dress. Of course, this decision may have had something to do with the fact that it requires Cretid tourists to patronize our local tailors’ shops, of which there are now eleven, rather heavily.”
	“But I’ve seen people wearing departure dresses, joining garb, a town leader’s jacket, First Blood outfits...”
	Cera smiled briefly at that last one, before the look of fatigue returned. “You knew Istria,” she said. “She must have told you that for us, fashion has always been a secondary concern. The kind of clothing you see on us from day to day is drab, as the guidebooks would say, ‘even by Ideiren standards.’ So the Cretids naturally gravitate to the fancy stuff. They don’t care what it’s supposed to be for; they just want something colorful. And the tailors encourage them.” She closed her eyes, turning her face to the wind. “They don’t know what it’s for.”
	“It’s lucky they don’t,” Aine said, speaking for the first time that morning. “That little girl would have been very embarrassed.”
	We both laughed. Aine smiled, pleased that Cera didn’t seem to mind her intrusion.
	“So tell me, Aine,” Cera said. “How could you tell? That they’re different about it, over there? I mean, we know through exposure to them...”
	She thought for a minute. “I don’t know, unless it’s that...they just...it seems like they hide all of that, in their minds. I thought of it I guess because the mother, she was carrying this shame, that the man didn’t have, but it wasn’t because of the writing or the guidebook...” She looked up at me. “I don’t know, it just seemed like that’s the kind of thing, that they wouldn’t want talked about.”
	“You’re reading people!” I said, clapping her on the shoulder. “I mean, you’re reading Cretids, but still. It’s very exciting.”
	Her face lightened with hope. “I am? Finally?”
	“Seems that way to me,” Cera said, amused by Aine’s enthusiasm.
	“I--” She looked at Cera. “Yes...I can read you, now, it seems like...I mean...”
	“Don’t be embarrassed,” Cera said, good sport that she was. “Tell me what you’re reading.”
	“I...” She was embarrassed, but she kept going. “You’re tired, and it makes you sad, to feel tired and...and...to see me.”
	Aine stopped in confusion. Cera nodded, sadly.
	“Because you’re so young,” she said, patting Aine on the shoulder. “You’re what I miss in myself. That excitement about so many things being new.” She looked over Aine’s head at me. “You must have a lot of energy to keep up with her.”
	I shrugged. “I suppose.”
	“Can I read you now, dhiaoc?” Aine said, swinging around eagerly.
	She stopped, because she could tell I’d backed up into a mask.
	“I’m sorry,” she said, dropping her eyes and coloring. “I--you didn’t ask me. It’s not my place. I’m sorry.”
	“Don’t worry,” I said, hurrying once again to prevent her from falling into hurt. “It’s a reflex. I don’t mind if you read me. You already know most of the embarrassing stuff. Go on ahead.”
	I stopped masking. She looked at me, a little frown of concentration appearing on her young and unlined face.
	“You feel better,” she finally said, surprised. “It seems like--it seems like you’re closer to happy.” She blinked. “Because you’re in Amranth.” 
	I turned away, looking over the parapet.
	“Now you’re sad again,” she said despondently.
	I had to laugh at that. With my back to the parapet, I looked at the two of them--both reading me now, but Cera considerably more puzzled than Aine.
	“You see, part of it’s what you read,” I said, “and part is knowing what to do with it. Cera’s reading the same things, but it doesn’t mean much to her. You know enough...” I trailed off, then resumed. “Istria talked sometimes, about visiting Amranth. I knew a lot of its streets and places before we got here, through her. Coming from the mountains like she did...it had magic for her. Being here makes me feel--closer to her. Like I’m moving toward her, instead of standing still.” 
	Cera was watching me with her arms folded. “You tell your scoilin a lot,” she said.
	“Best way for her to learn,” I answered.
	“About shri?”
	“About what she needs to know.”
	I leaned back over the parapet, looking at the hills that were now carpeted in the morning light. Shadows fell long and sharp around trees, houses, even some of the sheep that dotted the foothills. 
	“I’m going for breakfast,” Cera said. “Will you come with us?”
	I kept looking over the view from the walls. “In a few minutes.”
	Cera turned to Aine. “I’ll send someone up with something,” she said quietly. “I forget this is the first time you’ve seen the place.”
	She disappeared, and Aine came to stand near me, looking down the sheer drop-off.
	“We’re tourists too, I guess,” she said.
	I nodded. “It is beautiful, though, isn’t it?”
	She raised her head. “I thought you were scared of heights, dhiaoc.”
	I shrugged. “There are degrees of everything. A nice, solid, stationary stone walkway is different from a flaming mast on a sailing boat.”
	“Since I have this...thing...” she said, after we had looked in silence for a while.	
	“Yes?”
	“Would I...be able to see the siege? Or is that too old?”
	I shook my head. “See, this is why you should train with someone who has it. I don’t know. I don’t think Istria ever saw it, not the way you saw those lurers at Dunta. But I think she could read the memory somehow, even if it wasn’t visual. But maybe if you worked at it hard enough, long enough, you could get that far back.”
	Aine nodded. “When we get home...I do want to develop it.”
	“Really,” I said, mildly surprised. “What changed your mind?”
	She squinted into the sunlit distance. “Having that vision at Dunta,” she began. “You can’t know what it’s like, to have something so horrible spring on you from nowhere.” Her throat worked as she swallowed. “Now the door’s open, I want to have some say in what comes through it. Or at least to have some warning.”
	“Dalen’s the one to talk to, then,” I said. “I’ll ask Morat to have a word with her.”
	“Is...is it always bad? What you see, when you have this?”
	“Often, but not always.” I pushed myself back. “Shall we walk? I want to see the lake.”
	It made sense to me now, the way Istria had talked about the place. With those thousand-year flagstones under our feet, walking along the ramparts the way the daughters of Amranth had, all that time ago, looking down on the Cretids camped around the city. To the southwest, the Tsraid ran into Lough Eala, a natural lake spread out bright blue in the sunlight, dotted with small fishing boats and here and there a group of white swans. During the siege, of course, the lake had often been tinged with red. It was over the lake that most of the smuggling was done; the Cretids surrounded it, but they didn’t know the territory and they weren’t able to spare enough men to make the cordon impenetrable. A band of shriias had been very successful in running food and other basic necessities through the lines and across the lake to the Amranthians, but finally in spite of their efforts they were discovered and, since they couldn’t really resist, put rather quickly and brutally to death. After that it was up to those legendary Amstians, the individuals who had risked their lives in dash after dash across the troubled waters of that lake and who were called, in the tales, the Relievers. Every village in Amst claims at least one of them. We don’t know how many of the stories are true.
	We do know that the Cretids kept the siege up for two months, while Amranth starved. A few brave people can’t supply an entire city with the necessaries of life, no matter how heroic they are. Once they realized the Relievers were getting food through, the Cretid troops took to burning crops and slaughtering livestock--bringing famine down on the countryside as well as the city. It got worse when the Amstian army took the mountain pass north of Amranth, cutting off the supply route between the army and the Cretid Nation. After that, they were slaughtering for food rather than for tactical reasons, and the depredations increased. 
	Looking out over the lake, peaceful now and without a hint of red in its clear waters, it was hard for me to imagine. Even as I noticed the boats making deliberate circles on the lake below, the voices of the tour guides floating up to us as they neared the city walls, and thought about what Puela had said. It was the second siege, maybe. But it looked so unlike what that first one must have been. No bodies, no burning, no devastation. The town was getting richer, not poorer. No wonder people couldn’t tell, that it was the same thing happening again.
	“Here you are,” said Puela’s voice behind me.
	I turned around. What she handed us didn’t look too bad--a kind of thick porridge with oats and some butter melting in it. The three of us sat on the flagstones and fell to.
	“Are you from Amranth, Puela?” I asked once we’d blunted the edge of the hunger.
	“From Ancinte, actually,” she said, with a sharp glance at me.
	I’m not sure what was happening to my face, but Aine looked up.
	“So you knew her?” I finally asked. “Istria ni Vharen, I mean.”
	“I’d say, more, that I knew of her,” she said. “Ancinte isn’t really a village. There’s a town center, but the houses are scattered over miles and miles. Her family kept to themselves. And I was younger than she was. This is my first year practicing.”
	“Really,” I said. “What a way to start.”
	She nodded, darkly. Aine bent studiously over her porridge. Puela, seeing the abstraction in my eyes, decided on a bold Amstian frontal attack.
	“You didn’t choose wrong,” she said, dropping the spoon in the empty bowl. “I hardly spoke to her, when we were growing up, and by the time I got to the scoil she was already in tutorial. I didn’t know her at all, really. But I knew she was someone I wanted to be.” I stopped playing with my spoon. “To do what she did, that young, in a place like Ancinte. That took more balls than you’ll find on any ten members of the Amstian Army.” Aine was still looking at her porridge, but I knew she was beet red. “Because they said, you know, with everyone being so spread out, they didn’t know. But they knew all right, what he was doing--”
	Puela. 
	She glanced at Aine. What, you never told her?
	It’s not my story to tell, I said. I promised I’d keep it to myself.
	“Anyway,” Puela said, her enthusiasm a little checked now. “It’s her got me into this, really. Nobody from our village would ever have thought it was possible. Going all that way from home, down in a strange city full of fancy talk and fancy ways. From a nowhere place like Ancinte. But she got herself out.”
	“She had to,” I said quietly.
	Puela nodded. “I knew I wasn’t made for a life in Ancinte, but I didn’t know what else I wanted. Then I heard she’d gone south and I thought that’s it, I can do this.”
	“She would like to know that,” I said.
	Aine collected the empty bowls and got up to take them back to the refectory.
	“What about this Dohem, that her mother joined with afterwards?” Puela asked, that countrywoman’s hunger for gossip awakening in her. “More of the same, or what?”
	I knew Istria wouldn’t have wanted me to give much away, but I couldn’t let Puela think that about him, and Istria wouldn’t have wanted that either. “Oh, no. Dohem’s a completely different story. With a much better ending.”
	Puela nodded, with what seemed like genuine satisfaction. “So she got herself out too, Varen, in her own way.”
	“I suppose. He’s been wonderful to Sinal, and it was him, really, who got things to the point where she and her mother spoke again. Even if they didn’t speak much.”
	Puela leaned back, one hand over her knee, considering. “You think she really loved that bitch’s bastard?”
	“Who, Istria?”
	“No, Varen.”
	I shrugged. “I know very little about Varen’s heart, except that it hardens easily.”
	“Istria, then.”
	“Ah, that I wouldn’t tell you, even if I knew the answer.”
	“Fair enough,” Puela said, standing up. “Let’s get back to the Pharc, and we can get you that uisce you wanted. We just finished spelling a new batch, so if you happen to want a gallon, we can spare one.”	
	“I don’t know about a gallon,” I said. “But a couple of quarts, to be on the safe side...”
	Puela’s laugh trailed off as she saw the family ahead of us, looking out over the walls. It was the same group I’d tangled with in the shriin--the same group that had, alas, been sharing the guest house with me. The mother and I had made it up--or rather, she had apologized, with her invincible cheerfulness, and I’d let her do it--although the father still bore me no good will. Her daughter still looked bored, and yet intensely irritated at the same time.
	“...it’s all scratchy,” she said, tugging at the sleeves and neck of her white wool tunic. All that red embroidery must have cost them a bundle--most girls do their own, and so the designs are much less intricate and often fairly poorly executed. Only the wealthy buy them ready-made; they don’t have the time, I suppose, or they put it to other purposes.
	“We can’t help that, sweetie,” her mother said, still chipper even at this hour. “They don’t have things like fabric softener down here.”
	I was hoping we might get by without attracting their notice, but that was before I heard the shout behind us. I turned around. It was Jak and his wife.
	Puela and I backed against the wall while the two groups converged. From the conversation I gathered that they were from the same part of whatever city they were both from, which perhaps explained why they looked so much alike--everything from their body shape to their mannerisms proclaimed their commonality. 
	“...being killed out there in the woods,” Jak’s wife was saying as we tried to slip past them. “It isn’t safe here.”
	“It never has been,” Jak replied, loudly. “You can see why, too. I’ve hardly seen an enforcer since we got here.”
	“They blame it all on the spirits, and then they never have to prosecute,” said the father, nodding in agreement. “You know you can get off scot-free in Ideire no matter what you do, if you just say you were possessed at the time.”
	“Oh--ahm--shriia!” called the mother of the family, as we were about to make our escape.
	Habit was too strong in me, I turned around. Puela turned with me.
	“Yes?”
	“Mory has a question she wants to ask you,” she said, putting her hand on the girl’s shoulder.
	“Oh, mom, for God’s sake,” the girl said, mortified.
	“Go ahead, honey, ask it,” the mother prompted. “She won’t mind answering you, it’s her job.”
	The girl looked at me. 
	“Do you mind?” she demanded, aggressively.
	“A little,” I answered. “Ask anyway, now that we’ve gotten started with all this.”
	“What does...” She paused to try to frame the words right. “What does ‘faal too in banzakt’ mean?”
	Puela turned away with an ill-repressed chortle. I looked back, trying to stay serious.
	“ ‘Feal tu in beansacht.’ It means...well, I guess ‘Welcome to womanhood’ would be the best translation.”
	Her eyes narrowed. “Is that how people say hello here, or something?”
	“Not usually,” I said.
	“Then why is everyone saying it to me?”
	I looked over her shoulder at her smiling mother.
	“Come here,” I said, motioning her aside.
	She bent to extend an ear to my confidential murmur. “It’s something people say to a girl who’s had her first blood. It’s kind of like saying ‘Congratulations.’” Before she could voice her reaction, I completed the explanation. “When a girl gets her blood for the first time, her family throws her a party and she wears a fancy white dress with a lot of red embroidery--just like the one you’re wearing. That’s why they’re saying it to you--they think you’re celebrating.”
	EEEEEEEEEEEEWWWW!!
	I heard it before she said it, but with the grimace it had a much greater effect.
	“You told her, eh?” said Puela, amused, as the girl fled to the embrace of her startled mother. 
	“She asked me a direct question,” I said.
	“I have to go home and change!” the girl insisted.
	“But honey, you only have the one dress...”
	“Then buy me another one! A plain one.”
	Aine, who had returned, was looking on from afar with considerable interest. We joined her by the steps.
	“You read them right,” I said, as we descended to the Pharc roof. 
	“Do they not celebrate it, over there?”
	“Evidently not.”
	Cera showed us into the Raed, where they had set aside one room at the top of the triangle as a laboratory. I let the vigils out and fed them some of the day’s porridge. Phredi enjoyed it immensely; the others ate it without enthusiasm, but without too much balking either.
	“Is your refectory better than ours, or is this just a good day?”
	“Ah, thereby hangs a tale,” Cera said, nose wrinkling. “The Cretids have caught on, as you saw from that guidebook, and are feeding at the communal trough. The Seated Leaders feel that the quality of the food reflects on Amranth, and they lean on the donors to do a good job with it.” She rubbed her closed eyes with her fingers, slowly sighing. “And so then there was a huge battle over whether we would allow each donor to put a sign up on the refectory window saying which hotel’s chef was cooking which meals...and if it weren’t for some decent people that are still left in this city with some sense of shame, I’m not sure we wouldn’t have had to close the place down. They kept saying ‘But you’re not making money off it!’ and we kept saying, ‘But you are,’ and over and over--technically maybe it wasn’t a violation but I’ll be damned if they’re going to use us for free advertising on top of everything else.”
	“What would you have done?” Aine asked, alarmed.
	“Go back to begging,” Cera said, grimly. “We did it in the old days, we can do it again, if that’s what it takes. And that is what it’s going to take,” she went on, becoming convinced as she spoke. “All this--the Pharc, the refectory, our apartments, the sheep, the horses, the scrip--they give it to us on sufferance, because they need what we give them. Now we’re starting to be a nuisance, they’re using it to blackmail us. And if we want to keep shri as Idair wanted it--as we want it--we have to be willing to give all that up. If that’s what it takes.”
	And that was it. That was what Barant was missing--the determination to let all of that go, if keeping it meant compromising. That was her soft spot. That was where Lythril had worked in the thin edge of the wedge.
	“If that’s what it takes,” I agreed. “For Idair and the right.”
	I brought the vigils back into the cieridh and tucked it into my bag.
	“I hate to leave,” I said. “But we need to get moving. I want to be well into the mountains before nightfall.”
	“I’m glad to know you, Theamh,” Cera said, looking at us both. “And you, Aine ni hEmer. That there are two out there like you--it makes up for a lot.”
	“Keep each other strong,” I said. “I’ll bear a lot if I know you all are holding the fort, here. And Morat will be pleased to hear how things are.”
	“You’ve tested her now,” Cera said. “You’re sure.”
	“I’m sure.”
	“It’s the only reason I haven’t told her more,” she said. “You can never know. But I’m glad to hear it. If they get to her, they can get to anyone.” She pushed open the door to the street. “Safe there and safe home, the both of you. Idair walk with you.”
	The door closed. I stood looking out over the cobbles as the wind blew in around us.
	“Well,” I said. “Back to the gates.”
	“Dhiaoc?” she asked, after we’d been walking for a while.
	“Yes?”
	“If the shriias up there are really...really...”
	<Really corrupt.>
	<How will we get across?>
	<Corrupt or no, we’ve got Council orders, they’ll let us through. They may try to do something evil to us, but they’ll let us through.>
	<I’m glad we found a true place,> she said. <Even if it’s the last we see.>
	“Theamh ni hUlnach sues to leave,” I shouted up at the gatekeeper’s window.
	Adra leaned back out at us. “It was a short stay, shriia.”
	“Your city has been kind to us, but we’re in a hurry.”
	“Where are you going?” she said.
	“North to the border.”
	“Who goes with you?”
	“Aine ni hEmer.”
	“What do you take away?”
	“Some uisce slainte, and peace of mind,” I answered.
	“When will you return?”
	“I don’t know.”
	“If it comes to a fight, who will you fight for?”
	“For Idair, the right, and what I love,” I answered.
	“Amranth opens her gates,” she said. “Good luck up there.”
	The iron doors opened. A thin window of morning light widened. And into it we stepped, with another Cretid tour group hard on our heels.

V.
Things Fall Apart

	The path from Amranth to the entrance point was a clear one--the Cretids had only been traveling it, regularly, for three or four years, but even before that it was a fairly major thoroughfare. This was the major border crossing, the only one that was used with any regularity. It was where the medicals had come through fifty years earlier, where that ambassador had been admitted on his way to the City, where the shipments from the hospital crossed over, where, no doubt, gold was passing from Ideiren hands into Cretid ones on its way to Lythril, where Welbin and other poisons had come through in innocent looking boxes marked for delivery to the central hospital. Where Ygren and Hlos were doing the work of the Dark One. Where we would pass through the border, which would close up behind us and cut us off from the people we left behind us. Once we left Ideire, none of my links to Morat, Lilea, Slythe, or anyone else would work. They’d still be there, but the border would block any messages we tried to send. 
	But we weren’t there yet. We’d been walking the road for two days, dodging the horse-drawn carriages that transported Cretids back and forth from the border. It was harder than it sounds--the road snakes up and around the mountain passes in sharp curves that were never designed for vehicular traffic. More than once we had to flatten ourselves ungracefully against the mountainside while a carriage careened around the corner, sending pebbles and larger rocks flying off the edge of the road to shatter in the gorges below. When we weren’t cursing the retreating carriages--or, more accurately, when I wasn’t cursing them--we had little to do besides watch the flocks of mountain sheep clambering from knoll to knoll and hope that whatever they had in store for us at the crossing wouldn’t be too much to handle. So we were glad when, just as the sun was getting ready to decline on the second day, we saw Two Flocks appear beneath us, tucked into a cleft in the mountains by the side of the road.
	Two Flocks is something of an urban center for the mountain communities, which should give you some idea of just how bustling things are up there by the border. Its name is descriptive--the buildings are clustered in two clumps on either side of a natural spring, and from a distance you can see the stripes of green grass between them. Even standing there watching the human figures flutter around the spring, you can’t shake that sense of loneliness, the terrible isolation of life up there with nothing but the sheep, the birds, the grass and the winds that caress you like a butterfly one moment and slice like knives the next. 
	It wasn’t always like that, they say. The Greater Plague started in those mountains, and the Amstians suffered the worst. As usual, when something bad came into the country, it hit them first and hardest. The question of whether the plague actually came from the Cretids is one that historians have tacitly agreed, after long debate, not to decide. It started in Amst, and it was stopped only when the medicals came over with their drugs and stopped it. The plague went to Jipran, to Kengda, to Dairc and the City, but by then the medicals were already on its trail. They came too late to save the Amstians who scratched their unenviable living from this rocky soil. When the Greater Plague had gone through Ancinte half of their adults and two-thirds of their children were dead. Varen’s mother Crill had five children; Varen was the only one to survive. Istria spoke of Crill very seldom, and always with fear. I thought of her as another victim of the plague--her heart burnt out by all the death, living joylessly on in the blackened shell of her youth. If I’d ever met her, maybe, and known the cruel aridity of her anger, I wouldn’t have compassion for her. Istria didn’t; she just tried to stay out of her way.
	“See any Cretids down there?” I asked, as Aine leaned on a gray spar to look down at Two Flocks.
	“Hard to tell from this distance.”
	“Well,” I said. “At least tonight we can sleep indoors. Assuming their innkeeper is a reasonable person.”
	We picked our way off the road and down to the village. As we got closer, the human figures became gradually recognizable--and strangely, many of them were shriias. I say ‘many;’ there were maybe ten people in that square, and four of them were wearing hreapas. Aine noticed this too, and I could feel her anxiety.
	“You don’t think there’s been another...”
	“Let’s hope not,” I said, as we kept going. “It’s depressing. You know, three weeks ago, if we saw four shriias gathering, we wouldn’t immediately assume there was evil involved...”
	By the time we were coming over the crest of the hill toward the fountain, one of the shriias had noticed us. Her hail rang against the mountainsides, sounding remote somehow because of the amplification.
	“Come on over!” she cried. “It’s just about to start!”
	I advanced, puzzled. The woman hailing us looked about forty, with slightly grizzled black hair and a broad face with strong featured. When she could see our faces her dark brows drew together in surprise. “You’re not Hern, are you?”
	“No, I’m not,” I answered, matching her good-humored tone.
	“Tifni ni hEude, shriia for Two Flocks and the hinterland,” she said.
	I bowed at her. “I’m called Theamh ni hUlnach, and this here is Aine ni--”
	“You’re Theamh hUlnach!” Tifni said, drawing back in surprise. “Well, this should make Kleark happy...Kleark!” she called over her shoulder, to a man in a cloak who was talking to one of the shriias. “This is Theamh ni hUlnach!”
	“Do I know this Kleark?” I asked, as the man in question began heading in my direction with unsettling alacrity.
	“He’s a repeater covering the Order election,” Tifni explained, amused. “His publishers, down there in the City, wanted a view from the provinces. That’s why he’s cooling his heels here in the sticks with us.”
	“An honor and a pleasure,” he began, before Tifni could introduce us. “Kleark mac Caille, provincial repeater for True Stories. That was a fantastic speech you gave from the dock, down in Dunta.”
	I sighed.
	“I was in Amranth when it happened,” he said, as we all began walking toward the fountain. “On my way here. When I heard what had happened you better believe I turned right around. I’ll be filing stories for a week about that place.”
	“Is there much interest, back in the City?” I said.
	“Are you kidding? This is the biggest story since--well, since the Council published your session with them.”
	We had reached the fountain now, and I suddenly understood why everyone was gathering. Rising out of the basin into which the spring pooled were four waterglobes, their glass bases positioned over the source of the spring. The other people--the three shriias and the small but gradually growing crowd of local people who were ambling into the square--were finding themselves seats on the thin grass around the fountain, looking up expectantly at the blank globe. They were there to watch the Council debate; this was the night for it. They’d bring in the Council waterglobe and the image and sound would be sent out to all the waterglobes in Ideire. The shriias must have brought their own globes out so they could all watch the debate together, and so the locals could follow along. It was a nice idea, since this would probably be the most excitement Two Flocks had seen in a long time. 
	“Anyway, it’s starting soon, but after it’s over I would love to chat with you about what you saw down in Dunta,” he said.
	“I’m sure you would,” I answered, warily.
	Tifni, meanwhile, was introducing me to the other shriias. “Daire ni Fhilim, shriia for the Back Three...”
	“I’ve met you, haven’t I?” I said, bowing. “Were you posted in Dairc, a few years ago?”
	She seemed pleased that I remembered. “Yes I was--you taught me how to cure the long slow burning.” I nodded. “And I taught Wriana here...”
	“Wriana ni Vholin, all the way from High Winds,” Tifni said. “And this is Dahern ni Linn, who covers Slieve, Ancinte and all the poor lost souls stranded in between them.”
	I bowed at them, indicating Aine. “This is Aine ni hEmer, my apprentice...”
	“Aha!” Kleark said. “You’re the one with the ghost vision. Now you I must speak with after this is all--”
	“Kleark,” interrupted Tifni, “why don’t you go see if Sirva has anything to offer these two, it must be a hard piece of road they’ve traveled today.”
	Kleark took the hint and trotted off to the inn. Meanwhile another woman in a hreapa appeared, tapping Tifni on the shoulder.
	“Hern!” Tifni cried, turning around and embracing her. “I was afraid you weren’t coming. Theamh ni hUlnach, Hern ni hEglint...”
	After a few minutes we’d bowed ourselves into places, the shriias sitting in a little clump, Aine next to me, Kleark on the other side by Tifni and the locals in a circle that stretched around the fountain. Tifni kept an eye on the level of the sun.
	“Right at sundown, that’s when they said,” she whispered to me. “So have you made up your mind yet?”
	“You mean who to vote for?” Tifni nodded. “Yes.”
	“I thought you probably had,” she said. “Who is it?”
	“Morat,” I answered.
	She looked surprised. “Really. But Barant was your diaoc, wasn’t she?”
	The others were listening too. “I...yes, she was, but I think Morat would be better for the Order.”
	“Why?” asked Dahern, looking at me closely. Since she was shriia for Ancinte, there was probably a lot she knew about both of our histories.
	“I...I’d rather not get into it right now.”
	“Oh come on. You’re voting against your own diaoc and you don’t want to tell us why?” Daire laughed. “You have to be careful, Theamh. We spend our lives up here. We go mad in the winter months trying to occupy ourselves. A little hint like that can turn into a five-act drama in a matter of days.”
	“I don’t think Barant will do a good job,” I repeated.
	“Why shouldn’t she? You think she’s incompetent?” Wriana pressed.
	“No,” I said. “I think she’s extremely talented.”
	“Then--”
	“Shhhhh!” said Tifni, pointing up at the globes. “They’re starting!”
	The image was wavering and unsteady, the way reflections are. But as the sky darkened around us, and the light globes rose up from the shriias’ hands to bob gently out over the ring of listeners, I could make out the Council chamber, and the figure of Dalen pounding the staff on the floor to start the opening statements.
	I have to say I didn’t pay very close attention at the beginning. I was too busy downing the milk and bread Kleark brought out to us, and squinting at the globes in hopes of being able to read the expressions on peoples’ faces. It was impossible. Even though the image was actually pretty good compared to my globe at home, because of the direct spring source, it was too small to read easily. I could tell from the way Slythe was sitting that she was nervous. And if I could tell that at this distance, I was sure the rest of the Council could tell it too. Unless they were too busy being enthralled by Barant’s vision of the Order’s future.
	I found watching her incredibly chilling. She was so good at what she was doing--bringing them with her, making them believe what she told them was true. And so black at heart, at the same time. When Morat spoke, it was with a conviction and strength that I felt people had to admire--certainly it seemed like Tifni and the others were with her--but not the same gentle persuasion, the same genial plausibility.
	“The floor is open for questions,” Dalen finally said, stepping back from them. “Signal me if you want to speak.” There was a pause. “Yes, Kelah?”
	“Is it that little pain in the gleacha,” muttered Wriana. “You might have known she’d be first out the gate...”
	“...questions about the administration of the scoil under her time as docent,” Kelah said. “For instance, the distribution of apprentices. It’s been six years since I had one, and I know for a fact that while I’ve been patiently waiting my turn, others have trained up two, even three scoili. I’m concerned that if you’re installed as head of the Order this pattern of favoritism will continue, or even increase--”
	“It’s not favoritism,” Morat said abruptly, cutting her off. “The single most important influence on a shriia’s career is her diaoc. I take my responsibilities as docent very seriously and I make the assignments based on what I think is best for the scoili. They’re the future of the Order. I match them with the women I think will do them the most good, and if that means that some of us spend a few years doing our own cooking and cleaning, then so be it.”
	“There you go, Morat! Send it home!” shouted Wriana happily. I wondered what the history there was. There are histories and histories--it’s a small world, really, and once you’ve been rattling around in it for ten, fifteen years as Wriana probably had been you’ve pretty much run into everyone.
	“So what are you saying, Morat?” Kelah pressed.
	“I’m saying that as docent, I made the decision to assign scoili according to what would serve the Order instead of what would serve its individual members,” Morat answered calmly. “I understand why you might be angry. But in the past five years I haven’t found a scoilin for whom I thought you were the best instructor.”
	“No lie there,” Daire chimed in. “Have you ever worked with her?” she whispered to me.
	“Not to speak of,” I said. 
	“Barant, do you wish to speak to the question?” Dalen cut in.
	“I think Morat has made an excellent point,” Barant said. “It’s very important, when we dispose for the scoili, that we do it with the Order’s welfare in mind. I wouldn’t suggest doing it any other way.”	“So if you’re head, we can look forward to this continuing,” Kelah snapped.
	“I didn’t say that,” Barant said. “It would be worth looking into the matter, certainly. Perhaps we could set up a committee, instead of leaving it all up to the docent. It’s almost too much responsibility, for one person...”
	Oh Idair’s mercy no, I heard from what I thought was Dahern. Not another committee. 
	“If anyone has a problem with the job Morat’s done as docent, let her air it now,” Cualha said. “We’ve had fewer grievance actions, fewer transfers and lower attrition in the five years since she took over that post then we had in any one year under Cleadd.”
	“Yes, but I always thought that was because Morat terrified them all into submission,” Riina put in.
	“That’s not a fair comment,” Cualha returned. “I’m not saying she doesn’t terrify them, but it’s not because she’s abusive or unreasonable. It’s because she inspires respect. She’s done a good job in a hard position and we owe her a debt of thanks for that.”
	“Cualha’s right,” said Eorna. “Leave it be, Kelah, you’ve been riding that horse for years and it’s never yet won a race. I have a question,” she went on.
	“Very well then,” Dalen said.
	“I know it will be painful to my sisters here to allude to this unhappy event,” she said, “but the session at which Grinth was stricken--if you remember, we met in order to consider Theamh ni hUlnach’s proposal...”
	“How could I not?” Barant answered, with a sad smile. “Even if I wanted to hide the memory, the repeaters would remind me.”
	The group in the Council chamber, and the group around the waterglobes, laughed, but softly. The memory of Grinth’s death was still relatively fresh.
	“Then you’ll remember having expressed a certain amount of skepticism regarding Theamh’s clams and her mission,” Eorna went on. “Since she left, we’ve had a number of very disturbing reports from parts north, ranging from climatic anomalies to the mass-murder by lurers of fifteen people in Dunta. I wonder if any of this has made you change your mind at all. Because it seems to me very clear that something evil doesn’t want her to make it across that border.”
	“I’m not sure exactly what bearing your question has on the election,” Barant said, with a friendly smile.
	“It goes to the question of your judgment,” Eorna said, her voice getting a little unsteady as she launched this critique of someone higher-up and more powerful in the Order than she was. “Suppose you’d been head. Your arguments against it would have carried a lot of weight; we might not have authorized the mission. And then all of this would have continued without hindrance.”
	“First of all,” said Barant, “I think you may be misremembering. I never argued against sending her out. I merely wanted to make sure that those who did have reservations about the mission were heard, that’s all.”
	“Are you saying that you were in favor of sending her out, all that time?” Eorna asked.
	“Second,” Barant went on, ignoring her question, “as head, I would rely on the combined judgment of the Council members, just as I did in my work as head of Internal Administration. I don’t believe in enforcing my judgment and my will on the rest of the Council, as Grinth--Idair keep her safe--was sometimes wont to do. So you see even if I had been head, as long as the balance of opinion supported sending Theamh out on that mission, it would have happened anyhow. And everything you’ve suggested, Eorna, argues that my methods are more likely to be right, over the long run, than those of someone more autocratic. Since you believe that the Council did right by voting for that mission.”
	“Do you not believe that?” Eorna asked.
	“Morat, on the other hand,” Barant said, turning back to her, “I see as taking a somewhat more directive approach. Am I wrong?”
	Morat looked back at her, and small as the image was I would have sworn I could see the hatred.
	“Eorna asked you a question,” Morat said, quietly.
	“I’m sorry,” Barant said, turning back to her. “What was the question again?”
	“Do you or do you not believe that the Council did right by voting for that mission?”
	Barant considered. “I believe that since the Council felt there was merit in her claims, she should pursue her mission.”
	Eorna stood looking at her for a moment.
	“Do you wish to pursue, Eorna?” Dalen asked.
	“No,” Eorna answered. “I think I’ve learned all I can from this line.”
	“Who else has a question, then?” Dalen threw it back to the seated crowd. There was some movement, some coughing, and then Dalen turned. “Riina.”
	She kept her voice neutral, but I imagine she was as unhappy to see Riina standing up as Morat was. I’m afraid I must have bristled visibly; but then that was normal. They all knew the story, and that I hadn’t been able to give her the public forgiveness she’d made such a show of asking for.
	“Speaking of poor judgment,” Dahern remarked, as Riina made to speak. 
	“Shhh,” Tifni admonished her.
	“Morat,” Riina began. “I’d like to ask you about your work on the Disciplinary Committee.”
	“Ask then,” Morat said, joylessly.
	“I don’t mean to seem harsh,” Riina said, sounding rehearsed, “but I have grave reservations about your judgment, as shown in that committee. Almost from the beginning, there have been mistakes made--grave mistakes.”
	“Name them,” Morat answered.
	“First,” Riina said, “there was Lilea’s haling-out.”
	“Grinth and I both voted to propose it,” Morat said, her voice flat. “We felt it was necessary, for Lilea’s sake as well as for the Order’s, after what happened at the trial.”
	“But Theamh had already tested her on her body,” Riina said. “Shouldn’t that have been enough? Unless you thought Theamh was dark too?”
	“What I thought or didn’t think was not the issue,” Morat said, evenly. “That trial was attended by repeaters from every chain in Ideire. Rumors about Lilea and her alignment had reached everywhere from Mypril to Naucht Point by sundown on that evil day. I felt, and Grinth felt, that the only way to settle the question for good was to issue an Absolute Truth. And the Order could not put its seal to that without haling her out.”
	“But you cost a good shriia five years of her life,” Riina persisted. “For nothing, as it turned out. Since she was true after all.”
	There was a clatter as Lilea leapt to her feet. “Dalen! Am I allowed to answer?”
	“You’re allowed to participate,” Dalen said equivocally.
	“When the DC proposed that measure in full Council I gave my consent before Grinth could even call a vote,” Lilea said, emotion riding her voice. “Not because I wanted to quell the rumors. Because I really wanted to know.” Riina stood mute, silenced by the wave of empathy she must have felt rising toward Lilea. “If they hadn’t done that I would never have had the heart and faith to go on doing my work. They didn’t take five years from me. They gave me back the rest of my life as a shriia.”
	“It just seems to me like an expensive remedy,” Riina said. “To go around haling people out at the drop of a hat--”
	“Riina, I’m the one who was hurt by that, if anyone was,” Lilea interrupted. “And you don’t see me complaining. Don’t make a trouble where there’s none.”
	Sensing that she’d lost the crowd on this one, Riina moved on. “Well then. After that, there was the business with Theamh and Istria--all of which could have been avoided, if they hadn’t been set up in practice together, contrary to all custom. And it was you who saw to that, wasn’t it?”
	Morat nodded, distantly. “I promised them remedy. That was what they asked for.”
	“But by making that rash promise, you ran both of them into danger,” Riina said. “We might have lost both of them. As it is, we lost one.”
	“It was not rash, it was just,” Morat said, trying to hold back her anger. “We asked them to do something impossible, and by doing so we changed their lives forever. I admit my original mistake, which was to propose that mission in the first place. That was wrong. It was not wrong to try to repay them for the damage we did.”	
	“When you say ‘we...’” Barant said, musingly.
	Morat turned on her. “I mean all of us in this room,” she said. “And I mean you. The idea came from me. But it would never have turned into a mission if you hadn’t wanted it to. And it would never have been possible if you hadn’t talked Theamh into it.”
	“Oh, come on, Morat,” Barant said, with a disarming smile. “How could I or anyone else talk Theamh into anything?”
	“You wouldn’t do it outright, of course,” Morat said, her voice soft but somehow more formidable because of it. “I don’t know what went on between you, then. But I can see you talking her into it. Letting her know, slowly, indirectly, that it would please you to see her succeed at this. Just putting that bait out there, knowing she’d snap at it.”
	The Council didn’t seem to know how to respond to this, and indeed neither did I. I could feel the stares. I kept looking into the globe.
	<Did she, dhiaoc?>
	<Talk me into it?>
	<Yes.>
	<I...you know, Aine, it seems like before that mission I was a different person living another life. I couldn’t say, for sure.>
	“All I did,” she said, “was ask her to listen to you explain the mission to her and Istria. Then they both volunteered. You know the story.”
	“I know the part I saw,” Morat said carefully. “I’m not saying it’s entirely your responsibility. Only that you share it with me.”
	There was a beat of silence, during which I had the feeling that Barant was passing directions to Riina. Then Riina took up the line again. “When you got the Order to set them up in practice together out in the Vicinity...did you know, then, about their...attachment?”
	“Barant and I both knew they were in love,” Morat said. “They told us during the debriefing.”
	That was the first time I’d heard Morat put it that way. Usually she talked around and about it, the way Riina was trying to do; and she would never admit, during any of the fights we’d had with the Council, that what was going on between us was anything like love.
	Does it bother you?
	It came from Daire, who was still looking into the globe intently. 
	Does what bother me?
	To have them discussing this in open council and on every waterglobe in the country.
	I’d prefer that they weren’t, certainly, I answered. It is embarrassing. On the other hand, I’m real interested to see where Riina is going with all this.
	Daire smiled briefly, her attention still on the globes. The ambient noise around us, I noticed, had dropped significantly. People were paying strict attention.
	“And instead of taking measures to separate them, you deliberately put them in the path of temptation.”
	“I have explained to you my reasons,” Morat said curtly. “I did only what I had to do to honor the terms of my promise. After that I consistently used my role as a member of the disciplinary committee to separate them, at the cost of destroying my friendship with Istria and alienating Theamh from the Order. And if Theamh were here tonight I’m sure she would testify to that, at great length and in vivid detail.”
	Morat’s sense of humor is so dry people often don’t notice it, but for once she got a laugh. Barant smiled, but I was guessing that she was angry. When she’s on stage she likes to be the one working the crowd.
	Before the laugh died down, Eunem stood up. “I know this is out of order, Dalen,” she said, “but I’d like to request that Riina make her point, if she has one. There must be a lot of other people with questions.”
	“Point taken,” Dalen said, turning to Riina. “Riina, if you want to pursue this line, you’ll have to show us what bearing it has on Morat’s performance as head of the Council.”
	“I only wanted to establish a pattern of judgment errors,” Riina said, provoking noises of disagreement from Morat’s partisans. “If we elect her, we can continue to expect her to allow her emotions to dictate to her, instead of the Order’s welfare--”
	“Excuse me,” said Kelah, standing up suddenly and peering at Riina, “but this is Morat we’re talking about, isn’t it?”
	 The laugh that broke out in the Council chamber was echoed among the shriias sitting around me. The idea of Morat as a leaf trembling in the gale of emotion was inherently ludicrous to anyone who had ever dealt with her. 
	“You know, Riina,” Kelah went on, emboldened by this rare moment of support, “this all is not helping you reestablish your credibility.”
	Riina, stung by the allusion to her apology, leapt back into battle. “You think because she has that front of calmness and stability that she doesn’t make mistakes,” Riina shouted. “But look at the evidence, for Idair’s sake! She lops five years of Lilea’s life--”
	“I told you, Riina--” Lilea interjected.
	“--practically ruins two of the scoil’s most promising graduates, waits a full year for things to get worse until finally even she has to admit there’s nothing to do but separate them--”
	“All of that is in the past,” Eunem insisted, raising her voice. “Can you come up with one example that doesn’t have four years’ dust on it?”
	“What she’s doing now is worse!” Riina shouted, rounding on Eunem and turning away from Barant, whose expression was too small to read. “She knows damn well that we’ve got corruption and faithlessness here, in the heart of the Order, and she’s not doing a thing about it!”
	This was an unexpected departure. It was greeted with silence from the hearers on the Council, and some unnerved unspoken commentary among the ones I was sitting with.
	<Dhiaoc, this doesn’t sound good.>
	<No, it doesn’t.>
	“If you don’t believe me, ask her!” Riina went on, turning back to Morat. “Isn’t it true, Morat, that one of our number here on the Council is shrimarbh right now? And that you’ve known about this for weeks, and never brought it to the Disciplinary Committee’s attention?”
	<Fnaa.>
	<I don’t understand it,> Aine said. <Why are they exposing themselves?>
	<They’re not,> I answered miserably as the startled reactions flew through the air around us and, doubtless, in that Council chamber. <She’s banking on Morat wanting to protect Slythe. Morat has to admit, if she’s asked, that she knows about Slythe, but she’ll try not to divulge anything she doesn’t have to. It’ll look like she’s deliberately covering up a conspiracy.>
	<But Barant knows too...>
	<Yes, Aine, but remember Barant lies.>
	Aine turned her green eyes back on the globes. <It’s funny how I keep forgetting, even though I know she’s dark.>
	<This is bad, this is very bad.>
	“Isn’t it true, Morat?” Riina persisted, stepping down the tiers toward her. “There’s someone in this room who’s been shrimarbh for who knows how long, and all the time you’ve known about her, you’ve never called her before your committee. Isn’t it true?”
	Slythe was twisting in her seat. And I was sure that anyone sitting near her could read enough to put two and two together.
	Morat’s answer, when she gave it, was surprisingly calm.
	“Yes, it’s true.”
	The noise of reaction around me drowned out Riina’s next question.
	“Hush up!” Dahern shouted, leaning forward. “I can’t hear!”
	“...how you know this?” Kelah demanded, ignoring Riina and addressing Morat.
	“I suspected it for some time, but I know it because she’s confessed it.”
	“Why haven’t you told anyone?” Kelah cried.
	“I have told people,” she said. “I just haven’t brought it up before the disciplinary committee.”
	“Why not?”
	There was a long pause while everyone held their breath, in the room and outside under the light globes and the dark studded Amstian sky.
	“Why don’t you ask Riina how she knows I know all this?” 
	The scrutiny swung back to Riina in an almost audible movement.
	“Well?” Eunem demanded.
	Riina was stuck for an answer.
	“Don’t change the subject!” she finally brought out, flustered. “She asked why you haven’t done anything about this!”
	“I think that’s a much more serious question,” Barant put in, advancing on her slowly. “It’s much more important, I think, that we know who this individual is, and who else you’ve told about her, and why you’ve concealed this knowledge for so long.”
	Morat looked at her, with an expression that even if she’d been in front of me I still couldn’t have read.
	“Those are very important questions,” she said. “Why don’t you answer them?”
	“Because I don’t know the answers,” Barant said, trying to sound very stern.
	“Yes you do,” Morat said, looking at her from about two feet away, staring her down with those eyes that had put the fear of the Spirit into me so many times.
	“Are you or are you not going to answer the question?” Riina shouted.
	“Oh, I’ll answer the question,” Morat said, with a cold steel smile.
	Before Barant could blink, Morat’s right hand shot out toward her. Halfway through the motion Barant suddenly comprehended the situation and tried to draw back, but not fast enough. Morat’s hand slipped around Barant’s bare neck, and two screams with different pitches shrieked out from the globes into the cold night air around us.
	“Sit down! SIT DOWN!” The voices came from everywhere around the circle. We knew they couldn’t hear us, but we couldn’t help it. The shriias surrounding the floor had leapt to their feet, obscuring our view of Morat and Barant. I had a pretty good idea of what this tableau looked like, but it was still an agony of suspense before the crowd in the chamber had grouped itself so that we could see between those agitated bodies to the floor. Barant was curled up clutching her stomach with her head on her knees; Morat was trying to get up, but at the moment she was just leaning on her hands and knees, trying not to retch. They were both older than I was, and it had taken a lot out of them.
	Lilea ran into the circle and took Morat by the arm, helping her up. In a few seconds Morat was standing there, one arm around Lilea’s shoulders, looking down at Barant, who was still lying there on the floor whimpering.
	“Get up,” Morat said, her voice hard. “You’re younger than I am. Don’t fake it to get their sympathy.”
	Barant moved herself into a crouching position, then lurched up to her feet. “So that’s the answer, is it?” she said, venom in her voice for the first time.
	“This is what’s really at stake,” Morat said, directing her words to the stunned audience. “She’s dark herself, and she’s been corrupting others. I didn’t bring up Slythe’s case before the disciplinary committee because Barant was on it, and I didn’t want Barant to know that one of her minions had turned on her. It would have been very dangerous for Slythe. But now Riina and Barant and whoever else Barant has suborned already know, there’s no reason to keep it secret.”
	Slythe stared at Morat, openmouthed. The others stared at her.
	“Yes, Slythe’s shrimarbh, and yes, I’ve known that for some time now. But my friends, we have bigger problems.”
	“Is this true, Slythe?” Eorna asked, her shock tempered by her sympathy for the grief and shame that Slythe was radiating.
	There was another one of those pauses.
	“Yes!” Slythe finally shouted. “I’ve been lying and cheating and selling shri for two years, and Barant’s known it the whole time because she’s the one who spoiled me!”
	“Name of the Spirit,” said Wriana, for whom this was just starting to sink in.
	“And you’re lying now!” Barant shot back. “Morat’s the one behind this!”
	“Oh, here we go...” I muttered, disgusted.
	“Morat’s doing this just to discredit me!” Barant shouted. “Just so she can take over the Order and deliver us to the Dark One on a silver platter. She’s been working against us for a long time now and you’ve been too blind to see it.”
	“That’s a lie and you know it!” Slythe shouted, all the buried anguish of these past few weeks erupting into the open. “You’re the one who worked at me and picked at me and wore me down. You’re the one who ruined my life just so you’d have someone to keep your clients happy. I wasn’t brilliant and I wasn’t a star but I was good enough. And then you got to me, and now I’m just a pile of broken wood waiting for the torch. She’s the one who’s dark,” Slythe said, turning around to the shriias in the seats. “I know, to my sorrow.”
	“But since by your own admission you’re a liar,” Vrila shot back, “how are we supposed to believe you?”
	“You don’t have to believe her,” Morat said.
	All the stares moved back onto her.
	“You know now that one of us is dark and one of is isn’t. Hale me out and we’ll all know who’s which.”
	Over the ripple of shock, Morat continued. “We need an absolute, that’s the only way to get it. Hale me out. Then we’ll know.”
	“How old are you, Morat?” Barant demanded sourly. “Fifty-five? Sixty?”
	“Fifty-eight next harvest season,” she snapped. “I look my age, unlike your colleague north of the border.”
	Nobody had the heart to laugh at this barb, even bitterly. “Then we can’t hale you out,” Riina said quickly, jumping on the hint Barant had thrown her. “You’re too old. It might kill you.”
	“I’ll take the risk,” Morat said grimly.
	“But we can’t,” Cualha said, reluctantly. “If we hale you out and it kills you, that’s it for all of us.”
	Morat’s shoulders suddenly drooped. She hadn’t thought about it. It seemed like an obvious thing, now that it had come up--the average life expectancy of a shriia in Possessions is sixty, and there was no way of knowing how much time Morat had left. If they haled her out, there was a good chance they’d never be able to get her back in. You never want to believe you’re close to death, even when you are; and as she’d revolved this plan in her head she had forgotten to consider this unpleasant factor.
	“That’s all right, Morat,” Lilea said, seeing her intense disappointment. “It doesn’t matter who gets haled out, at long as it isn’t Slythe. Once we’re sure about one of us, we can test the others.” She dropped her arms and walked forward into the circle. “I lived through it once, I can do it again. I volunteer.”
	“All right, stop this right here,” Barant said, having now recovered from the pain. “I’m still acting head of this Council. We are not going to start haling people out just because Morat’s dark.”
	“For Idair’s sake, Barant!” Eunem shouted. “What is haling out for, if not a time like this?”
	“We don’t need to start shortening lives just to figure out that Morat’s dark,” Barant shouted, turning on Morat. “You’ve just proved that yourself!”
	“I proved that one of us is dark,” Morat said. “You say it’s me. I say it’s you. Now you and I know how things stand,” she went on, fixing Barant with that gaze. “But there are hundreds of shriias out there watching this who don’t. Before we ask them to put one of us in charge of this organization, we owe them the absolute truth.”
	It sank in with a sudden chill--the knowledge of what I was looking at. Good and evil squared off across from each other in that circle, with faith and power and the very name of truth hanging in the balance between them. And with most of the Order clustered in groups or singly around globes like these, watching through water and glass as the fate of everything that mattered was decided in that remote and illusory world.
	“We could always hale Barant out,” Slythe suggested.
	Barant looked at her, with hatred. Strangely, now that everything was out in the open Slythe seemed a lot less anxious and scared than she had before.
	“She’s young enough,” Slythe went on. “I’d volunteer myself, but I’d be no use.”
	“How about it, Barant?” Cualha said. “It would be one way to settle the question.”
	“Nobody’s haling me out,” Barant growled. “I’m not going to let the Dark One take five years off my life.”
	“Well then let’s do Lilea,” Eorna said. “Since she volunteered.”
	“No!” Barant snapped. “We’re not haling anyone out!”
	“Why not?” Eorna demanded.
	“Because it’s dangerous, it’s painful and it’s something nobody should have to go through,” she said, scrabbling for the moral high ground. “You can stand there and volunteer all you want but you don’t really understand what you’re getting into. I have a responsibility to this organization and the people in it and I’m not going to give into this panic that Morat’s started!”
	“I do know what I’m getting into,” Lilea said. “And I volunteer.”
	“And I say five years was enough for you to lose,” Barant said. “Even if you are dark, I won’t have another five on my conscience.”
	There was a long, unsettled noise of reaction among the people in the council chamber. Where I sat, everyone seemed mostly to be holding their breath.
	“Then let’s put it to a vote,” Lilea said. “Maybe the rest of us feel differently.”
	“This is not a regular session,” Barant answered. “This is purely a forum for debate. If you want a formal vote you’ll have to bring it up at the next business meeting.”
	There was a shout of anger from the audience, and Cualha advanced on the floor.
	“We’ve got dark users in the upper echelons, and you want to thurk around with procedurals?” she shouted, a wave of applause cresting after her. “I’ll cast my vote right now--let’s get to the bottom of it!”
	“This is not a regular session, and any vote you take is not binding,” Barant shot back. “I will not allow this Council to act on any decision taken under these circumstances. It would be irresponsible.”
	There was a drop in the noise level as opinions began to settle and form, and the gravity of the crisis became more apparent.
	“Barant’s acting head,” Morat said. “We put her in that position, and now she’s wielding the power we gave her. If we believe in our institution, we have to let her do that.” She walked a little forward until she was in the exact center of the circle. “I can only do what I have the power to do.” She took a deep breath. “Anyone who wants to know who I am and what I serve can come down here and test me on her body. I stand willing.”
	“Stay back!” Barant shouted, as she saw some movement in the audience. “It’s the old trick--she’ll weaken you with the pain and then her confederates will move in. It’s how they work.”
	Lilea walked forward, took Morat’s hand, and held it up. “If she’s dark, I am,” she said. 
	Dalen took Morat’s other hand. “I know where I stand,” she said. “With Idair and the right. If that’s where you stand, you have nothing to fear. Come down,” she said, turning around on Barant. “Come down and find out why it is that we couldn’t find Lythril the first years we searched for her. Come and find out why in the past two years the border has become a sieve. Come find out who sold her own apprentice to the minions of the Dark One just to save her own hide!”
	“I refuse to take responsibility for that,” Barant said, her calm coming back. “A diaoc does what she can. But Theamh made her own choice, and much as it breaks my heart there’s nothing I can do to bring her back to the light. I realize that now.”
	It was a minute before I or anyone else had completely understood what she was getting at.
	“I wanted to believe she was telling the truth,” Barant went on. “I let her go, hoping she’d come back and prove my suspicions wrong. But now I see it was a mistake. If I’d really said what was in my mind,” she went on, getting a note of self-blame into her voice, “we’d have nipped all this in the bud. We wouldn’t have let her go off to join Lythril, and she wouldn’t have killed all those people in Dunta.”
	You lying, blackhearted bitch.
	They all heard me. I didn’t care. 
	“Excuse me,” Cualha said, peering sharply at Barant. “Let me see if I have this straight. You’re saying that Theamh ni hUlnach invented that entire theory about the notborns being replaced just as an excuse to get us to authorize her trip over the border so she could join forces with Lythril, and that Theamh not only killed fifteen people but totally framed some poor innocent shriia?”
	“She’s been trying to get north to the border for the past four years,” Barant said. “She says it’s because she wants to rescue Istria. Well, no one as smart as Theamh is could possibly believe the poor woman is still alive. I’ve known that for a long time. I just didn’t want to think ill of someone who’s done such good work. But I’m afraid the evidence is clear. Since she left, there’s been nothing but destruction and death in her wake. If there’s any truth to that theory of hers, it’s because she’s had a hand in organizing it. I hate to say it about my own scoilin,” she said. “But there it is. She’s dark.”
	I wasn’t feeling a thing, yet. I was just waiting to see what would happen.
	“All right, that’s all I need!”
	The voice came from Eorna, who clattered down the steps toward the circle. “I’m a nobody with no name from a nowhere town in the middle of Dairc. I’ve only been on the Council a year and what the hell do I know. But I was up there in Daircri when the Ubh started burning. Theamh ni hUlnach came out to a strange place and a strange people at a time when you didn’t need shri to know her heart was bleeding. And miserable as she was I saw her out there every day swimming through the river, tending the sick, watching with the dying who were so grotesquely afflicted that their own families would abandon them in fear and disgust, going without sleep and without food until she found a way to stop the poison. I’ve been watching you,” she said, as Barant still wavered before the vehemence of her speech. “My guess is you’ve told your share of lies tonight, but this last was the biggest and the foulest.” Eorna took Lilea’s hand, which was the nearest to her, and held it high. “I know evil when I see it. And its name is Barant.”
	There was a roar from the benches, and a rush down to the floor that completely blocked our view. And a lot of shouting, shoving and movement back and forth. We kept bobbing and weaving trying to get a good view, but of course nothing we did mattered; there were always bodies between the globe and what we were looking at.
	“Has anyone got a link with anyone down there?” Daire asked. 
	“I’ll see if I can raise anyone,” I answered.
	<Morat?>
	<Theamh, NOT NOW.>
	All right, no use pressing. <Lilea?>
	<Theamh, this is not a good--NO! STOP HER!>
	I shut the link off so as not to distract her from whatever she was doing.
	“No luck so far--”
	I didn’t finish the sentence, because a bolt of red flame flashed out of the center of that confused mess straight toward us. We flinched back. But of course all that happened was a shattering noise, and then the globes going dark.
	“Oh dear,” I said.
	“Someone’s smashed the globe,” Daire echoed.
	There were a few moments of silence, and then the panic started.
	Tifni was quickly surrounded by a mob of local villagers, all shouting the same questions at her. She and Hern, who apparently had the next practice over, began talking to them as fast as they could. Aine and I sat where we were, with Daire, Dahern and Wriana nearby, in shock.
	“You see,” I said, “this is why I’m voting for Morat.”
	“So...” Daire began, looking a little dazed.
	“How long have you known?” Dahern finished.
	“I didn’t know--I mean beyond certainty--until a few minutes ago,” I said. “But I’ve been pretty sure that Barant was dark since...since the night Riina accused me.”
	“I’ve read the report,” Daire said. “So that’s twice now, you’ve been accused.”
	“First by Riina and then by Barant,” I said, still unable to really believe it. “My own diaoc.”
	“You know that if it happens again,” Wriana said, speaking up for the first time, “the Seat can have you arrested.”
	“What?” said Daire.
	“It’s true,” I answered, my stomach tightening with the sudden anxiety. “After the third time, whether or not the Council confirms the charge, the Seat can petition to have me arrested and tried in the courts as a suspected dark user.” 
	Aine stared at me, concerned and on the edge of panic. Dahern shook her head.
	“She really doesn’t want you to get up there,” Dahern said. 
	I looked at their drawn faces, reddened in the light of the fire globes. I didn’t know them well enough to make much of what I could read.
	“You don’t...you don’t believe that tarbhfnaa, about my being dark?” I said, my voice a lot less confident than I would have liked it to be.
	“I was in Dairc too, remember,” Daire said, putting out her hand.
	I took it. The other two looked relieved when nothing happened.
	“So,” said Dahern, as she and Wriana put a hand on each of Daire’s shoulders. “On the bright side, we’re not sitting here in the dark with the murderer of fifteen people. On the dark side, the acting head of our Order is in bed with the Dark One.”
	“Dhiaoc,” Aine said, tapping me on the shoulder.
	I turned. Tifni and Hern, who had been dealing with their people on the other side of the fountain, were now walking back toward me with what looked like unfriendly intent, followed by a group of very agitated Amstians.
	I stood up. The others rose behind me. Tifni stopped.
	“Theamh ni hUlnach,” she said, “you heard what your diaoc said about you.”
	“I heard it and I know it’s a lie,” I answered. 
	“She says you killed all those people in Dunta.”
	“Mo linn agam,” I said, holding out my hand. The light globe I’d hung left the others and flew to me. “If I’d killed anyone, wouldn’t I be shrimarbh?”
	“Unless you were dark,” Hern said.
	“She’s not,” Daire answered. “We’ve tested her.”
	“Oh have you,” Tifni said, her voice hard.
	Daire drew back, suddenly unnerved.
	“Oh no,” I said, turning to Tifni with genuine disappointment. “You seemed like such a nice woman...”
	“Try her, Hern,” Tifni said, staring back at me.
	Hern put out her hand. Every nerve in my body was telling me not to, but I took it.
	For a second I didn’t know where I was or what was happening. Then, after the worst of the pain had passed, I was aware of being on my hands and knees and staring down at the dirt. I couldn’t breathe, at the moment, so getting up was beyond my capability.
	“You see!” Tifni’s voice rang out. “Barant was right!”
	“Teir abhaile feiceann dubh!” rang out from the crowd behind her.
	By now Aine had me by one arm and Dahern by the other, and I was just about standing up. I could see Daire bringing fire into her hands, ready for battle.
	No, I got out. She’s shriia here. She’s got the crowd behind her. Even if we beat her, we’ll never survive them.
	We can’t just turn tail, Daire said. They’ll think she’s right.
	“Barant’s wrong,” Wriana shouted. “And so are you and Hern and anyone who believes you. Traitors!” she screamed, firing a bolt at them as the tears sprang to her eyes. “Sellers of yourselves! How can you live?”
	“Don’t be afraid,” Tifni called to the mob as they advanced toward us. “We’re here, and we won’t let them harm you.”
	Amstians are not, generally, bulky, but though they’re thin they’re wiry, and I knew they could make short work of any of us. 
	Set up a screen, Daire sent out. On my mark.
	When she gave the word, the four of us sent streams up between us and the others, crisscrossing in diagonal patterns until we’d woven a barrier that curved around and over us in a hemisphere. Tifni and Hern sent bolts out that sizzled against it and rebounded back.
	“All right, what do we do?” Wriana demanded.
	“Theamh’s right,” Dahern said. “We can’t make a stand here, not against her people. We’ve got to get back to our own turf.”
	“I’m their primary target,” I said. “I’ll draw their attention, you can slip off--”
	“Oh no,” Daire said. “Fleeing on your own through the mountain passes at night with a mob of blood-hungry Amstians after you? I don’t think so. You don’t know the territory. You’d break your neck in a ravine before they had a chance to dismember you.”
	“I’m the one got you into this,” I said.
	“Listen,” Wriana said. “The one thing Barant wants most is to stop you getting over the border. So that’s now the one thing I’m going to see done if it kills me. You’re going on, and you need our help. So let’s have no more talk about suicidal heroics.”
	“All right,” I said, glancing around and seeing them resolute. “But how are we going to get out of here?”
	“Dhiaoc,” Aine said.
	“Yes?”
	“What about your vigils?”
	“The vigils protect my spirit, not my body.”
	“I know that,” she said, a little irritated. “But that crowd of panicking Amstians doesn’t.”
	I opened the bag and took out the cieridh.
	“Lift the shield,” Daire said. “On my count.”
	When the shield disappeared, I saw that we were surrounded. For an instant, the ring of closed, hard faces waited silently, as if there would be a signal given.
	“Remember after this is over,” I said to the crowd. “We wish you no hurt and we did you no harm.”
	“A lie from the heart of the Dark One!” Tifni shouted. “Don’t let them get away!”
	<Now.>
	Green, blue, pink and yellow streams of fire burst from the cieridh in my hand and went scorching through the air in all directions. Tifni and Hern shouted for them to hold their ground, but the people around her believed their shivering guts and ran away from these terrifying apparitions--especially those in Zott’s path, who leapt for the cover of darkness with particular zeal and agility. We followed the swath he cleared for us, the other three closing in behind us at my command.
	“Come on!” Dahern shouted, leaping forward with us behind her. “Through the Snake’s Nest.”
	“Through the what?” I panted, running as fast as my legs would carry me.
	We brought ourselves up short in front of the side of a mountain, reaching black and featureless up before me. Daire, Dahern and Wriana joined hands.
	“Here,” Wriana said, holding her other hand out toward Aine. “We’ll put Theamh at the end, she can protect our rear. Don’t worry, there aren’t really any snakes.”
	Dahern disappeared into the mountainside. The rest of us followed, linked into our chain.
	The passage I entered was too narrow to admit more than one person. And as soon as I drew the vigils back into the cieridh, and we had passed the first bend, there was no light. At all.
	Hey, how about hanging a light, or something? I asked, after we had traveled bumpily through several twists in the passage.
	If we light our way they’ll see us, Wriana answered. There are a hundred different passages in and out of here. Those traitors have probably come through one of them.
	Does Dahern know where she’s going?
	Yes. 
	She was getting a little annoyed, so I stopped asking. And anyway, stumbling through complete darkness without knocking myself senseless against the stone walls was occupying much of my mind.
	<Dhiaoc.>
	<What?>
	<I’ve never been in a cave before.>
	<Well, so, this is a learning experience.>
	<I don’t think I like it.>
	<No more do I. It reminds me of-->
	I broke off because there was a sudden flap of beating wings near my head. I flinched back, thudding against one of the walls, flailing blindly with my arms. I think I smacked Aine pretty hard, but I never made contact with the flying thing, which disappeared.
	It’s just a mountain bat, Wriana said. 
	Just a mountain bat, huh. Are there other vermin in here I should know about?
	There are plenty of vermin, but I don’t think you should know about them.
	<Dhiaoc,> Aine repeated, more insistent.
	<I’m still here.>
	<I really don’t like this.>
	<Do mean it’s making you uncomfortable, or do you mean that in two seconds you’re going to start thrashing around and screaming about how the walls are closing in and we’re all going to die?>
	<I’m not sure.>
	<Ah.> I stumbled against an outcropping, remembered not to curse out loud, and kept going. Say, anyone know how long this is going to take?
	Be patient.
	Moments later the passage ended. It’s hard to say how I knew it, because it was still pitch black, but the space we were standing in was much larger, a basin rather than a fissure. When I moved my arm I didn’t hit rock, and the sound of our feet seemed to be traveling farther.
	All right, Dahern said. Wriana, can you find your way out or do you need me to show you?
	I’d much prefer it if you came along, Wriana answered. 
	Daire, you’ll take Theamh and her scoilin. Wriana and I will take Northeast Four.
	Idair with you both, Daire answered.
	Thank you, I added. I’m sorry I brought you all this.
	Since there’s a battle to be fought, it’s well we’ve started, Dahern answered. Get up there safely. That’ll be our payment.
	I heard them leaving. And I heard Aine’s breath getting louder.
	Daire, I’ve got speeder with me, I said. Can we use it or is it too dangerous?
	Wait till we’re in the passage, she answered, after a moment’s thought. Then let you both keep hold, because if you get loose you’ll get lost. 
	We groped in the darkness for each others’ hands. When we’d finally formed our shorter chain, Daire led us around the wall of the cavern, counting the openings until she found the one she wanted. In here. 
	Aine held her breath and squeezed after Daire into the passageway. I took the speeder out, shook some over me, and passed it up.
	Daire led us forward. Actually, since I couldn’t see a thing, the speeder didn’t seem to make much difference; I had no idea how fast we were traveling. Indeed, I had no real way of knowing we were traveling at all, except that my legs were moving and there was ground under them.
	<Dhiaoc.>
	<Try to hang in there, Aine.>
	<How does Harani do it?>
	<A lot of practice,> I answered.
	<I don’t know how long I can stand it,> Aine brought back. <I don’t think there’s enough air in here.>
	<There’s plenty of air. Just wait until-->
	<Oh, thank Idair.>
	She’d seen the stars spring into view at the other end of the passage. Daire, now dimly outlined, led us out onto the ledge. We were standing now on two feet of rock that dropped off rather sharply into a steep valley.
	All right, around to the left. Follow me. 
	We skittered along the narrow path until it widened on a plateau with a few stunted pine trees clinging to pockets of soil. Here we squatted, listening for noise from our pursuers and catching our breath.
	“I think we shook them,” Daire finally whispered. “I don’t see that mob threading single file through all that rock. If we have trouble at all it’ll be from Tifni or Hern.” She shook her head. “How did I not see it?”
	“Don’t ask,” I said. “The Dark One’s a subtle bitch.”
	Daire patted Aine on the back as she took long, agitated breaths of fresh air. “You made it all right, scoilin,” she said. “You’re a brave little hedgehog.”
	“Now what?”
	“I’ll take you back to my place,” Daire answered. “It’s right near the border. We’ll rest the night out there and then in the morning...you’ll go on, and I’ll stay and deal with the mess those two have made out of northwestern Amst.” I nodded. “Soon as your scoilin’s ready to go.”
	Aine stood up, her pride still stung by her spell in the cave, and the fact that Daire had read her panic. “I’m ready now, dhiaoc. Let’s go.”
	We got up. “Thank you, Daire,” I said. “Without friends I would be dead already.”
	“I was born in Helhan, on the outskirts of Daircri,” she said. “You’re the only reason anyone is still living there. As long as I’m in life, you’ve got a friend up here.”
	With her in the lead, we started slipping through the tree cover around the back of the hillside. It was a long journey, but uneventful; I was spooked three times by owls and once by a mountain goat, but there didn’t seem to be anything human following us. With the moon and stars there was enough light for us to discern the cluster of cottages when we finally came upon the cleft that hid the southeasternmost one of the Back Three.
	“Here we are,” Daire said. “Home sweet home. Impressive, isn’t it?”
	“You live here, in town?” I asked.
	She smirked a little bit at the terminology. “No, I live between here and Second of Three, in one of the passes. Most of them know where; I never made a great effort to hide the place. Didn’t seem worth the trouble, then.” There was a short pause. “Of course, had I known...”
	The town, as we moved through it, seemed quiet enough; dark windows and no one about on the streets. It was even smaller than Two Flocks--about one flock’s worth. The passage that the road led us into was wide enough that Aine could look up at the sky and not get too anxious. And I wasn’t anxious either, until we swung around the curve and saw the torches.
	They followed us down here? I demanded, incredulous.
	No, Daire answered, taking a cautious look. These are my people. 
	Waiting for you, I replied.
	Looks like it.
	Abandoning concealment, Daire moved into the middle of the road, hanging a light globe above her head so that she was well-lit. Aine and I fell into position behind her.
	“So the news has reached you,” Daire said, in a voice that was clear without being harsh.
	One of the men--probably the town leader, although none of them had stopped to really dress, and like the others he was wearing his cloak over a shift and his boots--stepped forward, handing the torch to someone behind him.	
	“Shriia,” he said, sounding almost apologetic, “nobody here would doubt you...”
	“But you do,” Daire answered.
	The sadness in her answer seemed to quash some of what I was reading from the crowd. And my own throat was pricking me as I felt it--the way it hurt her to see them wavering. The man who had accosted her felt it too.
	“Understand what it’s like,” he said. “We--nobody would have thought it, before--you’ve worked hard for us, and we...ah, darkness take it!” He swung around on the crowd. “Here, someone else come up and do this, I haven’t the heart.”
	“You’re leader here, Tomi,” another man shouted. “Don’t shirk what’s your job.”
	“It’s our village, it’s our children,” Tomi finally said, turning around with a sigh. “You’re a powerful woman, and we’re far from any kind of help. It hurts me to think it but...if you really are...we can’t allow you back, we can’t afford it.”
	Daire nodded, her eyes searching the crowd. For a long time nobody spoke.
	“You’re right,” she said. “You need to know.” She turned her head to indicate me. “This is Theamh ni hUlnach, about whom you’ve heard so much.” There was movement in the crowd, although I couldn’t tell whether it was fear. “I know I’m all right because I know she’s all right. But you weren’t in Dairc. You need more.” She fixed her gaze on the town leader. “If she hales me out, and you see, will that decide you?”
	Tomi looked down, then back up. “That was what we were here to ask, shriia.”
	“All right then,” Daire said, turning to me. “Let’s do it.”
	Daire, are you nuts?
	It’s the only thing that will convince them.
	You want me to do this by myself, in the dark night with evil abroad, I answered. This is beyond dangerous. 
	I trust you, she answered. Come on, the longer we hesitate the more they’ll doubt me. 
	Looking at her in the light of the torches, I knew she understood the risk. She was taking it because these were her people and she couldn’t stand not having them believe in her. 
	At least let’s get inside and do this where it’s protected.
	There isn’t enough room in my house. They need to all see it.
	I looked over the crowd’s faces. They were set enough. But I still had to give it a try.
	“People of the Back Three,” I said. “What you’re asking her to do is dangerous under any circumstances. Under these circumstances, your request borders on the homicidal. Please, for the sake of the good she’s done you, reconsider.”
	“The decision has been taken,” Tomi said, regretfully. “Nothing I can say will alter it. I know that much.”
	And if they weren’t going to listen to their own town leader, there was no reason they should care about me, a stranger who had never done them either good or harm.
	<Aine, get out the candles and set up a circle around where she’s standing. Make it a narrow one.>
	Aine complied, without a word. She was as worried as I was; probably more so. Daire turned her face to her people, and began undoing.
	<I’m going to need you to help me,> I told Aine. <Make the circle and say the words with me.>
	<But I don’t have my fire. Will it matter?>
	<I don’t know, but it can’t hurt.>
	Daire handed her bundled hreapa to me. I set it down outside the circle.
	“I’m going to let my vigils out,” I warned the crowd. “They won’t hurt you. They’re strictly for protection.”
	I had them leave the cieridh slowly, so they’d get used to them. They ranged themselves behind the three of us, protecting us. 
	Are you ready? I asked Daire.
	I’m prepared, anyhow. 
	She was, quite sensibly, terrified, but for people not close enough to read her that wasn’t obvious. Are you sure you want to do this?
	I can’t live with them wondering, Theamh. 
	“People of the Back Three,” I said, turning around. “To do this with only one shriia in attendance is incredibly dangerous. If I’m distracted, there’s no one else to keep up the chant. So please, for Daire’s sake, I ask you to be absolutely quiet and still while all this is going on.”
	“You have our promise, shriia,” Tomi answered.
	I stood on Daire’s left, and Aine stood on her right, just inside the circle of candles. After I lit them, Aine and I joined our hands in a very small circle around Daire’s rigid form--a circle that should have been a lot larger.
	“Daire ni Fhilim, you have been called upon to show yourself,” I said, my voice rising into the formal register. “Do you do this willingly?”
	“I do.”
	“Then we begin.”
	<Sing it with me, Aine.>
	If she’d been resisting, it might well have been impossible to do this alone. As it was, I could count on her to do the hard part--getting herself ready to leave. Daire’s eyes closed as she gathered herself into wherever it was that her spirit was seated. Sometimes it’s the head, sometimes the heart, with us sometimes it becomes the hands, we use them so much. I’d find out soon enough. What I was concentrating on was the words. It’s a very complicated spell, and it has to be chanted continuously, and the rhythm and the words have to be consistent. Any variation opens up a hole in the weave, and at a time like this even the smallest can spell disaster.
	Out there outside the circle they were listening to us, but they would never remember the song. And even if one of them did, without the fire it wouldn’t work. Aine’s singing along, by itself, probably wouldn’t have the power to hold her. But having her saying the words with me might help me keep on track. If there were other shriias there with me, we could have spelled each other, some keeping up the song while the others worked on lifting her up. I would have to do both at once.
	It’s hard to explain how I could tell, but I knew at a certain moment that she was gathered. In her heart, which made sense. A head-seated person would never have agreed to do this.
	I lifted one hand gingerly out of Aine’s grasp. Aine seemed to know that she should close the circle, which she did by grabbing onto the side of my hreapa. I sent as slow and gentle a beam as I could make out to her heart, and drew what was there inside.
	The change in her body was not exactly visible, but it was perceptible--and not just to me, but to Aine and to the crowd. A body without life looks different, even before it begins to change. And Daire’s wouldn’t, if I could do this quick enough.
	<Announce it, I can’t,> I managed to send over to Aine without skipping my place.
	Aine turned her head toward the crowd while I kept singing. “You asked her to show herself,” she said. “Here she is. Look on her, as she is, and know her absolute truth.”
	I spread my hand, and the beam dissolved. From its breaking heart the light that was Daire rose into the darkness above us.
	If a bird were all wings and nothing else, or if a star could fly, or if you could scoop a handful of the light of dawn out of the rising sun and put it into a cloud, it would look something like this. White at the heart, its floating tendrils tipped with bright and dark greens, turning slowly through the air.
	<She’s beautiful,> Aine said.
	I didn’t answer; I was afraid to break my concentration. But it was beautiful, and I saw it just as she did--and, what mattered more, so did that crowd, looking on silent with wide eyes and partly-open mouths at Daire’s spirit as it drifted gently above her stone-quiet body.
	They’d seen enough. I sent the beam out to enclose her. It would take a moment--she was bobbing away from me, drawn up and out by that irresistible force that takes us away from our bodies and into the nowhere. But once I got my fire around her she’d be safe. Relatively.
	Out of the corner of my eye I saw Zott suddenly lurch. 
	In a second I had my fire on her. And in another second, the vigils had wrapped around the circle in their parti-colored torrent, enclosing the three of us.
	I brought her down as quick as I could. They held it off, whatever it was, long enough for me to get my hand on Daire’s heart and to feel it beating again as she passed into her body and began the return. I heard screaming from outside the circle, and I saw the vigils’ light trembling and buckling with the effort of defense. Someone was firing at them.
	“Come on, Daire, let’s go, let’s go...”
	“Is she still out?” Aine asked.
	“No, she’s back in, but it’ll be a minute before the connection takes...” I looked up as a particularly violent fluctuation of Jayla’s sent livid yellow light spilling over Daire’s still-sleeping face. “You better get out of here, I’m going to have to reveal.”
	“But dhiaoc--”
	<Phredi, see Aine safely into that crowd, will you?>
	Phredi left the others and coalesced pinkly around Aine. She balked, but accepted its presence. Leaving, she didn’t accept. “I should be here to help--”
	“You can help by telling me what’s going on out there.”
	Still wearing Phredi like a veil, she reluctantly passed through the wall and out of the circle. I put two fingers under Daire’s jaw to check for the beat of her blood. Her pulse was strong; the connection was taking. But she still wasn’t conscious.
	<It’s two beams, both red-orange, from the rocks above the crowd,> Aine said. <I can see them up there, behind the boulders. Two women.>
	<Tifni and Hern?>
	<Probably.>
	<Where’s the crowd?>
	<Cowering inside the pass. They’re out of the path of the fire.>
	Jayla was sputtering now, and Shaineen’s part of the curtain was getting thin enough to see through to the fire outside. Zott was holding his own, but when he reached his breaking point he would snap like a twig; I knew that. 
	Daire. Come on.
	Did it work? Was I bright?
	Bright as the day is long, and they saw that. But we’ve got other problems. If you could regain consciousness real soon, that would be a big help.
	I’m trying. You don’t know what it’s like, coming back from this.
	I never answered, because I saw a tear opening up in the wall in front of me, a bright red slit that was getting larger. I crossed my arms over my shoulders and was glad that at least Daire’s eyes were already closed.
	The fire burst out of me just as that rent became a beam. Or rather two beams, blistering through the poisoned air through the hole in my screen toward us.
	Daire’s scream was the one I heard, above the others. She’d regained consciousness--just in time to realize that the flame would hit her before she could reveal.
	There was nothing on the ground that could burn--just dirt and rock. But Daire’s shift went up like a pine branch, with her inside it.
	I shot a beam out at each of them that I hoped would set them back. Then I shook out Daire’s hreapa and wrapped it around her, rolling it tight enough to smother the flames. From the traitors above us another joint blast ripped through the air. I crouched over Daire’s head, letting the flame bounce off my fire and onto the ground. As long as I could keep my fire around me, I’d be all right. But I couldn’t do it forever.
	The beam ended abruptly, with a human scream. It took me a minute to realize that it wasn’t the fire that had cried out. I looked up toward our enemies. Three women in white were standing behind them now, firing rapidly at Tifni and Hern. Winning, or if not winning at least giving me time to attend to Daire.
	I unrolled her. She was a grotesque sight now--her skin burned in red oozing streaks, hair singed almost off, shuddering and gasping in pain that was too intense to be screamed.
	“I’m going to try,” I said, bringing my hands above her twitching body. “I promise nothing, but I’m going to try.”
	Long slow burning or short quick burning it’s the same skill--drawing the fire out, putting it back. But with the long slow burning there’s time. I started with her face, since that seemed to be hurting her most; and after some minutes of sweat and trembling I had almost turned that mask into her again. But by the time I’d moved on to her chest and arms the flesh was already resisting me, perversely clinging to the fire that had invaded it, refusing to revert. The battle raged on around me; I didn’t waste time looking to see how it was going. If we lost, I’d find out.
	“Dhiaoc!” 
	It was Aine, who had managed to fight through the crowd and the dancing spurts of the flame I’d drawn off onto the tree limbs above us. 
	“I’m working,” I forced out.
	Aine took her first look at Daire and didn’t even flinch. I suppose after Dunta her stomach was proof against a lot of things.
	“Tell me what I can do,” she said quickly. “Let me help, somehow.”
	Having cured Daire’s face only meant that her agony showed on it that much clearer. I was going to lose this battle.
	“You’ve never done an empathic transfer,” I said, dully.
	“No.”
	“This’ll be your first. I’ll help.”
	Aine put a hand, gently, on one side of Daire’s forehead. I put mine on her other temple, still trying to pull the death out of her body with the other.
	<So how does it go, Aine?> I prompted.
	She began it, licking her dry lips as she felt Daire’s pain. “If it were as I would have, none of you would hurt or cry...”
	I took it up with her. “None would suffer sickness here, none would bleed and none would die...”
	Little tendrils of heat scrolled down my arm toward me, blossoming into pain. Daire took her first real, deep breath since her burning. We kept going.
	but since life is not, cannot be,
	as I’d have it, free and clear,
	at least then give it back to me,
	the sin, the pain that I brought here.
	Daire blinked, slowly, and turned her head toward me.
	“They burned me,” she rasped. “I’m dying.”
	“I think so,” I answered, my voice clotted.
	Aine was still keeping up her end of the song; I rejoined her as Daire’s eyes settled on mine.
	but since death seems to have to be
	like birth is, full of pain and fear,
	at least then give it back to me,
	the sin, the pain that I brought here.
	“You saw?” she asked.
	I nodded.
	“They saw?”
	I nodded.
	“So they know.”
	Trying not to wince as her pain spread through me, I nodded.
	I was aware, as we went on, that the space around me was filling with the bodies of other people, bent over our three forms. I didn’t look to see who they were. I didn’t care, at the moment.
	Daire coughed, trying to get something out, and gave up on speech. You can’t save me. Join the battle, I’m gone already.
	“The battle’s over,” said a voice above me.
	I looked up. Wriana, Dahern, and a woman I’d never seen before--tall, square, with wide features and iron-gray hair. All three of them were singed, and they looked exhausted.
	“What became of them?” I asked.
	“They ran, and we lost them in the passes,” Wriana said.  “I was hoping Tifni might fall to her death, but no such luck.”
	“This is Theamh ni hUlnach,” Dahern said, indicating me. “And...Daire ni Fhilim.”
	“Notya ni Chieven,” said the third woman, squatting down near us and putting a hand on my shoulder. “Lilea sent me out to look for you. I ran into these two on my way up.”
	“It occurred to us,” Dahern said, looking on in horror as Wriana knelt to help us with the transfer, “that Daire’s from Dairc, and that if I were Tifni, I’d take my chances tracking you two instead of us. So we doubled back, and followed them here.” She dropped to the ground near me, putting her hand in. “If we’d just turned up a half-minute earlier--”
	Don’t, Daire sent up us, her eyes darting from face to face. This is their fault, not yours. Remember that. 
	The pain was starting to ebb. Part of it was that the other three were now helping, but part was probably that it was ending.
	You were a beautiful thing, I told her. They all saw that. They know.
	Thank you, Theamh. She moved a hand, feebly, to take Dahern’s. Watch me out?
	“We’re all here,” Dahern said.
	The candles had gone up into cinders in the first blast, but Aine had prudently stored the bag under the roots of the tree that grew out of the pass above us, and she found some more inside it. While she set them up, Wriana started the song and Dahern lit them, one by one, moodily.
	We joined hands around her, the circle now large enough to comfortably encompass her. It was true--if they’d been there earlier, she’d have had enough people to defend her, this wouldn’t have had to happen. But they weren’t linked to us, and they couldn’t very well have used the Council pathways, and there was no way to let us know they were coming. Or that Tifni and Hern had followed us after all, because good as she was Daire had only had three years to learn this landscape instead of a lifetime. So now Daire was dying, with the five of us joined around her and my four vigils waving over her in concern and the crowd of her people, who now knew enough to grieve this as a loss they could ill afford in these rotten times, waiting stricken on the sidelines for the inevitable outcome.
	I want Dahern to do my departure, Daire said. 
	I will.
	I wanted...Wriana was crying, and so was Aine. There was more I wanted to do.
	Someone will come here and do it, Dahern answered. Someone true.
	It was the last thing she heard, probably. I couldn’t see it, now. But I knew that what I’d brought out of her minutes before was rising out of her again, and that no power on earth could bring it back.
	Nothing came to interfere with her. If Tifni and Hern were still lurking somewhere, they either let her go, or were warned off by our watching. Either way, it was a clean exit.
	We knew when it was over, as if it came to all of us at once. The song ended and we dropped our hands. I looked down at the ruin of Daire’s body, empty and alien now.
	“Remember this, all of you,” I said, standing and turning to face the crowd. “The night the Order split, here on this mountain pass, the Back Three lost a good woman, and Daire ni Fhilim became the first shriic martyr in this war.”
	Notya stood up. “You’d better come along now,” she said. “It’s dangerous for you here. I’ll see you through the border and safe into the Zone.”
	“Listen to what you’re saying,” I said, looking down at Daire’s body. “Safe, into the Zone.”
	Notya’s mouth twisted in a half-smirk. “Like it or not, you’ll be safer there than you will be here.” 
	“Go on,” Dahern said. “We’ll take care of her and her people.”
	She said it with anger, glaring around at the crowd and their torches, which seemed pitiful and weak against the memory of the fire that had been flying around us.
	“They didn’t ask for this,” Wriana said gently. “Remember, like she asked us to, whose fault this is.”
	“Idair with you all,” I finally said. “I tried--to--”
	“We know,” Dahern answered. “You did more than anyone could. Evil’s strong tonight, that’s all.”
	“Idair ride with you,” Wriana replied. “We’ll see you again, spirits willing, after this is all over.”
	Aine and I gathered our things and slipped into the darkness after Notya. 
	Lilea...is she all right? I asked.
	I hope so, Notya answered. Her message came on the Council frequency, so she couldn’t say much. But she’s still alive, at any rate.
	How’d you know where to find me?
	I was invited to that little party at Two Flocks, she answered. I didn’t go, because I don’t trust Tifni. But from what Lilea said I could tell you’d seen the show, and you could only have seen it there. And I knew Daire was going, and that she’d want to be the one to see you to the border. She was brave and good-hearted, that one, even if she was a stranger from the east.
	Aine let out a little cry of surprise. I turned back to follow her gaze. Above us, on the back of the mountain, an orange flame had suddenly leapt into the air. Its crackling came faintly down to us with the sound of weeping.
	<Daire departing,> I said.
	<You said she was the first shriic martyr,> Aine answered, after we’d gone on. <You expect there to be others.>
	<I hope there won’t,> I replied. 
	It wasn’t as long as I’d thought it might be before we were saw it--the border, shimmering faintly through the trees ahead of us like a transparent curtain. I’d never seen it before; I suppose Aine might have, depending on how far out her family sailed. It wasn’t opaque, like a shield; we could see through it, or we could have if it hadn’t been almost impenetrably dark.
	“Here.” Notya handed each of us a small cloth pouch on a loop of cord. “Put it around your neck and wear the pouch next to your skin. It’ll protect you against the place and its poisons. For a while, anyhow.”
	“How long is a while?”
	“We know it’ll hold out at least a week. Beyond that we’re not sure. Most of the people we send there make it into the Cretid Nation, or at least out of the Zone, by that time.”
	“Most?”
	“There will be a few still in there,” Notya answered, matter of fact. “There always are. Be on the lookout. They’re not nice people, and they have nothing to lose.”
	I slung the pouch around my neck, nestling it against my stomach right above one of the brooches. Aine put hers on, looking at me apprehensively.
	Notya, meanwhile, had drawn with her hands an opening about five feet tall and three feet wide, outlined in yellow fire. As she stood in front of it, reciting some spell I couldn’t hear, the curtain inside that space wavered and disappeared.
	“Go on through. Quickly. I have to close before they feel it, down there at the crossing.”
	I grabbed the hand of a hesitant Aine and pulled her into that dark opening. 
	Good luck, Theamh.
	The door shut behind us.

VI.
In the Zone

	I slept through sunrise, for the first time in five years. I was beyond exhausted; but more than that, I knew when I went to sleep that I wouldn’t be doing haons linn. Up in the Cretid Nation shri is, by definition, fraud, since they don’t believe it; fraud is a crime, and any Ideiren living in the Cretid Nation can be summarily deported if convicted of a crime, so what it boils down to is if they see you wearing a hreapa up there they toss you out as soon as they can do it. I’d have to go up there in ordinary clothing. Which to me, after all this time, felt like wandering around naked, but there was no help for it.
	I let Aine keep sleeping. She’d curled up on a corner of my hreapa, which was spread out behind some boulders we’d made into the support for a very crude shelter. Dark as it was, we’d been mistrustful enough of the spongy, wet soil to want that protection between us and the dirt. And as I stood up, with the skirt of my gray dress flapping listlessly around my legs, I realized we’d been right.
	The sky was a leaden kind of gray and seemed to be trapping a gritty haze, which drifted between the blackened tree trunks, giving the farther ones a grainy and indistinct look. I’d thought at first that it was the mist of dawn, but it didn’t burn off. The rising heat of day only made it soupier.
	Maybe it came from the sky downwards; or maybe it rose from the land, exhaled from this swampy and untrustworthy soil. Because this earth, it wasn’t right. What plants grew out of it were rank and weedy, yellow-green straggly things that I wouldn’t feed to any animal I cared about. And between these patches of unhealthy vegetation were stretches of standing water, or not water exactly. It was thicker than that, and danker, with puffs of frothy scum floating on top. They didn’t look like rain; they looked as if they’d oozed up out of the ground, trickled over from the mounds of damp earth separating them.
	Standing there looking across that depressing vista as the light grew stronger behind that smoky filter, something else came to me. Beyond the sickly plants and the polluted groundwater and the smell of that oppressive haze. Something familiar, and profoundly unsettling.
	Aine squelched up behind me, shaking my hreapa out so that drops of brown water flew off it. “Here you go, dhiaoc.”
	I began folding it up and sticking the brooches into the bundle. “Morning in the Zone, Aine,” I remarked, stuffing my hreapa into the bag. “Not a pretty sight.”
	“Do you think it always smells like this, or is it that it’s getting toward the hot season?”
	“The smell’s the least of it,” I said. “Do you not see it?”
	“You mean the haze?”
	I shook my head. “I suppose you wouldn’t, yet.” I squatted down, forgetting that the hem of my skirt would get stained, and ran a hand over what passed for the grass. “This whole place is on fire.”
	“The long slow burning,” she said.
	“Not like in Dairc,” I answered. “Not exactly. But it’s burning, with a different kind of poison.”
	Aine had packed up her robe, and was wearing the clothes she’d brought to the scoil--a wool tunic over a pair of canvas trousers. It looked a lot more practical than what I was wearing--designed for rough wear and easy cleaning. 
	“I had bad dreams,” she said, eyes narrowing as she tried to see through the haze to the other side.
	“I don’t blame you,” I answered. “It was a horrible night--and what a horrible death.”
	Aine shook her head. “They weren’t about that,” she said. “I can’t say, exactly, what they were about. But they were full of some kind of trouble that I couldn’t see, and didn’t understand.”
	The trees we began moving through were mostly dead, black hulks with stripped and broken limbs. Some were still green at the tops, but their leaves had the half-choked look of that grass. Poisoned at the roots, probably, by whatever was seeping into these puddles.
	“We send people to live here?” Aine said, her voice dropped to barely above a whisper.
	“We do,” I answered grimly.
	The pouches might have been protecting us from the poisons, but they weren’t blocking out the smell, the taste of that haze, and the sight of suppuration and putrefaction all around us. Or the heaps of--whatever--that we sometimes spotted in our path, around which we swerved cutting as wide a berth as possible. Some was recognizable by the smell as some form of waste, human or animal; but more often it was a pile of some kind of thing, dumped and left to rot, or not. Once we came across what looked like an abandoned vehicle, with its wheels in the air and rats scuttling in and out of rusted holes in the cab, which was sinking into the mud. And the whole time, the place was quiet with a dark and mournful silence. The absence of life and health and the animals that would have made the air sing. 
	“How can anyone live here?” Aine persisted, after a while. “With or without protections?”
	“I don’t know,” I answered, troubled. “I knew it was poisoned, but...name of the Spirit.”
	“Where are they all?”
	“Oh, don’t ask questions like that,” I said. “You’ll bring them out of the woodwork.”
	To take her mind of the soft squelching sound our feet made as we crossed the spongy ground, she changed the topic. “In that song for transferring pain...”
	“Yes?”
	“What does ‘sin’ mean?”
	I shrugged. “It’s the only place in the texts that Idair ever uses it,” I said. “We can guess from context that it’s something bad; that’s about all.”
	“Why wouldn’t she tell them when they asked her?”
	“I guess she didn’t want them to know.”
	“Do you suppose it’s something they have over the border?”
	“We’ll find out pretty soon, I--Idair’s teeth, look at that thing.”
	Aine stopped short, following my affronted gaze to the object that my absent mind had just that instant recognized. It was a human corpse, dressed in thin trousers and a muddy-green shirt with some kind of badge on it, lying half-sunk in the mud. Its feet and hands were bare, as was its head, now reduced by either corruption or scavenging predators to nothing but a skull with some hanks of hair dangling from it. It looked like it was male, although neither of us wanted to get close enough to verify that. 
	“Who was it, dhiaoc?”
	“No idea, but there’s no reason to leave it rotting here,” I said, shooting some fire out at it. “Slan abhaile, whoever you were.”
	The body didn’t take the flame right away--the damp had seeped into and out of it so that when it did burn it was with reluctant, clouded light and a terrible smell.
	“You know, I never liked departures,” I said, as we waited for the fire to burn itself out. “So I avoided doing them, when I could. I guess Idair’s decided it’s my turn to do my share.”
	“One of our exiles?”
	“I don’t think so...if he were wearing cotton or wool or linen it would have rotted off him, long as he’s been here. Those clothes are made of something else. Maybe it was one of theirs, overcome by the poison he was dumping.”
	“I suppose you’re--Iandar and Cailte, dhiaoc, there’s another one.”
	Ten feet away the bony, bare feet of another long-dead corpse were protruding from behind a tree stump. And as I started looking more closely at our surroundings, I saw that he wasn’t the only one. There were five of them, all men, all dressed like the first one. 
	“I don’t have time to burn them all,” I said, since it was what occurred to me to say. “Let’s walk on and hope we don’t find any more.”
	“What killed them, dhiaoc?” Aine said, sticking close to me.
	“Either the land or the people,” I answered. “Either way, I want out of here, fast.”
	We walked on through that dirty haze. We could only see about a hundred yards ahead of us, and even at fifty yards things started to look blurry. After a few miles, the vegetation started to become a little thicker, and the ground slightly firmer. The place never became whole or healthy, but the burning waned as we got further away from our side of the border.
	“Why does it get worse closer to us?” Aine asked. “Since the poisons come from them.”
	“They dump the stuff as far away from them as they can get it.”
	“Maybe that’s why there weren’t any people,” Aine said. “They all live closer to the Cretid border, where things aren’t so bad.”
	“Will you stop talking about them?” I said, a little irritated. “I tell you that’s the surest way to--”
	Sure enough, the shrill sound of a woman’s scream cut through the mist to the left of us.
	“Damn it,” I said, stopping and considering for a moment.
	“Shouldn’t we go to her?” Aine asked, watching me.
	“Yes, we should,” I answered, hitching my bag onto my shoulder. “Not that I want to spend another second in this filth...”
	I’d already started running, so I didn’t bother finishing the sentence. Aside from the dead tree trunks, there was hardly any cover in this place, so we saw them as soon as the haze thinned--a group of figures, dark in the gray miasma, clumped together. But only one of them had screamed, and she wasn’t screaming any more.
	Aine was ready to charge right in, but stopped when I moved behind a boulder. She crouched next to me. <What are you doing, dhiaoc?>
	<Count them,> I said.
	<One, two, three...five of them,> she answered.
	<We don’t know if they’re Cretids or what. This calls for a little strategy.>
	<Such as what?>
	<I’m going to teach you something we call mindshot.>
	After she satisfied me that she’d learned the basics, we split up, each of us circling the group. When we were on opposite sides, and both of us were concealed behind something large enough, I gave the signal to start.
	A second later, one of them straightened up suddenly, as if stung, and spun around. After the past few days I thought I’d be prepared for anything, but this still threw me. His head wasn’t a human head at all. It was more like the head of an insect--hugely magnified, with flat, glassy eyes set in a black face. In place of his mouth there was a protruding knob ending in three flat, round circles pierced with what were probably breathing holes. I didn’t see antennae, but that was all he was missing.
	<DHIAOC!>
	<I know, Aine. Keep firing.>
	While the first monster was still looking around to see what had hit him, another swung around away from their victim and the rest of his compatriots. And another, and another, until eventually they were all on their feet, hunting for the source of whatever was shying these small, irritating missiles at their backs.
	<All right, Aine, make the hail larger and drive ‘em off.>
	After a few moments, I saw them covering their heads in trepidation. As they ran from what they thought was pelting them, they cleared the area between us, and we saw what they had been gathered around--a woman in a torn gray dress, who was clutched into a ball on her side.
	<They’re coming back, dhiaoc.>
	<Watch this.>
	I found a likely-looking cloud and sent up a quick, narrow jolt of bright yellow. It bounced off the cloud, forking through the sky like lightning, and hit one of the dead tree trunks right in front of the group of insect men. The trunk exploded in a shower of charred wood and sparks. The shadows skittered into the distant haze.
	 <False lightning,> I said. <A good trick to know. Nine out of ten miscreants can’t tell the difference.>
	Aine had already gone over to the woman.
	“Dhiaoc,” Aine said, a note of anxiety in her voice.
	“Is she all right?”
	Aine, who had been bent over the woman’s body, pushed herself back on her heels. The woman was laid out on her back now, breathing shallowly and whimpering.
	“Name of the Spirit.” I moved closer so I could see her face. The proscription slash was still visible on it, black and now wet with tears and blood. Her eyes flicked open when my shadow crossed her face, and I could feel her mind recoiling from the strangeness of recognition.
	“Kitth,” I said, sadly.
	“So it is her,” from Aine.
	“Shriia?” she said, in a small voice. “Am I back home, then?”
	“No,” I said. “You’re in the Zone, and so am I.”
	As the implications suddenly occurred to her, she sat up and pushed herself away with what strength she had. I sat where I was.
	“I am not dark,” I said. “That’s not why I’m here. I’m on a mission.”
	She nodded, a little warily, but I thought she believed me. Mostly.
	“Here,” I finally said. “Let me take a look and see where you’re hurt.”
	Kitth sat more or less quiet while I examined her bruises. The skin under one eye was split and oozing, and her jaw, like her arms, was swelling. But nothing had been broken, and the uisce would help bring some of the swelling down and clean out the wounds. 
	“It must have been a quick trial,” I said, dabbing at the blood under her eye.
	“I confessed,” she answered, a little unwillingly. 
	<What is it she’s done?> Aine asked, watching her suspiciously.
	<Well, it’s probably not rape, so it’s either permanent harm or murder,> I answered. <Guess for yourself.>
	“Did your lawyer tell you to do that?”
	“I refused a lawyer.” In answer to my exasperated look, she hurried on. “They all know, in Felim. Even if I were--were--acquitted, I could never live there again.”
	“You could have gone to your family--”
	“My family won’t have me,” she said, with a bitter laugh. I put the bottle back in my bag. 
	“So...your husband?” Aine asked, tentative.
	“You said yourself,” Kitth replied, still looking at me. “It wasn’t a solution.”
	“Well, you know, neither was this,” I answered. 
	“At least we’re together, and he can’t hurt either of us,” she retorted.
	“The fosterer came with you?” I said.
	Kitth looked away, bitterly. “Small chance of that. He’s not made that way.”
	We both stared at her.
	“You don’t mean you brought the child with you.”
	“It’s my right,” she said.
	“Kitth--”
	“Nobody else will care for him,” she shouted. “The children my husband gave me can go to his mother’s and she’ll raise them for his sake. Raise them to hate me, but what do I care. But she’d torture this one worse than my husband did, and his father is a broken reed. I’m the only one will care enough to keep him in life and raise him--and raise him happy.”
	“You...you’re going to raise him here?” Aine demanded, having taken a moment to grapple with this. “Here? In the Zone?”
	“Presumably, she’s planning to emigrate,” I said. “To Plenana or Hendai or somewhere else.”
	“I was,” Kitth answered, the energy draining from her voice. “I can’t afford it.”
	“Didn’t they give you your passage money when they proscribed you?” I said.
	“Yes,” she answered. “I had to use it to buy our protections.”
	“To buy your protections?” I repeated. Aine shook her head. “Of course. Why not. If they’re accepting bribes, why shouldn’t they be extorting the convicted? I swear--well, if you bought them, where’s yours?” I suddenly asked, noticing she wasn’t wearing anything around her neck.
	Her hand flew to her neck in panic. Then her eyes remembered. “They took it,” she said. “They must have.”
	“The insect men,” I answered.
	“Without protections...” Her eyes came back to me. “What will happen to me?”
	“Where’s your child now?” I asked, avoiding the answer.
	“With the others.”
	“The others?”
	“The others like me. The stranded.”
	“Take us there,” I said, standing up.
	“Why?”
	“You’re a murderer but you’re still one of my people,” I said. “And your child is already starving, he shouldn’t have to burn on top of it. I can’t get you to Plenana, but I can probably get you into the Cretid Nation.”
	Kitth stood up, one hand still around her neck but her eyes starting to look less hard and dead. “Follow me, then.”
	She set off slowly, still moving with pain through the sickly grass.
	<Dhiaoc.>
	<Don’t start, Aine...>
	<If you bring her with us, isn’t that illegal?>
	<It’s illegal for us to go in there, period.>
	<According to them. But according to us--this is her punishment, isn’t it? For having killed?>
	<Aine, the laws of our country assume that exiles will be able to get out of the Zone after no more than a week. That’s why we give them passage money and protections. They do not assume that exiles will have to use their passage money to bribe corrupt shriias and then get set upon and robbed by a gang of mutant insect-headed men.>
	<Doesn’t it bother you, what she’s done?>
	<Of course it bothers me,> I answered, as Kitth clambered down the side of a dip in one of the hills. <But without protections and without passage money this is nothing but a death sentence. She doesn’t deserve that, no matter what she’s done.>
	I stopped when we got to the other side of the hill. In its shelter, there were about ten or fifteen other people--men and women--camped around a central fireplace, which wasn’t burning. They had built makeshift dwellings out of whatever they’d found there; tree limbs and loose wood, but also things I recognized from the piles of dreck we’d passed--sheets of rusting metal, swathes of tough, slick, material in various colors. And they were rusting like the metal. Aine couldn’t see it, but I could. Those faint, acid-tongued flames, playing around their skin, flickering through the lining of their guts, working at their long, slow deaths.
	A man in gray got to his feet as we approached. His shirt and trousers were eaten with holes at the elbows and knees, and whatever he was wearing on his feet, it wasn’t the shoes he’s been exiled in; they were made out of some kind of black, flexible stuff that reminded me of the insect-headed men. Except for reddened and raw-looking skin around his eyes and mouth, his face was pallid. Maybe because the sun never shone here, or maybe because of something else.
	“Are you new arrivals?” he asked us, as we hove into view.
	“We just got here last night,” I answered.
	Kitth had already run over to one of the women, who handed her the baby. He still looked pretty lethargic. Bad as his diet had been back home, it had to be worse up here.
	“How did you get the mark off so quickly?” he said, looking from one to the other of us.
	“We haven’t been proscribed,” I said.
	“We’re fugitives,” Aine added.
	He laughed, bitterly.
	“Welcome home, then,” he said. “My name is Ionn. I’m town leader here.”
	I almost started in with the formula, but stopped myself. I had realized in my first look around that there was no way I could take all of these people over the border. If they found out I was taking Kitth, it would get ugly. Best to let them assume, as he assumed, that I was a criminal like them and was as stranded as they were, and then slip off as soon as it was dark. 
	“I’m called Aine,” she said, bowing at Ionn. Then, aiming at him, About my friend...let me speak to you in private for a moment.
	The two of them drew aside. I went to have a look at the baby.
	His protection pouch was still in place, at least. It seemed to be the only one in the camp. The woman who had been tending him, and was now giving Kitth the benefit of her advice, wasn’t wearing one either.
	“...don’t ever go far from camp,” she was saying, as Kitth bent over the form of her ailing child. “The Lurkers will be on you just like that. If you want to take in the scenery,” she added with a bitter sneer, “wait till it’s your turn to go for food or firewood, with the armed party.”
	“The Lurkers,” I said. “Who are they?”
	“You’ve met them, by the looks of it,” the woman answered, looking at Kitth. “Some call them the Old-Timers, but that sounds too friendly to me. They’ve been here forever--longer than any of us can remember.”
	“But what are they?”
	“Exiles,” she said. “Those masks and the gloves they wear--they take them off the Cretids they kill. They believe there’s something in them that’ll protect them from the poisons. Maybe they’re right, but they still steal our protections off us, to be on the safe side. And food, if they find you with it, and anything else that’s not nailed down. You want to be careful,” she added, as Aine came to join us. “Young one like you, just arrived--they’ll be waiting till they can get you alone, you better believe that.”
	Aine swallowed nervously.
	<What did you tell him?> I asked, to distract her.
	<I told him you were wanted in five provinces and the Vicinity, and that you were prone to sudden fits of violent temper, but that you wouldn’t hurt anyone as long as nobody asked you any questions about who you were or what you’d done.>
	<Creative use of the truth,> I said. <It’s a good skill to have, but don’t let it get comfortable.>
	<Nothing I associate with this place is likely to get comfortable.>
	True enough. <He’s not looking any better, is he?>
	<How could he? What can they possibly be eating?>
	“When you said ‘go for food,’” I said, “you were talking about what, exactly?”
	She gave me a disapproving once-over.
	“Whatever you’re used to, it won’t be that,” she said. “I wouldn’t give two pieces for your chances here, soft living as you’ve had.”
	“If I’ve lived soft, I’ve gotten used to lying hard,” I said, a little irritated.
	I was surprised to see her back down, and almost look ashamed. “Of course you have, child. Of course.” She reached out to pat my arm. The hand that rested on the sleeve of my dress was spotted with dark scars, blackening carbuncles of skin with reddened, swollen flesh around them.
	I covered her hand with mine before Aine noticed them. “It’s all right. What’s your used name, anyhow?”
	“Weadiw ni Rhoisin,” she said, without enthusiasm.
	Aine’s eyes got slightly bigger, but she prudently refrained from comment.
	“You’ve heard of me,” she said, listlessly.
	“Of course I have,” Aine said.
	She looked away. We let it go at that.
	“You’ve been here two years,” I said.
	“Yes,” she answered with a cracked laugh. “I’m one of the veterans. Only other one here who’s lasted more than a year is Ionn there.”
	She nodded up at Ionn, who was standing behind us. “Since you’re new,” he said, sitting down on the sodden grass, “let me tell you how things work. Once a day we organize food and firewood parties. We share the responsibility but each party has to include at least five people and at least one who knows how to use the gun.”
	“The what?” I asked.
	“Never mind. Those who aren’t looking for food--” He broke off, coughing wetly into the sleeve of his ratty gray shirt. “--stay here within the camp. If you wander off alone, we wash our hands of you. We can’t afford to be tangling with the Lurkers over a single citizen. Fighting them is too expensive.”
	“I can see that,” I answered.
	“We tend not to be natural cooperators, but if you stay long it’ll be because you’ve learned to work with us. Are you good at anything?”
	I looked at him. “I’m good at a number of things.”
	“Such as?”
	“I thought Aine told you not to ask me any questions.”
	I tried to sound dangerous. I think I more or less succeeded.
	“Fair enough,” he said. “You’re new. Can you make a fire, at least?”
	I smirked. “Yes, that I can do.”
	“Then get one started, the party just came back.”
	I moved over to the campfire. The tinderbox was sitting there, next to the wood. It had been a while since I’d used one of these.
	While Aine talked to Kitth and Ionn went to meet with the hunters, I wrestled with the tinderbox. The sparks flew well enough but it was hell trying to get them to catch onto the leaves and moss that had been stuffed under the firewood. Everything here was sodden, even after they’d tried to dry it out. After a few minutes of trying to do it the hard way, I lost patience. Shielding the box with one hand so it would look like the flame had come out of it, I set the tinder on fire.
	Once the wood was burning, I took my flame back and moved away. The food party had apparently come back; at least, five people--four men and a woman--had returned, and were conferencing with Ionn, looking up now and then in my direction. The woman and one of the men came over to the fire, dragging a basket full of something. Another of the men handed something made out of metal to Ionn.
	<What’s that thing, dhiaoc?>
	<I don’t know. They’re being very careful with it, though.>
	<What does that mean?>
	<Either it’s important, or it’s dangerous. Or both.>
	“You the new arrivals?” asked the woman, abruptly.
	“Yes, we are,” I answered. “Tell us how to help.”
	“Here,” she said, tossing me something dead with brown, matted fur on it. “Skin that and get it ready for roasting.” 
	I repressed a gag, and looked rather beseechingly at Aine.
	She swallowed a lump in her throat, facing the dead thing resolutely. <I’ll do it, dhiaoc, there’s a knife in the bag.>
	She stuck her hand into the bag and groped discreetly for the clasp knife. She stretched the thing out and went to work, repressing whatever distaste she felt. Having been a hunter with her brothers, she knew how to do it, even if it now bothered her a lot more.
	The woman was watching me now, and not affectionately. “The job’s too dirty for you, is that it?”
	“I don’t know how,” I answered. “I never learned to hunt. I’d just destroy the thing. Tell me something else I can do.”
	She grabbed something else out of the basket and threw it at me. “This you don’t have to skin. Just pluck it and gut it.” I looked down at the bird, which was large and profusely feathered except for its long, naked, and from my point of view unnecessarily repulsive-looking neck. I turned it over, gingerly, watching its dead eyes and lax beak. “For Idair’s sake, it’s not like I’m asking you to learn shri. Just pull off the feathers, cut the head off and slit the gut.”
	<If you singe them a little in the fire, the feathers will pull out easier,> Aine said, still bent over her task.
	I held it near the flame. <What is that thing, anyway?>
	<It looks like a really big rat with a long, nasty tail and small ears.>
	<The meatless life has its advantages.> I started pulling feathers. <If you’re really hungry, you know, you can eat it. At your stage you’re allowed to break the rules if necessity commands.>
	<Necessity can command till it’s blue in the face. I’m not eating this.>
	 “Give me that.” The woman who had been flinging the dead animals about wrested the vulture from my grip and started pulling the plumage out with a lot more speed and dexterity. “I don’t know why you want to take in a big house woman, Ionn, she’ll be a lot of trouble and no thurking use.”
	“I’m taking her in because she and her friend there managed to fight off a party of Lurkers single-handedly,” Ionn answered, shortly.
	“And because she’s made the first decent fire we’ve had,” Weadiw said, huddling close to it. 
	Watching her struggling to get warm when she was already on fire was, for some reason, worse than anything I’d seen so far in the Zone. Aine handed the thing she’d just skinned back to the man from the food party, who stretched it out on a metal grill-like contraption he’d rigged up over the fire. She looked around for somewhere to wash her hands, and then eventually gave up and wiped them on the grass.
	The others grouped themselves around the fire, watching the dead things roast. The anticipation in their faces couldn’t by any stretch of the imagination be called eagerness, but they were glad to see these things turning brown over the flames, glad they were going to be eating soon. All I felt was an unpleasant queasiness.
	Over the years, or how ever long it had been, they had made themselves flat rounds of metal that served as plates. The vulture and the other thing were passed around the fire, each person tearing off part of it onto his plate. When it got to me I passed it along, hoping the others wouldn’t notice. No such luck.
	“What’s the matter?” sneered the woman from the fire, eyes narrowing at me under her rusty red hair. “Is it just not the same without the plum sauce?”
	“It’s more for the rest of you, so what do you care?” I snapped at her.
	“You’ll have to get over your refined tastes unless you want to starve up here.”
	“Well, since you hate my guts I don’t see why that should be any skin off your gleacha,” I said. 
	“Madena, please,” Ionn said. “She’s not bothering you.”
	“Yes, she is,” the woman retorted.
	“Everyone and everything bothers you,” Weadiw snapped. “Leave her alone and eat your whatever the hell this is.”
	“It’s called a possum,” said the man who’d cooked it, speaking for the first time.
	“Oh is that so,” Madena said. “You saw a lot of them that afternoon you spent up there, did you?”
	“It was three months, and I did see a lot of them,” he said, rounding on her. “They scuttle around at night feeding off garbage and molting with mange, just like you used to.”
	Madena flew at him with a curse, almost upending her plate of roasted possum. Ionn nodded at Weadiw, who stepped up to them and had peeled Madena off him in a matter of seconds. From her headlock, Madena spat at him.
	“That’s enough!” Ionn snapped. “That’s three times this month, Madena. One more and you’re out.”
	“He started it!”
	“If you can’t live within the rules, you’re on your own,” Ionn repeated.
	Madena resumed her place, surlily, and picked up her food.
	There were a lot of things I wanted to ask them. Why they hadn’t tried to get over the border. Why they were here instead of closer to the border, or at least over where Ubh was so they could fish, or something. How that one man had gotten across the border and why and how he’d been kicked out. But at the moment, I felt asking them would only create more trouble. 
	The rest of the meal, such as it was, passed in uneasy silence. Aine and I helped them clean up, which meant that we scrubbed the worst of the fat and charred flesh off the plates with bunches of dried, dead grass. Neither of us had eaten since we’d entered the Zone, but having witnessed this feast had given me a vague queasiness which had become more insistent. 
	“Ionn,” I called out. “Have you all designated a...spot...for doing business, or is it every man for himself?”
	“Out there by the tree with three forks,” he said, pointing at a blasted oak in the distance. “Take the spade and throw some dirt on it--and take someone with you.”
	“I don’t think that’ll be really necessary--”
	“Weadiw,” Ionn called. “Take her out to the privy.”
	“Come along,” Weadiw said, picking up a shovel. “I won’t look if you don’t.”
	Weadiw escorted me out to the tree. They had made some efforts at sanitation; they’d dug a pit, at least, and were attempting to cover the smell by pitching soil on top of each recent addition. It wasn’t exactly working, but it was encouraging to me, I suppose, that they were still trying.
	“Better hurry,” Weadiw said. “There’ll be a regular parade out here soon. Takes about ten minutes after a meal, and then--”
	“All right, all right,” I said, taking the spade behind the tree.
	Before I could bring myself to get started, the sound of Weadiw’s hurried footsteps came from around the trunk. Without even begging my pardon, she squatted down at the edge and lifted up her skirts.
	I moved away as discreetly as I could, although I doubted somehow that it mattered much to her. But even though I wasn’t looking I could hear. You don’t want the details; but by the time she finally stopped and stood up I had learned a lot about the state of her insides.
	When I was done with my business, and pitching soil into the pit, Weadiw patted me on the back with one of those carbuncled hands. “Life’s a funny one, isn’t she? One minute you’re sipping sparkling fruit juice on the divan, another you’re shoveling dirt onto your own fnaa in the Zone. You’re versatile, I’ll give you tha--”
	She broke off into a long, hacking cough that seemed to convulse most of her body, and which ended in the expulsion of a horrible clot of bloody mucus from her throat into the pit. 
	“Are you all right?” I said, grasping her arm as she seemed to be groping for something to lean on. 
	“Of course I’m not all right!” she said, after a long ragged inbreath. “I’ve been in this stinking hole for two years!”
	“I guess it was a stupid question,” I said.
	She laughed. “It’s your first day. I’ll cut you slack.” We started back, Weadiw still holding onto my arm as if she were grateful for it. “You seem like a nice enough young thing. How’d you end up here?”
	“Life is funny, as you said,” I answered.

	“So,” Ionn declaimed, after we had all fallen silent around the campfire. “We’re lucky enough tonight to have new arrivals.” He turned to us. “Do you two know any stories we don’t know?”
	“Stories about what?” Aine answered.
	“From the Chronicles,” Weadiw put in. “We--some of us, that is,” she said, watching Madena get up and retire sulkily to her shelter, “do a reading now and then after meals. We don’t have a text, of course, or a shriia, so we have to make do with what we can remember.”
	“We’re hoping you might remember some stories we don’t,” Ionn continued. “The Burning, the Coming, the First Revelation, all the feast stories, we all know. Madena’s got Sincil and Anron memorized, but she won’t recite it unless she’s in a good mood, and she never is.” Some subdued laughter from the others. “Do you know any we don’t?”
	“Probably,” I said. 
	“Then tell us one,” Weadiw said. 
	“Go ahead, Aine.” I nodded to her.
	<But dhiaoc, you’re the shriia-->
	<They don’t know that, and you may as well get some practice in. I know you’ve got the whole thing memorized backwards and forwards.>
	<But which one?>
	<Ask them if there’s one they want to hear.>
	“Is...is there a particular story you want to hear, that you haven’t heard in a long time?” she asked, looking around timidly.
	There was a silence as everyone thought, their faces grim in the light of the fire. The sense of loss, of the memory of what was gone, oppressed me to the point that I almost felt like I was going to suffocate. Of course that could just have been the haze.
	“What about Iandar and the thief?” suggested the man from the fire.
	“Kelot knew it,” Weadiw said. “But he’s been gone a year and more. I’m game.”
	The others nodded. Ionn looked back at Aine. “It’s settled then. Tell us the story.”
	Aine cleared her throat and clasped her drawn-up knees with nervous hands, staring straight into the fire as she started. “From the beginning of the third scroll, the story of Iandar and the thief.” Another long pause while she ran over the text in her mind, looking for a place to start.
	“ ‘And so by the time night fell, Idair and Cailte and Sincil were very tired. So that when they saw a large house standing in a clearing at the edge of the wood, with a candle in its windows, Idair did not even hesitate, but went up to the door and rapped on it with her own hand.
	“ ‘And the door opened, and inside was a tall man with a rough brown beard, who looked at them with the eyes of a mistrustful man, and said, ‘Who are you, and what do you abroad here at this hour of the night?’
	“ ‘My name is Idair,’ she answered, ‘and I am doing nothing, aside from looking for shelter for me and for my friends, who have walked with me a long time today.’
	“ ‘And would you be looking for it here?’ said the man, glancing at them with an eye of disfavor, because they were besmirched with the mud of the roads.
	“ ‘We are,’ Idair answered. ‘If you are too mean, or too frightened, to let us stay in your house for the night, which looks large enough, then we will move on, and there will be an end of it.’
	“And the man looked at Cailte, who seemed very tired, and Sincil, who looked as if she were ready to cry with fatigue, and said, ‘I suppose you must come in, it would be unlucky to refuse you.’
	“And Idair looked vexed, but said nothing, for they were all very tired. And although he did not do it gladly, Iandar, for that was the man’s name, gave them all a good dinner and took them into one of the rooms where they made their camp. And when he had gone, Cailte said, ‘He has heard of you then, and your power?’
	“ ‘It would seem so,’ Idair answered.
	“ ‘But why does that not make you happy?’ Sincil asks. 
	“ ‘I am not used to this,’ Idair said, after a long while. ‘It does not seem right, that I have this power.’
	“ ‘But who else should have it?’ Cailte answered. ‘We are your children, and you wish us well. It is well that you have power.’
	“Idair said nothing but ‘Let us get sleep, we need it sorely.’
	“ ‘But they were not to have the sleep they needed, for in the dark of the night they awoke, suddenly, to the sounds of violence. They looked, and saw that the door was open, and ran out, following the noise. And when they got to the hallway, they saw Iandar standing there with a knife in his hand, and a strange man in the doorway, clutching a bag.
	“ ‘Drop it now, and count yourself lucky to flee with your life,’ Iandar said. ‘That is my property. I will defend it as is my right.’
	“ ‘It will be my property as soon as I walk out that door,’ said the other man. ‘And you are not the one to stop me.’
	“And the strange man opened the door. But before Idair could say anything, Iandar flew at him, with strength and speed, and the knife flashed, and the man screamed.
	“ ‘What are you doing?’ shouted Idair, in horror. 
	“Iandar stood up, his breath loud in his throat. The strange man lay on the floor and his blood was pouring in waves onto the floorboards.
	“ ‘You see,’ said Iandar, holding up the bag. ‘It is my gold, and he was taking it from me.’
	“But Idair did not listen, for she was kneeling by the stricken man, and looked as if she were trying to make him well again by wishing. But she could not. And when she had accepted that she could not, she looked up at Iandar.
	“‘Come here,’ she said.
	“Iandar obeyed, not understanding why, and knelt by her to look at the face of the stricken man. It was a young man, and he would have been handsome, but he was dabbled all over with his heartblood, and horribly pale.
	“And Idair took the hand of the stricken man, and said to him, ‘What do they call you?’
	“‘I was called by my mother Little Apple,’ said the man, with the difficulty of the dying. ‘Later I called myself Nightbird. Now I will be called nothing, and no one will remember me.’
	“ ‘My name is Idair,’ said Idair. ‘I will remember you.’
	“ ‘I have a brother,’ said the stricken man. ‘He lives still with my father, in the forest north of town. His name is Anron.’
	“ ‘I will tell him that you spoke of him,’ Idair said. 
	“ ‘Do not tell him how I died,’ the stricken man answered, turning to look at her. ‘I do not want him to be ashamed, and I do not want him to avenge me.’
	“And Idair touched his hair with her hand, and said, ‘He will not be ashamed, and he will not avenge you. I give you my promise.’
	“And as Iandar watched, the stricken man’s spirit departed, and his body was without life. Idair closed his eyes, and stood to look down at Iandar, who still knelt by the body of the stricken man, and was very quiet.
	“ ‘He was taking from me what is mine,’ Iandar said at last. ‘It is the rule, in this place, that we may defend what is ours, even to the death.’
	“ ‘You have killed this man for a thing,’ Idair said, her voice loud in her anger. ‘For a lump of common stuff, for gold, for nothing, you have stopped a beating heart.’
	“And Iandar took up the bag and handed it to her. ‘It was not nothing. See, my whole hoard, saved through all my youth. My safety and security for my old age. It was not nothing.’
	“Idair saw that he was troubled as he spoke of his gold, and this increased her wrath, and she turned the bag upside down so that the gold fell out of it onto the floor.
	“ ‘Your whole hoard,’ she said, kicking it into the corners. ‘This is nothing, I tell you it is nothing.’ And from her open hands, as she stretched them out, fell more gold, striking the boards of the floor, piling up as she threw it down, while Iandar and Sincil and Cailte stared. ‘Yellow metal, too soft to make tools or put to any honest use, good for nothing but shine and lure and provoking the itch of desire and greed.’ And the gold piled higher, and Iandar began to be troubled. ‘Gold I can make, if that is what you need, or iron or stone or wood or any other thing that you need, I can make, I can pull roses from the air and I could choke you with a handful of diamonds but I cannot make a dead man live again.’
	“And Iandar’s face began to fall, but Idair continued in her wrath. ‘For this dead stuff, for nothing, you have destroyed the one thing that has real worth. Now you have more gold, and the world has less magic.’ And she called to Cailte and Sincil, and they came to her, and Idair said, ‘We are leaving.’
	“And Iandar, with tears in his eyes, said, ‘It is the rule here, that we may defend what is ours, even to the death.’
	“And Idair said to him, ‘If that comforts you, then I regret that I ever saw you, and I am bitterly sorry that I ate your bread.’
	“And they left his house, and they struck north, toward the place the man had said they might find his brother.”
	Aine looked around, but they still seemed to expect more story.
	<I think for this crowd, you better at least get to the part where he joins them.>
	<I suppose,> Aine answered, swallowing.
	“And it happened on the morning of the next day, that as they were breaking camp, they heard one behind them, and it was Iandar. And Idair said to him, ‘You have enough gold now, I will not make more.’
	“And Iandar said, ‘I do not want gold. I do not want anything, but for you to answer my question.’
	“ ‘And what question is that?’ Idair said.
	“ ‘How must I repay the world for what I have done?’ said Iandar. ‘What remedy must I provide?’ And as Idair looked at him, and seemed troubled, he said, ‘Must I die? I will, if it is the right remedy.’
	“ ‘Would you really?’ Idair asked.
	“And Cailte was troubled, for it seemed to her as if Idair might really tell him to die. And Iandar said, ‘Yes. Is that what is required? Is that the remedy?’
	“ ‘No,’ Idair said, quickly. ‘Death does not repair death.’
	“ ‘Then what is the remedy?’
	“And Idair looked at him, and sadness came to her, and pity, and she said, ‘There is no remedy. What you have taken cannot be replaced.’
	“And Cailte and Sincil saw that Iandar was greatly troubled, and that tears came from his eyes, and it seemed that he would not bear the knowledge she had given him. And Idair became gentle, and she said to him, ‘You talk of remedy and rule, and while you talk of those things, there is nothing to be done. But there may be something to be done, yet. You may yet bring magic back to the world, in some other way.’
	“ ‘What other way, Idair?’ he said, beginning to have hope.
	“ ‘I do not know,’ she said. ‘If anyone ever finds out, it will probably be you.’
	“ ‘If you want to find out,’ Cailte said, ‘you should come with us. Knowledge and wisdom fall out of the trees when Idair walks under them.’
	“And Idair looked at her, vexed, not because she had invited Iandar but because Cailte had praised her. Her eyes returned to Iandar, and she said to him, ‘If you want to come with us, you are welcome. We are going to find the brother of the man you killed.’
	“ ‘I will come with you,’ he said.
	“ ‘Then let us go,’ Idair answered. And they went.”
	Aine couldn’t close the scroll, because there wasn’t one, so she folded her hands in her lap and stopped talking. We looked around the fire, at Ionn and Weadiw and the others, waiting to see what would happen.
	“I’d forgotten a lot of that,” said one of the men. “I forgot how she made the gold. I wonder what happened to it all.”
	“Other people probably found it,” Weadiw said, a little impatient. “Found it and the body of that poor dead man, which nobody stopped to care for.”
	“I always assumed Iandar had taken care of it before he went after them,” I said.
	Weadiw shrugged. “Maybe. She’d have been better off without him, for all the good he did her.”
	“But if he hadn’t been there, we wouldn’t have had the Burning,” Ionn said. “He gave the first laws. Without him--”
	“Without him we wouldn’t be here,” Madena shouted, from the darkness outside the circle.
	So she’d been listening. “If there weren’t laws, we’d be worse off,” Ionn said, looking at Weadiw but clearly responding to Madena. “I would be dead, that’s for sure.”
	One of the other men nodded. “The law’s the only thing keeping us alive. As it is, her family almost got to me before the gardai did. I was mighty glad they got there first.”
	“We’re what’s keeping us alive,” Madena shouted. “The law shoved us out here to die. They just didn’t want to kill us at home, where it would stain.”
	“Maybe this is it,” said the man who’d been north, suddenly. “Maybe this is it, the remedy. Slow death by poison, while we work to try to make this rateaten place something other than nothing.”
	“Remedy my gleacha,” Madena snapped back, still holding aloof outside the fire. “What can it possibly help for us to be up here rotting? Your wife is with Idair and your children are growing up as they will without there being anything you can do either to or for them. You may as well be dead. So might I.”
	“I wish you were,” the man retorted.
	“All right,” Weadiw said, pointing warningly at the man. “You two are not going to get into it again. Madena’s one violation shy of dismissal, and if you don’t care enough about her not to want her alone in the dark with the Lurkers, I do.”
	There was a lull while the man subsided on his side of the fire. Ionn looked at me.
	“What about you?” he asked. “You think she would have been better off without him?”
	“Who, Madena?”
	A laugh ran around the circle, punctuated by a sharp bark of something from Madena that might have been mirth.
	“No, I meant Idair,” Ionn said. “Whether she would have been better off without Iandar.”
	I had never really considered this question. Iandar and the thief is one of the less popular stories; too dark, with an ending that’s too inconclusive. “He was trouble, for sure,” I said. “That business with the temple, and then getting himself abducted by the minions. And they never saw eye to eye on a lot of things, especially that obsession he had with justice. But...I don’t know, he always seemed essential to me. He was a question she couldn’t answer. You know, she never...they never found a way for him to make it up, what he’d done. But she kept him with her, until he learned there was a way to live with having done a wrong you can’t undo. I think...you know, if he hadn’t been among them, it would have been a long time before anyone learned that.”
	“You seem to know the story pretty well,” Ionn said.
	I shrugged.
	“Does it help you live with it?” Ionn pursued. “Knowing the story, does it help you live with what you’ve done?”
	“I told you not to ask her about that,” Aine interrupted, coming to my rescue.
	“That’s right,” Ionn said. “You did.” He sighed. “Well, if nobody else wants to talk, let’s turn in.”
	Feeling his eyes on my back, I walked with Aine back to Kitth’s shelter, which she shared with the boy and Weadiw. I couldn’t spread my hreapa out to sleep on without giving us away, so we curled up in a corner of a plastic sheet that was on the ground. 
	“Good rest to you,” Weadiw said, settling her bulk down near us. “I’m glad you’ve come among us, Aine, you and your friend. You’ll be good for the place.”
	<Dhiaoc,> Aine said. <We’re leaving tonight, aren’t we?>
	<Yes. As soon as everyone’s asleep.>
	<Good.>
	
	When the time was right, or at least when I thought it was right, I gathered Aine and Kitth and the boy. Weadiw turned in her sleep as we stepped around her, coughing so hard I thought she had to wake herself up. But she must have been used to it, because her eyelids never flickered. With a last look over my shoulder at her, we slunk out of the shelter.
	The embers of the fire had been banked, carefully. I stopped in the deserted camp, looking at them, with the irony biting at me. Here, where there was fire everywhere, it was still so scarce and hard-made that they had to save it when they could. When they had enough, probably, eating the flesh in their own bodies to cook a week’s worth of dead possums.
	<Dhiaoc, we have to go.>
	<I can’t do it, Aine.>
	<Oh no.>
	She saw me looking back at the shelter. <I can’t just sneak off and leave them here. I know it’s not practical-->
	<Dhiaoc, we have to get over the border. We don’t have time.>
	What’s going on? Kitth asked.
	<They’re burning with poison. I can’t walk away from that knowing I can give them some relief.>
	<Dhiaoc, the mission is our priority. If we stop for every suffering we find, we’ll never get there.>
	<You’ve never seen people die of this, Aine,> I sent back, striding back for the shelter.
	Aine and Kitth followed me, perturbed. We crowded under the shelter. I nudged Weadiw.
	“What is it?” she said, turning over and blinking at me.
	“I can help you,” I said.
	“What?”
	“With the sickness. It’s burning, I mean it’s poison but it’s all fire of one kind or another. I can draw it out of you. I can’t do anything about the scars on your skin, they’re burnt already, but--”
	“Who are you?” Weadiw said, looking at me closely.
	“I’m Theamh ni hUlnach,” I answered, quietly. “I’m a shriia.”
	Weadiw’s brow contracted for a moment as she looked at me. Then she nodded.
	“I should have known.”
	“If you’ll sit up--”
	“No, child.” She propped her head up painfully on one elbow. “You’ve got things to do, or you wouldn’t be here. Don’t stop to fuss over me.”
	“But--”
	“I know you could reverse the damage,” she said. “I heard stories about what you did for Dairc. But you cleansed the Ubh too.” Weadiw coughed. “So they didn’t get poisoned again. This place can’t be cleansed.” I was about to argue, but she cut me off. “If you cure me, it’ll only mean a longer time to spend up here, more pain and poison. You can slow this fire down,” she said, with a sad smile, “but you can’t put it out.”
	I looked back at her, knowing she was right.
	“Leave us,” she said. “There’s one thing that will do any of us any good, and that’s to get out of here. And we can’t. Not until things change on our side of the border.” Her shrewd gaze fixed me as I looked down. “And that’s what you’re after, isn’t it. Your colleagues, whose greed has stranded us here.”
	“Among other things,” I said.
	“So get out of here. Find what you’re looking for. Then go home and clean house. That’s the way to cure us.”
	“You’re a generous-hearted woman,” I said.
	“I have a lot to live with,” she answered.
	She lay down and closed her eyes, so she wouldn’t have to say goodbye. We slipped back out into the night and through the camp, into the Lurkers’ domain.

VII.
Don’t Drink the Water

	<All right.> We were coming up on the actual border--or at least what I assumed was the actual border. Through the darkness and the haze ahead of us I could see a wall, backlit by a vague kind of glowing haze produced by some sort of light behind it. Actually, it wasn’t a wall so much as a rather a fence, a kind of net made of wires, attached to posts at intervals. It looked to be at least twenty feet tall, and crowned on top by gleaming loops of razor-edged wire. <You know, the wire looks pretty mean, but as for the wall itself...I can’t believe they didn’t make it out of something sturdy. If we just move forward slowly, staying low to the ground, we should be able to get pretty close before they see us. I can’t imagine that metal would give us much trouble if we worked on it together.>
	<It seems too easy, dhiaoc.>
	<It does that,> I answered. <Perhaps they have protections we can’t see.>
	<So do we just...go on ahead?>
	<Let me try something.>
	I found a good-sized rock and aimed for a section of fence that was several yards to the east of where we were hiding. The rock banged into the fence with a dull clank, then dropped to the ground. Nothing happened.
	<It still seems too easy,> Aine said.
	<All right, I’m going to sneak up on it and see what happens.>
	<Be careful, dhiaoc.>
	Offending all of my senses, I prostrated myself in the weeds and slithered forward. I was glad I wouldn’t be able to see whatever was on the front of my dress when I eventually stood up. Sadly, the smell was not affected by the darkness.
	One of my hands came down on something hard and smooth, that wasn’t grass but wasn’t a rock either. It felt more like polished wood, but it was in an odd shape for a tree root or limb. I felt around; it was attached to a similar object, except this one was straight. And a few inches closer to me, they joined into a bulbous knob.
	<You’re right, Aine, this is too easy to be true.>
	<Why? What have you found?>
	<Looks like the skeleton of the last person who tried this.>
	<Dhiaoc, get away from there!>
	<The arm’s pointing toward me...looks like he was trying to crawl back for those bushes when he gave out.> I had already made out the skull and the arm crumpled underneath the rib cage. There was no flesh on the bones. Scavengers doing a better job, maybe, up here where animals were more plentiful; or maybe he’d just been dead longer. If it was a he. <Come on up here, Aine.>
	<What?>
	<I want to see what you can read off him.>
	<Dhiaoc!>
	<Look, if it were dangerous something would have happened to me. Whatever killed him was further up the path; he was retreating from it when he collapsed.>
	<But-->
	<If you can see what killed him, then we’ll know what we’re up against.> 	
	<All right.>
	Aine was better at this than I was--I barely heard a rustle before she was at my elbow. I pointed the skeleton out to her. <See what you can-->
	<Idair’s teeth.>
	Whatever it was, she was seeing it now. <What is it?>
	<I...I can’t...I don’t understand.>
	<What do you see?>
	<I saw what happened, but not what caused it.>
	<So what happened?>
	<I...don’t even know how to describe it.>
	<Then show me.>
	It was fresh enough in her mind. Turns out it was a he, and he was making the run at night, like us, in the faint glare of those lights behind the fence. His skin was covered with the same carbuncles on Weadiw’s, and had Ionn’s unhealthy pallor. He’d been crouching low--but that didn’t help. In the middle of his run, he suddenly crumpled to the ground, clutched over his stomach. And blood appeared, blossoming all over him, from holes torn somehow in his back. And then he dragged himself around and away from the wall, leaving the blood that was leaking from his gut in wide dark trails along the grass. And then collapsed where we’d found him.
	<Do you understand it, dhiaoc?>
	<Well...> I ran my hands along the spine, reaching through the rib bones to the grass underneath. I found a cold, metallic lump of something. And, a few inches away, another one. And then another one.
	I pulled my hand and its fistful of metal out of that rib cage. <I don’t know exactly what these are,> I said, showing her the little cylinders in my hand. <But I’m guessing they made the wounds you saw.>
	<But...they’re not sharp enough to be arrowheads, and I didn’t see the shafts.>
	<They aren’t arrows, that’s obvious. To get something this blunt through skin and flesh you’d have to get it moving pretty fast.>
	<So...it’s some kind of...machine, over there, that spits these things out?>
	<That’s my guess.> I looked up the hill toward that glow behind the fence, which was starting to seem sinister to me. <All right, Aine, let’s put those new reading skills in action. How many people are on the other side of that fence?>
	<How...how do I find out?>
	<Isolate their signals and figure out how many of them there are. It shouldn’t be too hard, Cretids are unbelievably loud.>
	There was a pause while Aine gave it a try, and I wished I had a link to Kitth. We’d left her and the child back there in the grass. He was too lethargic to cry much, but if he should take it into his head to start wailing it would be awkward for all of us.
	<I...I can’t tell. I think there’s someone over there, but I can’t distinguish any particular signal.>
	Well, perhaps this learning in the field thing wasn’t something to test out right here right now. <All right, I’ll try...>
	A few moments later I was as puzzled as she was. Because I couldn’t either. Nothing you could identify as a thought stream, an aura, the carrier of a consciousness. There was a kind of hum and buzz--a vague sense of activity, concentration, motion. But nothing you’d call a will.
	<Well, Aine, the good news is, it’s not you.>
	<But then what is that? An animal?>
	<No...>
	<What then?>
	<I don’t know. If it’s a machine doing this, someone or something has to be aiming it. But it’s not something that has much in the way of a mind, so it shouldn’t be hard to outsmart.>
	<So how do we do that?>
	What’s going on?
	Kitth was right behind us, kid in tow.
	Well, we’re trying to figure out how to get up there without being pumped full of these.
	I showed her the little round pellets, and felt the fear.
	They must have guns.
	Oh is that what those are.
	They have one in the camp; Weadiw was teaching me.
	Did she tell you anything about how they aim?
	You point it at what you want to kill, and you press the trigger.
	Which would presume there was a person doing the pointing. Maybe this was something different.
	She says up there, you don’t even have to be a marksman--the gun will practically aim itself.
	And how would it do that?
	That’s beyond what I know.
	<All right, then it must have some way of identifying the target and moving into position. And it didn’t fire at the rock, so it’s not just motion.>
	<Sound?>
	<That poor guy we’re crouching next to wasn’t screaming, or anything, on his way up there.>
	<Smell?>
	<Could anything cut through the stench of this place?>
	<Well, it’s not taste or touch.>
	It hardly could be, we were too far away to be tasted or touched. And how would you tell the touch of a human from anything else, from the touch of this dead bone I’d crawled over, or the feel of these heartless little metal pellets.
	<Not taste, for sure,> I answered. <Back up, I’m going to try something.>
	They backed up, anxiously.
	I shot a fireball over our heads in as high an arc as I could get. 
	Instantly the silence we had been crouched in was split into jagged shards by a high-pitched, shrilling scream.
	We lay flat on our stomachs in the poisoned dirt while the scream was joined by a volley of flashing lights on the far side of the fence, accompanied by a series of loud popping noises. And the sound of Kitth’s child crying.
	I brought the thing down to ground level and drew it back into me, scorching a path along the grass as it came. Once it had reached me the scream stopped, and so did the popping. The boy kept right on whimpering, but nobody seemed to be taking much notice of him except for Kitth. Of course, we were out of range; maybe closer in the noise would have drawn fire.
	<Heat,> I said. <The difference between a living thing and a dead one is heat; that’s what those machines look for.>
	<How does that help us?>
	<Hang on a minute.> I made a fireball in each hand, one much hotter than the other. Then I sent each of them toward the wall, sending each to hover in front of a different tree. The scream and the volley of noise came back. One of the trees--the one behind the hotter fireball--suddenly lost one branch, then another, cracking off as we heard the pellets thudding into the wood. 
	I brought the hotter fireball back. The guns now went for the other tree, sending bark and branches flying off around it.
	So. I took the second fireball back. They work by finding the hottest thing and firing at it. Pretty simple.
	Also pretty effective, Aine answered.
	Yes, I answered. Except that I can make fire that’s a lot hotter than us, and keep it in there until after we’ve cleared the danger zone.
	When they were ready, I started shooting fireballs into the air. We started up the slope to the east, looking back nervously at the flying metallic rounds that sometimes glinted very briefly in the light of the flames. I kept the balls moving erratically, to give the machines something to deal with. The scream kept up, and the rest of the noise, but although it disoriented us, it did cover the child’s crying.
	I had my back to the fence, since I had to work the fire; Aine got down to the job of cutting through the wire on her own. It was hard work for her, but I heard the strands of that net snapping as she put the force of her mind on them. The fire was lighting up details that I hadn’t seen--the skeleton we’d crawled across, but also others, scattered along the hill, some older and some more recent. Things that had been dropped in flight and mouldered; troughs plowed in the ground by those metal things. And, as the shooting kept up, there was the rising smell of a bitter, unfamiliar kind of smoke.
	Aine had broken and bent enough wires to give us room to crawl through the fence. Aine went through first, then helped Kitth across. I was the last to go through, bending the wire back up after me, still agitating the fire that was still floating through the Zone. And looking now at the muzzles of those machines, spitting out the acrid smoke I’d been smelling along with their hot metal missiles.
	Kitth and Aine had dropped instinctively to the ground. I brought the fire up higher, so that the machine leaned back and shot up at a steeper angle. It gave us more room to maneuver behind the line of belching death-holes without getting into the stream of these flying things.
	At last we were behind them--looking at the squat, black hulks from which those death-spurting tunnels projected, and which were still firing their metal idiotically into the heart of the flame. 
	“Mo linn agam!” 
	They swiveled, but they couldn’t swivel far enough. Evidently these were designed to protect strictly against attack from the south.
	Now that we were through, I could take a minute for my first look, since my childhood, at Cretid country.
	It was still dark, of course. But that haze that we’d seen was all around us, shed from large, glowing white circles mounted on posts along a black ribbon that seemed to run along behind the guns, parallel to the fence. As we moved across it, the surface felt strange; harder than earth or wood, but not the same hardness as stone. In the center, someone had marked it with an interrupted yellow slash that ran the length of the thing, or at least what we could see. The segments of that broken line glowed brighter than anything around them, remaining visible even after we had moved into the trees on the other side.
	<I guess that’s one of those paved roads they were talking about,> I remarked.
	<I suppose so.>
	As we crouched behind the screen of branches, I saw Kitth’s face suddenly go white. And it was a minute before I realized it wasn’t just the whiteness of pallor; it was reflecting white light, which was moving along that black slashed ribbon at a horrifying pace.
	I caught Kitth by the shoulder and dragged her further into the trees; but almost before I’d touched her, it seemed, the twin beams slung hurtling past where we were, attached to a monstrous, beetled, wheeled thing that flattened us in a rising roar of unfamiliar sound.
	I was sure it was going to discover us. Those lights were too bright not to pick us out. But almost before I could resign myself to this, it was gone--the light, the racket, and the speeding, massive hulk that drove it along. The silence returned, but uneasily, as if the air too had been given a nasty shock.
	They have speeder too? Aine ventured, shaken.
	Speeder’s wonderful stuff, but it won’t move anything that big that fast, I answered. That’s a machine. A powerful, noisy, ill-mannered machine.
	Kitth sniffed the air. And flatulent with it, she answered.
	She was right--it had left a smell in the air, a whiff of sour smoke and something else. So the machine was burning something. Something that wasn’t burning clean.
	Well, so I think we should get as far away from these supposed ‘roads’ as possible. I don’t want to be colliding with anything like that.
	When we’d withdrawn so far into the wood that we couldn’t see the road, we made camp and lay down. There wasn’t too much left of the night but we needed the rest. 
	Good rest to you, I said. Tomorrow morning we’ll see where we are.
	I don’t care where we are, Kitth answered. We’re not in the Zone. Thank you.
	I didn’t answer her, even though I wasn’t asleep.

	<I’m hungry, dhiaoc.>
	<Regretting that possum, huh?> We were pushing through what looked like the last of the forest. It wasn’t so much a forest as a corridor--a tree screen that had been planted to keep the sights and smells of the Zone hidden from the Cretids. We couldn’t tell exactly what was on the other side, but we knew the trees were ending soon.
	<And it’s not natural for a child to be this quiet,> she went on. <He needs food, worse now than ever.>
	<I’m hungry too, Aine, but it’s not really nut season, and I don’t see any berries...>
	Every once in a while Idair will have her little joke. Aine stopped short, as did we all, in front of a row of strawberry plants. Laden with fruit, just sitting there. 
	I looked up, perplexed. This row was only the first of what looked like a hundred, stretching back and out to cover most of the earth we could see. They were ranged into straight rows, which were grouped into squares set out in a grid, separated by straight and well-defined packed-earth paths. Up at the far horizon I thought I could discern a cluster of buildings. But from where we stood at the edge of the forest to that silhouetted farmhouse, it was really just strawberries.
	Kitth’s eyes were getting rounder. “They put all this into fruit?”	
	“Looks that way,” Aine said.
	“Are they crazy?” Kitth responded. She had a lot more spirit now we were out of the Zone. “Who’s going to eat all that?”
	“More to the point,” I said. “I mean, I’m a city girl...but it’s not the season for these things, is it?”
	“Look at them,” Kitth said, lifting one up with her fingers. “They’re huge.” She broke it off and bit into it. 
	“Ripe enough.” Kitth chewed, looking up abstractedly as she appraised the taste. “Bland, though--pulpy.”
	“They don’t belong to us,” I said.
	“Idair never cared,” Aine answered.
	“I know,” I said, walking forward between two of the rows as Kitth started gathering fruit.
	“And besides, there must be millions of them. There’s no way they could miss what we’re picking.”
	“I know,” I answered, troubled for some reason. I was walking abstractedly up the field, the wet leaves of the plants brushing my bare legs. One row over I saw Aine, standing tall now and looking out over the tops of the plants with that furrow between her eyebrows.
	“You feel it too, don’t you?” I said.
	“I feel...something,” she answered, unable to be more specific.
	I would say it was like the field was trying to talk to us, but really it was more like becoming aware of a silence that shouldn’t be there. A mask over some kind of secret--one the field was keeping unwillingly. 
	I knelt down in one of the furrows and took a closer look at one of the plants. Red, round fruit--three or four times the size of our wild ones at home, and firm. Green leaves, shining with moisture; a healthy, happy, thriving plant. About which something was wrong.
	The whole matter of Ubh and the long slow burning had turned on a feeling like that. A belief that there was something there, and it was just a matter of adjusting my vision, of making the smallest, slightest changes to the way I saw. And standing there, until people thought I had lost my mind, staring at that water until I saw the flame.
	“It’s not on fire like the Zone was,” I said. “It’s not that. But...” Aine was looking at me. “I’m not losing my mind? You feel it too?”
	“I feel something, dhiaoc, but this is the Cretid Nation. Anything could be normal.”
	From further up the hill, I heard something, faintly. A human voice, raised in a shout.
	Someone was running toward us, but he stopped on the dirt path at the edge of the square we were in. Straining toward us, he repeated the shout.
	“What is this?” Aine said. “If he wants us to hear why doesn’t he come closer?”
	I jogged toward him. “What is it? We can’t hear you!”
	“...just sprayed!” were the first words I caught. “It’s not safe!”
	I looked back at the moisture on those leaves.  And I made the adjustment.
	“Kitth!” I shouted.
	She looked up with one of the berries in her fingers, about to feed it to the boy. 
	“Don’t!” Her face questioned me. “Get out of there! Try not to let the plants touch you!”
	The urgency got through even if she still didn’t understand why I was telling her to leave the first real food we’d seen in two days and run toward this stranger who might mean us harm. She came after us. 
	“It’s too early,” he was shouting. “It’ll be another hour before the sun lifts enough off. You can still make quota if you work after sundown.”
	“Quota?” He was wearing heavy boots and trousers made out of some creased and worn canvaslike material, dark blue in some spots and faded light in others. And a shirt with a row of buttons down the middle, the collar buttoning under a lined face.
	“You don’t work here,” he said, his eyes narrowing.
	You’re not a Cretid, are you? I brought back.
	He heard me, but it startled him. And neither are you, obviously. His eyes traveled over our clothes.
	You’ve got a good signal, so I’ll give it a shot, I answered. We just made it over the border. We’re fugitives. 
	And you need a place to hide. 
	Kitth--my friend there with the child--she needs a place to hide. Aine and I will be moving on.
	His gaze swept over the four of us--three unlikely women and a sick boy.
	What is it you’ve done?
	Kitth killed her husband. Aine and I...well, we’ve made some enemies.
	He fixed his stare on Kitth, sizing her up. What’d she kill him for?
	He was starving her child, the one she’s got there. It wasn’t his child, you see.
	The man nodded as if this was something he understood. Come with me back to town, I’ll see what we can do.
	What town?
	Their town, as it turned out, was a clutch of huts off to one side of the strawberry field, grouped around a bare dirt patch that was reminiscent, in a pathetic and squalid way, of a town square. They were more permanent than the shelters we’d seen in the Zone, but still had a look of hurry and transience about them--built out of material scavenged from other things, knocked together without any thought for longevity, aesthetics, or even real comfort. As the sun was rising a little higher, people were outside eating their morning meals. Our guide led us into one of the larger ones, holding up a flap made of that same plastic as we entered.
	“Chara,” he called. “I brought company.”
	“Don’t get up,” I said, as the woman on the pallet began swinging herself into position. She was in the final stages of pregnancy, and even though the day was cool her head was lightly dewed with perspiration. “We’re not grand enough to be company. Your husband has just--”
	“Oh, he’s not my husband,” the woman said, heaving herself to her feet. She was now looking at Kitth’s child, in some concern. 
	“Chara, these people have just come over the border. They need a place to stay. I thought maybe--”
	“Your baby’s hungry,” the woman said.
	“Yes,” Kitth answered.
	“I’ll go and find you something for him,” she said, and went out by the rear flap.
	He looked as if he would have liked to prevent her, but had learned not to try. “That’s Ilean,” he said. “It’s true I’m not her husband, but I would be, if she’d let me. My name is Abiard.”
	<And they’re both exiles too,> Aine said, as I started introducing us. <Criminals.>
	<Not necessarily. Some people have always come over on their own--come through the border and taken their chances.>
	<Why would you do that?>
	<Curiosity, poverty, desperation...>
	“What is this quota you were talking about?” I asked.
	“The arrangement,” said Abiard, “is that we’re paid a fixed amount every day, and to get that sum we have to deliver a certain number of trays--picked berries, you understand.” I nodded. “That’s the quota. If you fall behind, you’re docked.”
	“And I suppose no one pays if you miss a day?” I ventured.
	He laughed.
	“That’s why Ilean’s still out there,” he said, more serious now. “Working a full day, close to her time as she is. Ordinarily people would pitch in--try to contribute a little extra to her pile so she wouldn’t have to work so hard--but since they’re spraying, that’s impossible; we lose too much time in the morning.”
	“Well, it’s simple then,” Kitth said, as she saw Ilean coming back. “I’ll go in her place, until she has the child.”
	“We’d share what we have with you,” Abiard said quickly, relieved that Kitth had read his reasons. “She’ll care for your boy while you’re out there, and when the child comes, then you can care for it while she works. It’ll be stretching thin to make it all go around but...but I think people will help.”
	Ilean had returned with a number of small glass jars, and a metal spoon. She unscrewed one of the lids and handed it to Kitth.
	“It’s good stuff,” she said, as Kitth smelt at the yellowish-orange paste. “It’s specially designed for babies, see?” She pointed to the paper label on the jar. It had that same machine-produced writing I was familiar with, forming the words “DR. GREFFEN’S BEST BABY FOOD.” But Ilean wasn’t pointing at that; she was pointing at the picture next to it, which represented the head of a chubby, radiant baby, laughing with pleasure. “I’ve been stocking up...but my child will be nursing for a while, and yours needs it now.”
	Touched at the gift, even if she was still a little spooked by the packaging, Kitth started spooning it into the boy’s mouth. He gurgled slightly, and looked pleased. She smiled, for the first time in a while.
	“So you heard what we said?” Abiard asked Ilean, with some trepidation.
	“I heard,” she answered, unwillingly.
	“It’s hard to let someone else do what you think is your duty,” I said, “but you’re so close to your time. You’re doing Kitth’s child a good turn; let her do yours one.”
	Ilean looked doubtfully from me to Abiard. 
	“She needs a place to stay,” Aine said. “And you don’t want to lose this one.”
	Both of their heads swiveled around to fix Aine with a startled and somewhat defensive stare.
	“I’m...I’m sorry,” she said, embarrassment compounding her fear. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry.”
	“She is right, though,” Abiard said. “You’ve come so far.”
	Ilean took his hand and nodded, silently.
	“Come on,” he said to Kitth. “I’ll take you out to meet the others. If a Cretid asks, you’re Ilean.” Kitth nodded. “I doubt the supervisor will bother you; we all look alike to them.”
	They left the place. Aine took over feeding the boy, who was at least more compliant than Frih had ever been. Ilean lay back down on the pallet, looking at Aine.
	“How did you know?” she asked. “About the others.”
	Aine looked down at the floor in embarrassment. “I...I read it in you. Both of you.”
	Ilean’s hands ran over her distended belly. “This is my fourth,” she said. “I lost the other three much earlier. I hope this one will stay with us.” Her voice became a little shakier. “I have to work. We all have to work. Other women carry theirs, working--”
	“It’s not your fault,” I said. “Sometimes they just aren’t ready to go through with it, that’s all.”
	She sat up, slowly and with effort. “That’s what mathi told me,” she said, her eyes bent intently upon me now. “That they get frightened, and decide to return. But she’s very old, and superstitious.” Ilean pushed a strand of dark hair behind her ear, wiping a trickle of sweat from her forehead. “You believe that?”
	“I do,” I answered.
	“What frightens them?”
	I shrugged. “From what I understand, it could be a lot of things. Something about the body they’re in, that they don’t like; something they perceive in the world around them, that they’re scared to deal with. Some believe that notborns have the ability to see the future, and that they return sometimes rather than live out a life destined to be full of pain.”
	“Do you believe that?” Aine asked.
	“I don’t know whether I do or not. There’s a lot they seem to know and we can’t figure out how they would know it; but then there’s so much they don’t. I’ll say this much, though,” I said, as Ilean’s anxiety got louder, “I don’t know anyone who believes they return because they don’t like their mothers, or they want to punish them for doing them wrong.” 
	“And since this one has stayed...does that mean she’s not frightened? That she’s made up her mind?”
	“Why don’t you ask her?” I said.
	She looked at me as if I were not quite sane.
	“It’s easy,” I answered. “Easiest link in the world to make. Of course getting a straight answer, that’s harder, but it might ease your mind just to have made contact.”
	Ilean put her hands on her abdomen. “I’ve tried,” she said. “Tried just to hear, you know, the way I can hear grown people. But I don’t know how to link.”
	“I’ll teach you if you like,” I said. 
	She nodded.
	I moved over and covered her hands with mine. “There’s a technique to doing it with strangers, but for people close to you it will almost happen by itself, with the right encouragement. Bring up all the things you associate with her--your fears, hopes, whatever--and try to use that to imagine what she’s like.”
	It took a while, with me prodding and shaping and guiding her when she needed it, but finally her eyes lit and it seemed like she was there. “I...” Her eyes looked inward, concentrating. “She is a girl, after all.”
	Her happiness radiated out to us, and we sat there basking in it. She was so relieved to feel her there, to know she’d made contact--it was something we hadn’t felt for a while, that sudden flush of relief and contentment and even joy, coming along as she felt surer. Glad she was there, glad she could hear her, and glad she was a girl.
	“How do I...turn it off?” Ilean called.
	“Withdraw,” I said. “Pull back within yourself; it’ll close.”
	After a few seconds she seemed to have done it. “How do I make it work again?”
	“Easiest way is to just think of her real hard, and then try calling. Now that the link is in place it should click right open.”
	“Thank you for showing me that.” I nodded. “Did you do that with your own children?”
	“I don’t have any children.”
	“Then how do you know how to do this?”
	“I’ve seen it done,” I said evasively.
	Something about my manner--or maybe Aine’s peaked, tired and unfocused gaze as she sat patiently by the wall--pushed her to turn the topic. “Look at me--I haven’t offered you anything, and you’re starved. I don’t have a refrigerator here, but we’ve got a few nonperishables in that cupboard. Take anything you like; you look like you need it.”
	Being a professional indigent is different from being a beggar, as I was beginning to understand. We don’t have to deal with the pity, the knowledge that what you’re living off is someone else’s charity, and that what they’re buying with it is your gratitude, rather than your help. Even after thirteen years of living at the public expense, it was still hard for me to accept this offer, not to put it off with the “Never mind, I’m all right” that came immediately to my mind. Aine and I looked through the cupboard, both of trying to reconcile our desire for dignity with our raging hunger.
	The situation became even more frustrating as we surveyed the contents of the cupboard. Everything was either in a box or a jar or wrapped in that thin, transparent material I’d seen for the first time down in the hospital storeroom, and even when we could see through the jar or the wrapper that didn’t always help. Aine and I started sorting through things, bending both of our minds to the problem of determining what this food was.
	<Here’s this, it looks like it could be bread,> Aine said, holding up a soft-sided rectangular block of something encased in a transparent plastic sack. 
	<Could be...it seems a little soft for it, though.> After inspecting the package, I noticed that there was a segment of small print labeled “Ingredients.”
	<Aha!> Aine said, as I pointed it out to her. <Wheat, yeast, so far so...what’s this “partially hydrogenated soybean oil?”>
	<I’m blest if I know. But it looks like bread, right enough. Let’s set it aside and keep going...>
	<Great Idair’s boots, dhiaoc, what can this be?>
	It was miniature loaf-shaped thing, yellow and spongy. When I turned it over, crinkling in its transparent shroud, there were three white holes in the bottom out of which some sort of thick white substance was beginning to leak. The “ingredients” panel proved a broken reed; the only words we could identify were “yellow dye number 8.”
	<Whatever it is, we’d best not tangle with it.> Near it was a sealed carton of some kind of “formula.” From the label, it seemed that if you mixed this stuff with water it would become milk. I put it near the bread. After a protracted search, the only other thing we felt safe ingesting was an apple we found on the top shelf. It had gone brown and soft in one area but the rest of it was still sound, even though there was something about it that made me uneasy.
	Ilean looked up when she heard the doors closing. “Oh, that stuff--that’s for the baby, you don’t want that.” She was indicating the carton. “If you want something to drink, there’s a hose outside we get our water from. Here,” she said, standing up as she saw incomprehension on our faces, “I’ll show you.”
	Ilean picked up a couple of drinking cups made out of that same thin, not-cold stuff that wasn’t glass. Around at the back of the cabin there was a length of coiled green rubber, twining like a snake from her house up the hill toward some kind of pump in the center of the settlement. She picked up the end, pointed it into one of the cups, and pressed something that released a gush of water into it. After filling the other, she handed them back to us, while Aine and I tried not to be impressed by this demonstration of Cretid technological know-how.
	“Running water,” she said, as we lifted our cups to her. “Or close enough that the Aiv can tell himself he’s not a slum lord or a slave driver.”
	I smiled and dropped my eyes toward the cup I was lifting. What I saw froze my hand in midair.
	<Aine, don’t.>
	She stopped too. <Don’t what?>
	<Don’t drink the water.>
	<Why not?>
	<Just wait till Ilean goes back inside and I’ll purify it for you.>
	Ilean was already moving back into the shelter; we watched her disappear behind the flap. Then I took Aine’s cup and set them both down on the packed earth, holding one hand above each.
	<What is it?> she asked as I began drawing the poison out. 
	An extremely pale wisp of sickly flame curled off the surface of the first cup and began coiling upward into the palm of my hand. Aine put a hand over her mouth.
	<Is that...is that the long slow burning?>
	<Not exactly,> I answered, as the second flame lifted up from the second cup. <It’s that stuff they’re spraying on the strawberries. It must have gotten into the water.>
	<Are they trying to kill them all?> I turned my hands, cupping the fire in my palms. It soon flickered out. 
	<It’s safe to drink now,> I answered, chugging mine and tearing into the bread. <I don’t know why they should be spraying poison onto their crops, but I can only assume it has some purpose besides sickening their laborers. I can’t imagine even Cretids would engage in mass-poisoning for the fun of it.>
	When we were done with our bread and water we went back inside. Ilean was sitting by their makeshift table, drinking from a cup of her own.
	“Is that...” She looked at me. “So you use that water, that comes from that...hose, as drinking water?” Ilean nodded. “Is that what everyone does, here?”
	“Pretty much. Some houses, you know, haven’t been up as long and don’t have their own taps, so they come over and fill up from ours.” Aine’s face betrayed the deduction she was making. “Why?”
	<We should tell her, dhiaoc.>
	<It’s too late. She’s been drinking it for who knows how many years, it’s done its work.>
	<Couldn’t you cleanse her?>
	<Not pregnant as she is. All the pregnant women I worked with in Dairc lost their notborns.>
	<But that might not have been your fault.>
	<And then again it might have. I don’t want to risk it.>
	“What are you thinking about?” Ilean demanded, having watched us during this exchange.
	“We were just...” I began. Ilean looked to Aine when I trailed off.
	“Abiard was talking about spraying,” Aine said. “What is it that they spray onto those plants, do you know?”
	“Half the year it’s fertilizer, the other half it’s pesticides,” she said. “You know--to kill the beagi. Why?”
	Before I could think what to answer, an older woman entered through the flap, embracing Ilean as they met. She was pretty well knotted and lined, with a tight, thinning bun of gray hair, dressed in some kind of wrapper with brightly colored splotches. “This must be them,” she said, turning her keen eyes on us. “Introduce us, will you?”
	“This is my mathair, Mahial,” Ilean said reluctantly, indicating us. “This is...” She realized she didn’t know our names.
	“I’m called Theamh,” I said. “And this is Aine.” Mahial bowed; Ilean looked a little restive. “Your daughter has been very kind to us.”
	“And to me,” she said, sitting down by one of the walls. “She knows how I miss having new arrivals to pester.” With a sigh, she stretched her legs out in front of her. “Get me some water, would you, Ilean? It’s been a hot morning.”
	Ilean went out to the tap in the back. Aine looked at me; I tried not to look back at her.
	“So,” she said, with only partially feigned cheerfulness. “What’s the news from the old country? What’s going on down there?”
	I sighed. “Where should I start?”
	“You mean how long has it been?” she said. “Last new arrival we had was...oh, two years ago, a young fellow from Dairc. Told us all about the Lythril trial. You must have been glad to see the back of her, eh?” 
	“I certainly was,” I answered, with dread. If she’d heard the story, she’d heard my name, and it wasn’t a common one.
	“Poor boy up and ran off a few months after he got here,” she said. “Had to get back to some woman he left behind him. Medina or Magdalna or something like that...”
	Madena’s taunting face rose up before me, and I thanked Idair that she hadn’t made my life as complicated as this poor man’s.
	“Well,” I said, “I guess since then, the big news is that Lythril kept making trouble after she left.”
	“Making trouble how?” she said, settling in for a long story.
	I gave her a summary, leaving my own role and Aine’s out of it as much as possible. With creative use of the passive voice, it was possible. Ilean returned early on, and settled down next to her mother, handing her the cup with a brief glance down into it. Mahial listened with pleasure, Ilean with something more like exasperation. I got the sense that most of the story read to her like a folk tale--one of those legends that can’t be true, that people tell because it serves some other need besides the hunger for truth. Mahial obviously had the same sense, because after Ilean had made some very modest noise of incredulity she turned on her a little snappishly.
	“Stranger things have happened,” Mahial said, while Ilean dropped her eyes in resignation. “You never lived there, you don’t know.” She looked back at me apologetically. “She was born here. We did what we could, but it had its effect.”
	“That’s not fair,” Ilean said, turning on her. “I use my mind and I know the stories. That’s more than Brean can say for herself, or Grahnia.”
	“Yes,” Mahial said. “True enough.”
	“And I know better than to let Abiard get me into one of those--temples.”
	Mahial sighed. “It’s only for security, Ilean. The Aiv’s got it well set-up now, but someday someone else will be running the Border Police, who has more honesty or wants more money, and then where will the child be with his mother out of work and his father in the Zone?”
	“Don’t go over this again, mathi.”
	“I won’t then.” She stood up. “You two haven’t seen much of the town, have you?”
	“No,” I answered. 
	“Come along then, I’ll show you the town square.”
	We followed her between the shacks toward a roughly square plot of ground around which these shaky buildings clustered. One of the structures, significantly larger than the others and probably able to seat a hundred comfortably, stood north of the square and was probably meant to be the town hall. Aine and I were both distracted from the building itself by the same thing: a group of wires that swooped above its roof and off into the trees, where a tall pole lifted them on its crossbeams before they dipped again and swooped off into the woods. From some of the metal fastenings at the top of that pole, lengths of wire ran down onto the roof of the building and from there spidered into a network of mismatched cords that were ultimately tethered to the ground. 
	Aine was staring in puzzlement; I was staring in a kind of stunned horror. To her, it was a strange and apparently pointless kind of spiderweb wrapping the town hall in its ungraceful strands. To me, it was the hand of death--a nest of poison vipers, the tightening tentacles of one of those transparent floating stingfish that the Nauchtians call darkhairs. 
	“What...what is that?” Aine demanded, reading my fear.
	Lightning, is what it was--flowing around and into that building through that network of veins. The single most terrifying thing in the world Idair made us, drawn out into fine black threads and worked around this frail wooden shell.
	“Ah, that’s Abiard’s brainchild,” Mahial said, with some vicarious pride. “It gladdens us to know that if the rent’s high here, at least the utilities are included.” She saw that neither one of us had any idea what she meant. “Those are the electric lines, overhead. Abiard’s hooked us up to them, so we get free electricity. It’s totally illegal, of course, but then so are we.”
	Mahial started forward; Aine followed. I remained rooted to the packed earth. I could not believe they were going in there.
	<Dhiaoc?> Aine stopped at the doorway, looking back at me.
	<This...this...these people are insane.>
	<What is it?>
	<I cannot believe it.> I was now sweating, and probably pale with it. <I cannot believe people actually walk into that building, of their own accord.>
	<Is it dangerous?>
	Mahial was now watching me, with some concern. Your friend...has she got a demon?
	No, of course not, Aine answered back, although she was just as baffled by my sudden and incapacitating terror as Mahial was.
	“You don’t see it then,” I finally croaked.
	“Don’t see what?” Mahial asked.
	“Never mind,” I answered, mastering myself enough to follow them. “Don’t mind me.”
	Aine’s mind was on me even when her eyes weren’t. I crossed the threshold, keeping myself exactly in the middle of the doorway. I was extremely reluctant to touch anything in there, whether it was a wire or not.
	“Here we are,” Mahial said proudly. “Our happy Cretid home, with all the modern conveniences. Well, almost all of them, anyway.” She indicated a tall metal structure in the corner, shaped somewhat like a wardrobe. “Communal refrigerator...” When Mahial pulled on one of its handles, the metal door swung open, revealing a set of horizontal shelves loaded down under a profusion of boxes, jars, jugs, bowls, and other vessels. “Whenever you come by anything liable to spoil--dairy, you know, or meat--or anything that’s better served cold, this is where you store it.” Aine put a hand into the glowing slit of its open mouth, feeling the cold skin of the walls. “Label it first, though, or someone might eat it for you.” The door swung to just as Aine snatched her hand back. “It’s old, and it shorts out sometimes, but it’s fairly reliable.” I was now staring up at one of the rafters, along which snaked one of those deadly black threads. The wire ended at a metal fixture from which depended a strangely shaped globe of glass.
	Mahial saw me staring at it. “Ah, the lights. Now this is something to see.” She grasped a long string that dangled from the metal fixture; I flinched on her behalf, but of course she was completely nonchalant. “Watch this.” She pulled on the string. “Ta se an linn!”
	And indeed, the globe above her lit up immediately, with a harsh white glare. Aine stared up at it, her face pale as a fishbelly.
	Mahial pulled the string again; the light winked out. “Bhfuidh an linn.” She laughed, pulling the string again and again, making the globe dark and bright. “Look at me, I’m a shriia!”
	She stopped when she realized we weren’t going to start laughing.
	“Forgive me,” she said, misinterpreting. “It isn’t blasphemy, truly. I find humor where I can; it takes the edge off the knife of old age.”
	Leaving us standing dumbstruck under the glass globe, she moved over to a square cabinetlike object that sat on top of a pair of crates, raised so that its smooth, dark glass face was several feet off the floor. The forked end of its coiled white tail was jammed into another one of those fixtures, into which another one of those black lines fed. “Now this...this is our pride and joy.” She pressed something down in one of the bottom corners. “Behold...the VisionBox!”
	The dark glass burst suddenly into an explosion of color and light, as sounds began blaring out of it. 
	Aine and I started backward. Frightened as we both were, we couldn’t look away--we both knew that there was some sort of meaning to those splotches of grainy color, and we had a feeling that if we just spent enough time staring at them we would decipher it.
	Mahial smiled as if this was a reaction she finally understood. “It takes a while. You have to look at it like it’s a picture, only it’s moving.”
	“Pictures don’t move,” Aine said, her eyes narrowing. “That’s what a picture is.”
	“These ones do,” Mahial answered. 
	Before the color and light began making sense, I had at least started to make out the noise. It was a woman’s voice, low and breathy, speaking over soft music made by unseen instruments.
	“...soft pinks, warm browns, and outrageous reds. Innocence in the morning...sophistication in the evening...”
	<I see it, dhiaoc.>
	<What is it, then?>
	<It’s a woman’s face. Painted. Look, the mouth is the red part.>
	I looked at the glistening red gash at the bottom of the glass. It wavered annoyingly, but in the few moments that the image lasted I was able to resolve the two multicolored blobs above it into eyes, and the rest of the face coalesced around them.
	The face suddenly became smaller; now we could see the cloud of blond hair tossing around it, the slender neck and frail shoulders underneath, the flimsy, clinging black shift that clung to the curves of her hips. Its straps were thin, and it was bordered at top and bottom by openwork that let us see through to her naked skin. One of her hands, tipped in the same shining, nauseating red, traveled caressingly down the sharp angle of her jaw while the other traveled up her thigh, hiking the shift up and revealing a larger expanse of hairless, pallid skin.
	“And at night...the only limit is your imagination.” The woman’s head turned, as another figure appeared on the screen, behind her in what I now realized was meant to be a doorway. The silhouette was dark, but square enough to be unmistakably male. “Or his.”
	The screen went dark, except for the words “Metamorph. By Glistella,” slashed across the screen in red.
	“What--” Aine began, but the image had already changed--into some kind of strange assortment of geometric shapes that were swerving around in such a hurry that it made me nauseous to watch them.
	“Please...” I said, turning away.
	Mahial pressed the button; the screen became dark. “It takes getting used to, I know. But once you do, it’s a great comfort. Life is slow here.”
	“What...what is that?” Aine asked. I was still too shell-shocked to really take the initiative much.
	“It’s moving pictures,” Mahial answered. “I don’t know how they get ‘em to move, or how they get ‘em in there. But there are all these different stories, going on in there, all the time, told with those moving pictures. And you can use these knobs and things to pick out a story, and watch it.”
	“What do you mean, watch it?” I asked.
	“Watch it. Like at a play.” Aine shook her head. “Like I said, it takes getting used to. But it’s a wonderful thing. You can find out what’s happening, anywhere in the world--they show you pictures of it. Anywhere except Ideire, that is. And then there are the stories they just make up. Lots of them are fnaa, but sometimes they get it half-right.”
	“That thing we saw...that was a story?” Aine said, looking shakenly down at the cushions that were strewn around on the floor in front of the VisionBox. 
	“No, that’s what they call a break. They break into the stories to try to sell you things.” Mahial put a friendly hand on Aine’s shoulder. “You seem like a bright girl, you’ll figure it out.  It all comes easier to the young ones, this machine stuff.” 
	“What...how do they make the sound?” she said. 
	“I don’t know,” Mahial answered honestly. “They say this stuff isn’t magic, but if you ask me, that’s the only explanation for some of it.”
	“Is...are these all the wonders you have in this little cave?” I asked, with a ghastly attempt at humor.
	Mahial nodded. “It’s not much, but it serves us well.”
	“It’s very impressive,” I said. “I mean that, really.” Mahial smiled uncertainly. “Can we...can we get out of here, now?”
	She opened the door, through which I tottered. After I’d gone a few feet I felt better. Aine was still concerned, but she could tell that at least nothing had happened to us. “Life here must be strange,” Aine said to Mahial. 
	“It is to me,” she answered, taking no notice of my rasping breath. “To the born-heres, like Ilean, it’s natural as breathing. Even you’ll get used to it soon--you’ll see.” Aine nodded, uncertainly, with one eye on me. “I must be off--I’ve got a lot of work to do.” Aine looked at her. “I’m what you might call semi-retired. Too old for fieldwork, but they send things out for me to do--laundry, sewing, and mending. Nobody among the Cretids knows how to mend. You gain and you lose, I suppose...Idair with you.”
	We bowed at her, and she walked away toward her own hut. As soon as she was out of sight I folded my legs and sat down on the path.
	“Dhiaoc, what is it?” Aine demanded, crouching anxiously in front of me. “I--I didn’t know there was anything in the world could frighten you like that.”
	“No wonder they don’t have shri here,” I said, passing a hand over my clammy forehead. “How could you have shriias here, we would all go mad.”
	“What do you mean?”
	“Electricity,” I said. “The Cretids talk about it like it’s water or air so we think that’s what it is...”
	“Then...then what is it, dhiaoc?” Aine asked.
	“It’s lightning,” I said, still shaken but pulling myself together. “There was enough lightning running through any one of those wires to kill any hundred people who got in its path. The only thing separating us from death, that whole time, was a quarter-inch of that shiny black stuff wrapped around it.”
	“You mean...they’re bringing lightning into their houses?”
	I nodded. “They live in, around, under, on top of the most powerful kind of fire there is and they think nothing of it.” I fixed my hollow stare on nothing in particular. “After your Ordeals, I’ll teach you how to see fire. And then you’ll understand what I’m talking about.” My eyes focused on her drawn, worried face. “I can see the lightning inside those wires. I can feel it. I tell you every hair on my body has been standing on end since we sighted the place.” I ran my fingers through my hair, settling it. “I don’t know how Lythril stands it.”
	“Well...what will you do?” Aine said. “It sounds like...I don’t know much, but...”
	“No, you’re right,” I agreed. “Wherever we go, this stuff will be there. I’ll just have to be tough.” I shivered, and stood up. “When I get back, if the Order is still in one piece, they had better give me a good long vacation. Fire in their water, and lightning in their veins,” I said, as we stood up. “This place is going to go up in smoke, one day, if they’re not careful.”
	“So this is what that ambassador meant, by electrification,” Aine said.
	In her mouth, spoken with her new knowledge, the word sounded unbelievably sinister.
	“Must be.”
	“Idair preserve us,” she said.
	“Let’s hope,” I answered, directing us back toward Ilean’s shelter.

VIII.
The Enforcers

	<Are you all right, dhiaoc?>
	She might well ask. Incredible as it was to me, I was back in that building, seated in the palm of death’s fiery hand, on one of the cushions spread out in front of the VisionBox. I was keeping my calm, as far as the others could tell, but I couldn’t quite ignore my consciousness of the lightning sparking around us, and it made me jittery. I’d met a lot of the others at the evening meal--there were about fifty of them there, although as I understood it there were about twenty others who for one reason or another didn’t come to the communal meals. Preferred to hoard their earnings themselves, maybe, or perhaps they were just shy. Anyhow, they looked at my gray dress and made their assumptions; obviously I was some kind of criminal, but I seemed harmless enough, and perhaps I’d had my reasons.
	Mahial, who seemed to be a kind of unofficial town leader, was standing up by the VisionBox, still a dark, brooding and alien presence. “What are we going to see?” someone shouted.
	“What do you want to watch?” Mahial answered.
	“Meri’s Variety Hour!” shouted one woman.
	There was a contemptuous snort from someone near her. “It’s not on.”
	Another woman leaned in to talk to her. “It’s like I explained, mathi. You can only watch a show at the day and hour it’s broadcast. MVH is broadcast the third day of the week.”
	While this conversation moved into mindspeech, Ilean called out, “I want to see ‘The Enforcer.’”
	There was a cheer from part of the crowd, and a groan from a woman about Ilean’s age near the front. “What do you want to watch that for? It’ll only end in heartbreak like always.”
	“Not necessarily,” called a man on the other side.
	“He can’t escape forever,” Abiard put in. 
	“Yes he can,” the woman answered. “The Dark One’s keeping him alive, that’s obvious.”
	“Look,” said a middle-aged woman with short brown hair and a scar on one cheek. “Even the Dark Leader’s luck ran out eventually. One of these days somebody, whether it’s the Black Tiger, Ken Kan or Running Water, is going to bring that bastard down and when it happens I want to be there to see it. So turn it on.”
	“Exactly,” Ilean called emphatically.	
	Mahial pressed a series of buttons. The image flickered rapidly, too fast for me to keep up with, and finally settled on the figure of a man, silhouetted darkly against the light of a crumbling brick doorway, charging straight toward us into the glass. His legs were working, but his hands were lifted up and joined, holding something up in them. As he got closer to the screen, his mud-green shirt and his square, hard features became visible, along with his short stiff flaxen hair and the metal form of what I now knew was a gun.
	As he ran, letters hovered over his head, getting larger as he did, and finally sprawling themselves across the image of his face. Black, barred, angular letters, forming the words, “THE ENFORCER.”
	A chorus of hisses rose from the audience. I thought it was just the ones who hadn’t gotten their way expressing dissent, but actually it was Ilean, Abiard, and the woman with the scar, accompanied by almost everyone else. 
	It was evidently the man they were hissing, because within seconds it was obvious that he was evil. As the same harsh, pulsing music drove at us, the image shifted, showing the man hitting another man across the face, knocking him into a puddle of some kind of black oily stuff; then he was on the edge of some strange sort of precipice, that was too perfect a right angle not to be man-made, with his hands around the throat of another man, who he hurled over the edge to what surely must have been his death; then he was back on the ground, slamming yet a third man face-first into the shiny metal surface of a wheeled thing I heard the others identifying as a car, then bending the man’s arms behind him and fettering them in two joined metal circles. I had just time to notice, as the image shifted, that this man on the hood of the car had tight curly hair and dark brown skin, rather like Darin’s but a slightly different shade. But before I could wonder about this the image went away, and instead there was the man in the mud-green shirt, wearing something that looked like a blindfold except that it was made of rigid, shiny black material that reflected the sun’s light, and that it hooked on behind his ears with little hooks instead of tying at the back. His feet were planted a little wide on the impossibly level concrete surface of some very high platform, his black-gloved hands on his hips as he gazed with those blindered eyes out over what, I was informed by the noise of the minds around me, was Cretid City.
	After that, he disappeared, and I couldn’t follow the images as well any more because the others weren’t paying attention. Reading this box was still hard for me, but I was finding my way into comprehension the same way Harani gets around in a world she can’t see--listening to what the minds around me were saying and matching it to the incomprehensibility moving across the smooth face of that dark and inscrutable glass. Harani had explained it to me--when a person sees something, the mind recognizes it, with a little echo you can hear if you learn to listen for it, so that as a man walks down the street his mind is saying tree, curb, stop for the cart, let the woman go by, and so forth. We don’t hear those, normally, because they’re exactly the kind of thing that you learn early to filter out as useless and distracting. But with practice, you can adjust so that you are getting them; and if enough people are around, you can listen for those echoes, and if you can judge by the sound where they are relative to you, then you have a map of the world. Of course the map is constantly shifting; navigating this way is very difficult, but according to Harani it can become second nature just the way truth does. When she’s not making weather, she spends a lot of time teaching the sightless how to do this. She also teaches it to scoilin, and to shriias who want to learn it. Dalen uses the technique when she tracks, reading off animal minds and moving through the darkness with them. I could never do that. But as the story unfolded, I could catch the recognitions and the commentary around me, and give meaning to these unfamiliar shapes.
	Almost an hour later, I was starting to get the hang of it. This gashed pattern of gray and black and steel was meant to be Cretid City, where the buildings certainly grew very tall and narrow and where sunlight had a hard fight to get past them to the ground. And the man in the mud-green shirt with the gun was The Enforcer--what the older ones called a garda, what the younger ones recognized as a member of the CCP, an acronym that Ilean told me stood for Cretid City Police. But although he had a uniform and worked for what I surmised was their version of the gardai, he was a criminal himself, battering, maiming and killing men without asking anyone’s leave. He spent a lot of time beating up people in ratty clothing with furtive eyes and messy hair, who would tremble after a while and tell him whatever it was he wanted to know. Based on this, I got the sense that he was very angry with someone called the Black Tiger, who had brought a great deal of something into the city. This stuff, which was stacked inside one of the buildings the Enforcer shot his way through in large bags of that transparent filmy stuff they were all calling plastic, looked for all the world like salt or sugar,  but their minds were calling it whitedust. And sure enough, the Enforcer looked around at the contents of the shack, now crumbling around him after the violence of his entrance, and said, to a smaller and somewhat nervous little red-haired man who also wore the CCP uniform and who followed the Enforcer around as if he were very much in love with him, “Whitedust.”
	<Where have I heard that before?> Aine asked.
	<I’m not sure, but...oh, wait.> I reached into the bag and pulled out Darin’s list. <Yep--right here. Must be a kind of mind poison.>
	“My God,” said the little red-haired man, looking around in awe. “It must be worth a million at least--two, maybe.”
	“Three,” the Enforcer said curtly. “That last bust we did pushed the street price up.”
	Ilean shook her head. One of the others called out, “And I don’t suppose you saw any of that profit, huh?”
	Why do people pay for mind poison? I asked Ilean.
	To Cretids it’s not poison, she answered. I mean--it’s bad for them, but they can take it and live.
	But why would you want to?
	It does something to their brains, and so once they’re poisoned they want more. They’ll pay a lot, and if they don’t have the price they’ll steal and kill to get it. It’s a huge plague for them--we hear about it on the news all the time.
	The news?
	On after this--I’ll tell you later. I want to watch.
	I had wanted to ask her why this man was setting fire to something he said was worth three million of whatever the Cretids use for currency, but she didn’t want to be interrupted. Perhaps he just liked watching things burn.
	The Black Tiger, when he appeared on screen, seemed to be very upset about the loss of his whitedust. He showed this by narrowing his eyes, taking in his breath through tight lips, and stabbing a short, sharp knife point downwards into the table. It struck me as a little excessive, but then I couldn’t read him, so it helped. I couldn’t read any of these people on the screen, any more than you can read a painted image. Ilean had said it was like watching a play--that these were actors, and that none of this was really happening, even though it looked like it was. But even at a play you can read off the actors--they work hard at dredging up the emotions they’re supposed to be feeling and projecting them to the audience. Here, you had to go by facial expressions and the tone of voice, and it made everything flat--especially when the Black Tiger had to say such extremely flat things as “May I be dishonored before all of my ancestors if I have not killed him before the sun sets tonight.”
	“Go get him!” the woman who hadn’t wanted to watch shouted, looking very excited. The Black Tiger, I got the sense, was a real crowd favorite. He was handsome, with his very dark, very straight black hair and subtle, but distinctive features. And he knew how to dress. Instead of mud-green he was in black, gray and silver, with a jacket tailored close to his slender trunk over black trousers that billowed just a little bit as he strode furiously over the figured carpet. And, despite what to me was the outrageously bad quality of the dialogue he was speaking, he delivered the lines with a kind of tense energy that you could almost read. He looked like someone who was dangerous but who knew what he was about--someone you’d like to have on your side in a tight corner.
	The minds around me identified him, in that unconscious undertone, as hendanai. I had never seen anyone from Hendai before. It was even farther away from our island than Dubhinis was; further east, they said, but not as far south. It was only four hundred years ago we found out the place existed at all--and it was thanks to the Cretids, whose sailors were, as they put it, more adventurous and, as we put it, stone cold crazy. All that sea, we figured, had to have been put there for a reason. But they were used to seeing hendanai, evidently; they thought little of it. And indeed, it seemed from what I’d seen so far that Cretid City was full of people from places I’d never been to--Plenana, Dubhinis, Hendai. The others could recognize right away which place they were from; I couldn’t see how they were doing it, unless it was that they tended to be on the receiving end of one of the Enforcer’s punches.
	The Black Tiger turned toward a desk by one of the wide, paneless windows these Cretid buildings seemed to be full of, and picked up a rectangular black object with a thin wire stretching out of one end. He punched a number of buttons and then held it to his ear.
	That image disappeared, replaced immediately with one of a woman lying at full length on a bed covered in some kind of shimmering, fine fabric. It was peach-colored, with shining highlights of gold along the folds into which she had rumpled it. The woman herself had dark, straight hair like the man’s, only much longer. She was wearing nothing but a robe of the same shimmery stuff, only it was red and green figures on a gold ground, and it was tied loosely around her so that it fell away over her hip, revealing one long, smooth, barefooted leg stretched along the length of the bed. Between her head and shoulder she held a similar black object, speaking into it with lips painted bright red.
	I couldn’t understand the words she was saying, and neither could the people around me. But letters appeared on the screen, white against the dark rug. I gathered that this was a translation of whatever she was saying. According to the letters, she was commiserating with the Black Tiger on the loss of his warehouse, and agreeing that vengeance must swiftly be his unless his ancestors were asleep in the heavens. Then she told him that she would be there, wherever “there” was, at the rising of the full moon, and that she loved him. She paused before she said this last part, and a single tear rolled from the corner of one of her eyes, slightly blurring the dark charcoal with which she appeared to have outlined her eyelids.
	The others seemed to think this tear was bad news; they remained apprehensive as she pressed a button on the rectangular thing and laid it down on a small, carved wood bedside table.
	She swung her legs over the side of the bed, sitting and staring into space. Then another form moved onto the screen, appearing to come from some part of the room we couldn’t see. I didn’t recognize him without his mud-green shirt and trousers, but they all did. It was the Enforcer, in the buff.
	I could only see him from the waist up but even so, he was the most repulsive piece of manflesh I’d ever seen, and while admittedly that’s not saying much I had the feeling I was not alone in this assessment. Aine, for instance, appeared to be viscerally horrified at the sight of his bulging arms, whose muscles seemed to be trying to split the skin around them, and the veritable carpet of hair on his broad chest. The woman in the robe got to her feet as he approached, looking down at the floor. 
	“Where’s it going down?” he growled, putting one of his beefy hands around the nape of her neck.
	She lifted her face to his, the dark hair falling away from it down her back. “The pier, at moonrise,” she said. Her voice was faltering and strange, as if she was never quite sure of saying what she meant. “While you are patrolling the Corner, tonight, there will be a disturbance at the pier. You will be called to suppress it. They wait for you there.”
	The Enforcer looked down at her with a silent nod. Then he said, “I’ll be ready.”
	She closed her eyes, and he lifted her head toward him, pasting his mouth down on top of hers.
	Ilean shouted “Gaaaack!”, or words to that effect; and indeed, this moment seemed to have an almost emetic effect on the crowd. “Kilai, how could you?” cried one forlorn viewer. Aine and I were just staring in shock. He appeared to be trying to suck her spirit out through her mouth, but instead of struggling she had her arms clamped around his shoulders while her head twisted under his. In his grip she looked tiny, much lighter and more fragile than she had alone on the bed. We were hoping someone, maybe the Black Tiger, would rush in and save her; but instead, they just fell backward onto the bed, her limbs thrashing slowly under his bulkier form as they wallowed in that welter of gold and peach.
	“AUGH!” shouted Abiard as the image disappeared, and the concentration of the people around me broke. 
	“You knew it was coming,” said the woman from the front.
	“That two-timing little bitch,” Mahial put in, getting interested for the first time. “After all he’s done for her.”
	“It’s not her fault. He must have borrowed magic from someone,” said the woman with the scar. “Why else would every woman he meets fall under his spell, especially when he kisses like a suction pump?”
	“That was a kiss?” Aine blurted out, forgetting to be embarrassed.
	The room erupted in laughter. “What passes for one, here in the VisionBox,” the scarred woman said. “It’s enough to put one off the whole prospect, isn’t it?”
	“To go from the Black Tiger to this,” said Ilean sadly. “I thought she had more sense.”
	“She does,” said the scarred woman. “That’s what I’m saying. It has to be dark magic.”
	“Maybe,” said Ilean doubtfully.
	“Or maybe,” said the woman who hadn’t wanted to watch, “maybe she’s setting him up? Maybe she’s just making him think that, and really they’re going to get him at some other time and place, when he’s not looking.”
	The others seemed to like this idea. “That’s it,” said the scarred woman. “It must be. She’s too smart for that to be real.”
	Ilean shook her head. “Remember what happened with Ken Kan’s sister,” she said.
	“But Ken Kan’s sister was a glass addict,” the woman countered. “They’re maniacs--liable to do anything.”
	Glass? I demanded.
	Ilean dropped out of the conversation to answer. It’s another kind of mind poison. It’s related somehow to whitedust--they all are. But it comes in clear, hard sheets, like glass. They break it up and eat the chunks, with water. Somehow that makes the poison more potent.
	Why do they want it to be more potent?
	I don’t think they do, Ilean answered. The suppliers sell it that way; it gets them addicted faster.
	Aine was listening, not understanding this any better than I did. But the Black Tiger sells this stuff, doesn’t he?
	Oh, sure, but he’s just a pawn. It’s the Enforcer who’s getting rich off this.
	How?
	Watch a few weeks, you’ll see. He keeps burning warehouses and arresting dealers and beating the living fnaa out of everyone in the trade, but it never stops. He could stop it if he wanted--but he doesn’t. So we figure he must have a finger in this pie.
	I wanted to ask more, but my attention was drawn back to the screen. A man in the Enforcer’s uniform, but concealed under a big dark winter coat and wearing those eyeshades even at night, had emerged from a car and was walking toward two men who were fighting on the pier. The pier was something Aine and I could at least recognize--it looked like any kind of pier jutting out into the water, except that it was backlit by one of those very bright lights like near the border, outlining their black silhouettes in a white haze.
	“All right, boys, break it up,” he called  in a rough, deep voice that sounded sort of like the Enforcer’s, but not quite. As he took hold of one of the fighting men, there was a whooshing sound, and a lithe black figure leapt out of the darkness above him. The figure wrapped some kind of dark, flexible cord around the uniformed man’s throat, and began trying to throttle him.
	Suddenly now we could see their faces--the man being throttled was the little redheaded man, and the man throttling him was the Black Tiger, who had mistaken him for the Enforcer. And the man behind the Black Tiger, jerking his head back as if trying to snap his neck, was the Enforcer.
	“Damn!” shouted the woman whose theory about Kilai’s double-crossing had just been disproved.
	But the Black Tiger, although forced to let go of the red-haired man, spun around out of the Enforcer’s grip and began kicking and swinging his fists at him in a series of impossibly graceful movements. The Enforcer dodged and parried, both of them now suddenly caught up in a carefully choreographed dance. It reminded me a little of the stylized battles between the Minions and the Followers that I had had to be part of once a year at the Burning. Except that I could never, in a million years, have done what whoever was playing the Black Tiger was doing. 
	But agile and airborne as the Black Tiger was, the Enforcer suddenly got the upper hand, pummeling him unmercifully. And, just as the Black Tiger seemed to be about to lose, he suddenly spun around and began running.
	This was greeted with a shout of refusal from the watching audience. “Don’t run!” shouted one of the men. “Stand and fight! What about your ancestors?”
	“Come on!” Abiard shouted. “Can’t they leave him with any dignity?”
	“What do you mean, leave him?” Ilean asked.
	“It’s obvious, isn’t it, that they’re--”
	“Sssh!” from someone next to us.
	And now the Enforcer was running after him. To me, it looked as if the street itself were moving, rushing from one side of the screen to the other as the Enforcer hung suspended in the center, his legs churning in the air. But all that changed when the Black Tiger pulled up short in front of a brick wall that inexplicably ended the canyon he had been running down. He stopped, turned around, and shot out his hand. Something metal flew out of it, shining as it traveled through the air with impossible slowness. Then the Enforcer doubled over, one hand stuffed into his gut as the blood began to flow.
	There was a loud whoop of approval from the crowd. “Ah, you should’ve aimed lower!” cried the woman with the scar, drawing scattered laughter from those who got it.
	The Black Tiger smiled, and raised a round piece of metal that had jagged teeth running all along the outer edge. He drew his arm back, saying something in a language nobody seemed to understand. But before he released it, there was a deafening crack. His face froze in its smile, his eyes forgetting to blink as a hole appeared in his forehead, right between his eyes, red-edged and running with gore. His body toppled backward against the wall, finally slumping to the ground. 
	The Enforcer looked down at him with a snarl, one hand still in his gut and the other holding the smoking gun. He replaced the gun in a kind of scabbard he was wearing and turned away.
	“NO!” wailed several members of the audience.
	Damn, I heard from Ilean. He’s killed him.
	It was true, it certainly looked like he should be dead; he was motionless, and there was that hole in his forehead. But his body hadn’t gone through that change. It was as if he were asleep, but very soundly and in a very strange position.
	As the others began mourning this apparent death, the little red-haired man came running up with his gun drawn. I was waiting for the Black Tiger to throw off the feint, leap up and stab him to the heart in the one final moment that would vindicate him and Kilai both. They must surely have planned this together; for him to be able to fake that hole in his forehead he would have had to know he would be shot at.
	But he didn’t get up. Instead the red-haired man stared down at this still-living but inert body and said, “So that’s him. The Black Tiger.”
	“That was him,” said the Enforcer.
	There was a pause, and then the red-haired man said, “I’ll call it in.”
	An instant later there was a square white vehicle with flashing lights there, and a white cart with wheels on it, on which the Black Tiger lay, still motionless, covered up by a sheet except for his face. His eyes were closed now. The Enforcer looked down as the cart, wheeled by someone in a white suit like what Darin wore in the hospital, paused in front of him on its way into the vehicle.
	“See you in hell, scumbag,” he said.
	As with one voice, the crowd called out, “May you follow him soon, gleachinai!”
	Black letters appeared over the frozen image of the Enforcer’s face. I couldn’t read them all before they disappeared, but it said something about a producer.
	“Wouldn’t you know it!” Abiard brought out, lifting his hands in frustration.
	“I told you it would happen,” said the woman who hadn’t wanted to watch. “Every time. Every damn time.”
	“Ah, keep quiet, Ely,” said the scarred woman, good-naturedly. “Hope dies as hard in you as it does in us.”
	“But he was so close,” Ilean said. “That trap at the boat show--that really was brilliant. It could just as well have worked.”
	“If anyone was going to do it, it would have been the Black Tiger,” another man agreed. “He had the cunning and he had the organization. He was too smart for that. It shouldn’t have happened.”
	“That’s what I’m saying,” said the scarred woman. “Dark magic, it’s the only explanation.”
	“This is the problem, you get attached,” the other woman put in. “Even knowing they’ll kill him eventually, you get attached. I do too.”
	“Well, there’s still Ken Kan out there,” yet another woman added. “I have hope.”
	“It doesn’t seem like a play,” Aine said, looking back at the screen as the talk settled down. “It looks so real.”
	“It’s wonderful how they do it,” Mahial agreed.
	The noise had dropped; now there was a woman’s head on the screen, buried inside a halo of stiff wheaten hair. She was sitting behind a desk, her fragile shoulders and thin neck rising above it clad in dark blue.
	“Coming up tonight on the Cretid News Network: See what the Border Police are doing to keep you safe from Ideiren criminals.” As the general mood soured, the image was replaced with that of a man, wearing the same cap and mud-green shirt as the Enforcer. He was talking to no one in particular. “‘Course these guns were put in here ten, fifteen years ago, and even with the new laws they’re not doing the job.”
	Just as I was starting to want to know more about who this man was, he disappeared and the woman popped back onto the glass. “And ScienceWatch goes behind the buzz over Erysin to tell you the facts about what some men are hailing as a miracle drug.”
	“The Cretid News Network,” I said, interested for some reason. “What story is that?”
	“Oh, that’s not a story,” said Mahial. “That’s the news. That stuff is all really happening.”
	“It is?” I asked.
	“Sure it is. They take their cameras out and take pictures of real things, and feed them in there. If it has ‘news’ in the title, it’s a true story.”
	“Well, that’s a matter of opinion, isn’t it,” said Abiard.
	“What I meant is,” Mahial said, “that these people, who work for the Cretid News Network, they’re like repeaters. Only they can actually show you pictures of what they’re repeating.”
	“Well,” I said, settling down. “This should be interesting.”
	The others were still conversing about the episode when that woman reappeared. Aine and I were distracted by the noise and by her image from the words she was saying. I knew she was remarking on the same thing I was.
	“How long have they had the famine up here?” she asked Ilean, her voice hushed in sorrow.
	“What?” Ilean said.
	Aine opened her mouth, but I had just leaned forward like a dog scenting a pheasant, and to my own amazement was shouting, “Quiet, quiet, I want to hear!”
	This was because I had recognized, in the image that had just appeared, the guns and the wire fence that we had crawled through to get into the country. Only it was daylight, and there was that man in the mud-green uniform, squatting down to show someone who wasn’t visible the hole that Aine had managed to make in the fence.
	The others, alarmed by my sudden interest, subsided. “...you can see the ends of the wires, here,” he was saying. “Clean break, snapped right off. They must have had some pretty sophisticated tools.”
	Kitth had noticed too, and was starting to pay close attention.
	“But how did they get past the guns?” asked the voice of that unseen person.
	The man straightened up with a sigh. “Heat-seeking technology will allow you to hit the right target 19 times out of 20, when it’s functioning properly,” he said. “‘Course, these guns were put in 10, 15 years ago, and even with the new laws they’re not doing the job.”
	The same sentence, repeated in the same inflections, and the same image with it. So they had a way to repeat sight and sound--to keep the image somewhere, and flash it out when they wanted. 
	The screen now showed the head of another woman, with brown hair but with the same stiff halo, the same painted skull inside it. “Under the Criminal Exclusion Act of 895, which made it legal to fire on anyone attempting to cross the border at anything other than an official checkpoint, it finally became possible to automate the border guns, a measure that cut the costs of border maintenance in half, and the influx of illegal aliens almost down to zero.”
	Now there was someone else on the screen--a man, with gray hair and a graying face, wearing the same kind of thing that ambassador had worn on his trip down. Underneath him the letters said his name and the words “Director, Department of National Security.”
	“I think we’ve pretty much answered our critics,” he was saying. “The fortification of the border alone could not be an effective deterrent as long as the fugitives knew there was a chance they wouldn’t be fired on. Now, any fugitive attempting to cross the border turns back when he hears the warning volley. It’s far more effective and, in the long run, far more humane.”
	Aine’s mouth had opened in astonishment. My astonishment was a little louder.
	“Humane my gleacha!” I shouted.
	There was some bitter laughter, and then the woman with the brown hair was talking again. “But Patroller Geall learned last night that no system is perfect.”
	Back to the man in the mud-green shirt, who was now sitting next to the brown-haired woman at  a desk looking up at a glass screen in a box much like the one we were watching, only the image was dark and very strange.
	“You can see on the infrared better how they did it,” he was saying, pointing with a finger to a red smear in the center of that dark screen. Suddenly our own screen became dark too, with vague purple shadows shaped like trees, and vague orange blots with arms, legs, and little bulbous bald heads, and two bright, round red splashes up in the corner. 
	“The three escaped criminals are visible in the lower right-hand corner,” said the woman’s voice, as the image suddenly jumped into movement. “The computer’s infrared scanner does register them. But they are eclipsed by the very intense heat radiating from two objects hovering behind and above them.”
	The orange blobs crawled slowly along the screen, while the bright red splashes fluttered around behind them. 
	<It’s us,> Aine said.
	<What?>
	<It’s us. It’s how the...the...computer...saw us. That’s what this is. See? You can see how Kitth’s holding the baby.>
	And indeed, the shape almost disappearing off the screen had its arms folded around an oblong blotch of slightly cooler orange.
	“What’s happened is, they’ve got a hold of some kind of rockets, which they set off to cover their escape route. Essentially, the heat from the rockets distracted the computer, and it sighted the weapons on them instead of on the real targets.”
	I was diverted from the next few lines by the rising indignation around us. The real targets. Shooting practice. That’s what we are. Ducks on a pond.
	“...were able to get some information from two motorists who happened to pass three people answering their basic description on the night in question,” the mud-green shirted man was saying. “From them we may eventually get a composite image we can broadcast to help track them down. All I can tell you right now is that they appear to be female--two women and a girl--and that like all Ideiren fugitives, they should be considered armed and extremely dangerous.”
	The brown-haired woman was back now, standing in front of that fence, with the hole Aine had made plainly visible. “When it was first passed, critics of the Criminal Exclusion Act called it government-sanctioned murder. Even they now admit that whatever the means, the new policy has achieved its end: border crossings have dropped to an all-time low, and the farmers of southern Wheatlea sleep easier at night. But south of the border in Ideire, the natives say that every net has holes. Tomorrow, we may wake to find our nation once again under siege. Tonight, Patroller Geall and his men will be combing the hills looking for three escaped convicts. Calia Fleen, Cretid Nation News, Tillston.”
	That first woman, with the blonde hair, appeared again, with that desk, turning to the brown-haired woman  who was now suddenly visible beside her. “Thanks, Calia. Anything else you can tell those concerned citizens out there who are worried about this new invasion?”
	“Just to remind everyone to be very very careful. If suspicious characters appear in your neighborhood, or if you’ve taken on any laborers who don’t have full papers, report them immediately to your local Border Control representative. Remember, Ideire only exiles violent offenders, so even though these fugitives are women, they are still extremely dangerous and Patroller Geall wants me to stress that you should under no circumstances attempt to apprehend them yourself. Inform your local enforcer and let the professionals handle it.”
	“Thanks, Calia. Coming up next: new hope for old flames.”
	The image changed and the concentration broke. Aine could no longer contain herself. “Even though?”
	“Welcome to the Cretid Nation,” said Mahial with a laugh. “Tell me, Hana, have you seen any suspicious characters around here?”
	“You mean aside from the one I’m talking to right now?” the scarred woman called back, in the same jovial tone.
	“Or any laborers who don’t have full papers?” Abiard called out.
	“I’m shocked, shocked and hurt that you could suggest such a thing,” said the woman who hadn’t wanted to watch, putting a hand over her heart in mock alarm. “Of course I have full papers. I bought ‘em myself.”
	There was an explosive burst of laughter, with anger behind it. Mahial turned to me. “How did you do it, anyhow?”
	“What can I say?” I replied, spreading my hands. “It’s not the first time an Ideiren’s outwitted a machine.”
	Mahial nodded, and I thought maybe she had winked at me but I couldn’t be sure. The others didn’t seem worried that they were harboring three wanted women. In fact, they seemed rather pleased.
	“So, violent offenders,” Ilean said, a little more serious now, “what is it, exactly, that you’ve done?”
	Kitth looked down at the floor, her new pleasure at being a celebrity suddenly dashed.
	“Never mind,” said the scarred woman quickly. “You’ll tell us when it’s time. Don’t rush her, Ilean.”
	As the conversation washed around us, I glanced up at the screen. I was looking at someone in a white coat like Darin’s, holding up a narrow glass tube and peering at it. And then there was a man, with stiff gray hair and one of those knotted strips around his neck, talking at us.
	“...promised a miracle cure and then never delivered. But now, doctors say, the CN’s youngest pharmaceutical company has solved one of humanity’s oldest problems.”
	Pharmaceutical.
	“I’m sorry,” I said, tentatively. “I--please, I’d like to hear the rest of this.”
	The people around me settled down and started looking at the screen. Mahial let out a noise of exasperation.
	“Ah, not more fnaa about Erysin,” she sneered. “Will they never be done with it?”
	“You’d think they’d discovered a cure for death itself,” one of the women agreed.
	Over the laughter I could hear the voice of a different man, who wasn’t wearing the knotted thing. He was sitting in an armchair, wrinkled and white-haired, while a woman of thirty sat near him, holding his hand.
	“It’s certainly changed our lives,” he was saying, as the woman patted his hand.
	“Yeah, now you have something to hang your towels on,” shouted one of the young men.
	 “I thank the Lord every morning for making Erysin possible before it was too late for us.”
	“Like many of Dr. Elbirt’s patients,” the first voice was saying as we kept watching the man and the woman putter around what looked like a room in a house, “Ferik’s impotence is the result of a protracted struggle with prostate cancer...”
	“That or a protracted struggle with old age,” called out a younger man. The old man and the young woman were walking down what seemed like a paved path through a garden. One of the other young men cupped his mouth with one hand, so that the sound came out with a half-echo, and said, “This is Air Traffic Control, you are clear for departure. Repeat, you are clear for departure.”
	The room broke up laughing. “That’s a good one, Stann,” said Abiard, as Mahial wiped the corner of one eye. “Clear for departure.” He chuckled, taking Ilean’s hand.
	I didn’t get it, and anyhow it would take a long time before I could laugh at the idea of a departure, even for someone obviously as close to his time as this man. The voice was still booming over the picture. 
	“Of course, other companies have come out with other products claiming to be the cure men all over the Nation have been waiting for. What’s different about Erysin is that it works.”
	The image went back to the man and woman sitting in their chairs. I wondered why they couldn’t just go to one place and stay there. 
	“Does it work?” They both began laughing, he with a broad guffaw and her with a high-pitched giggle. “You bet your gleacha.”
	“Yes, he’s much happier now--much more active,” the woman said.
	“Well, at least he’ll go out with a bang!” another young man called back.
	I was starting to get irritated with him. Certainly there was something highly ridiculous about watching this man grin like a fool over the fact that everyone in the country now knew, apparently, that he was now able to thurk a woman much too young to be his wife. But at the same time, there was something cruel about the way these men in their twenties were mocking his white hair and trembling hands. And besides, I really did want to hear more about this wonder drug.
	<What is it, dhiaoc?> Aine could tell I was interested in this for more than its comic value.
	<I’m just wondering...I mean, I see her everywhere, but I wonder...>
	When I could hear again, the man in the knotted noose was walking through a very large, very bright room in which tables were covered with metal stands and glass tubes like the one we’d seen at the beginning.
	“Skeptics point out that independently controlled clinical studies have yet to be done. At this moment, Erysin’s effectiveness is attested to only by anecdotal reports from physicians and their patients. But that testimony is so strong, and apparently so convincing, that Erysin has already become the best-selling prescription drug on the market. All this adds up to good news for the men who have been suffering in silence and humiliation...”
	“Not to mention frustration!” cackled one of the women.
	“...and to great news for DeVane Pharmaceuticals, the company that holds the patent.”
	“Name of the spirit!”
	It’s a powerful oath, when said with conviction, and it quelled the cutups who had been riffing on what, until that very instant, had been much closer to farce than drama. I said it not only because they mentioned the name of the place that big box of money had been addressed to, but because on that cue the image changed to that of a man, still young in his curly red hair but older in his lined face, wearing one of those white coats and standing in front of a wall lined with books. And underneath him appeared the letters, “Dr. Wyll Sinclare, Vice-President of Marketing, DeVane Pharmaceuticals.”
	“Obviously we’re very pleased with its early success,” he was saying in his smooth, modulated voice. “And I think it shows that we were justified in lobbying the Dispensary Board for early approval. Clearly there was a demand out there waiting to be met.”
	“Oh,” I breathed, fixing his image with a gaze sharpened with hatred, “is it you, you son of a bitch?”
	Nobody but Aine heard me, because one of the wags had called out, “And I wanted it to be on the market before my hot date this weekend!”
	“Dhiaoc?” she asked, now very perturbed.
	“...about those who say that there should have been more trials done before this drug was released to the public?” the first man was asking.
	“You must remember,” he said, speaking with that maddening rationality, “that most of this criticism is leveled at us by the bigger firms, who are naturally unhappy to see us coming of age as a competitor. Erysin was subjected to rigorous in-house experimental trials before we ever applied for approval. We’re quite satisfied that Erysin is a safe, effective treatment for impotence, and we think that over time, the results will vindicate us even in the eyes of our harshest critics.”
	“I’m sure it will,” said the other man. “But what I think our viewers are more interested in, really, is knowing how exactly Erysin works.”
	He smiled that white-toothed, predator’s smile.
	“I’m afraid that’s a professional secret,” he said. “You wouldn’t ask SunRain to give up the formula for Welbin, would you?”
	The other man laughed. “But, Dr. Sinclare, you can understand how people would be curious about the development process. After all, DeVane has only been operating for two years, and at the larger companies it’s quite common for a drug to be a decade or more in the making.”
	That smile again. “I would say, Dugg, that simply indicates that we have a better research and development team.”
	“Oh, I’ll just bet you do,” I muttered.
	He disappeared off the screen as suddenly as he’d risen up. But I saw his image, burnt on my shocked eyes, all through the end of Dugg’s final speech.
	“...still murky. Why was approval granted so early? Can we be sure this new drug has no unpleasant side-effects?”
	“No, you can’t,” I said quietly.
	“But for hundreds of thousands of men like Ferik here and around the world, these are questions that can wait. The important one--”
	“Is, of course, ‘who can I impregnate?’” the scarred woman called. “Oh--no offense, Abiard.”
	“None taken,” he said with a smile.
	“--and Erysin, it appears, is the answer. Dugg Hylend, Cretid Nation News, Cretid City.”
	I was still staring at the screen, event though I wasn’t seeing what was on it.
	“Theamh?” Mahial waved a hand in front of my eyes. “Theamh, are you all right?”
	“Cretid City,” I repeated. “I have to get to Cretid City, as fast as possible. How do I do that?”
	“Easy now,” she said, patting my hand. “I know it’s a lot to take in in one day--”
	“You don’t understand,” I said. “Anyhow, the gardai are after us, you heard them.”
	The others laughed. “No worries there,” said Mahial. “I’ve been illegal for twenty-five years--Hana there for fifteen--all of us, except for the bornheres, are illegal. And thoughts of the Border Control have never troubled our sleep.”
	“Our Aiv arranges it with them,” said Ilean. “He needs us; we work for cheap and we can’t advertise for a better offer. They look the other way, most of the time. And when they don’t...we have our methods.”
	A low chuckle ran around among the spectators. I was going to ask what the joke was when the rickety wooden door of the building flew open and clattered against the wall. The structure vibrated almost visibly and the wires lurched around us. I shuddered.
	It was a woman, looked to be about eighteen, and she’d been running hard to get there. “The BC!” she shouted, panting. “Coming here!”
	Despite their assurances a minute earlier, there was an immediate wave of panic. “But...what, isn’t he paid up?”
	The woman shook her head. “I don’t know. But there’s three of them, and they look like they mean it.”
	Abiard cursed. “Nothing for it, then,” he said, glancing around at the appliances. “You all hide the machines, I’ll go disconnect.”
	“Disconnect?” I shouted, as he started for the door. “You don’t mean you’re going to fool with those wires, do you?”
	“Border Control is easy,” he shouted. “But Cretid Power and Light--you don’t want to mess with those bastards.”
	The room had leapt into activity around me. Aine and Kitth had been drafted into helping move the giant food wardrobe--to where, I couldn’t see. But I ran out to watch Abiard, climbing up the pole that supported those swooping wires toward the heart of the lightning.
	“Abiard, come down here! It’s not worth it!”
	“It’s easy,” he shouted, pulling on a pair of thick gloves. “I know what I’m doing.”
	I crossed my hands over my shoulders. The cloth of my gray dress reminded me that I wasn’t in hreapa. Ah well. It might become necessary, all the same.
	His hands were working in the middle of that crackling mass of certain death, protected somehow by his gloves. The end of the black wire that ran to the roof of the building came free of the pole and fell back on top of the house. 
	At the top of the pole, Abiard breathed a sigh of relief, and reached one bare foot down the pole toward one of the iron footrests.
	Idair gives us, along with the fire, the gift at times like this of seeing slow. And as he swung himself down the pole, I saw those lethal lines beginning to bulge, curving out toward his body. So that by the time he was screaming with the first thrill that brushed his flesh, my fire was on its way up to intercept.
	I felt it take, and felt the lightning gathered at the top of that pole searing down the stream and around my body, which shook with the violence of the power rushing around the protective shell of my fire. 
	“GET...DOWN...HERE!!!” I shouted to Abiard, who was frozen in amazement at the top of the pole. I had wanted to add, “You stupid bastard,” but there would be plenty of time for that later on.
	Through the curtain of flame and lightning around me I saw a dark, man-shaped form slide down the pole, stand, and draw back. Abiard was out of harm’s way. Now came the tricky part. Lightning likes the ground; and it was following my fire because I’d made a direct path. If I did not want to end my days as a human lightning rod, I would have to break the path at the top, where the fire hit the pole, and not at my hands, which was more natural. 
	It was a while before I could work up the nerve to make the break. If I did it wrong, and the break wasn’t clean, when I drew the fire back into me the lightning would come with it.
	There was now a small crowd of very concerned people, including a dumbstruck Aine, gathered at the doorway of the building gawking at me. Ah well.
	Idair, keep your daughter safe. “Mo linn agam!”
	The recoil threw me backward onto the ground. But it was the shock of my own fire--a good, friendly, pleasant kind of shock, compared to the one I’d been afraid of.
	“Dhiaoc!” Aine shouted, running forward.
	Well, if anyone still hadn’t been clued in, they were now.
	“I’m still alive,” I croaked.
	With her help, I sat up, waiting to be done trembling. Abiard, a little shaken himself, approached us nervously.
	“Are you all right?” he asked.
	“If you ever do that again,” I said, looking at him with bloodshot eyes, “I will give you such a cursing as you can only dream of.”
	“Dhiaoc, your dress is burning,” Aine said.
	She was right. The shoulders had gone up in a cloud of carbonized ash, and little flames were still flickering around their burnt and curling edges. I put them out with my hands and then, seeing that they were hanging by threads anyhow, ripped the sleeves off. Aine helped me up.
	“Well, come on then,” I said to the stunned crowd. “The Border Control is coming for us.”
	Hana and Mahial clambered onto the roof and began rolling up the wires, coiling them onto the roof and covering them with branches and dead leaves. I had the sense they were used to doing this. Then they slithered down to the ground, and we all crowded back into the building.
	“Someone start a story,” Ilean said hurriedly, as we sat down in a circle in a room that now looked much emptier. Cushions had been piled up negligently against and on top of the VisionBox; the globe and its strings were gone; the wardrobe thing had disappeared behind some kind of false wall. Ilean took Abiard’s shaking hand, pressing it and no doubt telling him something. 
	“Have you heard the one about the mermaid’s husband?” the woman who hadn’t wanted to watch asked.
	“To hell with that, just start it!” Hana said.
	“Very well then,” the woman said, hardly perturbed at all by Hana’s snappishness. “Once, a long time ago, there was a fisherman who lived by himself on a rocky island, alone all day with the gulls and the waves...”
	By the time there was a knock on the door, we were all listening intently--especially Aine, who was comparing this version to the one she knew and filing away the variations. Once again, the door flew open, and three men in mud-green shirts, trousers, and heavy black boots strode in, along with their guns.
	I’d seen them in the field, and I’d seen them on the VisionBox, but to see guns in person still put the wind up me. I tried not to show it, although since Aine’s terror was palpable I’m not sure how much that helped. Kitth stared back at them almost as insolently as they were staring at us, holding her baby. 
	“Good evening, Patroller Geall,” said Mahial, standing up and addressing one of the intruders--whose thickset form, muscular neck and balding head I recognized from the VisionBox. “Can we be helping you at all?”
	The faint west country accent Aine and I had detected in Mahial’s speech was now suddenly much, much stronger, and her head tilted with an ingratiating, and patently insincere, smile.
	“This is a raid,” the man barked, without acknowledging her. “Line up against the wall and present your identification.”
	Without hurrying, but without dawdling, the others stood up, and ranged themselves against the far wall of the building. Aine, Kitth and I followed suit. But whereas most of them reached into a pocket or sleeve or shirt and brought out a creased, folded sheet of paper with printing on it, we had nothing to reach for. 
	 Here, Abiard sent as he handed a scrap of blank paper to Kitth. Just show it to him. I’ll do the rest. Your name is Meri Vihani and you were born in Wheatlea Maternity Hospital in 867. Can you remember that?
	“Name?” the first man was barking, as another inspected Mahial’s card.
	“Mahial Eckson,” she answered.
	“Birthplace?”
	“Ideire.”
	“Naturalized?”
	“864.”
	I had the sense that he wasn’t very invested in doing this--that he’d been through this round before and was only half paying attention. The second man handed Mahial the card with a nod, and they moved down the line.
	Abiard shuffled himself down the line to be near me and Aine. Here, show this to him--
	It’s no good, Abiard, I answered. I’m not allowed to lie.
	Not allowed? This was obviously, as far as he was concerned, the stupidest thing he had ever heard of. Allowed by who?
	By Idair, I answered, a little snappishly.
	The light went on. Never mind, shriia, I’ll fix it for you. God but I’m thick. I suppose you’re a shriia too?
	No, Aine answered, but I’m in the habit.
	Say nothing and leave it to me.
	“Name?” The man in charge had worked his way down to Kitth.
	“Meri Vihani,” she said, handing the blank card to the second man.
	The second man stared down at the card, for all the world as if he was reading something on it. Meanwhile Abiard was looking off in another direction as if he hadn’t a care in the world, but I knew he was working hard.
	“Birthplace?”
	“Wheatlea Maternity Hospital,” she answered readily.
	“Birthdate?”
	“867.”
	The man in charge was about to move on, but the third man put a black-gloved hand on his arm to stop him. I was wondering what the third man was for; evidently he was there to pay attention.
	“You were born here then, were you?” he said, putting his thin-cheeked face a foot away from Kitth’s.
	“Yes,” Kitth answered.
	“And your boy, he was born here too?”
	“Of course,” she answered, a little warily.
	“So where are his papers?”
	“I’ve had to write away for new ones,” Kitth said, inventing her answer with a facility I admired, even though I couldn’t emulate it. “The others got mixed up in the diaper pile the other day.”
	The third man’s pale lips tweaked in a partial smile. “Careless of you,” he said, in a falsely paternal chiding tone.
	“You know Ideirens,” Kitth said, with a shrug. “Thick as mutton stew, that’s us.”
	“But you said you were born here,” he repeated, his teeth showing now in that unpleasant smile.
	“Well,” Kitth said, with that detached and quiet obstinacy I’d noticed in her before, “Idair loves me in spite of that.”
	The third man laughed, anemically, and moved away from her. Just as she was about to relax, he suddenly turned back on her. “Who was your doctor?”
	This was a question Kitth couldn’t understand, so she stared back at him until Abiard helped her out.
	“It was a nurse,” she answered. “Named Vahelan.”
	It was clear that the third man had his doubts about Kitth. But as long as she was able to answer all his questions, and as long as that second man, under Abiard’s influence, believed that this ragged blank thing was an official document, he couldn’t do anything about it. He moved down to Abiard.
	“Name?”
	“Abiard Creagon.”
	“Birthplace?”
	“Ideire.”
	“Naturalized?”
	“883.”
	Now they’d reached me. While Patroller Geall sized up my gray dress with its ripped armholes, Abiard was busy making contact, visual or mental, with the others in the line. I stood up and looked back at him.
	“Well?” he demanded. There was a bad smell on his breath--sour, but with a sweet poisoned tang. “Where’s your papers?”
	I didn’t answer--but Abiard did. We don’t need to see her identification.
	From all up and down the line I heard them repeating it. We don’t need to see her identification. We don’t need to see her identification.
	“We don’t need to see her identification,” said the third man.
	Patroller Geall looked at him as if he were out of his mind. “Investigator--” he began.
	“I’ve given you the order, Patroller,” he said. “I shouldn’t have to repeat it.”
	Brassbound bastard, said the Patroller’s mind. Fine. Let them hang him for it up at the Clearinghouse. “Name?” he spat.
	“My used name is Theamh ni hUlnach,” I said.
	“Birthplace?”
	“City Central Hospital.” He looked at me. “Which is in Ideire.”
	“Naturalized?”
	I didn’t answer.
	“Naturalized?”
	I crossed my arms.
	“You were never naturalized?”
	Abiard came to my rescue. Stop wasting my time.
	The others took it up, and sure enough, the third man snapped, “Stop wasting my time, Patroller. Move along.” 
	The Patroller looked at him with barely disguised contempt. Even for an Investigator, you’re a stupid sonofabitch.
	“You heard me,” said the third man.
	So me moved along to Aine.
	“Papers?” he demanded wearily.
	“I don’t have them,” she answered.
	“I told you, we don’t need to see her identification,” the third man snapped. 
	The Patroller sighed. “Name?”
	“Aine ni hEmer.”
	“Birthplace?”
	“Nocknarae, in Jipran.” She added, “Which is in Ideire.”
	“I know that, you Ideiren slut,” the Patroller burst out, angrily.
	Aine was too angry to answer, which was lucky enough. “Naturalized?” 
	And again, from all sides it came in: She’s not the one you’re looking for.
	“Never mind,” said the third man. “She’s not the one we’re looking for.”
	This was too much for the Patroller. “Investigator, if you can’t see what’s happening here--”
	“I told you, Patroller, I’m not here to keep your particular backwoods district clean and safe. I’m looking for two specific fugitives and neither one of them is in this building. What you do with yourself on your own time is your own business, and certainly I’d prefer not to speculate about what that is. But I’ve got a hundred miles of country to cover tonight and I don’t have time for the small fry. We’re through here.”
	The second man leapt to open the door for the third man, who stormed out with the second one at his heels. The Patroller looked us over with a baleful and, I was beginning to think, perhaps intelligent eye.
	“Right,” he said, pointing at me. “I’ve got my eye on you, Neehoolnock. Don’t you forget it.”
	And the door swung shut behind him.
	Nobody breathed until we heard the slamming of another, heavier door, and the grumbling rattle of what the minds around me recognized as an engine. Through the structure’s one window I saw one of those traveling machines bouncing up the dirt path back toward the landlord’s house.
	After the general exhale came the general laughter. Abiard bowed for the applause that was liberally offered up to him, pleased to have pulled it off.
	“That’s some trick,” I said. “Where’d you learn that?”
	Abiard shrugged. “Ah, I saw it done in some show on the VB.”
	“You see?” Ilean said, patting me on the shoulder. “Nothing to it. Cretids are easy.”
	The worry on my face dampened the hilarity somewhat. And then people started remembering the scene outside with the lightning and the wires. And then they were standing there staring at me, drawn slowly closer to me by their curiosity.
	“So,” Ilean finally said, after a silence that unnerved Aine even more than it bothered me. “Are you really a shriia?”
	“Yes,” I answered.
	“What are you doing here?”
	“That’s a long story we don’t have time for.”
	“Why do you need to get to Cretid City?” Mahial put in from the sidelines.
	“Because I think I’ll find what I’m looking for there,” I answered.
	“Why?”
	This one was from Aine, who must have been wondering that for a while.
	“Erysin,” I answered. “The wonder drug. It’s a wonder all right.”
	“You mean it’s one of her potions?” I nodded. “I guess...you told me she made them, aphrodisiacs and so forth, but what makes you so sure?”
	“That so-called ‘doctor’ there in the box,” I said. “Sinclare. He used to be the main stud in Lythril’s stable.”
	There was some snickering among the young men, but Aine didn’t think it was funny.
	“You mean...Lythril’s in Cretid City,” Mahial said. “Selling her potions as medicine.”
	“I can’t be sure without going there myself, but it’s a very strong possibility.”
	“Well,” Mahial said as the silence persisted. “You’d better get up there then.” The others nodded. “And you better leave quick, because sooner or later that brassbound bastard is going to figure out he’s been influenced.”
	“Later rather than sooner, I’ll bet,” said Hana with a laugh the others shared. “But all the same, you’re right. You’ll need clothes and you’ll need money--”
	“I can’t use money.”
	This was news to some of them, I could see, although the older ones just nodded. “Then you’ll have to hitch.”
	“People do that here?”
	“They do,” Hana said, “but not if they can avoid it. It’s not safe. You’ll have to be very careful. Abiard’s got a broken-down old thing that’ll get you out to the North Road, but after that you’ll have to go it on your own. Have we got a map?”
	By this time much of the group was bustling around looking for things, with the speed and efficiency of people used to sudden unwelcome visits. Within about ten minutes Aine and I were standing nervously next to the rusting frame of what looked to be one of those cars we’d seen on the VisionBox but was much older, much more dilapidated, and had a big open cargo bay in the back. Aine had found herself a pair of blue trousers, shoes soled with that strange stuff they told us was rubber, and an checkered shirt over a kind of short-sleeved black tunic that tucked into the waistband of the trousers. I had on the same kind of pants--I’d borrowed a pair of Mahial’s, which were a little baggy on me but not too much--with a green shirt that felt sort of like cotton, buttoned down the front and at the cuffs of the long sleeves. I now had my shift and my ropesoles tucked into my bag along with the hreapa, and I felt very much at a loss inside these strange clothes without even a shift to come between my skin and this strange fabric.
	“All right,” Mahial said as we climbed, not without anxiety, on board this traveling machine. “Stay low and don’t trust people. The road’s not a kind place.”
	“Thank you for all you’ve done,” I said, looking at Ilean’s worried face. “And for taking care of Kitth and her boy.”
	“Least we can do,” she answered. “After what you did for Abiard.”
	Abiard flipped something, and the machine suddenly shuddered into life, vibrating in every inch of its metal skin and shaking my innards like a fruit juice cocktail.
	“Is it supposed to sound like that?” I shouted above the din of the engine.
	“More or less,” he shouted back.
	With Ilean and Mahial waving after us, the thing started lurching down the dirt path, Abiard directing its motions with a round wheel like a pilot’s.
	<If this doesn’t kill us, I suppose nothing will,> Aine said, her face turning white.
	<Never say nothing.>
	<Those men on the...the Border Patrol...will all Cretids be that weak?>
	<I don’t know.> The thing jounced over a rock and threw me against the door. <I’ll tell you what really worries me.>
	<Which is?>
	<That third man said he was looking for two fugitives,> I said. <They know three of us crossed over.>
	<So?>
	<Someone over here in the Cretid gardai has decided Kitth’s not worth chasing,> I answered. <To me, that means someone here knows who we are. Which means that someone on our side told them.>
	<Makes sense,> Aine answered, as the machine pulled onto a more even, flat surface and the speed picked up. <We know Barant and her cohorts are colluding with Lythril.>
	<But don’t you see, this means either that Lythril has confederates in the Cretid government--which would be bad enough...>
	<And what would be worse than that?>
	<Or else Barant is in league with someone in our government, who got the message through to theirs.>
	The machine, thankfully, rattled and clanked its way to a stop. We were by the side of one of those very wide, very flat roads with the stripes, on a soft shoulder bordered by trees.
	“You know how to hitch?” Abiard said, as we opened the door. “You stand by the side of the road and you point in the direction you want to go to. If someone wants to take you they’ll slow down. Of course, you won’t have much luck for the first ten miles or so.”
	“Why not?”
	Abiard gestured to a signpost. It was dark, but the letters were in that same reflective stuff as the stripes on the road.
	“YOU ARE IN THE VICINITY OF THE WHEATLEA REDEMPTION FACILITY. DO NOT STOP FOR HITCHHIKERS.”
	I sighed. “And the Wheatlea Redemption Facility is...?”
	“One of the places where they keep their criminals,” he answered. “Instead of sending them to the Zone, they lock them up in huge buildings in the middle of nowhere. Much more humane.”
	The way he said it made me look at him. “If you had the choice, which would you pick?”
	“I’ve had the choice,” Abiard said, his eyes hardening at the memory. “All things considered, I’d take the Zone.”
	The door to his machine slammed and it peeled around, heading back the way it had come. I looked up at the sign.
	“All things considered...” Aine repeated, her eyes following mine.
	“Well,” I said. “So we’re stranded here in the dark in the vicinity of what, if Abiard is telling the truth and speaking from experience, would seem to be hell itself.”
	She nodded.
	“So let’s see if these boots were made for walking,” I said.

IX.
Asking For It
	
	 After four hours of walking it was past midnight and we couldn’t go any farther, whether or not it was safe to stop. We hadn’t seen a sign declaring that we were no longer in the vicinity of the WRF, but there was nothing we could do about that; we’d pushed ourselves about as far as we could go on strange food and in borrowed clothing. We thrashed our way into the undergrowth on one side of the road and found a small clearing shielded by three trees. We curled up, strewed some branches over us in the vain hope that this would provide some camouflage, and commended ourselves to Idair.
	Idair at least did me the favor of putting the nightmares on hold for a night. Who knows, maybe now that Lythril and her minions had spilled over into my waking life I no longer needed to dream about them. So I got a few hours of unbroken sleep, for once. The downside was that I was sleeping so soundly that I didn’t notice anything amiss until I felt my grip tightening on the fabric of my traveling bag, which had unreasonably come to life and begun trying to slide out from under me.
	Two seconds later, I realized that in fact the bag was not moving under its own power. It was being tugged on by a pair of hands, which were a few inches from my nose. Although the fingers were pale, the nails were black and shiny. However, what was most vividly impressed on my mind at the time was the fact that they were clutching the bag that contained my hreapa, and that they were presumably attached to a person who intended to take it away from me. 
	I rolled over and pulled back on the bag with a jerk. At the other end of the arms was a white skull from whose dark-ringed sockets a pair of over-bright eyes gleamed. “Teir abhaile arani!” I shouted, breaking the thing’s grip on my bag and sending out a kick that hit something altogether too solid to be part of an arani.
	Aine was now not only up but quivering in a painful state of alertness. “Where? Where?”
	I stood up, crouching in anticipation of the thing’s response, but there wasn’t one; it was on its knees with its arms wrapped around its stomach and one shoulder and the side of its skull pressed into the dirt. Tears seeped out of the sockets through lids squeezed shut. Now that I had a moment to reflect, I realized that it wasn’t a skull after all; it was just a very pale, very gaunt face, with heavy dark circles around the eyes and dark paint on the mouth. Which matched the extremely black hair that stuck up in rich profusion around the scalp, the paint on its nails, and the rusty black clothes it was wearing.
	<Never mind, Aine. It’s human after all.>
	“Are you all right?” I asked it, bending down to address the face that was still twisted up in pain.
	It reared up on its knees and flung a clenched fist out at me, but all I had to do was step back. Aine, meanwhile, had come around behind it. When it lurched up to its feet, I was able to determine for the first time that it seemed to be a woman--a little bit younger than Aine, probably, although what with the face paint, the shiny black boots and the strange pictures that someone had drawn all over her bare arms it was hard to be sure.
	“Gimme that bag!” she shouted, thrusting her other fist out at me. I was momentarily stunned by her absurd confidence until I realized that this hand was holding out the sharp blade of a knife.
	Had I actually been wearing my hreapa I would probably have just laughed in her face, but as it was I felt this called for diplomacy. “Look, friend, I’m sorry you’re desperate, but I can’t give you this bag.”
	The hand thrust itself a little closer to me. Aine had crept quietly around and was poised for intervention.
	<Jump when she jumps, Aine, not before.>
	<All right, dhiaoc.>
	“It wouldn’t be any use to you anyhow. I don’t have any money in here; not even any food, worse luck for us.”
	“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said. “Hand it over.”
	“No.”
	“Are you deaf? I said hand it over.”
	“I hear you fine, I’m just not going to give you the bag, that’s all.”
	<Are you reading her?>
	<I think so.>
	<Then use that to guide you.>
	“Give it to me or I’ll cut your throat,” she said, in an unpleasant guttural tone of voice.
	“That’s what I would call a false dilemma,” I answered.
	She didn’t understand me, but she was tired of trying. 
	It was really too easy. With her projecting her leap before she made it, I knew which way to swerve; she stumbled onto thin air, and when Aine leapt on her she fell face-first into the fallen leaves. It wasn’t even a half minute before Aine had her pinned flat with a knee in her back and a hand tight on each wrist. While our would-be thief was struggling ineffectively, I pried open the fingers of her right hand and shook the knife out of it. I took hold of the wrist while Aine retrieved the knife, folded it up and tucked it into the waistband of her trousers.
	I squatted down by the woman’s head, which was twisting angrily on her neck. “Can we count on you to behave yourself now, or are you going to lunge for us as soon as we let you up?”
	“Gimme that bag!” she repeated, her breath now rasping with the effort of her unsuccessful struggle.
	“But this is crazy,” I said, trying to reason with her. “You’re unarmed, and there’s two of us, and you’re clearly not a match even for one of us. Why in the name of anything should I give you my bag?”
	For an answer she started crying--against her will, and angrily. Her red streaming eyes and gasping mouth made her look even younger. She was beaten, and she knew it, and the sheer injustice of the thwarting and humiliation she was enduring was crushing her very young heart, squeezing out these tears of rage and shame.
	“Let her up, Aine,” I said. 
	Aine slid off her and got to her feet. The woman--or girl, really--sat up slowly, wiping her eyes with the dirty heel of one hand. She wouldn’t look at either of us.
	“I’m called Theamh, and this is Aine, whom you’ve met,” I said. “What do you call yourself?”
	She took her first really good look at the two of us. We were, out of context, an unlikely pair. Too close in age to be mother and daughter, too far apart to be sisters or friends; her obvious deference toward me and my probably equally obvious assumption of authority; looking too different to be cousins or kin. She could make nothing of us--except that we’d obviously slept in the open that night, just as she had been doing for a while.
	“NightQueen,” she said.
	Well, I was pretty sure that wasn’t the name her mother had given her, but then that wasn’t what I’d asked her, was it. 
	“Ah,” I answered. “That would explain the black.”
	“Very funny,” she said, defensively.
	“It’s a little ambitious, isn’t it?” Aine said unexpectedly.
	“What?” The girl looked around at her.
	“I mean, maybe you should start with something a little smaller, like NightPrincess, or maybe NightLady-In-Waiting.”
	“Oh, come on,” I said, wearily intercepting the punch NightQueen tried to land on Aine’s jaw. “We’re all on the road, and we’re all poor as outbound sailors, with so much in common we ought to be friends.”
	NightQueen glared at me. 
	“The pictures, the ones you’ve got on your arm there,” I said, pointing to the image of a crowned sword on her shoulder. “How is that done?”
	“What, you’ve never seen a tattoo before?” she demanded, anger receding under incredulity. “Where’ve you been all your life--Ideire?”
	“Yes, as a matter of fact,” I answered. “You, on the other hand, are from somewhere else. What are you doing out on the roads like this?”
	“What does it look like I’m doing?” her mouth answered, while her mind said, Running away.
	“Running away?” I hazarded.
	“You’re a thurking genius,” she spat.
	“Where are you running to?”
	“What’s it to you?”
	“Nothing, only I thought you might want company on the road.”
	“I can take care of myself,” she said. 
	“Since you say it,” Aine answered.
	NightQueen looked at her as if she knew this was supposed to be insulting but couldn’t quite figure out how.
	“Whether you can or not,” I said, “it never hurts to have friends. Especially on this piece of road.” 
	“I can take care of myself,” she repeated.
	“Well then,” I said, standing up and shouldering my bag. “We’ll be going. I’m sorry we haven’t got anything we can share with you.”
	“Idair keep you,” Aine said without affection as we started off on our way.
	“Wait!” We turned to see NightQueen looking after us, uncertain now. “What do you mean, this piece of road?”
	“I mean that this is the vicinity of the Wheatlea Redemption Facility,” I said. “There are signs all along this stretch of road telling people not to pick up hitchhikers. They started about twelve miles to the south of us. I don’t know how close we are to the north edge.”
	Her mind cursed but she remained silent, irresolute.
	“Where are you guys going?”
	I pointed north. “Up the road till we get to Cretid City.”
	<Dhiaoc, are you sure we want her along?>
	<The poor child is out on her own and she wasn’t raised for it. Look at her.>
	<But she looks like a dark user’s apprentice.>
	I repressed a chuckle. <I should be so lucky.>
	<Dhiaoc?>
	<Look at those boots.> She glanced down at the thick rubber soles of NightQueen’s glistening hipboots, which left her perched uncertainly, tilted forward with her heels several inches higher than her toes. <And all the paint she’s wearing, and that little black dress. I don’t know much about Cretid fashion, but the spoor of affluence smells the same anywhere and she reeks of it. Lythril wouldn’t lay out a tenth of that on her apprentices, let alone for an outfit this impractical and indiscreet.>
	<If she’s not dark, then why is she wearing that ridiculous getup?>
	<Who knows? Maybe she thinks it’ll protect her.>
	“All right,” NightQueen finally said, tramping toward us through the leaves.
	It wasn’t a bad idea, really--now there were three of us, but NightQueen wouldn’t fit any of the descriptions, and whatever it was she was trying to look like it certainly wasn’t an Ideiren fugitive. We kept in the trees, waiting for the signs to stop popping up to our left.
	“So what’s in the bag?” she asked.
	“None of your business,” Aine said.
	“I didn’t ask you,” NightQueen snapped.
	“It’s still none of your business,” Aine answered.
	“So what’s in the bag?” she repeated, looking directly at me.
	“Aine’s right,” I answered. “It’s none of your business.”
	“Fine,” she muttered, and fell silent.
	“So,” I finally ventured, “what are you running away from?”
	“None of your business,” she snapped.
	“Fair enough,” I answered, and decided to talk to Aine instead.
	<Good job on the taunting, Aine.>
	<Thanks.>
	<Have you been practicing?>
	<No, just watching you. Does it really help?>
	<I’m not sure. I justify it on the theory that anything that makes you feel more confident has to help, whether or not it rattles them.> I shrugged. <Probably it depends on the user. Lythril is someone you can bait, if you do it right. Of course, that’s true for me too.>
	<How do you bait her?>
	<I’d say her biggest weakness is her vanity. She wants to be the sexiest, smartest, most powerful woman in the universe--really, really badly. You can sometimes get her to do things by making her believe it’ll make her look smarter or more powerful. Sometimes. She really is smart and powerful, though, unlike someone like Gwilna.>
	<And...sexy?>
	I shivered. <If you like the whole “sex meets death” thing. Some folks find that exciting. She makes my skin crawl, but she certainly never wanted for attention, while we were there.>
	<Men or women?>
	<So far as I know all of her actual lovers were men. Which is not to say that she didn’t seduce women.>
	Aine glanced distastefully at NightQueen. <Was she--like she is--from childhood up?>
	<You know, I don’t know much about that. She came to the scoil--under a different name, of course--from somewhere out in Kengda. They let us read her evaluation files before we went after her--the only woman she’d trained with, who was still teaching there, was Grinth. Grinth was impressed with her mindstrength but even very early on she had reservations about the strength of her character. Within a couple years there start to be complaints about her--petty grievance fnaa, some of it, but then there are some of her fellow-scoilin accusing her of abusing her mindstrength--everything from meanspirited pranks to more serious violations of their psychic integrity. And then in her fourth year there was a huge disciplinary hearing over something suspicious that happened to one of the other girls in her cohort.>
	<What, suspicious?>
	<Well, one fine day she went crashing through a Pharc window, and they’re thick enough you wouldn’t do that by accident. And she wasn’t the kind of woman liable to do that to herself on purpose. It was on the first floor, so she recovered, but it cut her up pretty badly.>
	<Idair’s hair. Who was it?>
	<Morat.>
	Aine skipped a beat while registering the shock. <I never knew.>
	<Neither did I, until we read the files. But there’s a pattern of scars on the back of her neck, if you look. I think that’s why she wears her hair short--she’s too proud to do anything that would make it look like she was trying to cover it up.>
	<So that’s why she hates her so much.>
	<That’s part of it. It was humiliating for her, too; she thinks should have been able to best her. But Morat was a year behind her, and anyhow you can’t be keeping your guard up twenty-four hours a day, particularly in scoil-->
	<Exactly!> Aine put in, horrified.
	<And I can’t be sure, but I think Lythril did it to her because she knew Morat was watching her and that it was only a matter of time before she was found out and bounced out. Morat’s got a keen eye for character.>
	<So what happened?>
	<Well, Morat accused Lythril of thralling her. Lythril refused to let the docent scour her when asked, but Morat agreed, and they concluded that Lythril was more than likely to have done it than not, and they expelled her.>
	<As well they should have.>
	<So after that, she went back to Kengda, but apparently her family wouldn’t have her at any price, and not long after she set up her own apartment in her home town the town council voted to run her off. So they did, and she went into the swamps, and the next thing anyone heard from her she was doing the work of the Dark One at an undisclosed location.>
	We tramped on in the leaves for a while, passing another one of those damn signs.
	<So...this must all have been...over thirty years ago.>
	<Let’s see...all of this was very old news by the time I saw the files--thirty years old, or thereabouts. She’s got to be fifty-five now, at least, and she came to the scoil at sixteen, and was gone by the time she was twenty. So put it thirty-five years ago that she was kicked out.>
	<That would make it...seven years before you were born?>
	<Just about.>
	<So she must have known your mother,> Aine observed.
	Obviously she thought this had occurred to me, but it hadn’t. I actually stopped walking.
	“You’re right,” I said, out loud by mistake. “She must have.”
	“What--she never mentioned her?” Aine said.
	“She doesn’t--” I saw NightQueen watching us, and switched back, picking up the pace. <She doesn’t talk about her scoil days much at all. But you’d think she would have mentioned knowing her, especially during the trial and so forth.>
	<But...you did say, didn’t you, that your mother was twenty-five when you were born,> Aine answered. 
	<No, you’re right. And she’d dropped out six years before that, and she went into the scoil at sixteen. So she would have been in Morat’s cohort--a year behind Lythril.>
	<And she never talked about Lythril?>
	<No--but then she never talked about Morat either. And come to think of it, Morat never had much to say about her. Neither did Grinth.>
	<Maybe she was shy.>
	<Shy? My mother?>
	NightQueen interrupted. “You gonna finish that sentence, or what?”
	“What sentence?”
	She just stared at me, and then gave up. “We haven’t seen a sign in a while.”
	“You’re right, we haven’t,” I answered. “Time to try the road, then.”
	Easier said than done. NightQueen went strolling blithely along the shoulder, with machines whizzing by her at speeds I could only imagine, the force of their passage blowing her hair and black clothes in the wind. But Aine and I hung back for a while, afraid to put ourselves in proximity to these hurtling, thundering hulks of moving death.
	“Come on!” NightQueen shouted at us over the noise of these speeding vehicles. “Do you want to get there or don’t you?”
	<Maybe we should just walk,> I said, looking longingly into the sheltering trees.
	<Anything that little self-crower can do I can do too,> Aine answered, striding purposely out after her.
	And so we straggled along, faced half-forward and half to the side, lifting our arms to point up the road when a car went rattling by us, in a motion that got less and less hopeful as the morning wore on. Evidently people were very busy in the Cretid Nation, or very mistrustful, or perhaps both.
	We were so used to being ignored that by the time the little blue contraption puttered to a stop ahead of us I assumed it was having some kind of mechanical trouble. But instead, when we got there, the person behind the steering mechanism had leaned over and was holding one battered blue door open for us. “You need a ride, ladies?”
	I looked into the car to see who we were dealing with. Like the women we’d seen on the VisionBox, the driver had long hair fixed somehow into a stiffened frame around the head, paint on the lips, cheeks and eyelids and prominent bones. But the skin under the paint was light brown, like the wood at the heart of a tilu tree, and the hair was close to black. Brown eyes with green flecks rested on mine for a moment, welcoming but wary at the same time.
	“We certainly do,” I answered.
	“Where you headed?”
	<Quick decision, Aine. Can this one be trusted?>
	“Cretid City,” I answered, while Aine deliberated and NightQueen said nothing.
	<I--yes. Is that right?>
	<If I weren’t here, you wouldn’t be able to ask; you’d have to know you were right. Are you right?>
	There was a little laugh from the driver, and then, “What do you want to go there for?”
	It was a little more definite this time. <Yes.>
	<We’ll go on that then,> I answered. 
	“Well, that’s a long story,” I said.
	Reddened-brown lips slid over white teeth into a smile. “Then you can tell me while we drive.”
	“Thanks very much,” I said, putting a hand on the door-edge. Aine began trying to open the rear door, whose fastening was apparently a cryptic thing that did not easily yield its secrets to her. “Come on, NightQueen--”
	“No,” NightQueen said, a little more emphatically than necessary.
	I sighed. “Excuse us a moment,” I said to the driver.
	“Of course,” came the somewhat warier answer.
	“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I whispered, a little fiercely.
	“We should wait for someone else.”
	“Who else? Rides aren’t exactly plentiful as hen’s eggs on this road this morning, in case you haven’t noticed.”
	“I don’t want to ride with him.”
	“Her,” Aine corrected. “You say ‘her.’”
	“Why not?” I cut in, before they could get started.
	“Because he’s a freak!” NightQueen whispered.
	“And you’re not?” 
	Aine had meant it perfectly sincerely--she thought, perhaps, that she had misinterpreted poor NightQueen, and that actually all Cretids dressed like this at a certain age and there was nothing wrong with her after all. But NightQueen didn’t take it well, nor did she appreciate the laugh I couldn’t stifle.
	“Not as much of a freak as he is,” she said, deliberately raising her voice.
	“You can be a cruel piece of work when the mood takes you,” I said, real anger coming through and quelling even Aine’s. “Stay here, I’ll see if I can undo the damage.”
	What damage? her mind asked, but I was already on my way back to the car. “Excuse me...lady of the car?”
	That face turned back on me without a trace of that engaging smile. “I beg your pardon?”
	“Not the right term of address, obviously,” I said, sadly. “You’ll have to excuse me, I’m not from around here. Do you mind telling me the name you use? I’m called Theamh.”
	“I’m Lara.” 
	“Glad to know you, Lara,” I said, taking the ringed hand offered and shaking it. “I just wanted to apologize for our traveling companion. She’s young, and like many of the young she’s foolish with it.”
	“No hard feelings,” Lara answered. “So are you coming?”
	“I’m sorry, Lara--you’re a generous woman, and it’s kind of you, but I don’t feel we ought to accept now; it will do you no good to be around the likes of her. She hasn’t got a helpful mind.”
	“I’ll say she hasn’t,” said Lara.
	“So thanks all the same, and good luck on your journey,” I said. 
	“Same to you, sweet thing,” Lara said, closing the door.
	I walked back to Aine and NightQueen, who were in full battle mode with all troops engaged.
	“You shouldn’t treat them that way!” Aine was shouting. “It’s bad for them!”
	“What, will I make him cry and smudge his makeup?”
	“That’s enough,” I said, cutting both of them short. “If your parents never taught you any better than to hinder a ransani, then be satisfied with the knowledge that you’ve lost us the only chance of a ride we’ve had today and let the shame of that keep you quiet. Let’s go.”
	All three of us trudged up the road in bad humor. NightQueen shot occasional furtive glances out at me, in which fear and fascination were mixed. Aine was still fuming.
	<Well it isn’t right,> she finally said, her head voice explosive with the anger.
	<No, it isn’t. But I don’t think she did her any real harm.>
	<So even when the person’s not around...>
	<Even then. I mean, maybe it wouldn’t matter, technically speaking, but if you want to have a helpful mind you just have to go all the way, I think.>
	<Have you ever done one? A ransa, I mean.>
	<There was one fellow up in Vinha who was training for it, but he never followed through.>
	<Why not?>
	<I couldn’t find a suitable partner for him. That’s always the hard thing. The only woman his age who was interested was all the way out in Dairc and their first meeting, up at Treehall, well, he liked her well enough in a lukewarm kind of way but it sort of soured him on the idea, and by the time he got home he decided he was well as he was.>
	<What about her?>
	<I think she ended up finding a partner in Dairc.>
	<Is it difficult? The procedure?>
	<No, the procedure’s pretty easy. The hard part is all the preparation--hard for them, not for you, of course, but it’s still a long difficult process. Which is why it made me so angry...>
	I stopped, because another car had come to a somewhat suddener stop up ahead of us. This one was black, sleek and shiny, with round curves and no top, so that we could look right in on the person behind the wheel. It was a man, with those same reflecting eyeshades, short blond hair waving back from his pink forehead and broad shoulders under a black cotton shirt with an open collar. NightQueen was already walking a little faster than she had before. We hurried to catch up with her.
	<Dhiaoc?> Aine asked, as we got close enough to see the ice-blue eyes that were under the shades he lifted off with one manicured hand.
	<Yes?>
	<Was I right? About the first one?>
	<Yes, you were.>
	<Am...> She faltered as she pulled up behind NightQueen, who was already engaged in conversation with him. <Am...I...right...about this one?>
	“So who are your friends?” he said, looking over her shoulder and out at us with a whiter and more dazzling smile.
	<FNAA,> I sent back as I got within range.
	<I’m right, aren’t I?>
	“This is Anya, and this is Thayuv,” NightQueen said, with a face that was unrecognizable it was so smiling and eager to please. “You think they can fit in the back seat?”
	The eyes raked over us, stopping longer on Aine. “I’m sure they could. It’s kind of snug back there,” he said, his eyes coming back to me, “but you two don’t mind being at close quarters, do you?”
	If there wasn’t so much else to be worried about, I’d have been much offended by the snide smile that went with his insinuation. “Oh, Queen of Air and Darkness?” I said airily, turning away from him. “May I speak with you in private, please?”
	She rolled her eyes. “Don’t go anywhere.”
	“Take your time,” said the man with the blue-blade eyes.
	We withdrew until I thought we were out of earshot. “You are not seriously going to get into a moving object with that at the helm.”
	“Why not?”
	Aine couldn’t believe it. Neither could I, until I reminded myself that she was a Cretid.
	“Can you not tell what’s in his mind?” Aine said. 
	“So what?” NightQueen said, with that challenging glare. “He’s a damn sight better-looking than the first guy I thurked.”
	“What he looks like isn’t the point,” I answered. “I mean, for you it is, perhaps, and that’s your affair. But the main thing is that his fantasy world is something you really don’t want to become part of.”
	“You just don’t like men,” she said, her eyes hardening. “That’s your problem.”
	“It’s true most of my close friends are women,” I answered, “but that doesn’t change the fact that this man is a killer of women and we are all well advised to stay the hell away from him.”
	She stared at me now with complete rejection, her eyes hard and closed. Her mind said, very plainly, Crazy bitch.
	“You watch your mouth, NightCrawler,” Aine shot back. “You’re the one who’s a crazy bitch, if you get into that thing with him.”
	Fear crossed NightQueen’s white face. She started backing up, slowly.
	“Aine, what did I tell you about Cretids and their minds,” I said wearily, starting after her. “Listen, NightQueen, it’s the truth I’m telling you, he’s not safe.”
	“Stay away from me,” she shouted, running toward the car.
	We trotted after her, but the door had slammed before we got near, and the wheels spun murderously out onto the road as the car went streaking into the distance with NightQueen in it.
	“Damn it!” I shouted after them. There was no way we could catch them now; speeder wouldn’t put us at a tenth of that pace. “All right, Aine, let’s go over it again. What are the things Cretids cannot do?”
	She fell into step disconsolately beside me. “Read, send, receive, link, enter, exit, wrap, animate.”
	“Why can they not do these things?”
	“Because their minds are different and besides they don’t train for it.”
	“And what do they call those among them that believe they can do these things?”
	“Lunatics,” she mumbled, looking down at her feet.
	“Which means that while we are among Cretids we should what?”
	“Try not to let them know that we can read, send, receive, link, enter, exit, wrap and animate.”
	“Very good,” I said. “Next time you get angry, ask yourself if you’re forgetting anything.”
	“I’m sorry, dhiaoc,” she said, blinking hard.
	The snuffle came next. I sighed and put an arm around her thin shoulders.
	“It’s all right, Aine,” I said. “We all forget things. Idair knows I do. Just try to be more careful, will you?”
	“It’s not all right!” she said, wiping one eye with an irritated fist. “Poor NightQueen is going to be murdered and it’s all my fault--”
	“So now it’s ‘poor NightQueen,’” I said, amused a little in spite of the gravity of the situation.
	“Nobody deserves death,” Aine wavered.
	“Well, maybe Idair will protect her,” I said doubtfully, looking up ahead.
	Strangely, that little blue car had pulled over onto the shoulder again--far away, but close enough to be recognizable as Lara’s. 
	“What’s stopped her?” Aine asked, when I pointed it out.
	“I don’t know,” I answered. “Idair, maybe.”
	We broke into a run, our feet pounding over the treacherous gravel that almost threw us several times. By the time we reached her Lara had emerged from behind the front of her car, which looked different this time. Its blue cover had popped loose and was pointing up in the air like some kind of triangular metal tongue stuck out over a set of grimy black teeth. Lara was wiping her greasy hands on a dirty rag and watching our advent with a curious smile.
	“We have to stop meeting like this,” Lara called, before we could greet her. “People will talk.”
	“Why’d you stop?” I called back.
	“Not by choice,” she answered. “You wouldn’t happen to be a skilled mechanic, would you?”
	“No, I wouldn’t,” I answered.
	“Pity,” she said, glancing down at the blue car with gentle sadness. 
	“It stopped on its own, then?” I asked, following her glance.
	“More or less.”
	“And you can’t make it go?” Aine said, much disappointed.
	Lara laughed, and put a hand on Aine’s head to ruffle her hair, something she bore patiently. “Look at you, so sad and blue. I sure will try, just to make you feel a little better.” She picked up some metal things she found in the pocket of one of the doors and headed for the hood. “Have to get somewhere in a hurry, do you?”
	“Yes, yes we do.”
	“So how’d you manage to ditch Little Miss Sunshine?” Lara called cheerily from behind the blue metal tongue.
	“She ditched us,” I answered. “She’s riding off north in a black car driven by a black-hearted bastard I wouldn’t trust as far as I could toss him.”
	“Oh dear,” Lara said. “Got a bad vibe from him, did you?”
	“We could tell he was bad news, if that’s what you mean.”
	“Well, she’s a tough little chipmunk, I’m sure she’ll be all right.”
	“I’m not.”
	Lara poked her head around the edge of the metal thing. “Ugh. That must have been some vibe.”
	“It was indeed unusually strong,” I answered, warily, as her head disappeared behind the metal again.
	<I thought they couldn’t read people,> Aine said. 
	<Me too. Maybe Lara’s part Ideiren?>
	“Sweet thing,” Lara called out, “will you get in there and turn the key for me, please?”
	“Key?” Aine asked blankly.
	“Yes, key,” said Lara, amused. “The metal thing that goes into the ignition. You know.”
	Aine clambered over to the steering mechanism, out of whose side there was indeed a small piece of metal protruding. Aine tugged it this way and that for a while, then finally got it to move. That shaking, humming sound we were now starting to associate with these vehicles started up. 
	“Faaaantastic!” called Lara, as the blue tongue dropped back into place. “Lara’s magic hands triumph over the machine.”
	Aine slid out of the car, looking at her keenly.
	<You think she means it, dhiaoc?>
	<About the magic?>
	<Yes.>
	<I’d be surprised, but I suppose it’s possible.>
	“Scoot over, folks, we’re ready to roll.” She looked at me. “You want to ride shotgun?”
	As she saw me looking a little spooked, she added, “I mean in the front seat. I just don’t like having the two of you in back, it’d make me feel like a chauffeur.”	Whatever a chauffeur was, she didn’t want to feel like one, so I got into the front seat and Aine slid obediently into the back. Lara took the helm, and we were out on the open road.
	“So this long story you were going to tell me,” she said.
	“Oh, I never said I was going to tell it to you,” I answered.
	“Well,” said Lara, with a pout. “I’m mighty disappointed. Will you at least tell me why you’re in such a hurry?”
	“At the moment,” I said, “the urgency you seem to be detecting in us is related to NightQueen, or as you call her Little Miss Sunshine. We’re hoping maybe you can overtake the car she’s in before something bad happens to her.”
	“Aha,” she said, with a sly little glance at me. “You want a drag race, so you’ve come to a drag queen. You’re a smart lady.”
	The car surged suddenly forward, its little engine straining at its seams. I don’t know whether it had seams or not, actually, but that’s what it sounded like.
	“So is that the term for it, up here?” I asked, because it seemed from her mind as if it was. “ ‘Drag Queen?’”
	“Well, of course to call myself a drag queen is misleading,” Lara said, zipping past several cars as her blue ship slipped toward the left side of the road. “I just can’t resist a really horrible pun.”
	I could hardly believe we were traveling this fast. Aine’s hand had gone white and rigid on the handle of the door. “Put the seatbelt on, hon,” Lara called to her, looking up into a small mirror attached to the front of the glass separating us from the beagi that were splattering into it. “You’ll feel better.”
	<I’ll feel better when we stop, and not before,> Aine answered, evidently afraid to open her mouth.
	<Now you know how I felt,> I answered.
	“I’m not, properly speaking, in drag at all,” she said, as another car fell behind in the dust. “Drag’s a costume, an illusion. This is the real me.”
	Lara, either out of consideration for Aine’s stomach and nerves or concern for her engine, slowed down somewhat and began drifting to the right. “I like that term you had for it,” she said, as Aine’s little prayer of thankfulness drifted up to Idair behind us. “ ‘A helpful mind.’ You make that up yourself?”
	“No,” I answered. “It’s a common term, in my field.”
	“Ah, now we come to it,” Lara said, taking delight in her curiosity. “What is your ‘field,’ exactly?”
	I sighed, looking out at the featureless expanse of gray pavement that was rolling underneath the machine like a noodle being swallowed. “You’ve been so kind to us, I don’t want you to think me rude,” I said, “but I’m afraid I’m not allowed to tell you anything about my field, unless you happen to be Ideiren by some chance.”
	Lara laughed. “Sweet thing, there’s a lot of things I’m not, and Ideiren’s one of ‘em.”
	“Ah well then,” I answered. 
	“So this car you’re looking for...”
	I described it as well as I could. Lara prompted me with a number of detailed questions, so that by the time I was through I thought she could probably see the car better than I could. And indeed that would seem to have been the case, because it was Lara who suddenly pulled the car over to the shoulder with a lurch that did terrible things to Aine’s tenuous inner equilibrium and began slowing down faster than I’d thought something could.
	“Is that the beast, up there?”
	The car had been pulled way over, almost in the trees. It was black, shiny, rounded, all the things I remembered, but it was also empty.
	“I think so, but...” 
	Aine, who had seized the first opportunity to open the door and stumble out into the fresh air, now fixed her gaze on a small oblong plaque that was affixed to the car’s flippant rear end. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it is, look.”
	I got out and looked. The plaque had letters stamped on it-- “FHB 123.”
	“FHB?” I asked, at a loss. “That means something?”
	“I don’t know, but I remember noticing the letters on his car when it was stopped by the side.”
	“Maybe that’s what these things are called,” I said. “Maybe that’s the brand name, or something.”
	“No, hon,” said Lara, who had stepped out to look with us. “That’s how the Man keeps track of us motorists. Each car has a unique plate, with different letters.”
	“Ah,” I said. “Well, so this is it, then. But where are they?”
	Aine strained her eyes toward the trees. Lara suddenly let out an exclamation of dismay.
	“Oh my God,” she said, putting one hand on my shoulder and tightening the grip. “I just caught on. Lord have mercy.”
	“Caught on to what?” I asked.
	“It’s the Fair-Haired Boy,” Lara said, shaking an excited finger at the plaque. 
	While Aine and I stared at the letters, she went on, getting more and more dithery and alarmed. “I was reading about this guy just the other day. There was this big deal over whether they were going to give him back his convertible after he got out. It was used in the commission of the crime, see--”
	“What do you mean, ‘got out’?” I demanded, starting to have, if possible, an even worse feeling about this whole situation than I already did.
	“He’s been doing time in the WRF for four years, they just let him out today. He should’ve gotten the Wire, but they got it reduced to manslaughter--”
	“Manslaughter,” I repeated, staring dully at that plaque. “That’s funny.”
	<You seeing anything, Aine?> I asked, as she moved toward the car.
	<No,> she answered. <Nothing.>
	“What else do you know about this ‘Fair-Haired Boy’?” I demanded.
	“He’s a sick puppy,” Lara answered. “Strangled his girlfriend in the woods, after doing Lord-all knows what to her first--”
	Aine had suddenly leapt to attention. “The woods, dhiaoc! I see them!”
	I looked. There was, of course, nothing where she was pointing--right now.
	“Chase it,” I called out to her. “I’m right behind you.”
	“What are you, crazy?” Lara shouted, as I sprinted after Aine. “This guy is a bona fide psycho!” 
	“You don’t have to come,” I called back.
	And indeed Lara didn’t. But Aine kept barreling through the trees, with me after her.
	<Talk to me, Aine. What are you seeing?>
	<He’s...he’s dragging her with him, he’s got...he’s got some kind of a gag on her.>
	As we ran, I looked for clues that would confirm her, and they appeared--broken branches, snapped twigs, dark patches of earth where the covering of leaves had slid out from under struggling feet. 
	<You’re on the trail, Aine, keep following them.>
	<It looks like her hands are bound with something.>
	<Is she struggling?>
	<She is--> There was a pause, as I registered Aine’s shock. <She’s not now; he must have knocked her out when he hit her.>
	Knocked her our of consciousness or into submission, one way or another. Aine suddenly stopped, holding a hand out to stop me. After a moment I saw what she was pointing at. The trees, tall and uniform with their early summer leaves spread out over us, still stretched into the hazed distance, but one of them looked different. It had a kind of bulge near the roots--a bulge about five and a half feet tall, and lumpy. 
	<You think it’s her?> I asked. 
	<What else could it be?>
	We crept up slowly. I let Aine take the lead because she was much better at this, and tried to be quiet. Soon I could make out the contours of the lump, and we were right--it was NightQueen. Her hands were bound behind the tree trunk, and her head dropped limply forward from her strained shoulders. I couldn’t tell whether she was out, or just weak.
	<Where’s the bastard?> I demanded.
	<You see him, over there.> Aine pointed to another tree; from behind the trunk, we could just see the edge of a black-shirted shoulder and one manicured hand, resting on the curved surface of the trunk, waiting.
	<Is he hiding from us? He’s seen us?>
	<Maybe.>
	There was a muffled noise from NightQueen, and her head lifted slowly, turning on its neck in bewilderment. And then a much louder, but still inarticulate noise of panic as where she was came back to her.
	“The sleeper awakes,” said the man with the blue eyes, stepping out from behind the tree so she could see him.
	<All right, so now what?>
	<You’re asking me?> Aine sent back.
	<Yes, I’m asking you. There’s two of us, but he’s obviously strong, and he’s killed before.>
	“Don’t worry,” he said in that false, soft voice, stepping up to her and running that hand down her white, pulsing neck. “I won’t hurt you...unless you ask for it.”
	<Plus,> I added, <I don’t want to use my fire because they’re both Cretids, and I can’t mindforce him because that’s a loss violation. So what’s the best plan of attack?>
	Aine thought, while that hand traveled down to NightQueen’s breast. She tried to squirm away from the touch, but there wasn’t anywhere for her to go. He crushed his trunk up against hers, pressing her back against the tree and his mouth into her neck.
	“So that’s how you want it,” he whispered, loud enough for us to hear. “Well then that’s what you get.”
	<Well, obviously the first thing is to get him away from her,> Aine said. <Then one of us can release her and one of us can wrap him.>
	There was a soft snick, and I realized that this monster was carrying a knife too--a long, cold one that appeared to mean business. And was right now slicing down the front of her black dress, cutting the fabric and grazing the skin underneath.
	<All right, lesson’s over.> I started maneuvering myself to a spot several yards behind him. <I’ll engage him, you release her.>
	He put his hands on either side of the tear he’d made, and ripped the front of her dress open. The cloth, scored unevenly, didn’t tear right away; he was still tugging at it when I stepped out of the trees behind him.
	“Hey!” I shouted. “Gleachinai!”
	Above the strip of gray plastic that had somehow been attached to her mouth, NightQueen’s eyes sparked suddenly with something other than fear. The man’s blond head turned, with a smile.
	“Well, look who’s come to watch,” he said.
	“Get away from her.”
	“This is a private party,” he answered, with that sick smile. “She doesn’t want your interfering. Do you, my little queen?” he said, looking back at her with a grotesque parody of a lover’s gaze.
	HELP ME. 
	I wouldn’t have thought she could project that far, but Cretids are loud and she was in great distress.
	“The last woman you killed was young too, wasn’t she,” I said. “Five feet three inches, one hundred pounds.” He was still ignoring me outwardly, but I could tell from his mind that I was getting to him. “A foot shorter than you and half your weight, but then I guess if you could take on anything bigger, you’d have had a better time in prison.”
	He swung around toward me with murder in his eyes. “I’m going to smash your skull in.”
	“With what?” I demanded. “A skull’s not an egg, you know. You’d need something pretty big and heavy. Are you carrying a hammer in your pocket, maybe?” I glanced down at his faded blue trousers. “Evidently not.”
	“You wanna see what I’ve got?” he said, taking a menacing step toward me.
	“No,” I answered, backing up. <Where are you, Aine?>
	<Behind her, working at the wrists. Whatever he tied her with, it’s gumming up the knife.>
	“You,” he said, his voice rising as he kept walking. “You are asking for it.”
	“What does that mean?” I shouted back at him, receding into the trees away from him. 
	I couldn’t let him get any closer. I bored into those cold blue eyes. And reading in them, as plain as words on paper, the plans he had for me, I clenched my teeth and started the wrap.
	His legs launched his body toward me, but without the use of his arms he was unbalanced and when I sidestepped him he fell heavily against the tree trunk. I backed away from him, trying to complete the wrap. His mind wasn’t that strong, but his arms were, and he was able to lurch back up to his feet, those hands clenching by his sides in an agony of impotent rage.
	<There!>
	Behind me I heard a soft ripping sound, and the traffic of scuttling feet. I couldn’t look around; the minute I broke my concentration he’d be loose.
	<Run like the wind, Aine, I don’t know how long I can hold him.>
	With a desperate heave, he tried to throw the knife at me, but his arm wouldn’t move far and it clattered uselessly into the leaves. He let out a roar of frustration. I had the arms now, and the legs down to the knees. I circled around him and started backing toward the road.
	<Where are you?>
	<At the edge of the road.>
	<Do you see Lara?>
	<She’s fiddling around with the front end of that black car.>
	<Get her attention, quick.>
	I had to go out backward, keeping my eye on him. He got further away, but not fast enough for my taste.
	“Come back here, bitch, I’m not done with you!”
	“Yes you are,” I shouted back. “Killer of women, torturer of the weak, may the spirits blight and wither every fiber of the cruel thing you call your body!”
	He was too far away now--the wrap was starting to slip. I had once again chosen an inopportune moment to taunt.
	I turned around and legged it toward the side of the road.
	“START THE CAR!” I howled.
	I didn’t look behind me--I didn’t want to know. I heard him crashing through the branches but as long as I couldn’t actually feel him behind me I would be all right. My breath was loud and my heart hammered in my ears but my legs kept moving, and eventually I burst through the last screen of branches onto the shoulder. 
	The door of the blue car was already open for me. I slid into the front seat and slammed it behind me.
	“Fnaa!” 
	This was from Lara, who was watching the man charge through the trees and across the shoulder. Lara reached across me to push down on something that was sticking up out of a hole near the door window. One of those reddening paws slammed against the glass.
	“See you later, sweetheart!” Lara shouted at his twisted face.
	The car leapt forward, slowly at first but with gathering speed. I turned around, looking over Aine and NightQueen’s worried heads through the glass at the back of the cabin. Through it I could see the man getting into his car...and the car sitting there.
	“One thing about taunting that you won’t learn from watching me,” I panted, as I watched the car get smaller in the distance. “You have to pick your moments.”
	“Why isn’t he coming after us?” Aine said, her voice shaking.
	“I don’t know,” Lara said over her shoulder. “Could be his car won’t start.”
	“Because...”
	“I always say,” Lara said, holding up with one hand a strange piece of metal that had the appearance of having been torn up by its roots. “A girl should never go out on the road without a basic knowledge of auto mechanics.”
	I smiled back at her. As she started laughing, I turned around to address myself to NightQueen.
	She was paler than before, if possible, except where the dark rings around her eyes had blurred and left tracks of dark smudge where the tears had welled out. Also, there was a bruise just under her left temple that was starting to swell and turn purple, and from which the red blistering lips of an open wound ran down the side of her jaw. One hand rubbed at the corner of her mouth, which was bleeding where some of the skin had somehow been ripped away. She looked sick and exhausted, shivering and clutching the ripped halves of her bodice together over the blood drying on that shallow track the knife had left.
	“You all right, NightQueen?” I said, trying to sound gentle.
	“I wanna go home,” she said, her eyes streaming.
	“Where’s home then?” Aine asked.
	“Nowhere.”
	“Gotta be somewhere,” Lara replied philosophically. “We all have parents, even me.”
	“I wanna go home,” NightQueen cried.
	“So we’ll take you home,” Aine said, patting her gently on the shoulder. “Just tell us where your family lives.”
	“I don’t wanna go there!” she shouted.
	“Then you don’t have to,” I said, a little bewildered. 
	There was a long silence with only the hum of the road and the sound of NightQueen crying.
	“Where do you want to go, NightQueen?” Aine asked softly.
	“Nowhere!” she cried. “They’re everywhere, there’s nowhere to go!”
	I turned around in my seat, baffled. Lara had extracted a long thin cylinder of white paper from a small box that was now lying on the seat between us. “I’ve been waiting for a good day to quit,” she said. “This isn’t it.” With one hand she placed it between her lips. “Can you give me a light, sweetie?”
	“Yes,” I answered.
	“Thanks a million,” she said. “The lighter’s in my purse.”
	I rummaged through the small, beaded bag she indicated. I found what had to be the lighter--a flat, rectangular thing with a hinged lid. I flipped the lid back and stared, wondering how I was supposed to ignite the flammable liquid that I knew was waiting inside it. It looked to be like some kind of miniature tinderbox, the spark being something that came from this little metal wheel that I tried to turn.
	“That’s it,” she said, glancing at me. “Just push the wheel real fast with your thumb, it’ll light right up.” Her eyes went out to the road. “I wouldn’t trouble you, but Lara needs both hands on the wheel right now.”
	I kept trying, but my own hands weren’t that steady either. The wheel turned ineffectively and the spark never came.
	The hell with it.
	I snapped my fingers and held the flame to the end of that long white cylinder, waiting for the tip to glow red.
	“Thanks, Theamh,” she said. “You’re an angel of mercy.”
	I took the flame back and put the lighter in her purse. Lara breathed in deep through the filled straw, then took it out of her mouth with two fingers and exhaled a stream of smoke through the open window.
	I kept my mind on her for a while, but it seemed to be true. She was so interested in the smoke she hadn’t noticed where the fire came from.
	“Some redemption job they did on that boy, huh?” Lara said, after a couple of puffs.
	I closed my eyes. “Idair’s mercy and wisdom. With mortals like that, who needs demons?”
	“It’s all right,” I heard Aine saying. “We’ll take care of you. It’s all right.”
	I looked into that little mirror up above us. NightQueen was curled up in the back seat with her head in Aine’s lap, and one of Aine’s hands stroking her shoulder quietly. “You’ll be all right. There now.”
	NightQueen’s chest shuddered in a long sigh, and her eyes closed.
	Lara’s eyes met mine in the mirror. She took a long, thoughtful draw on her red-tipped cylinder.
	“Men,” she finally spat, tossing the paper stick out the window. “And to think people ask me why.”
	Lara’s foot moved closer to the floor, and the car lunged viciously forward.

	“Are we having more car trouble?”
	I asked because Lara had moved the car to the right and was starting to slow down. We had been moving for hours, and the woods of evil memory had disappeared long ago. Now, the gray pavement river was winding between hard gray banks along which an underbrush of steel and concrete flourished in thick, bulbous profusion. Occasionally a lonely tree or two would fight its way through the blanket of false stone between the outgrowths, but more often than not what I took for a tree would turn out to be a metal or concrete tower rising up toward some platform or symbol from which, by some mysterious operation, a cryptic message projected. Some were letters, like the glowing golden “W” that we saw passing us more than once; others were symbols; some had a combination of both. It made Aine and me both thoughtful and quiet to be barreling down this darkening tunnel from which words were constantly leaping out at us, mocking us with their unreadable power and disappearing into the vagueness behind us. The sheer profusion of writing--on top of the towers, on the giant placards that bristled up on either side of the road, plastered along the sides of those sprawling square things hunched along the riverbanks. It was a strange thing, to recognize the words and speak the language and yet to be able to tell nothing of the purpose or power behind these fragmentary incantations. Were they warnings, challenges, invitations? Who put them up there? What for? Why were the Cretids so liberal with their power?
	Neither Lara nor NightQueen, once she woke up, seemed to pay much attention to them. The one time Lara commented, it was on one of the placards, which bore the message, “He’d Choose Life--But No One Asked Him.” Next to the words was an image I couldn’t understand. It looked something like the eel baby from my nightmare, but with a larger head and more distinguishable feet and hands. Lara looked up, spat some more of that smoke out the window, and muttered, “Bastards. How do they know?” When the eel baby reappeared on another placard, this one with the message, “Choice=Death,” Lara said nothing, but radiated an anger so intense I thought it better not to ask.
	Nobody had suggested going to the gardai about the Fair Haired Boy. Of course we couldn’t have helped with that--I was sure that third border guard was still hunting for us. And maybe NightQueen was on the run too--she looked furtive enough. But I couldn’t understand why Lara hadn’t mentioned it. Although of course if most of their gardai were anything like the Enforcer, that would explain why nobody with sense would want to tangle with them.
	“No, hon, we just need to refuel,” Lara said. “The car does, anyhow, and so do you. Your stomach’s been rumbling for the past hour and a half.” I sighed. “So where do you want to eat? The world of fast-food lies spread out before us.”
	“You should know,” I said, “that Aine and I aren’t carrying any money.”
	“And here I had you pegged as millionaires,” Lara answered. “How about you, Sunshine?”
	“I’m out of money too,” NightQueen said, looking dully out the window.
	“I know that, genius,” Lara said. “It’s on me. Where do you want to eat?”
	“WorldBurger,” NightQueen answered promptly.
	Lara made a face. “WorldBurger all right with you two, or do you have a different preference?”
	I could tell Lara wanted to go somewhere else, but I didn’t know any other place to suggest. “Since you’re paying, you ought to choose the place,” I said.
	“None of that,” Lara answered. “A gift’s a gift, no strings attached. Otherwise life is worth nothing. So you want WorldBurger, huh?”
	NightQueen nodded.
	“Well, you’ve had the hardest day, you should get your way,” Lara said, pulling the car onto one of the road-river’s tributaries.
	Aine looked at NightQueen, who still bore the signs of her recent ordeal. <Dhiaoc?>
	<Yes?>
	<Do you think...we might use some of the uisce on her? Those cuts must hurt.>
	<I guess...just try not to let her see the sparkle.>
	Aine went through the bag and found the bottle. The stopper popped, and a trickle of uisce poured out onto a wadded-up cloth.
	“What’s that?” NightQueen asked suspiciously.
	“It’s water,” Aine answered. “I thought you’d want to get cleaned up some before we go anywhere.”
	NightQueen took the cloth from her and started dabbing at her wounds, looking at her reflection in the darkened window of the door next to her. The sight of her bruised face seemed to startle her, and she shuddered a little as she wiped the dried blood off.
	When she handed the stained rag back to Aine, she didn’t seem to be comforted much. I knew the water was probably helping with the pain, at least some; but she was obviously feeling kinds of pain that had nothing to do with those cuts. Of course an attack like that will leave its invisible mark; but there was still something about the darkness of her reaction that I couldn’t understand, and that seemed also to puzzle Aine.
	“Here,” Aine said, taking her outer shirt off and giving it to NightQueen.
	NightQueen put it on, buttoning it all the way to the top. Now that the water had carried away some of her paint with the blood, and the buttoned check shirt was hiding her ripped bodice, she looked different--more lost, and more forlorn.
	When we got out of the car Aine stood frozen for a little while, the way a bird will sometimes after hitting a window. I was disoriented too--there seemed to be nothing to navigate by. The ground was nothing but a patchwork of flat, hard and dark--it changed from gray to darker gray to black to buff and back to gray again, and those things that I was just starting to recognize as buildings leapt up out of it in clusters, and then there were ranks and ranks of these traveling machines, sitting stationary and gleaming under the bleaching glare of their artificial lights. That golden “W” was everywhere--on the building we had stopped in front of, at the ends of the piece of road we had come up on, even visible inside the building through its lit windows.
	“Come on,” Lara called, heading off toward the temple of the W.
	We followed them inside, glancing around hesitantly. Lara and NightQueen went to stand at the end of a line that stretched back from a counter behind which three or four people about NightQueen’s age and wearing the golden W insignia on their breasts and on their paper hats were moving back and forth.
	<Oh, I see,> Aine said. <It’s like the refectory.>
	That made sense. These people were initiates into some kind of order, whose power was symbolized by that W, and staffing the communal kitchen was part of their training. I looked up at the placards they had posted above the counter to see what I could find out.
	Each message had an image next to it--presumably for people who couldn’t read the words. These were, as far as I could tell, descriptions of the different manifestations of the power of the WorldBurger, which seemed to be what the W represented. He came to them in many forms. There was the Big Blue Burger, whose attributes were zest, spiciness and abundance; then there was the Double-Your-Burger, which had twice as much of that “big beefy taste” as his immature and less powerful avatar, the Basic Burger. Then there was FishBurger, who I suppose appeared to them in rivers and in the ocean. These avatars were waited on by attendants, who were never far from their side, and often appeared with the Burgers in the images, called “fries.” 
	Which was all very interesting, if cryptic, but as we moved up in line I was starting to wonder where food came into this picture. So far, the people who were walking away from that counter with their trays all appeared to be followers who had lined up to purchase devotional items--small figurines made in the shapes of the various manifestations of the WorldBurger and his (I had the feeling it was a he; they never mentioned its gender) attendants. But there was definitely a smell of cookery about the place--the odor of frying, mainly--so there was hope for us.
	“Welcome to WorldBurger,” said one of the scoilin. “How can I help you?”
	Lara looked up at the placard. “Well, NightQueen, what’s your poison?”
	“I want a Big Blue Burger,” she said, and then added a furtive and embarrassed “Please.”
	“How about you two?” Lara asked, looking back at us. “Hey. Earth to Ideire. What do you want for dinner?”
	“What have they got?” I answered, still not sure exactly how this worked.
	“Well, they have burgers, fries, and various pseudo-ice-creamular products.”
	This meant even less to Aine than it did to me. “You choose, Lara--I don’t care what it is, as long as it’s not meat.”
	 The moment of startled reaction Lara had was replicated in the scoilin behind the counter, who had heard me, and in NightQueen.
	“You don’t eat meat?”
	“No--I’m sorry, I guess I should have said.”
	Lara chuckled. “All right, then, I’ll take two Big Blue Burger combos, and two extra Tonics.”
	“You want fries with that?” asked the scoilin.
	“Oh yes,” Lara said, emphatically. “We want fries with that.”
	Lara handed what must have been banknotes to the scoilin, and the scoilin handed back a flat tray loaded with those effigies and a number of paper cups with little plastic hats on them. The hats were a clever thing--it kept the liquid from sloshing out as the tray moved. 
	We passed away from the counter between ranks of devotees seated around tables in clusters. I was too busy trying to look like I knew what I was doing to pay much attention to them--except for one group whose eyes followed us as we passed, and whose minds sent off faint echoes of what I’d read from the Fair-Haired Boy.
	Aine noticed it too, and was looking back at them as we sat down. They were all in their twenties, all men, and all with the same almost-bald heads on which a dusting of growing-out hair was barely visible. On reflection I realized it was Lara they were staring at. Another set of unhelpful minds.
	<So...what about our dinner?> Aine asked as Lara and NightQueen selected one of the tables and sat down. 
	<Maybe they bring it out to us, after we’ve contemplated their images for a while?>
	She was doubtful about this, and so was I. We slid down the strange slick benches. The tray held four of those cups, four little boxes for groups of the attendants, and two round objects wrapped in blue paper, on which were painted a number of irregularly shaped green-brown blotches and that ever-present W.
	<Oh, look, dhiaoc, it’s a map of the world.>
	<What is?>
	<The paper. See, there’s our island-->
	But we didn’t have time to finish contemplating, because NightQueen had ripped the paper off, exposing the Big Blue Burger figurine.
	“Aha,” I said. “Now explain to me what--” 
	NightQueen put this object into her mouth and sank her teeth into it. She tore off a bite and kept chewing, looking down meditatively at the mutilated thing in her hands. And I realized that I had not been imagining the smell of frying that clung faintly around this round, wilted, oozing object.
	“Idair’s teeth, that’s food?” Aine cried, in amazement and horror.
	“Sort of,” Lara answered, amused. NightQueen just shot Aine a dirty look and took another bite. “Here’s a survival tip, kids--anything that has ‘burger’ in the title is going to involve meat of some kind.”
	That’s meat? Aine demanded, as she stared at the dark brown sliver sandwiched in between the doughy rounds of bread. But this time only I heard her.
	“So what is there here that isn’t meat?” I asked.
	“The fries,” Lara said, shoving over the little golden attendants standing at attention in their paper boxes. “Go nuts.”
	NightQueen stopped chewing long enough to say, “It’s all right--they used to fry them in animal fat, but they changed because people were complaining.”
	Hence the name. “What are they, before they’re fried?”
	“Pratai.”
	Aine heaved a sigh of relief and grabbed a fistful. As she was bringing it back, she suddenly shot a frightened look up at me. “I’m sorry, dhiaoc--I should let you--”
	“Please, don’t worry about it,” I answered, taking some for myself. <And don’t call me dhiaoc in front of the Cretids.>
	We munched on our fries, washing them down with occasional drafts of the dark, sweet stuff in the cups. It was far from what we were used to, but we were trying to resign ourselves to that for the duration.
	<It’s just I was hungry.>
	<Of course you were, Aine. It’s all right.>
	While we ate with little concern for taste or dignity, NightQueen stared abstractedly at the remnants of her Burger.
	“I never thanked you,” she said, still not looking at me.
	“Don’t mention it,” I said.
	“How...” She looked furtively at me as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer. “How did you know?”
	“Know what?”
	“That he was...a killer of women.”
	She said it as if it wasn’t a phrase she was used to. “I just...” I shook my head. “I don’t think there’s a way to explain that to you that won’t make you think I’m insane.”
	“I won’t,” she said. I laughed. “No. After this, I won’t. You were right.”
	I smiled. “I was right once, so now you’ll believe me no matter what kind of crazy thing I might say?”
	She looked down at the table, and I remembered this was not a time to be teasing her.
	“I’m Ideiren,” I said. “I mean, surely you’ve figured that out. But we...some of us, anyhow, who’ve developed the skill, we can read people.”
	Lara laughed. “Uh huh.”
	“Believe, don’t believe, it’s true all the same. We looked at him, and...”
	Aine picked up where I trailed off, her earnestness seeming to convince Lara more than I could. “We could see what was in his mind, when he was looking at you,” Aine said. “Visions he was having.”
	“What do you mean, visions?” Lara demanded.
	“I just--it was in there, what he wanted to do to her,” Aine said, facing her defensively.
	“I saw the same, when he was charging for me,” I answered. “It’s disconcerting, to see your own head smashed in, in the eye of someone else’s mind.”
	Aine started. “Oh, dhiaoc, you never said. How awful.”
	I shrugged. “That was just the end of it,” I answered, although the confrontation had bothered me more than I was letting on. “There was a whole gallery of pictures leading up to that. Fortunately he never got started working on them.”
	“What...” NightQueen swallowed, but returned to the question. “So what were the pictures of me?”
	Aine took a long draw on her drink, and tapped her fingers on the table. 
	<What do I tell her, dhiaoc?>
	<Not everything has to be said. But what you say has to be true.>
	“I think you know enough about that,” Aine finally answered, looking at her. “If I told you the rest, it would make you more upset, maybe, but it wouldn’t tell you anything you don’t already know.”
	<Good answer!>
	She didn’t let the smile that brought to her dawn fully on her face, because NightQueen was still looking at her, and she didn’t want her to think that anything about this story was something anyone would smile at.
	Lara was looking at her in amusement. “So where in the City are you and Zoltan the Magnificent headed?” Lara asked.
	“We don’t know, exactly,” I said. “Just drop us off wherever’s convenient to you. We’re already imposing so much.”
	“Well, what are you looking for?” she continued.
	“We’re looking for the headquarters of DeVane Pharmaceuticals,” I said.
	Lara chortled. “You and every man in the Nation.”
	“From what I’ve seen,” I observed, taking another gulp of my drink, “your Nation needs Erysin like I need a hole in the head.”
	“But why are you making a pilgrimage to DeVane Pharmaceuticals?” Lara pressed. “Elderly relatives back home, or what?”
	Aine was watching me to see how I would handle this. “I want to find out who’s behind it.”
	“Why, you thinking of launching a protest?”
	“Not exactly,” I said, a little shortly. I was feeling edgy and irritated--if she were as sensitive as she seemed to be, she should have known I didn’t want to talk about it. Whereas instead she seemed obsessed with returning to the subject.
	“It’s just not one of the things people tend to come to the City for,” Lara said. “The Tower, or the port, or any of our fine houses of art and culture, or the Lurid District, these are the things most tourists are interested in.”
	“We’re not tourists,” Aine said, starting to seem a little irritable too.
	“Oh sure,” NightQueen said with a laugh.
	“Well we’re not!” Aine snapped.
	<Take it easy, Aine.>
	“Then what are you?” NightQueen asked.
	“None of your business,” I retorted.
	“Play nice, children,” Lara said warningly.
	“Children my gleacha,” I brought back. “I’m twenty-eight years old.”
	Lara pushed back from the table. “You know what? I’m going to go use the restroom. When I come back, maybe you’ll have morphed back into human form.”
	I felt bad, but I was also still feeling irritated--jumpy, as if my nerves were waiting for an enemy to come around the corner. Reaction from all the stress of the past few days, maybe, finally setting in. Except that Aine was feeling it too, fidgeting in her seat, fingers drumming anxiously on the table.
	“What’s the restroom?” I asked quietly as Lara walked away.
	“It’s where you go to the bathroom,” NightQueen whispered back.
	This was unenlightening. Aine took another gulp from her drink and started looking around.
	<Dhiaoc, I have to go.>
	<Well, that must happen fairly often here, they must have a privy.> “Say, NightQueen...where does one go to void around here?”
	NightQueen looked back at me like she was about to die of embarrassment just thinking anyone might look at her and think we were together. “That’s what I said. You do it in the restroom.”
	“Thank you,” I said, gritting my teeth, and walking faster than I had to up to the sign that said ‘Restrooms.’
	Aine was right behind me. <I feel weird, dhiaoc.>
	<Me too.> I looked up at the artificial lights. <You know what it is, probably--the electricity. The wires aren’t exposed, but I can still see ‘em.>
	<But the electricity’s never bothered me before.> We had reached a little alcove from which two doors led. We went in through the one marked “women.”
	Once the door swung to behind us things got worse. The light was unnaturally bright anyhow, and was bouncing off a series of gleaming basins ranged along one side of the room, making the glare even worse. On the other side was a set of metal doors, swinging gently inward into what looked like a line of horse’s stalls. 
	“So where’s the damn...” I began, looking doubtfully at the basins.
	“In here, I think,” Aine said, poking her head into one of the stalls. “There’s...there’s little individual ones, set off by the doors.”
	I found one of them and settled down gratefully, closing the door. My stomach was a little more active than I would have liked it to be, and my nerves still felt stretched and frayed. It was a couple minutes before I stood up to struggle back into my trousers. I had the fastenings almost tamed when a sudden whooshing sound made me jump almost out of my skin.
	The water in the privy was suddenly, unaccountably, disappearing down the pipe, of its own volition. From a few stalls down I heard a similar noise, and a startled yelp from Aine.
	“This place is possessed!” she cried, emerging rapidly from her stall.
	“It’s got to be machines,” I said. “Who knows what they--”
	But it seemed like Aine’s theory had more merit than I’d given it credit for, because from behind the wall behind the stalls we started to hear voices, loud and raised in anger. And then thumps.
	“What do you think it is?” Aine hissed, clutching my arm in heightened terror.
	“Come on, Aine, you should be over this by now,” I said, throwing her hand off me irritably. “It’s coming from that other room, the one behind this one. Let’s go look.”
	We left the room and stood for a minute outside the other door, hoping maybe we’d imagined it. But then there was another thud, a whooshing sound, and another raised voice.
	<All right, I’ll go first.> I took a deep breath and leapt in boldly, pushing the door wide so Aine could follow.
	“Teir abhai--whoops!” I cried, bringing myself up short as a group of quite mortal-looking men--the almost-bald ones who’d been at that table--turned their shaved heads to look at me. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude, I’ll just--”
	“Hey, ladies, a little help here--” 
	It was Lara’s voice, coming from one of the stalls, and it didn’t sound happy--especially the way the sentence ended with a soft thud and a groan, as if she’d been hit in the stomach.
	“All right,” I said warily to the men as Aine took up her position next to me. “I don’t know what you have against her, but she hasn’t done anything to you. So why don’t you just let her out of there before something happens.”
	“Lookit this,” said one of them. “Coupla fe-males coming to help out the she-male.” They laughed, unpleasantly. There were four of them in the room, and it looked like two of them in the stall with Lara, which must have made things pretty crowded in there. 
	“Let her go,” Aine shouted, that anger flaring up. “You should be ashamed!”
	“You’re right,” said the one closest to us, who seemed to be the leader. “I’m a baaaaaad boy.” The others laughed, and I heard the sound of pummeling from inside the stall.
	I started walking toward the stall, but the three lackeys ranged themselves in front of it. “This is the men’s room, lady,” one of them said, with a nasty smile. “You better get out before something happens to you.”
	“Stand away from the door,” I said, my voice rising faster than I wanted it to.
	He snorted, leaning against the door and crossing his arms. “Make me.”
	“Boy,” I said, staring back at him. “You look mighty tall for a two-year-old.” I reached for the handle, pushing him to one side.
	His colleague on the other side shoved me away, into the third door-blocker, who shoved me back toward the fist that was shooting out toward me from the other man’s shoulder. Which I was glad to see coming, since it meant I could finally start fighting. I dropped, letting it sail over me, and drove my fist into his groin.
	The room exploded. With this many attackers it was impossible to sort out who was planning what, so my mental advantage was gone, and anyway I was in the grip of such a rush of panic-fed nervousness that I doubt I could have concentrated. Through the melee I did get one good look at Aine, who had flown into battle with me. At the moment, she was backed up against the sink, and in a practically imperceptible motion that knife she had in her waistband flew into her hand and her hand to one of their throats.
	“Put that down before you kill someone!” I shouted, and in the moment of distraction took a punch in the ribs that sent me winded and hurting against the metal spine of one of the stall dividers. An extra attacker had now appeared from nowhere--or, more likely, from the stall with Lara in it--and now two of them were trying to pin me to the wall, no doubt so that the third would be able to really concentrate on beating the fnaa out of me. Meanwhile Aine, who hadn’t listened to me, had moved into the corner and was keeping her two attackers at bay with the knife, which she was slicing about with in a flurry of wild-eyed motion that looked at the same time skillful and desperate. But there were two of them, and the inevitable moment came when she sliced at the left one and the right one landed a fist on her head, knocking her into the basins and then down to the floor. With one thug on each arm, stretching me out for the third man’s blow, a flash of that fight with the lurers came rushing back to me in red fury, and I lost it.
	“Stand back from her, you sons of bitches, or you’ll wish you had!”
	There was a laugh from the leader, who was over near Aine. “Break her jaw, Bayl.”
	Aine’s second attacker drew his fist back.
	Flame roared out of both of my hands--hotter than I’d wanted it to be, hot enough to leave blisters along the cheeks of the two men holding Aine down. It didn’t touch them--I could still aim, even if in my agitated state I was miscalibrating the fire itself--but it sent them recoiling, clawing blindly away from the searing heat, and into each other. Meanwhile the ones who had been holding me, and had seen this stuff erupt from very close up, dropped me as if I were molten iron and stumbled backwards cursing in fright. With little tongues of flame still flickering over my hands, I battered on the door of Lara’s stall, which had been bolted shut from the inside. 
	“Open this thurking door!” I shouted.
	There was a clatter as if Lara had reached for the lock and been prevented. I was in no mood. I shot a bolt through the open space between the floor and the bottom of the door, between the two heavy black boots that didn’t belong to Lara. “Open the thurking door or I will!”
	There was a panicked scrabbling at the door, and the bolt slid back. I slammed the door back into the almost-bald, then grabbed him by the collar of his grimy white shirt and hurled him into the middle of the room. He started slapping frantically at the little flames that scrolled along the collar of his shirt where I’d hauled him out by it. Lara was huddled up in the corner, disheveled, bruised, and staring at me with a look of utter terror.
	“You all right?” I demanded, still sort of in shout mode.
	She just shook her head, unable to frame a response.
	I whirled around, the flame from my hands cutting an arc through the air. “Come on then!” I yelled, as the group in the middle of the room cowered away from the heat. “If you want a firefight I’ll give it to you, because you bastards picked the wrong day to thurk with me!”
	They said nothing, staring at me with drained white faces. In the silence I noticed, for the first time, a loud, repeated bleat that appeared to be proceeding from somewhere near the ceiling. From a group of little pinwheels that stuck out of the plaster above us, rain started falling.
	“How about it, leader of cowards? You want a piece of me?” I shouted at the leader.
	“N...no...” he stammered, watching the water fail to put out the flames on my hands. 
	“Then get out of here,” I said. “And don’t let me hear you telling this story, or see your ugly gleachas again, because believe me I can make it a lot hotter than this.”
	 Six damp, almost-bald men exited the room as fast as they could. I took back whatever fire was still flickering about and went to help Aine, who had risen on her hands and knees and was shaking her wounded head.
	“Did they hurt you?”
	Aine took a careful breath. “I’m all right. They teach us how to bend with it, you know, so it doesn’t damage so much.”
	“I’m glad you remembered how to do it. My hand-to-hand skills are not what they used to be, sadly. At least you’ll get some practice up here, since these Cretids appear to have this mania for beating the fnaa out of each other.”
	She reached an arm across the floor to pick up the knife. “I’m sorry about the knife, dhiaoc, I just--I forgot myself.”
	“So did I,” I answered, helping her up.
	“Damn, girl!”
	This was from Lara, who had finally emerged from the stall and was looking at both of us with that stunned shock. She took in us, the drizzle from the sprinklers, and the puddles forming on the tiled floor, and shook her head in disbelief.
	“All right, that’s it!” she finally said. “No more caffeine for you two!”
	The outer door swung in, and the hatted head of one of the WorldBurger scoilin appeared. He looked around, and then the head withdrew as we heard him address someone outside.
	“Yeah, it’s just another false alarm.” The door opened and the scoilin, accompanied by what looked like his diaoc, appeared in the doorway. 
	“Sorry, folks,” said the diaoc, looking at three bedraggled, disheveled women. “We’ve been having some trouble with the smoke detector in here. Would you like a towel?”
	“No thank you,” said Lara, sweeping past him out the door.
	We followed her out. Despite the stares that fastened on us, Lara paid no mind to the other devotees, or to NightQueen’s inquisitive stare. All the way out to the car she kept up that regal bearing, an imperiousness of manner and disdain of rabble that made me wonder if she really were a queen, in some little out of the way province of the Cretid Nation where they still had royalty.
	“What happened?” NightQueen hissed to me as we piled into the car.
	“There was kind of an incident in the restroom,” I answered quietly, since Lara seemed not to want it brought up.
	“Understatement,” Aine said. 
	“Don’t start with me, please,” I answered, frightened. “I’m obviously not responsible for my actions right now.”
	Lara started it up, but we only went a short way, to park outside some kind of concrete island from which sprouted a metal box filled with dormant fire--the same stuff I’d seen in that “lighter,” or almost. And as, in my jittery state, I withdrew from contemplating the horrific spectacle of Lara picking up a hose and pouring this liquid fire into a hole in the back of our traveling machine, I huddled up in the corner made by my seat and the door and closed my eyes, trying to get my pulse to stop racing.
	“Caffeine,” Aine repeated, rubbing pointlessly at a spot on her arm. “Is that on the list?”
	I pulled it out of the bag and ran an eye over it. “It’s down here at the bottom with a question mark next to it.” I folded the list up and tucked it into the bag. “I guess he wasn’t sure if it would affect us.”
	“I guess we are,” Aine replied.
	“You can’t have caffeine, you can’t eat meat...” NightQueen said, looking at Aine. “What can you eat?”
	“Practically nothing, it seems like,” Aine answered.
	Lara got back into the car, slammed the door, and peeled out back onto the gray river road.
	After we had driven in silence for a few minutes, I turned to Lara. “Do you mind if I ask you something?”
	“Mind?” She gave a little hollow laugh. “Why should I mind anything?”
	“It’s just, well, I’ve never done this myself, and I don’t know how it works up here, but...since you are a ransani...why were you using the men’s room in the first place?”
	“Oh,” she said, pulling another long stick out of the carton, “I walk like a woman, but I void like a man, and I hate it how they stare at me when I come out of the stall...”
	I waited for her to put the stick in her mouth, but instead she brought her hand back to the wheel with the stick unlit as her chin started to crumble.
	“Of course,” she said, trying to laugh while she started to cry. “They’re going to stare anyway, no matter which one I use it’s the wrong one...”
	The cry won over the laugh, and she started weeping for real, snuffling as the tears made tracks in the already-running paint on her cheeks. 
	“I’m sorry,” was the next thing she said. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t...I’ll be all right...I’m sorry.”
	“Iandar and Cailte, why should you be?” I said, wishing she weren’t too busy steering the car to look at me. “Six muscleheaded thugs just tried to stuff you down a privy. I’d cry too.”
	NightQueen heard, and a flicker of remorse reached me from the back seat. Lara kept right on crying.
	“I’m so stupid,” she said, striking the wheel with her stick-holding hand. “I saw them staring at me, and I should have just been smart and waited to go until we left.”
	“You went to go use a public privy. How is that stupid?”
	She shook her head, blurring the tear tracks. “You don’t understand.”
	“I understand that you were in there minding your own business and harming no one, and a gang of six bastards went after you in a completely unprovoked attack, and you’re sitting here blaming yourself for the fact that your country is apparently packed to the gills with maniacs who have nothing better to do than go about increasing the power of evil.”
	“You might just as well say,” Aine put in, coming to my assistance, “that it was NightQueen’s fault she almost got killed by that marbhfeicann, just because she was stupid enough to get into the car with him. When anyone can see that...”
	She trailed off, looking at NightQueen, who had now burst into tears. 
	“It is my fault,” she wavered, curling up in a miserable ball in the angle of the back seat. “I asked for it.”
	“You asked him to tie you up and cut you open?” Aine demanded.
	“But I--I went into the woods with him--”
	<Aha.>
	<What is she talking about, dhiaoc?>
	<She went with him on her own will, up to a point--that’s why you didn’t see anything at the car. The memory didn’t get strong enough until she started resisting.>
	“But that means nothing,” Aine returned, looking from me back to NightQueen. “He wanted to hurt you and frighten you and see you bleed, and he would have seen to it no matter what you did. He’s the one ought to be whipped over the border and into the Zone to be torn apart by the Lurkers.”
	“Nobody deserves death,” I remonstrated.
	“You’re right, dhiaoc,” she said, subsiding. “I guess I’m still partly caffeinated.”
	“I’m the stupid one in this vehicle,” I said. “Flinging fire around in front of Cretids who wish me ill when I’m wanted on both sides of the border--now that’s stupid.” Lara glanced at me silently. “And when I wasn’t in full possession of my faculties, at that. I might have hurt someone.”
	Lara looked at me as if that sentence was the most incredibly absurd thing that had happened all day.
	“I’m sorry about the knife,” Aine answered.
	“It’s all right, nothing terrible happened,” I said. “But you may as well give it back to NightQueen.”
	Aine handed it to a still-crying and now confused NightQueen.
	“They surely didn’t teach you knife-fighting at the scoil.”
	“I learned it from my brothers. Things get rough on the water sometimes.”
	“I bet they do,” I said. “But you see now how it’s not much help to us. A weapon isn’t that useful unless you’re prepared to do permanent harm.”
	Lara had been following this conversation in silent misery. But now she finally had to ask.
	“So do all Ideirens spontaneously combust when they’re threatened?” she said, trying to get that light note back but not reaching it. “Is that some weird anti-predator thing you all have evolved down there?”
	“No,” I said.
	“So this is just your particular talent?” she went on.
	“No,” I replied, and then reflected that as far as proselytizing went, the damage was pretty much already done. “I’m a shriia. Have you never heard of shri, up here?”
	“It’s something to do with that cult down south, right? Idairism.”
	I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant, but the description didn’t sit right with me.
	“It’s magic,” Aine put in from the back seat. “Shri is magic. The fire comes to you once you get your power.”
	“So are you...are you...a shriia, too?” NightQueen asked Aine, subdued now.
	“Not yet,” she answered. “The shriia’s training me.”
	“You know, Aine,” I said, “if this whole incognito thing is going to work at all, you’re going to have to start using my name.”
	She didn’t respond to this. I sighed.
	Lara kept her eyes ahead of us on the road, shaking her head a little as the tears kept coming.
	“Anyhow,” I said, bringing my hands together and trying to sound cheerful. “I’m under a very strict injunction not to proselytize, so the less said about it all the better.” As soon as I’d stopped speaking a heavy silence fell, diluted only by the hum of the road beneath us and the soft sounds of weeping from the front and back seats.
	I didn’t know what to do about this, and Aine was at almost as much of a loss. Of course it’s upsetting to be set upon and attacked, but the danger was over and there hadn’t been any permanent harm. There was something else besides fear of harm driving all of this--something they were sharing now, different as they were, that we were shut out of.
	Lara’s face was swelling up now, on one side, just like NightQueen’s had, and there were bruises on the side of her neck that her hair didn’t hide. And looking at the water still dripping off the ends of her hair, I realized that part of what was puzzling me was a kind of humiliation that seemed out of place to me. After all, we had beaten them. 
	“It’s not your fault,” I said, for some reason.
	Lara shook her head. “You don’t understand.”
	It was true, I didn’t. And it was also true that Lara really wanted me, or Aine, or NightQueen, or someone, to understand.
	“Here, Lara, pull over,” I said.
	“What for?”
	“There’s something I can do that might make you feel better, but I can’t do it while you’re driving.” Lara glanced at me. “And don’t look at me like that. I took a vow of celibacy.”
	“I didn’t say a word,” Lara murmured, as the car glided over to the shoulder.
	I twisted around in the seat so that I was facing her. <They’re making you all specialize in your second year, aren’t they?>
	<Yes,> Aine answered.
	<So you wouldn’t have learned this one,> I answered. <It’s really a Comings and Goings thing. But it will come in handy, so you may as well try this with me.>
	While I sent Aine the instructions, I attended to Lara, who was waiting with a combination of interest and skepticism. “I can’t explain exactly how this is going to work; you don’t really have a framework for it. But will you just humor me, and trust me that if it does no good at least it will do no harm?”
	“Honey, I’ll try anything once,” Lara answered, with a trace of her former spirit.
	“How about you, NightQueen?” Aine asked.
	“What do you want me to do?”
	“Just to look at me,” Aine said, “and let things happen, when they happen.”
	She didn’t get it, but she trusted Aine’s desire to help her. “All right.”
	<All right then, here we go.>
	Looking into Lara’s brown-green eyes, I sent Aine the words as I said them so that she could sing it with me. Of course, the two of them wouldn’t know Old Tongue from a hole in the ground, but that’s what’s magic--as long as you and Idair understand the words, it doesn’t matter if they don’t.

	this should not surprise you, daughter
	watch a pebble break the water
	the surface heals without a stain;
	underneath, the rock remains

	jagged fragments, shards of metal,
	one by one the memories settle
	silent pain builds silent grief
	watch the rock become a reef

	sail along the mirrored surface--
	all concealment has a purpose;
	never notice, never feel
	till the reef strikes on your keel.

	so, one spark ignites the furnace;	
	so, one thread pulls on the skein;
	let it rumble, let it ravel
	link by link unwind the chain.

Lara’s eyes were big and dim in the light-shot darkness of the night behind her. It was hard to know what they were seeing, or if this was even working. Until she suddenly reached out to take one of my hands, and it came.
	So much hit me at once that it was difficult to sort out, and difficult to keep my mind on the words. A hurt, baffled shame that was almost as old as she was, as if she had never known anything but the sense that she was wrong, monstrous, out of place. The pain of a heart that wanted love and got none, that continued to be surprised and staggered by rejection no matter how often it happened. The terrifying, sanity-threatening recognition of a wide and impassable gulf between her truth and everyone else’s. The high cost of refusing to accept what felt like a lie but what they told her was true.
	
	hidden fever bursts in blisters
	one wound has a hundred sisters
	make one pinprick in the skin
	all your blood comes rushing in

	so of course you try to smother
	any pain that wakes the others
	too much now lies buried there
	too much you’re afraid to bear

	a shriia’s word cannot be broken;
	speak then what cannot be spoken--
	share the burden out with me,
	give me half and be half free

	so, let burn what is ignited,
	ravel out the pain and fear,
	take the chance to have the nightmare
	it won’t kill you; I am here.

 Aine was struggling with NightQueen’s burden now, just as I was finally beginning to understand how many battles Lara had fought, how many losses she had turned into victories, how lonely it is to be the only person who believes in the being you have made yourself. And what it was for anyone living in that cold-hearted place to believe that by insisting, by resolutely clinging to the truth that was so vibrant and living inside herself but turned to ash and scattered in the gaze of the others, she was doing right. How hard it was not to believe that this kind of resistance was some kind of...
	Sin.
 	There it was. The word Idair hadn’t wanted us to learn.
	And there Lara was, still crying, holding onto my hand now with both of hers, and there was NightQueen, crying in a different key with her arms shuddering in the air as if she were trying to fight off demons with her fists alone, and there were Aine and me, our faces streaked with the tears of a bitter grief that we shared but still could not quite understand, waiting for the weight to lift.
	It happened, slowly. The sounds of weeping slowed down; the whirlpool of emotion churned slower and softer until breath came easy to them and Lara looked up at me, with the wonder of someone who knows something has changed but can’t tell how, and saw passing away from my face the echo of her history.
	“Damn,” she said, softly this time.
	“So it worked?” I said, drying the corners of my eyes with my sleeve. “You feel better?”
	Her voice was a little raw when she answered, but she said, as if she were surprised to find it true, “Yeah.” 
	“Aine, how are things on your side of the border?” I said, turning around in my seat.
	She was still recovering from the shock of whatever NightQueen had transferred to her. “I...I’m all right, or I soon will be, anyhow.”
	“Well then,” I said to Lara. “How many miles to the City?”
	“We’ll be there before you know it,” she said, starting up the car.
	<Dhiaoc?>
	<Yes, Aine?>
	<How much do you know about this Lord of theirs?>
	<Not much. Why?>
	<I think...> Aine looked out the window. <I don’t even know if this is possible, but I have the idea...that he did NightQueen great harm.>
	<Anything is possible,> I answered.
	And it seemed that way, with this little blue machine hurtling itself down the narrowing tunnel of light that led from the nowhere we were flying through up to Cretid City.

X.
Bright Lights, Big City
	
	“Well, this is it, ladies,” Lara said, shutting the engine off. “Home sweet home.”
	I got out gratefully, opening the door for Aine, who was still having trouble with the latch. NightQueen crawled out the other side, her face rumpled and lined where she’d slept on it.
	The car sat quietly on a strip of pavement next to a square building in a row of square buildings, all looking almost identical. “So this is the City?” I asked, looking down the street with its even-sized lots and their identical dwellings.
	“Not quite,” Lara said. “That’s the City, over there.”
	We looked. Between two buildings we could see a narrow stretch of water, above which twinkled what looked like fifty constellations packed into a three-inch space.
	“Lara’s too poor to live uptown,” Lara said, lifting a hinged lid on the back of her machine and taking out two traveling cases, “and too smart to live downtown, so here I am on the Southshore. It’s not much, but it’s yours while you need it.”
	“Thank you,” I said. “You need help with those?”
	Lara winked at me. “You’re such a gentleman.”
	“I resent the implication,” I said, reaching and then stopping. “Uh...there’s no money in there, is there?”
	“Sadly, no.”
	“You can never be too careful,” I said, taking the heavier one.
	Up a very narrow staircase that led between beige and nondescript walls we followed Lara, NightQueen bringing up the rear. 
	“It’s a phone booth,” Lara said, putting a key in the lock of the last door we stopped at, “but it’s worth it for the view.”
	The door opened. And indeed, the first thing we noticed was the wall of window that faced us, and through which we got a much better view of the City.
	“Iandar and Cailte,” Aine said, moving toward the glass as if she were a bird facing a snake.
	From the windows we could see a wide expanse of water, and on the other side of it those constellations, but now spread out in their panoply all along the bank. High towers, low banks, the sloping lines of impossibly high roofs above fantastically tall and narrow walls, blocks and clusters and strings of lights in all manner of color and brightness.
	“It’s beautiful,” Aine said, putting her hand tentatively on the glass.
	“From this distance,” Lara answered. I heard the door close, but we were still looking out at this thing that seemed like a vision of the other world sprung sudden in full glory upon out mortal understanding. Despite NightQueen’s somewhat harsh commentary on our rubelike fascination, which I was willing to believe she was trying not to let us hear.
	I didn’t take in the rest of the room until I heard a strange man’s voice coming from one of the corners. “You have three new messages.”
	It startled both of us, this sudden intrusion of a voice that was definitely masculine even though not obviously human. Lara was standing by a counter on which a flat rectangular object was sitting, from which the voice seemed to be coming.
	There was a beep, and then a different voice, equally masculine but sounding somewhat more human, spoke from the box. “Lara, this is Harina--I know I probably missed you, but that buyer from GlobeTurners out in Coalslip called back at the last minute. If you get this message while you’re still down there, will you call Maysie at--”
	“Got it, went there, made the sale,” Lara said, pressing a button on the machine and walking past a partition into a small space that seemed to contain a lot of the room’s electricity. I was learning more about this stuff and how I read it--the closer the lightning was to the surface, the more intensely I hated being near it. In this building, like in the WorldBurger temple, the lightning wires were hidden inside the walls, so the distress, while still noticeable, was less acute. But this section that Lara had walked into, which held one of those big food wardrobes as well as a number of other metal boxes with hinged lids, seemed to be eating this power at a pretty good clip.
	“...hey hey Lara Lee, it’s just little old Sonya calling to chat...” It was a different voice now, a little higher in tone and with different inflections, but difficult to assign a gender to. Lara listened to the voice, nodding but never responding.
	<What the hell is it?> Aine answered, staring at Lara, who was now smiling at the machine as if it were not only human, but a human she really liked a lot.
	“Hi, it’s me.” Obviously she knew who this third person was, and was glad to hear his disembodied voice. “Hope you had a good trip to the hinterlands. Call me when you get back to civilization. Bye, babe.”
	“Aw, he remembered,” she said, looking fondly at the little box with its green winking eye.
	“End of messages,” said that first, tinny voice from the inhuman beyond.
	<Well, let’s not stand there staring at it like we’re hicks from nowhere who’ve never seen nothing,> I answered, turning around. <It’s a machine that plays sound, like the VisionBox but without the pictures.>
	<Yes, but...well, never mind, I’m sure we’ll learn,> Aine said, looking around at the rest of the room.
	It was about the size of my living area at home, with white walls on which she had hung various framed portraits of people in various kinds of outlandish garb. There was a couch, a table, and a lot of shelving crammed with all manner of things I couldn’t really identify, except that one of them looked like it might be a VisionBox. NightQueen was surveying the place with us, and looking a little concerned.
	“So where’s your sleeping area?” I asked.
	“You’re standing in it,” Lara answered, opening the food wardrobe and removing a bottle. “The couch folds out. We can fight each other for it later tonight.”
	“It’s got a great view,” NightQueen said.
	<Progress,> I sent to Aine, who nodded. We both knew that what she was really thinking was that it was too tiny a hole even for one, let alone four. 
	“Doesn’t it, though?” Lara answered. “Help yourselves, ladies. There’s beer in the fridge. NightQueen, I’m sure you’re legal age?”
	“Of course,” NightQueen said, giving her a lie that Lara seemed to have been expecting.
	“That’s what I thought, as mature as you are.” She picked up a black object like the one we’d seen the woman use on the VisionBox to talk to the Black Tiger. 
	“You want one?” NightQueen asked, as she took a bottle out of the wardrobe. “It’s the good kind--imported.”
	She handed me the bottle. I looked at the label and handed it back.
	“No thanks.”
	<Alcohol,> Aine said, having glanced at it with me. <That’s on the list.>
	<We may as well commit it to memory,> I said, sitting down on the floor and taking the list out.
	“Hi, honey.” Lara was talking into the rectangular thing now, smiling and lowering her dark lashes as if whoever it was were there to see her. “Did you miss me?”
	I turned my attention to the list. It was long.
	<So should we make it a song?> Aine said, daunted by the long catalogue of unfamiliar words.
	<Probably. Here, we’ll work on it together.>
	In the background, I heard Lara’s voice. “...well, it sure was interesting. I got us a lot of new clients, so that’s good.” 
	While we worked on versifying the list, Lara’s responses would occasionally drift into my consciousness. “...no, honey, not tonight, I’ve got company...no, just a few of the girls...really, it’s been a long trip and I’m pretty beat...”
	<It doesn’t scan very well, this alcohol.>
	<It’s a mnemonic, Aine, not a spell. Don’t kill yourself trying to make it art.>
	NightQueen was dividing her time between watching us pore over this list and eavesdropping on Lara. “...no of course not, honey, you know I’m always happy to see you. Well then...sure, I’d love to. Except there’s the girls...” And then a laugh. “Oh, honey, I’m not sure that’s a good idea. These girls are country. And I mean deep thurkin’ country.”
	<First time anyone’s called me country,> I said, as we wrapped up work on the song.
	<It stings at first,> Aine answered. <But now, I’m proud to be country.>
	<As well you should be.>
	“Well then,” Aine said, handing me the list. “See we’ve missed anything out.”
	While NightQueen watched, Aine went into the song.
	“Catalogue of Mind Poisons To Be Avoided.

	Since you come from land bucolic,
	Shun the beverage alcoholic:
	Any kind of wine or beer,
	Brandy, gin or sweet liqueur--”

	“That’s not how you pronounce that,” NightQueen said.
	“So what, if it makes the rhyme work,” I answered. “Keep going.”

	“Beware of whiskey, cold or hot,
	It sounds like uisce, but it’s not;
	Known as rotgut, scotch, or rye,
	Either way, touch it and die.
	Grain alcohol may have no taste,
	But just as surely lays you waste.
	Drink nothing served to you at table
	If you have not seen the label,
	And, if you would travel far,
	Nothing served you at a bar.
	If you can’t identify it,
	It’s far safer not to try it.”

	“OK, that’s it for the liquids,” I said, as Lara put down the rectangle and drifted over to watch. Aine cleared her throat and went on.

	“Now, to carry on my tale,
	Things that you should not inhale:
	Lo, the five-leaved hempen weed--
	Smoke thereof you must not breathe.
	Though they treat it like a joke,
	Fear like plague its pungent smoke.
	Smoke of what they call tobacco
	May or may not drive you wacko;
	But, even if you safely could,
	Smoking it does no one good.
	Powdered whitedust also goes
	Swiftly up the Cretid nose;
	It will kill you faster than
	Any of these others can.
	Glass, when simmered up in water,
	Makes a steam that would soon slaughter
	All Ideirens who did breathe it;
	Therefore should you simply leave it.
	True it is what said Idair:
	‘All that you should breathe is air.’”

	“That covers the airbornes,” I said. “And the final category?”

	“Here’s the warning you don’t need,
	Still, it’s worth it to pay heed:
	Things that are forced through the skin
	With a doctor’s tube and pin.
	There are names for all of these,
	Which friend Darin calls IVs;
	But no need to run them through,
	I won’t touch them, nor will you.
	An injection is no joke;
	Any fool who tries to poke
	Any needle whatsoever
	Into me, she is not clever.
	Stay away from Tonic, tea,
	Also what they call coffee;
	It’s not safe to get all wired
	And go setting stuff on fire.
	Caffeine and shri, they are not friends;
	Here the catalogue now ends.”

	“I think that’s everything,” I said, folding up the list and tucking it away.
	Lara gave us a round of very sarcastic applause, which NightQueen seemed to appreciate.
	“It’s beautiful,” Lara said. “You should send that to the Enforcers, they could put it out on the VisionBox for the edification of teenagers everywhere.”
	“You could call it ‘Things To Say No To,’” NightQueen suggested, and they both started laughing.
	“I especially like the part about not inhaling,” NightQueen wheezed.
	Aine and I watched them collapse in a fit of helpless laughter, falling about on the couch. 
	“It’s not funny,” Aine finally said.
	“Oh, but it is,” Lara replied, sending NightQueen into more hysterics.
	“Oh Lord,” NightQueen gasped, “they should have you do announcements for the Parents’ Temperance Union, they really should. ‘Lo, the five-leaved hempen weed...’”
	<Never mind, Aine,> I said, walking with her off to the window. <An artist is seldom appreciated in her own time.>
	<But it isn’t funny,> she answered. 
	<Not to us it isn’t. I don’t think they understand what it’s like for us.> I sighed, looking out at that vast empire of light. <Which means of course we can’t trust them to look out for us. We’re going to have to be very careful up here, Aine.>
	“Say,” called Lara. “Speaking of living large and getting high, are you three up for a little taste of City nightlife?”
	“Tonight?” NightQueen asked, a little surprised.
	“It’s just my sweetie wants to go out on the town, and he suggested I bring you along,” Lara answered. “It’ll be fun. I’ll show you the club scene, we can go dancing...”
	“Dancing?” Aine said, her eyes lighting up hopefully.
	“Oh, you’ll have a great time,” Lara said, her own excitement spilling over and coloring her view of the world and us. “Give me half an hour to put my face back on and get all gussied up and we’ll start.” Lara practically floated off into what looked like a large closet, and returned with a wide assortment of what I assumed were garments, which she tossed onto the bed. “Oh dearie me, whatever does a girl wear to the ball in these modern times...”
	<How about a little freagair, Aine?> I said, as I turned away from the spectacle of Lara choosing an outfit.
	<I was going to ask,> she said. 
	<In Idair’s name and in the name of the spirit which we will never know.>
	<Bi I go deo.>
	<Ceard a bfhuil tu ag iarradh?>
	<Ta me ag iarradh shri.>
	<Ask and I answer.>
	<It’s hard to know where to start...> Aine ran through all the things that had happened in the past week. <Do they have spirits up here, like we do?>
	<That’s one of the uafach freagair. They used to--when Idair was here, you know, she found them in the north and in the south too. Now, you never hear of people being possessed or overtaken or attacked up north, but who knows what that means. I think there must be spirits up here, and in the other places too. Why would they choose us, out of all the people in the world, to deal with?>
	<Why can the Cretids use mind poison and we can’t?>
	<Their minds are different.>
	<Were they always different?>
	<You’re just determined to hit all the uafachs tonight, aren’t you?>
	“Ladies, give me your opinion on this one,” Lara said, turning to us.
	A little irritated at being interrupted, I glanced around. Lara was wearing a tube of practically skin-tight black material around her skinny hips, the hem of which came about halfway down her thighs. On top of this she had on a red sleeveless shift of some kind on which were sewn a great quantity of sparkly things that shimmered as she turned her thin brown shoulders in front of the mirror. Her legs were encased in hose the like of which neither of us had ever seen--a latticework of black lines, forming a net that was more hole than fabric, with a visible black seam running up the back of each leg. Perched as she was atop a pair of shoes whose heels were murderously high, her gleacha outlined in sharp detail by that clinging, rubbery skirt, she was terrible to behold.
	“So, Theamh,” she said with an anxious smile. “What do you think?”
	“Oh,” I said, waving my hands before me in a helpless effort to ward her off, “please don’t ask me a direct question.”
	She looked back, and nodded as if agreeing with some unspoken thing I had said. “Too much?”
	Not enough, was Aine’s horrified answer. I feared to respond.
	“Back to the drawing board,” she said gaily, turning around and tugging at the skirt.
	<Where were we?> I resumed, still a little in shock.
	<Uh...about the mind poisons.>
	<Right. Well, see, when Idair was here, there were no mind poisons. They weren’t developed until about four hundred years ago. There was this outbreak of what seemed like plague in Amst and along the coast of Kengda, and we found out that it was caused by people drinking this stuff they’d bought off Cretid traders. So either the Cretids were always different, or we used to be the same and then once they rejected Idair and what she had to teach us, their minds gradually changed from being used differently. Personally that’s the theory I-->
	“Oh, here we go,” called Lara, waving at us to look. “This is it. This is the fnaa. Don’t you think?”
	This time it was a one-piece black thing that covered her from her shoulders to several inches above the knees, just as clingy but not as shiny. The hose were different too--a white lacy pattern scrolling around her legs, with the same seam up the back, and held up by garters that were visible under the short skirt.
	“Your...your garters are showing,” Aine ventured, hesitantly.
	“I know, that’s the point,” Lara said. 
	She’d covered up those painfully sharp collarbones with a gauzy white scarf of some kind, and instead of the open-toed heels was wearing high-heeled white boots made of what looked like it had been an animal hide at one point in time.
	“I like this one better than the first one,” I said, grateful for the shelter of comparatives.
	“Ah, we’re making progress.” Lara turned to NightQueen. “How about you? You’re not going to waltz around in that ventilated undertaker’s suit. Go in and pick out something nice.” NightQueen disappeared, with a trace of excitement, into the closet. “And for you...” she said meditatively, looking at Aine.
	“Oh no,” Aine said, backing away. “No, no thank you, I’m fine as I am.”
	“Theamh?”
	“I’m sure there’s nothing in there that would fit me,” I answered.
	Lara glanced over my figure. “You’re probably right,” she said, sighing. “Well, there it is. Here, you shouldn’t have to just stare into space while we play dress-up,” she said, pressing a button on a black thing that made the VisionBox leap into life. “Should be about time for the news. You look like In-Depth Report types.”
	Images flashed confusingly by, and finally the screen settled. There was a man sitting behind a table--old, with gray in his hair and a sallow, lined face.
	“Tonight on In-Depth, startling developments south of the border could lead to changes in the Nation’s Ideiren policy. Nyra Blain has the story.”
	<What do they mean, startling developments?> Aine asked.
	<Let’s find out...>
	The screen was showing the inside of a large, square, ugly building without much furniture, inside which a number of people were huddled in groups. They had the air of waiting for something--a kind of disgruntled but resigned impatience. In the foreground there was another woman in that suit they all seemed to wear, talking at us.
	“It began, they say, with a knock on the door. Ely Hunden, her husband, and her two children, had just settled down in their Amranthian hotel room when they got the first sign that their Ideiren holiday was about to be cut short.”
	Now suddenly there was a close-up of a woman’s face--one that I recognized. It was the mother of that child who had been writing on the windows back in the shriin. Only now she was sitting with her husband and her children on a bench, surrounded by luggage, inside this building.
	“There was this knock on the door, and my husband went to open it...and it was the hotel steward telling us there was an emergency and we should pack our bags and report to the lobby as soon as possible.”	Back to the newswoman’s face. “And then what happened?”
	“Well, naturally we assumed it was a fire or something, so we packed up and went down to the front hall, and the manager told us that all the Cretids were being evacuated.”
	“Did they tell you why?”
	Ely shook her head in bafflement. “No, they just said that it was an emergency and we would have to leave the city before they sealed the gates.”
	Aine and I moved forward closer to the screen as Lara and NightQueen went on chattering in the background.
	“They were told it was for their own safety,” said the newswoman, who was now roaming about the building, pausing between the disconsolate family groups. “They were bundled into horse-drawn carriages and dragged over steep mountain roads in the middle of the night. For many Cretid families, their week of rustic relaxation suddenly became a night of terror.”
	Now the face on the screen belonged to that truculent Jak fellow. “Of course they’re driving like maniacs, and we can’t see a thing out the windows. We don’t know whether they’re going to throw us down the mountainsides or shoot us all or what. And then all of a sudden we’re thrown out onto the road and told to walk the next mile and a half to the crossing.” He chortled angrily. “I’ll tell you, Ideirens have a lot to learn about customer satisfaction, that’s for sure.”
	And now the woman was standing outside the building, which I realized must be at the checkpoint, but on their side. A huge metal vehicle had pulled up near the building and people were being loaded onto it. “So two hundred Cretid tourists are waiting here for buses to take them through the Zone and back home. But even once they’ve all been returned to safety, the questions will remain. Why the sudden evacuation? What is this ‘emergency?’ Ely Hunden thinks she might have some idea.”
	Back to Ely’s face. “The whole city was in an uproar. We were being herded through the streets downtown and through the carriage windows we could see people rushing by with swords, pikes, torches, all kinds of things, yelling ‘Amranth and Idair!’ and jumping around. And when I looked back, after we got through the gates, there were these figures in white standing up there on the walls, like they do at sunrise.”
	“So you think it has something to do with Idairism?”
	Ely nodded. “We had a run-in with one of the priestesses a few days after we got to Amranth--she was really jumpy and irritable, I could tell there was something wrong.”
	My gleacha you could.
	Well, she’s trying to show off for the news people, Aine said soothingly.
	“...then a few days later we heard all this uproar in the town square, and we asked our chambermaid what it was, and she said something about them announcing the election results. And then the next day after that this happens.”
	“As usual,” said the newswoman, now standing in front of a Cretid-built building, “contacting the Ideiren authorities has proved difficult. I was able to speak with one of the shriias operating the checkpoint, who was unable to tell me anything about the Amranth evacuation except that it had not been authorized by the central government. She also informed us that the election of the head priestess had gone smoothly and that it was highly unlikely that it was in any way connected to the disturbances in Amranth. She said, and I quote here from my interview with her, which of course I couldn’t tape, ‘Amranth has always been the most regionalist and anti-Cretid province in Ideire, and it was regrettable, but inevitable, that the presence of the tourist trade would someday spark a grassroots backlash. We hope that once order has been restored the Amranth city council will offer an apology and indemnification to any Cretids who were inconvenienced.’”
	“Well,” I said, bringing my hands together. “Whoever that was, we know she’s dark.”
	“...expect some answers when Ideire’s newly appointed ambassador to the Cretid Nation arrives in Cretid City--”
	The picture suddenly disappeared.
	“NO!” both of us shouted in unison, turning around to where Lara stood with the little zapping thing. “PUT IT BACK!”	“Yikes,” Lara said, hitting the button and restoring the image. “Who knew you’d already become couch pratai.”
	It was the man at the desk. “Thanks, Nyra. Coming up: trouble in Plenana. Can the Council of Plenana’s Indigenous Peoples make good on their threats, or is their rhetoric as empty as their bank account? When we come back.”
	“Never mind,” I said, sadly.
	We stood up, since they seemed to be ready to go. I shouldered my traveling bag.
	“You don’t need to take that with you, do you? We’re coming back here,” Lara said.
	“That’s as may be,” I answered. “Where I go, it goes, I don’t care how short the trip is.”
	“Suit yourself,” Lara said airily. “Come on kids, let’s taste the wonders of public transportation.”	
	
	“Lord,” Lara said, looking at us from her seat across the aisle. “Did somebody die?”
	“What?” I asked, having been too preoccupied to pay attention to her. If the electricity was annoying inside Lara’s apartment, down here in this metal canister that was shooting through a tunnel carved, Lara assured me, through very solid rock underneath the surface of the bay my awareness of the fork-tongued menace was so powerful and omnipresent as to be practically incapacitating. Meanwhile Aine’s problem with caves proved to be transferable to large manmade underground burrows, so she wasn’t especially happy either. Let alone the fact that the tube we were sitting in was jammed with other human forms, many of which were dressed even more strangely than Lara and NightQueen, all of them with noisy minds. Or that this thing was rocketing along through the tunnel with stomachroiling speed and nerve-shattering noise.
	“What’s the matter?” Lara shouted back, as the thing lurched. “You look like you’re at a funeral.”
	I grasped with difficulty the fact that she was wondering why we both looked so worried and dejected. “Bad news from home,” I called back.
	“What news?”
	I shook my head. “It’s too complicated to tell here.”
	I returned glumly to my contemplation of this evening’s broadcast. Indeed there were unanswered questions, but there were also a number of things that seemed opaque to the newswoman but were crystal clear to me. For one thing, Barant must have “won” the election. If she hadn’t, her crony up at the border wouldn’t be lying about it having gone smoothly; she’d have tried to make it look like the procedure was irregular in some way. For another, there was only one reason why Amranth would seal its gates. They were getting ready for another siege.
	The threat wasn’t going to come from the north this time, though. If Ely had told the truth, and those were Amranth’s shriias up on the walls watching the caravan wind away from them through the mountain, that could only mean one thing. They were expecting Barant, with that faction of the Council that was behind her, to come up there after them, and they were going to fight her there. 
	If it were only Barant and her minions, then that would be one thing. But if the city leaders had been involved--and they must have been, only they could have organized and authorized that evacuation, or ordered the gates sealed--that probably meant that Barant wasn’t working on her own. This had somehow, through someone’s machinations, become politic, and Amranth was closing its gates not just on the dark Council, but on the Seated Leaders who were allied with it.
	Civil war. 
	It came from Aine, who was staring furiously down at the floor in an effort not to crack with the strain of the smallness of the space and staleness of the air.
	The beginning of it, I answered. Unless we’re lucky.
	There was a horrific screech, and the car shook as if it were going to come apart at the seams. But as it happened, it was only the doors that slid back, as the motion stopped. Lara grabbed us by a hand each and propelled us through the opening until we were carried along in the stream of human bodies and human minds up the moving steps and out into the night air.
	Thank Idair, Aine said, taking her first real breath since we’d gone into the bowels of that thing. But where are we?
	I wasn’t sure either. We were standing on that hard, paved stuff they called concrete, looking around at a lot of other concrete, at cars moving slowly or quickly down the roads in fits and starts, and at giant square monsters of wall and window shrieking up into the sky to stab at the fainthearted stars.
	“Welcome to Midtown!” Lara cried, throwing an arm out in a dramatic gesture of abandon. “The big bloody heart of this big bloody city. Come on!”
	I abandoned the attempt to keep track of where Lara was taking us. There were no landmarks anyhow. Just more and more of steel and gray and black and gunmetal and people and cars and smoke. My mind didn’t register much of anything but a confused mix of darkness and blinding light until we stopped in front of a hole in the sidewalk. When I’d adjusted I realized it was the top of a flight of steps that had been sunk into the earth, at the bottom of which was a door with a sign reading “The Third Term Bar and Dance Floor.”
	“He said he’d wait for me outside,” Lara said, looking at a small round medallion strapped to her wrist. “Of course, I’m only half an hour late, so he probably won’t be here for another...well, speak of the devil, here he comes.”
	There was a sudden leap in Lara’s mind that would have tipped us off, even if she hadn’t, to the fact that the tall, lanky, brown-skinned man who was walking toward her was, in her estimation, something very special. I had to admit he dressed well--at least by Cretid standards, with a neat set of grays and browns that matched well and fit his form. Lara hesitated for a moment as she looked at him, as if deciding how to greet him, and then opted for the more understated approach, gliding up to him and placing a light kiss on his cheek while stroking his shoulder with one delicate hand. We waited by the railing that ran around the hole, warned by something in her manner to leave her alone for this moment.
	NightQueen’s mind was a little perturbed. After saying nothing for as long as she could, she finally turned to us.
	“So it doesn’t bother you at all,” she said, challengingly.
	I shrugged. “I’ve never wanted ransa for myself, but then I had the fortune to be born a woman,” I answered. 
	“No, I mean...” She was embarrassed, but determined. “I mean...watching two men, together.”
	“First of all,” Aine said, still a little short-fused after her bout with claustrophobia in the tunnel, “she isn’t a man, and you should stop calling her one, or it will hold her back.”
	“And second,” I said, “although I personally find men unappealing in general, I’d rather have them happily thurking each other than turning out like that twisted thing we met with in the forest.”
	NightQueen looked shocked, more because of the phrasing than the content. “Didn’t you say you were a shriia?”
	“Don’t repeat it in public,” I snapped. 
	“But...isn’t that like being a preacher?”
	“I don’t know. What’s a preacher?”
	“Never mind,” she said, suddenly withdrawing.
	Lara was now leading her man over to make the introductions. “Ladies, this is Iriq, my knight in muted earth tones. Iriq, meet NightQueen...”
	“Charmed, I’m sure,” Iriq said, taking NightQueen’s reluctant and black-nailed hand with a smile.
	“And these are our two guests from foreign climes, Theamh and Aine.”
	Aine remembered how to shake hands. “Glad to know you, Iriq,” I said. “Lara has been very kind to us, I’m glad to know she’s got someone to be kind to her.”
	Iriq was hard to read--Cretid though he was, he was also a man, and a more complicated and reserved one that that maniac in the black car. I could see Aine puzzling over him too. Lara was closer to the surface, even though she was just as complicated.
	“That’s Lara,” he said, taking her hand. “Softy that she is--she’s always picking up strays.”
	<I will assume for Lara’s sake he didn’t mean anything by that,> I sent Aine as we started down those steps.
	<Not another cave,> Aine answered apprehensively. <Please, dhiaoc, I’m trying to learn around this but I can’t.>
	<Maybe they won’t stay long,> I said, unhopefully.
	At the portal to the cave there was a person perched on a stool, who looked like she might be a ransani but who was obviously in the early stages, and overdoing it. Her hair, a giant shining wheat-colored helmet that had to be artificial, was piled up on her head in curves so stiff they could cut paper, and the paint on her face was so exaggerated that I had a hard time locating her eyes, especially with the glare from the beads on her sheath dress half-blinding me. “Can I see some ID, sweetie?” she purred in a husky and feline voice.
	“Oh, let ‘em in, Xylla, they’re with me,” Lara said. 
	“That won’t cut any ice with the Enforcers, hon,” Xylla answered.
	“Let’s face it,” Iriq said. “If the Enforcers show up, we’ll all have bigger problems.”
	Xylla sighed, pouted, and said, “Well, all right, for you. Come on in, jailbait.”
	This seemed to be directed at NightQueen, who walked through the door as if trying to muscle through her enemy’s phalanx. I followed, stopping short as Lara pointed to Xylla for my edification. “Now this, honey, is a drag queen.” 
	Xylla waved a hand. “Oh, go on out of here, you thing.” I turned to look at her.
	“Pleased to know you, your majesty,” I said.
	A high laugh with a frenetic edge broke over my head from the woman on the stool. “Likewise, I’m sure. Have a good time, sweetie. Remember, at Third Term every night is ladies’ night.”
	I dragged Aine in after me. She had entered the Zone with more enthusiasm than this; and indeed two seconds after that door swung shut behind me I was starting to appreciate her point of view. There were only three things my senses could register at first try: it was dark, it was loud, and it was crowded. Also, ladies’ night or no ladies’ night, it was almost entirely men, and I had the feeling as I glanced around on my way to the table Lara and Iriq were fighting toward that those who weren’t men at the present time had been at one point. There was a crescent ring of tables set up, at which groups of men and ransani were talking and drinking, and on the other side of the railing there was a crowd of people who were bouncing up and down and flailing their limbs about, all pulsing to the same beat that was faintly detectable through the floor we were walking along.
	Puzzled by what looked to me like some kind of mass possession, I glanced at Lara. “So what are my chances of dragging you ladies out onto the dance floor?” she asked with a grin, nodding out to the writhing mass of humanity beyond the railing.
	<That’s...dancing?> Aine faltered.
	“I’d say slim to none,” I shouted back over the noise.
	“Why am I not surprised,” Lara said. 
	“I’m going to the bar,” Iriq said, glancing around at the four of us. “What can I get you?”
	“Nothing,” I answered.
	“Nothing,” Aine echoed, looking pale and sick.
	“Something sweet and frilly,” Lara said, with a smile.
	“You think I can get an Alien Probe in this joint?” NightQueen returned.
	“I think if you’re looking for a probe--” Lara began, but Iriq cut her off. 
	“What is that, like a Green Lightning?” Iriq said.
	“Yeah, only with an extra shot of SheerClear.”
	“I’ll see what I can do,” Iriq said, starting for a counter on the other side of the room.
	“That’s Iriq,” Lara sighed. “Such a gentleman.”
	The beat to which the possessed crowd was vibrating was starting to reverberate in my skull. On top of that, I was feeling antsy in a way that had nothing to do with whatever remnants of caffeine might still be in my system. This place had to have a whole lot of electricity running through it, and running through it in a manner that was not especially safe.
	Conversation, what with the pounding and the noise, was difficult. Aine and I could hardly hear each other think, and Lara and NightQueen appeared to be conversing in sign language with the aid of lip-reading. By the time Iriq had fought back to us with the drinks, I was about ready to start screaming. Lara’s was slushy and pink, Iriq had gotten himself what looked like a beer, and NightQueen was handed some horrible concoction that was bright green and shone inside its tall, clear glass like the venom of an otherworld serpent.
	I couldn’t bear to watch her drink it; its color reminded me of those guuns, and the whole setting reminded me that I was on a mission and so far I had spent a lot of time thurking around with people who had probably never seen or heard of Lythril and wouldn’t know if they had. Watching Lara sip at her cold pink mush made me thirsty, but I was afraid to consume anything that might be dispensed from the poison counter. It wasn’t until Iriq had pushed back his chair and asked Lara to dance that I bethought myself of the Cretid fetish for privies and plumbing.
	“Do you think this place has a restroom?” I shouted to NightQueen.
	“A what?”
	“A restroom!”
	“Course it does. Right over there, next to the stage.”
	<Come on, Aine, maybe some water will do you good.>
	She followed me, still pale and a little shaky on her feet. The crowd was dense, and not particularly inclined to interrupt their movement for two people who were neither men nor ransani, but I managed to forge ahead toward a doorway that was next to the curtained opening at the back of the dance floor. The closer I got, the more nervous I felt; probably memories of what happened the last time I tried to use a Cretid privy. Aine was too sickened and tense to take much notice of anything, until we finally burst through the door with the skirted figure on it.
	“Well,” I said in the cavernous white space. “Here, at least, the line’s outside the men’s’ room.”
	Aine leaned gratefully on the cold porcelain basin, and closed her eyes with a shudder.
	“Dhiaoc--”
	Souvenirs of our adventure at WorldBurger went flying into the basin in a nasty brown arc. I patted her consolingly between her jutting shoulderblades. “I’m sorry, Aine. This isn’t turning out to be much fun for you.”
	“Or you either,” she panted, turning the handles to release the water. “Is it the electricity?”
	Now that her own stress was temporarily relieved, she could tell how much I was under. “I don’t know. I guess. It feels different somehow, though.”
	“How different?”
	“More...” There was no other way to say it. “More wrong.”
	“Idair and Cailte,” Aine said, her breath still catching and labored. “How could you get more wrong than this place? Buried under all that concrete, with no air at all and poison flowing like water...”
	I wasn’t really paying attention. I had walked to the door and was leaning on it with one hand, trying to pin something down.
	“What is it, dhiaoc?” she asked.
	“Stay here,” I said, abstractedly. “You’ll feel better without so many people around. I’ll be back.”
	The door to the ladies’ room opened onto a little alleyway that ran around behind the stage. It was down that tunnel that my weird sense of massed, seething, dangerous wrongness was leading me. This wasn’t electricity, which if it was death was at least death in motion. This was something different. Powerful, compact, brooding, at rest now but not for long. 
	Electricity for the stage was ranged all along the ceiling of this back alley--huge metal canisters mounted on rods that dangled above me. But what I was searching for was behind a nondescript metal door marked “Custodial.”
	There was a hinged closure with a padlock on it, but a few minutes of focused mindstrength took care of that. I disentangled the ruptured metal bolt and pushed the door open to peek inside.
	Crouched on the floor of a tiny closet, about three feet high by three feet wide, was a pile of something.  It was halfway liquid, halfway solid, the color of river mud, and molded into a roughly cubical shape. Red and white wires sprouted from all sides of this lump of goop, feeding into a black box. The box was powered by electricity--the stored kind, what Lara told me was what they called a battery. But the rest of it wasn’t electricity. It was congealed, quiescent, consolidated fire, packed into a space much smaller than was natural. Something that was not, at the moment, burning, but which was just waiting for the chance to start.
	I squatted down to look at the box. It trailed wire-ends from one of its sides, and looked as if it had been meant originally for some other purpose. Onto a metal plate that was affixed to its top had been scratched, with the clumsiness of an amateur engraver, the symbol of a sword stuck through a crown. NightQueen had one like this on her arm, only on her the hilt of the sword was at the bottom and the point thrusting up; this one had the hilt at the top like the letter t, with the point stabbing downward through that headless crown.
	I closed the door. <Aine, come with me, we have to find NightQueen.>
	By the time I got back to the restroom Aine had emerged, clean if somewhat damp about the face. <What is it?>
	Fortunately she was still at the table, having just finished her green venom. “NightQueen!” I shouted. “I need your help!”
	“Coming,” she said, barging through the crowd toward us. “I’ll say one thing for these people, they know how to mix a drink.”
	Ignoring the smell off her breath and the somewhat goggling look in her eyes, I took her by the fingerless glove and dragged her behind me to the back corridor.
	“But I already showed you at Lara’s house,” she said. “You just sit on the oval-shaped thing, and when you’re done you push the--”
	“I know how to use a toilet,” I snapped, dropping her arm as we reached the doorway.
	“That’s not the bathroom,” NightQueen said, squinting at the door.
	I sighed. “I am aware of that.” I opened the door. “Look at that thing, and please tell me that you know what it is and that it’s supposed to be here.”
	NightQueen crouched down and peered at it. For a second she seemed too befogged to recognize it. Then suddenly a knife-edged blast of panic cut through the sluggish mess of her mind.
	“I know what it is,” she said, her hand shaking as she grabbed my sleeve to pull herself to her feet. “But it’s definitely not supposed to be here.”
	“Then what is it?”
	NightQueen was already backing up; we recoiled with her. She closed the door very gently, her hands still trembling. “It’s a bomb.” I looked back at her. “You’re not going to tell me you don’t know what a bomb is.”
	“I do now,” I said, as the images in her mind came to me.
	“We’ve gotta get out of here,” NightQueen croaked, turning and clawing her way back through the crowd. “We’ve gotta tell people.”
	As I looked around, it seemed like a big job. We could hardly hear each other; and certainly nobody would be naturally inclined to listen to us, three obvious outsiders, one still groggy from the effects of mindpoison. 
	“Lara,” I said. 
	Aine and I clawed, shouldered, and scraped our way to the center of the dance floor, where Lara had her arms draped around Iriq’s neck and was swaying gently with her body next to his, smiling dreamily as his hand cradled the small of her back.
	“Lara!” I shouted.
	She looked at me, annoyed. “Not now, honey, Lara’s busy.”
	“There’s a bomb!” NightQueen shouted, unable to contain her panic. “A bomb! Back in the janitor’s closet!”
	Iriq suddenly stopped swaying and turned around to fix us with a pair of dark, electric eyes. “What did you say?”
	“It’s true,” I said. “Come with me, I’ll show you.” And, as I felt him disbelieve me, “I am not making this up!”
	“Stay here,” Iriq said to Lara. “Show me this thing you’ve found.”
	Once again we made the trek back to the closet. NightQueen was getting more and more rattled as time passed, and I wasn’t exactly cool as the Amstian winter. Especially when once again I confronted that ominous crouched thing, which seemed even angrier than before.
	Iriq looked at it. Lara, who had not listened to him, craned over his shoulder.
	“You’re right,” Iriq said, looking at me. 
	“Can you...you know...draw the fire?” Aine said, hesitantly.
	“Who do you think I am, Idair?” I snapped, unfairly. “Thirty shriias working in concert couldn’t draw this fire. If it bursts while we’re still in here there’s nothing I can do.”
	“I’ll find the manager,” Iriq said. “Lara, you tell two friends and have them tell two friends. Spread it slow. If there’s a panic we’ll never get the place cleared.”
	While the two of them disappeared, NightQueen started weaving through the crowd toward the door. Aine and I stood near the edge of the floor, looking out with despair over the crowd.
	Lara was working it. She seemed to know everyone; and she also seemed to be able to convince them to leave without making it look like they were fleeing imminent fiery death. Soon there was a steady trickle of people heading to the door. But the crowd was still thick, and it was going to be a while before the place emptied.
	Suddenly that pounding stopped, the noise quieted, and the lights suddenly leapt to almost daylight level. This change in atmosphere was greeted with aggrieved outcry from the patrons, many of whom were averting their eyes from the sudden glare.
	“Gentlemen and ladies,” said a disembodied voice, “this is to let you know that our friends at Family Forever have called in another bomb threat.” There was a universal groan, devoid of any of the fear that it should have had. “Now of course it may be nothing, but here at Third Term it’s always safety first, so I want all you fabulous creatures to proceed out of the bar in an orderly fashion and go up the street a safe distance while we get this thing checked out.” More shouts of resistance. “I’m not playing around with you, people, you know what those bastards are like. Just take a little walk into the fresh air, it won’t kill you.”
	“Bomb threat,” Aine observed, as the line of aggravated, gesticulating patrons began forming in the middle of the room. 
	“Presumably so they don’t all rush the exit at once,” I said. “Since there would appear to be only one.”
	“You see, now,” Aine said, bouncing nervously on her toes, “you see why I don’t like caves?”
	The grumbling line of people had snaked partway out, and the place looked about half-empty. If the burst held off for another few minutes things would probably be all right.
	Of course, that estimate did not incorporate the possibility of someone actually going back there to take a look for himself, which unfortunately was what happened.
	“IT’S A REAL BOMB!”
	This strident cry pealed out over the noise of conversation like the kill screech of a hawk. Movement out the door stopped as the others turned to stare at this tall, pale, wild-haired apparition, who had just emerged from the corridor.
	“IT’S A REAL THURKING BOMB!”
	Suddenly there was a surge forward, and the sound of many trampling feet. Aine was knocked sideways by a man behind her who went stampeding forward. I went to help her up, but only managed to drag her out of the path of the rest of the patrons, who were charging past us to the clot that had formed at the exit.
	“Fnaa,” I muttered.
	The pressure of the crowd notwithstanding, nobody was going anywhere now; the crush of shoving, crying, terrified people at the door had blocked it, preventing it from swinging inward and letting people through. 
	“This is bad, dhiaoc,” Aine said, unsettled.
	“All right, Aine,” I sighed. “Under what circumstances are we allowed to use suasion?”
	“These ones,” she returned, too rattled to give a complete answer.
	“I’ll get you to expand on that later,” I said, walking with her up to the door.
	We fought about six deep into the crowd and then started sending it out. Nothing verbal, just a sense, crafted in our own minds and hearts with great effort and trouble, that we would be all right. Of course we had to believe it ourselves, which was the hard part, but Idair helped me, and that helped Aine. We had come so far, I couldn’t believe it was her plan for us to die in a fireball under ten feet of Cretid concrete.
	As it seeped from us into them, the crowd got looser, and people began drifting back, a little surprised at the urgency and panic they saw in their neighbors, drawing away from all that into their own calm. Which meant that Aine and I could move further up to the door, finally convincing the people who were throwing themselves against it and hammering on the wood to draw back a little and size up the situation. I opened the door, and Aine and I drew it as wide as we could, hanging onto it grimly as we stopped emitting.
	Singly at first, and then in twos and threes, they started rushing through the door. It was hard keeping the thing open, but we managed it--with the help of Lara and Iriq, who had come over with us and were clinging to it with unexpected strength.
	“So what kind of a trick is that?” Lara asked me.
	“Please, not now,” I said. 
	“Where’s Sunshine?”
	“She was out the door early,” I answered. “She’s fifteen; you can’t blame her.”
	Iriq was blaming her, though. Blaming her not just for abandoning us, but for the bomb being there in the first place.
	I wanted to tell him that she couldn’t have, that she’d been with us all day and anyhow she wasn’t like that, but I couldn’t without letting him know what I’d heard off him. So I hung onto the door as the last of the patrons filed through and my body, clear now of the miasma of panic that had thickened the air, suddenly leapt to excruciating alert.
	“FNAA!”
	“What is it, hon?” Lara demanded, edgily.	
	“Out, NOW!”
	Lara and Iriq ran through the door, Aine and I following. I leapt up the steps, pushing the sleeves of my shirt up past the shoulders. Lara and Iriq were running up the street after the rest of the crowd, which they shouldn’t have done. They wouldn’t get far enough from the flames, and they wouldn’t be close enough to me.
	Time slowed down for me again. Aine, who’d seen me cross my arms out of the corner of her eye, averted her eyes. My fire broke out of me. I grappled Aine to me and rolled to the side of the street, wrapping my white shield around us. And a blistering wave of heat roared red out of the mouth of that cave, sending a shower of flame, glass, and other shards down the street.
	I huddled that way for what seemed like forever, my fire repelling the other flame back into the breath of the explosion, burning up the flying debris before it reached us. Then I brought it back.
	Aine was scraped a little where we’d hit the pavement, but she was up and breathing. I put out the fire on my shoulders and checked for cuts and bruises. Around the entrance to the stairs fire was still burning; the street was littered with broken things, splinters and chunks of what had been the bar, some of them still on fire. But the hail hadn’t fallen through the shield to us.
	“Are you all right?” 
	Aine nodded. “Thanks, dhiaoc.” She dusted herself off with shaking hands. “How many times is it, now, that you’ve saved my life?”
	“I don’t know,” I answered. “But I bet that if you subtract the number of times I’ve recklessly endangered it, the net figure is a small one.”
	“Will I get to save your life someday?”
	“If I don’t get you killed first,” I said.
	Until that moment, we had forgotten about Lara. Then we both started picking our way up the street, moving as fast as we could between the chunks of fallen debris.
	The air was shattered with the bleating scream of sirens, and cars with bright flashing lights were all over that end of the street. And closer to us, two people in white jackets with red bands on them had loaded Lara onto one of those rolling carts we’d seen in the VisionBox.
	“She isn’t--that doesn’t mean--” Aine stammered.
	“No,” I said, as I watched her reach out for Iriq’s hand. He walked beside her as the coated people wheeled her back to their square vehicle, then lifted her inside. He climbed in after her, and the coated people pulled the square doors closed behind him.
	Aine and I were already running after the thing, but it disappeared before we got there.
	“Well,” I said, looking around. “You see NightQueen anywhere?”
	We didn’t. There was quite a crowd of patrons, their finery in disarray now, and a small army of Enforcers moving amongst them. And a palpable, crackling sense of animosity, heldback thunder and conflict, radiating from that group out to us.
	“No,” Aine replied. “She must be all right; she was out early. Maybe she’s hiding somewhere.” She looked at me. “You kept a hold of that bag, all through all this.”
	“My hreapa’s in here,” I said. “I’m much more likely to lose my head than my hreapa.”
	“Am I ready to start on mine yet?” she asked, as we watched people being bundled into vehicles.
	“You’re getting there,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens while we’re up here.”
	“If what happens?”
	“Can’t tell you.”
	She sighed. The last of the square white vehicles pulled away. Now it was just the Enforcers and their cars. And I suddenly remembered that we were wanted on both sides of the border.
	“We better get out of here,” I said.
	It was easy enough; people were too busy inspecting the wreckage to notice us. We made it across several blocks and into an open square of grass, the edge of what looked like a park, before stopping to take stock.
	“So,” Aine said. “I guess we go back to Lara’s and wait for her?”
	“How are we going to do that, Aine?” I asked, wearily looking up at the gray-edged, blank sky. “I don’t know if you remember how to get back to the Southshore, but I’m certain I don’t.”
	“We could...ask directions?”
	“Even if we could trust anyone to give them to us, those houses are all alike--those streets even are all alike. There’s no way,” I said, the realization finally hitting me. “We don’t know her full name, we don’t know her address, we don’t even know which hospital they’ve taken her to.” Aine got quiet as this sank in.
	“We’re alone in the City,” I said.
	“Well,” Aine answered, “at least we found the campground.”
	She was pointing off toward a clump of trees, around which a group of low, shabby cloth-and-frame structures was grouped.
	“That’s lucky,” I muttered, as we walked off toward the only living trees we’d seen all night.

XI.
The Blue Angel

	“You ladies new to the City?”
	“Yes,” I answered, staring into the trees with a sigh. “Yes, we certainly are.”
	I had spread my hreapa out on the ground, having decided after a lot of dithering that the safest way to avoid having it swiped while I was asleep was to sleep on top of it. Our interlocutor had staggered haltingly over from the little cluster of extremely makeshift tents under the neighboring trees, a bottle in one hand and his hat in the other. He looked to be about fifty, or maybe a thirty-year-old who had weathered badly. His gray beard hadn’t been trimmed in a long time, nor had his hair; his face was red and chapped and his blue denim pants were browned with dirt. Aine didn’t seem put off at all by this, so I tried not to be. After all, in about a week I’d probably look worse, at this rate.
	“I’m Huther,” he said, putting out one grubby hand. “Who do I have the pleasure of speaking with?”
	“I’m called Theamh,” I answered, shaking his hand. “This is my friend Aine.”
	“Glad to know you,” Aine said.
	“Likewise.” He proffered the bottle; I shook my head. “You sure? It’s real stuff, not the turpentine Dugan drinks.”
	“Thank you, but we don’t drink alcohol,” I said. And then, as he was looking offended, “I mean nothing by it, it’s just that it’s very bad for us.”
	He laughed and took a pull from the bottle. “It’s bad for me too, but habits die hard.” His legs folded and he plumped softly to the ground. 
	“I’m sorry we’ve nothing to offer you,” Aine said. 
	“It’s all right, little lady.” He settled back. “So where’d you say you come from?”
	“We didn’t say,” I answered.
	“So where do you come from then?” he returned, still placid but insistent.
	“From Ideire,” I answered, too tired and discouraged to worry about being prudent.
	Huther looked surprised. “No kidding?”
	“No kidding,” I said gloomily.
	“Huh. I never met a real live Ideiren.” I looked down at my feet. “Is it true you all worship fire?”
	“What do you mean, worship?”
	This seemed to give him some pause. “I mean, like...bow down to it, and offer it sacrifices, and stuff.”
	“We don’t really offer sacrifices to much of anything,” I answered, a little amused in spite of myself.
	“I’ll be,” he said, staring back at me. “Huh.” Several moments went by. “You ladies got enough to eat?”
	“We’re all right for tonight,” Aine said. “Thank you, though.”
	“Anyways, I just wanted to warn you,” he said. “This isn’t a safe place at night. If you’ve got anywheres to go, go there.”
	“If we had anywhere to go,” I said, “wouldn’t we be there?”
	He shrugged. “All right, have it that way, I’m just saying things get rough here.”
	Aine laughed once, short and sharp. I laughed too. Pretty soon we were both laughing pretty hard.
	“What? What’s funny?” Huther demanded, looking miffed that we weren’t taking him seriously, but at the same time ready to be in on the joke if we could explain it to him.
	“It’s just that...” I began, slowing down the laughter. “Well, since we crossed the border last night, we’ve been chased by a demented woman-killer, nearly beaten up by a gang of shaved-headed thugs, and practically blown to shards by a bomb. If the City wants to scare us at this point, I think it’s going to have to come up with something pretty big.”
	Huther looked from Aine to me, as if he weren’t sure he believed us but was afraid not to. “All that in one day?”
	“All that in one day,” Aine answered.
	“Hooee,” he said, shaking a hand as if he’d burned it. “Next meteor shower, you better not stand next to me.”
	“Tell ‘em about the aliens, Huther!” shouted a man from the camp. Laughter rang out from the others gathered there, loud and unkind.
	Huther knew the others were laughing at him, and it hurt him to hear it. I had been wishing he would go away and let us sleep in peace, but now I wanted to hear about the aliens, just to make him feel taken seriously. After all, up here, I was a lunatic too.
	“Aliens?” I asked, trying to sound as polite and interested as possible.
	“It’s true,” he said, suddenly in deadly earnest. “They don’t believe me and you won’t either, but it’s true, I tell you.”
	“But what are these...aliens?” Aine asked.
	His voice dropped as he leaned forward. “You know. Visitors from outer space.”
	“Outer space being what?” I said.
	He looked at me, at a loss. “You know. Outer space. Out there.” He gestured at the washed-out night sky above us. “Beings from distant planets.”
	“All right,” I said, though I wasn’t entirely sure I was following him. “So what about them?”
	“They’re here,” he said, urgently. “They come here, at night. I’ve seen ‘em.”
	“Why do they come here?” Aine asked.
	It wasn’t the question I was meditating, but it turned out to be the right one. Huther’s eyes got bright and he leaned in toward us conspirationally. “They’re experimenting on us. Sucking our life juices out so they can find out what makes us tick.”
	“Life juices?” Aine repeated, blankly.
	“See, they’re looking around now, getting ready to make their move,” he said. “But before they can take over and make us all alien bondslaves, they have to find out how we work. So they experiment on us, see? They suck memories out of our brains and the life out of our bodies, and take it back to the mother ship with them to put in their laboratories. That way they can clone us and start substituting the clone people for the real ones so when they finally invade the clones will already be in power and we’ll surrender just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
	“Please...” I said, wondering if it was that this stuff was unfamiliar to me or if the man’s wits really were astray, “you have to slow down. What do you mean, ‘clone’?”
	“Clone,” he repeated, as if that would help. “You know. An exact biological replica. They take a piece of your DNA and they can build a whole new body exactly like yours only it would be one of them.”
	“If it were one of them how would it be an exact replica of you?” I asked.
	“It would, physically,” he said, that urgency increasing, “but not up here or in here.” He tapped his head, then his heart. “The body would be exactly the same, down to the hairs on your head. The blueprint’s all in the DNA.”
	“The what?” Aine asked, but he was not to be deterred this time. 
	“So the thing looks like you, it walks like you, it talks like you, but it’s not you. It’s your body, but with one of them in it.”
	This, I was starting to understand. “You think these...aliens...have the power to actually duplicate an individual human body? Exactly?” 
	He nodded. “They must, ‘cause we can do here, it in rats and sheep and stuff, and they’re much more advanced than we are. We got all this technology, but man, next to the aliens, we look like Ideire. Oh--no offense--”
	“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We’re getting used to it.”
	“So what do these aliens look like?” I asked. 
	Huther’s whiskery face came close to mine as he dropped to a hoarse whisper. “See, everyone thinks aliens are these little green men, but they’re not.”
	“They’re not?” Aine said, wearily.
	“No,” Huther replied, proud of the knowledge he was about to communicate. “They’re blue, and they’re--”
	“HUUUUUTHER!”
	This stentorian, startling bellow proceeded from the lungs of a man crouched in some kind of wheeled conveyance--a wagon, maybe, or barrow, something low and stable on four wheels. In the dusk I could make out his white beard and hair, both yellowed in places, and the dull glint of the metal in the chain he wore around his neck. Dangling from the chain was a miniature metal sword, point downwards, stuck through a crown.
	“Leave thou thy foolish ways and come hither to the tent of righteousness!” was his next sally, shouted at full throat as he wheeled himself closer to us. 
	“Don’t you two get into it,” warned a rough voice from the tent city. “I’m not drunk enough yet.”
	“Don’t pay him any mind,” Huther whispered to us. “It’s just the Preacher. He’s crazy in the head.”
	“Thus saith the Lord, thou shalt not consort with women in the dark shade of the evening, lest ye be stricken with palsy deep into the flesh,” the Preacher declaimed at him, drawing nearer but not too near.
	“I’m just being neighborly, Preacher,” Huther retorted. “Weren’t any of you brought up to be polite when there’s ladies present?”
	“You’re too old for ‘em, Huther,” shouted one of the men.
	“And a damn sight too crazy,” added another, emerging from his tent to blink across the struggling grass in our direction. “Seriously, baby, if you want company come on over to Dugan’s place, I’m the only one on this whole damn lot still sound in body and mind.”
	“Thank you, we’re well as we are,” I called back. 
	“Shun the temptress of the early morning hours,” the Preacher howled, swinging his cart around now toward Dugan. “Repent your lustful words, for they will bring you only affliction and death!”
	“Shut to hell up, you crazy bastard,” Dugan shouted back. “Crawling into piety just because you’re too withered for sin!”
	Aine, having tired of this conversation long ago, laid down on my hreapa to see if she could sleep through this. I, unfortunately, could not escape, because the Preacher had seized on me as a prop.
	“Look not on her, brother, for she will awaken the demon lust in your heart,” the Preacher was now shouting, pointing at me. “Turn your sight to the heavens, and let not her devil’s flesh tempt you to the ruin of your body and soul!”
	“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “Do I know you?”
	“Harlot!” he shouted, swinging that bearded, belligerent head around to face me. “I know thee indeed! You have many faces, many forms, but I know you now as I knew you when you lured me to your bed of disease and filth!”
	“I beg your pardon?” I shouted, but Huther put a hand on my arm.
	“You see now why this is a gentlemen’s establishment,” he said regretfully. “He’s been touched like this since the cold season. It makes it hard to convince the women to hang around.”
	“Forrrrrrrrrnicator!” he was now calling, wagging a tremulous finger at me. “Fleshly vessel of sin! Vassal of the fallen angel! Go thou from me! My heart is washed pure in the love of the Lord, and your corruption shall blight me no longer!”
	I was still interested in what that word sin meant, but I certainly didn’t want to do anything that would increase his chances of continuing to converse with me.
	“Then get away from me, for Idair’s sake,” I said.
	The mention of Idair sent him into a fresh tizzy, this one fierce enough to turn his face apoplexy purple.
	“HEEEEEEEEEEEATHEN!” he wailed. “Pagan witch addicted to the flames of hellfire! I banish thee from my sight!”
	“How about you banish yourself from mine,” I answered.
	Dugan, a thickset man with square, hard features and bleary eyes, was now stumping over from the tent city. “For the love of God will you knock it off, you crackpot, and come help me finish the last of the liquor.”
	The Preacher suddenly curtailed his harangue and started hauling himself over toward the tents.
	“Thank you,” I said.
	“Always glad to do a turn for a lady,” he said, with a leer. “Between the Preacher and his Blue Angel and Huther with his aliens, we don’t get much company down this end of the park.”
	“Has he always been like that?” I asked, wonderingly. “I mean, so obsessed with his own lust that he screams filth at everything female?”
	Dugan laughed. “Can’t tell you that, lady; all I know is after his legs started going he went queer in the head too.”
	I watched as he groped about inside Dugan’s tent, his legs lying useless under him in the cart. “So his legs started going...recently?”
	“Since the cold season,” Huther put in. “We figure he got froze that night he passed out the snow, and his legs never thawed out.”
	“So how about it then?” Dugan said, looking back at me. “It’s still cold here, nights, and I’ve got a new blanket.”
	It was so blunt I could hardly believe I was reading him right, but I was. “I can’t, friend. It’s...” I fished around and found a phrase that had seeped into me from one of the Cretid minds around me. “It’s against my religion.”
	“Religion,” Dugan said, and spat to one side. “Spoils everything for everyone.”
	Dugan walked back to the tent, grumpily. Huther sighed. 
	“I do apologize,” he said. “There’s nothing bad wrong with him, but he’s got no breeding. And the Preacher, poor soul...’course even when he was sane he was a real pain in the gleacha. Oh, begging your pardon.” I waved dismissively. “Well, goodnight,” he said, putting his hat on as he got shakily to his feet. “The Lord keep you safe, and don’t trust anything that comes to you in the night.”
	When I’d said goodbye and seen him cross back to his tent, I curled up next to Aine.
	<Are they gone?> she asked, her eyes still closed.
	<Yes.>
	<Is everyone in the Cretid Nation crazy?>
	<Maybe.>
	Even used to sleeping on the floor, I was having a hard time with this. It was too bright, there was too much noise, and too much had happened. We were on grass and under trees, but we were also surrounded by bits of trash, and crowds of pigeons that strutted back and forth, and the noise of the cars rushing through the streets around us kept me tossing and turning. Aine had the resilience of the young, and went off to sleep without too much trouble. But two hours later, I found myself sitting up on my hreapa, pulling the tails of my shirt around me to keep warm, staring into the unnatural watery dusk that was night in Cretid City.
	Sometime during the night there was movement in the tent city, and I heard the creak of wheels that needed oiling. The Preacher’s seated bulk began rolling away from the city and into the trees, his arms hauling away with speed and urgency at the makeshift paddles he used to propel the thing along the ground. 
	Where he was headed, the darkness was thicker and more real than what was enveloping us; the branches of the trees screened out some of the diluted light. A light wind that had picked up rustled the leaves and sent scraps of paper and plastic skidding along the ground. 
	It wasn’t just insomnia, and he wasn’t going for a stroll. He was working hard to get to that dark hollow, grunting with effort or perhaps with frustration. Something was going to be happening to him there--something he really wanted to be in time for.
	I didn’t know what an angel was, let alone an alien. But from the way both had talked about them I knew these things weren’t human, and that each was as scared of the one he believed in as he was scornful of the one he didn’t. Aside from that the only thing I could tell about either entity was that it was blue.
	The natural world doesn’t produce blue with a lot of abundance and abandon. A few berries, certain birds, robin’s eggs, the ice rivers up in Amst, and a few kinds of deepwater fish. Even water isn’t blue, really, unless the sun shines on it just right. Strangely, blue is a fairly common color for human auras to be--maybe because we spend so much time under the sky and around the water, maybe because Idair just likes the color, who knows. But even in the spirit world, there aren’t too many things that are blue. There’s the vigils of the third encircling sphere, who come in various shades of blue to violet; the sowlths, who are a sort of blue and gold twined spirally color; and the olaidh.
	Aine was still asleep, curled up on my hreapa. If I pulled it up I would wake her, and since she could sleep, she deserved to. It would probably be all right for the few minutes it would take me to slip out to the trees and see this blue angel, or blue alien, if the thing existed.
	The Preacher never noticed me; he was too focused on his destination. He spent a lot of time trying to position his barrow in exactly the right place, inside a kind of natural circle that the trees formed. He flung his head and shoulders back, so that he was arched up toward the sky with his arms open and his beard jutting into the night.
	“Come to me,” he muttered, staring with those unhinged eyes up at the tree cover. “Come to me now, angel of perdition, in my moment of weakness. Come, Satan, demon of the blue lust, come and take me now, slave that I am!”
	He was starting to tremble with the anticipation. That he should be imploring the attentions of the thing he had been excoriating a moment ago didn’t surprise me; the man’s mind had been on fire with images of writhing lust the whole time he’d been near me, which was one of the things that had made me wish so ardently for his speedy departure. Any man who can have fantasies that lurid about a woman that looks like I do is someone to stay away from. I had thought at first that he was troubled with a kraikk, but so far I hadn’t seen any of the signs. Then again, I was not inclined to get close enough to him to look for them.
	“COME TO ME!” he shouted. “COME TO ME, DEMON BELOVED!”
	If this little one-man show was all the entertainment on offer, I was better off trying to go back and at least doze off. But something told me to stay. There was a confidence, along with the agony of conflict, in his appeal that made me pretty sure it would be answered.
	The wind picked up. The Preacher seemed to appreciate this, greeting the movement of the air across his upturned face with a sigh. And then, between the branches that darkened the distance, I thought I saw something approaching.
	It was indeed blue. Dull at first, but brighter as it neared, brighter than it should have been given the light there was. It was the shape of a human, with a head, arms and legs. A specter, maybe? 
	But it was walking--moving around tree trunks, parting branches, treading the ground as if gravity meant something to it. Not, perhaps, with all the weight of a mortal body, but without the indifference of a spirit. And although the light it gave off blurred its edges, it wasn’t trailing or unformed. A definite human shape--the shape of a woman, with long legs, full breasts, a narrow waist and round hips. And aside from long, dark blue hair that streamed around her in the wind she seemed to be carrying with her, she wasn’t wearing anything but her own luminescence.
	From my post behind a large and comforting oak tree, I watched her come closer. There was something about the face that struck me as familiar--familiar and not especially pleasant, although the features were regular and the eyes, while unsettlingly bright, were intelligent and conscious the way an aidolen’s aren’t. 
	He felt her approach, somehow, and sat forward in his cart, hands clasped in front of his chest--in supplication, in fear, in anticipation. The apparition stood before him, hair waving gently around her, and spoke to him.
	“You’ve come back,” she said.
	The voice was hard to describe--human in shape and intonation, but with something hollow to it. The Preacher, for once in his life, was silent, merely nodding at her.
	“Why do you come back?” she answered. “I do you harm.”
	“I want you,” he said, the words forced out against his will. “The flesh is stronger than the spirit. I crave my own destruction.”
	The woman’s face turned in what was vaguely like a smile. “Where did you hear that one?”
	“Torment me no more,” the Preacher whispered, closing his eyes. “Consume me.”
	The apparition bent a knee and climbed up to straddle the barrow, putting a hand around the back of the Preacher’s head.
	“Since you ask it,” she said, the voice strange and hard to read.
	She pulled his head toward her and put her mouth on his. I was about to turn away, but I saw that her other hand, which had gone to rest on his shoulder, was resting not on his shoulder but in it. The fingers had melted partway into his arm, and his arm sagged limply from the shoulder as a whimpering sigh escaped the Preacher.
	I couldn’t just stand and watch this--now that I thought I knew what was happening, even if I wasn’t sure how it was happening.
	I stepped out into the clearing. Neither of them paid me the slightest attention. The Preacher was shuddering in the grip of some painful kind of ecstasy, and the apparition was continuing to plunge her hand into the flesh of his arm, which to my overwrought eyes looked as if it were withering visibly.
	“Teir abhaile!” I finally shouted, not knowing what name to add.
	I’m not even sure the Preacher heard me; but the apparition did. Her head swung around, her arm pulling out of the Preacher and into its original form, and those bright piercing eyes fixed on me.
	With a cry of anger she started toward me. I crossed my arms.
	“Teir abhaile olaidh!” I  repeated, lamely.
	She flinched. So the words did affect her, somehow; probably fire would too. But instead of firing at her right away, I waited, for some reason, as she stood there without attacking but without retreating, studying me.
	“Who are you?” she finally asked, as if she really wanted to know.
	“I’m Theamh ni hUlnach,” I said, amazed. “What the hell are you?”
	The name seemed to mean something to her, somehow. Those eyes were dim, for a moment, with an attempt to recall, to place, to attach me to some time or some thing she remembered. And then lit with something that didn’t look sane, or friendly.
	“Are you my mother?”
	The question was so bizarrely out of place that it didn’t even occur to me to be worried. “What?”
	The thing flew at me, knocking me onto my back on the ground with the force of its impact. It had some heft, after all--even if I crumpled at least as much out of surprise and shock as from the actual collision. Because here I was, pinned to the ground with the cold hand of an unfamiliar glowing blue being wrapped around my throat, looking up into eyes crazed with longing and anger.
	“Are you my mother!” it shrieked.
	“No,” I said, wondering why it wasn’t starting to do its withering work on me already. “No, I’m pretty sure I’m not.”
	“Then where is she?” the thing demanded.
	“Friend,” I answered as the grip of its cold hand tightened, “I have no idea what you are or where you come from, and I have even less of an idea where your mother might be.”
	“Dhiaoc!”
	The apparition’s head turned to look at Aine, who was running toward me, my hreapa streaming from one hand and a bottle of uisce in the other. As she saw the thing turn back to me, Aine pulled the stopper out with her teeth and slung water out of the bottle at us.
	The apparition shrieked, and from its back suddenly jutted out two streams of blue that beat in the air above me like wings. Then it lifted off me, and with the wings hovering above her she half-ran, half-flapped away through the trees into the darkness.
	Aine stopped running and plumped suddenly to the ground, passing a hand over her pale and sweating forehead. I stoppered the bottle and began folding up my hreapa.
	“Thanks, Aine,” I said. “That’s one in your column.”
	She took a long, careful breath. “I didn’t know if the uisce would help, but I thought, if it keeps out the spirits...”
	“It was a good hunch,” I said. “See, you’re making progress.”
	Her mouth smiled briefly. “What was that, dhiaoc?”
	“Well,” I said meditatively as I looked off into the distance, “that is a question to which I do not know the answer.” I collected my hreapa and stood up. “What woke you, anyhow?”
	“Dugan,” she said with distaste. “He came to make me an offer.”
	“Evidently he’s no longer discriminating in his affections,” I observed. “Ah well--at least he asked first, which is better than we’ve seen from some Cretids. We better see how the Preacher’s doing.”
	As we walked into the darkness, Aine returned to the question, unwilling to believe there was something out there I really couldn’t identify. <You don’t have any idea what it was?>
	<It was blue,> I answered. <And I have a feeling it’s kin to the olaidh. It was trying to feed off the Preacher--and it’s obviously been doing so for some time, hence the withering of his nether regions.>
	<And it was trying to feed off you?>
	<Actually,> I answered, still puzzled by this, <it never did.>
	<Then what did it want?>
	<It wanted me to tell it where its mother was.>
	Aine found this as odd as I did. <That thing has a mother?>
	<It seems to think so. I have my doubts.>
	“Damn you, meddling strumpet!”
	It was the Preacher, whose throat and lungs were working even if his arm wasn’t.
	“Good evening to you too,” I answered, approaching for a better look at the arm. “So that was your blue angel?”
	“The Lord will smite those who thwart the will of his servants!”
	“Well, the Lord may, but you won’t be doing any smiting with this arm for a while,” I said, looking at his dangling appendage. “You know, I might be able to give you back the use of your legs, if you--”
	“Demon!” he shouted venomously. “Lead me not astray into the fens of iniquity! Go from me, reeking temptress from the pit of sensuality!”
	“Suit yourself,” I said, and began walking back.
	<You really think you could, dhiaoc?>
	<I’m not sure. If it were just the olaidh, I’d say yes...but this thing is something very much different. It could be she’s done damage to him that I couldn’t undo. Anyhow, we won’t find out as long as he’s in this mood.>
	<But...if you could help him...>
	<We’re bound to make the offer. But unless it’s life or death, we’re not bound to help people who actively refuse that offer.>
	We heard him wheeling himself after us, cursing all the way. We walked doggedly back to our campsite, ignoring him as best we could.
	Huther was there, looking concerned. “Are you all right? Did they probe you?”
	I studied him with a more professional eye this time.
	“Huther, have you always had that limp?” I asked.
	“No, see, that’s what I told you,” he said. “Sucked the life juice right out of my leg. Would’ve sucked the rest too, only I got away.” He looked me over. “It’s not so bad now; it used to be a lot worse. But you look like you made out all right.”
	“With help,” I said, clapping Aine on the shoulder. “Tell me, Huther, do these...aliens...come here often?”
	“I’ve seen ‘em a bunch of times,” he nodded, eagerly. “I was the one told Preacher about ‘em. He didn’t believe me. Still doesn’t. But I’ve seen ‘em land and probe him.”
	Watched from a distance, maybe, afraid to get as close as I had.
	“So your leg’s been getting better?” I asked.
	“I’m a little more spry every day passes,” he said, demonstrating with a feeble little skip. “Not back to my old self yet, but I get by.”
	“But the Preacher’s just getting worse.” 
	He nodded. “First one leg, then the other. Now he can’t walk at all. We shouldn’t have found him the wagon, maybe--he only uses it to roll out there and get probed again--but we thought he oughta be able to get around.”
	Taking care of him, irascible bastard that he was, because nobody else would. “I don’t know if you or anyone else has any influence on him,” I said, “but if you could get him to stop going out there, he might not get better, but at least he’d get no worse.”
	Huther shook his head. “You try preventing him. The man thinks with his zazb, even though the poor thing’s as withered as the rest of him now.”
	“FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEND!” came the cry from the tent city. “Flee the disease-laden whore of the pit with her venomous lips and snaky hair!”
	“Suppose that’s me?” I observed, turning to Aine, who shrugged.
	“Please take no notice,” Huther said. “We all go crazy out here, those who weren’t crazy to start with. He can’t help himself.”
	“For your sake, I’ll ignore him,” I said. “Good night, Huther. Thanks for looking after us.”
	He nodded, with a crooked smile. “Don’t mention it. Always pleased to have helped a lady.” And with a bow, he went back to his side of the park.
	Aine watched him go. “Why does he care so much?”
	“About what?”
	“About our being women.”
	I shrugged. “Maybe you’re right, and they’re all crazy.”
	I spread the hreapa out again and we made another stab at sleep.
	<Dhiaoc?>
	<I’m trying to sleep, Aine.>
	<It has been some day, hasn’t it?>	<That it has.>
	<It was lucky for them all Lara’s boyfriend wanted to go out, wasn’t it?> she went on. <Or that bomb would have gone off with everyone in there.>
	I turned over on my back. It didn’t really help. <I’m not sure it was luck, Aine.>
	<What was it then?>
	<When you took theoretics, did anyone teach you about the Idair Effect?>
	<No, I never heard of it.>
	I sighed up at the gray sky. <Ah well. I suppose I should be lucky I’m remembered for my deeds, and not bother about my crackpot theories.>
	<What’s the Idair Effect?>
	<I wrote a little memo up on it my first year in practice. Barant really liked it. Of course, what does that mean in the here and now.>
	<So it was your idea?>
	<For what it’s worth.>
	<Tell me about it.>
	She was turned away from me, trying to snuggle her way into a soft spot on a patch of ground that didn’t have one.
	<Well, why not, maybe it’ll put you to sleep.>
	<Really, dhiaoc, I want to hear.>
	<So you know how nobody really knows for sure, but we’re all more or less convinced that Idair watches us, and helps out from time to time.>
	<She must, or we’d be dead by now.>
	<That’s my point. Now, one of the big questions has always been, how can Idair, who is of course a million times more powerful than any of us are but whose power was nonetheless limited, keep track of everything that’s going on in the world all at the same time, with all of its thousands of people?>
	<Uh huh.>
	<So this was my theory. Idair does watch us, and help us, but she’s not watching all of us all the time. If nothing very important is happening, say, in Dairc this spring, she’ll pay more attention to Amst. There will be whole years--kyelrans even, maybe--where the world rattles on merrily and well all by itself, so long as we take good care of it. But then there are times of trouble and struggle, and at those times Idair takes more of an interest. And when she does, you get the Idair Effect.>
	<So what happens then?>
	<Well, this kind of thing--coincidences, lucky breaks, a sudden rush of crucial events and big decisions all packed in together. Life becomes more erratic, more dangerous but more exciting. Fate throws you clues or obstacles, things that make no sense when they happen make sense later, unrelated things come together into a neat bundle. Instead of things happening and being random, they all fit together and lead you somewhere. It’s Idair doing what she can to make sure things work out. So in my little memo, I proposed trying to study this phenomenon, so we could take advantage of it. If we could figure out when she’s taking an interest, and be alert for the signs and nudges and so forth she gives us, we could maybe help keep things right better.>
	<So you think Idair’s taking an interest now?>
	<This is a time of great trouble; and this is the classic pattern. I mean, even before now--look at me running into Taric at market that day I met Mna, and then him turning out to be so closely connected both to Crann and to me. But especially now. Mahial introduces us to the VisionBox the very night they’re doing a story on Erysin, so I find out we need to get up here. We stand there on the road looking for the first person who’ll give us a ride, and Idair sends us Lara. NightQueen prevents us from picking up with her; and lo and behold, Idair sends her car trouble so we find her again after all. I thought it was just Idair making sure we had a roof over our heads, but it turns out that really it was to get us to that bar so we could find the bomb and save those people. And then the bomb was lucky too, for us, because if we hadn’t gotten separated we wouldn’t have had to camp out here.>
	<How is that lucky?> Aine returned.
	<Well, I got to see that strange blue thing,> I answered. <I don’t know what it is. But if my theory is right, then Idair went to a lot of trouble to bring me here so I could see it. And if that’s true, then it has something to do with what we’re looking for.>
	<Or,> Aine answered equably, <your theory is wrong, and this blue thing is just the Cretid version of the spirits, and we’re shivering out here in the park because some lunatic up here in this country of madmen wanted to kill a bunch of people for no good reason.>
	<Well, you see,> I replied, <how it would make a difference, if this could be substantiated. Either this is an important hint Idair is tossing me, or just more proof that we’re getting farther from the scent the longer we stay here.>
	<It’s true they have a saying in Jipran,> Aine said thoughtfully. <That if you want to find a needle in a haystack, let Idair guide your arm.>
	<Exactly,> I answered. <People scoff at the folk stories and so forth but just because they’re not shri that doesn’t mean they’re bogus.> I rolled over. <Of course, when you do find the needle, that’s usually only because it’s sticking into you.>
	<It’s an interesting idea,> Aine said. <I’ll have to think about it. Good rest to you, dhiaoc.>
	<Idair keep you.>

	“All right, move along now.”
	I had somehow managed to fall asleep; the sky was getting lighter, and the sparrows in the trees were making morning noises. I couldn’t tell how many hours I’d gotten, just that it wasn’t anywhere near enough, and that I was much irritated by this voice that had burst in on my precious sleep.
	The voice was harsh, but not with the roughness of Dugan’s; commanding, dry, authoritative. And, as I sat up and looked in its direction, proceeding from one of those mud-green-shirted men with the boots and hats and the guns on their hips.
	“Aw, come on, Enforcer,” came Huther’s wheedling voice. “We’re not bothering anyone.”
	“This is public property, not your private real estate. Move along.”
	The man, and his mud-green-shirted associate, were now starting in on the tents, pulling the stakes out of the ground and tossing the cloth coverings aside. “Let’s go. Come on, get up and move it before we start arresting for vagrancy. Let’s go.”
	One of them was heading in our direction. “Ladies, it’s time to move on. You won’t get any trade here anyhow. Come on, up and off.”
	Aine sat up and was staring at the man angrily. “We are not public whores,” she said, dangerously.
	“Doesn’t have to be any of my business what you are, as long as you move along,” he said. “Come on, the park belongs to everyone. Let’s go.”
	“If it belongs to everyone,” Aine said, “doesn’t it belong to us too?”
	Before he could answer I had started stuffing things into my bag. “Don’t mind her, Enforcer,” I said with an uneasy light laugh. “We don’t want any trouble from you. We’re moving.”
	We hustled along to join the group of men, who were being reluctantly herded out to the sidewalk. 
	<So is this Idair taking an interest, or just Cretid bloody-mindedness?> Aine snapped grumpily.
	<This, I blame on the Cretids,> I answered. <Look at them--they’re used to it. This must happen fairly often.>
	A few blocks down the street, the group had reformed, out of earshot of the Enforcers, who had formed a loose cordon around that area of the park. “Well?” demanded Dugan, rubbing his red eyes. “Anyone know where there’s the chance of a meal?”
	“What about the place on 22nd street?” Huther suggested.
	“Nah, that’s no good, they only take women and children,” answered one of the men.
	“DEEEEEEEEEEEEEEMONS!” shouted the Preacher. “Lie not with the purulent succubi of--”
	“Will you SHUT UP with that!” Dugan shouted. “Or so help me I’ll break your neck, and there’s not a court in this City that would convict me for it.”
	“They’ve opened a new one on 25th and Plenana,” Huther put in. 
	“But...” I said, “what do you mean, ‘Plenana?’ I thought that was in the ocean, thousands of miles from here.”
	Huther looked at us and shook his head. “You must really be from Ideire,” he said, pointing up to the top of a pole. “See that little plaque up there?”
	I looked. A rectangular metal thing was sticking out from a tall pole, and on it I could just about read the words “New Cretinia.”
	“That’s the street name,” he said. “The north-south streets are named after places, and the east-west ones are numbered. The low numbers are south and the high numbers are north.” Aine and I looked up at the signs with great interest. 
	“Very convenient,” I said. “It’s a good idea.”
	“You mean you folks don’t have street signs?”
	“Not really,” I answered.
	“How do you find your way around?” interrupted Dugan, who was flabbergasted.
	“People who live there know where they’re going, and people who don’t can ask someone who does,” I said.
	They just stared at me.
	“Besides,” Aine added, turning her gaze back to Huther, “it would be no help to you, if you weren’t a reader.”
	“This is very helpful though, for strangers like us,” I said, rooting through the bag I was carrying. I pulled out Darin’s letter. His handwriting was of course terrible, but I thought I could make it out pretty well. “101 East 5th Street, Apartment 3.” I looked up at the street signs. “So I just take one of these things south, and when I get to the crossing street, the number will be marked?”
	“Yes,” said Huther, still a little taken aback.
	“Well then,” I said, “we’ll come with you down to the one on...25th, was it? And then we’ll be moving on.”
	“Glad to have your company,” he said, finally. 
	New Cretinia Avenue was broad, and it was affluent. Shining store windows, expensive goods behind them, well-kept concrete sidewalks. But deserted so far, this early in the morning, except for a few shopboys out sweeping stoops and taking out bags of trash.
	“So how is it that you’re a reader, Huther?” I asked.
	“What do you mean?” he demanded, a little touchy. “Why shouldn’t I be?”
	“No reason,” I answered, sorry to have offended him. “It just isn’t so common, where we come from.”
	“You don’t teach it to your children?” Dugan chimed in, reluctantly interested.
	“They get to be about nine or ten, and if they have an interest they start learning it. If they haven’t, they go on with lore and music and figures and mindstrength--”
	“Mindstrength?” Huther put in. “What’s that?”
	“Oh...” Aine glanced at me, and didn’t have to tell me what she was thinking. “It’s something we learn, down in Ideire, that they don’t teach you folks up here.”
	I looked up at the signpost on the street we were crossing now. “67th,” I said. “So we only have...forty-five streets left to cross?”
	“Yeah,” Dugan spat. “It’s a long walk, but hey, we got the time.”
	We walked. And was we walked, the city got worse. It was gradual at first, but by the time we had reached the thirties, there were more vacant shops than occupied ones, and their fronts were often marred with cracks or with words and symbols scrawled on them in what the others called spraypaint. Trash scudded along the empty sidewalks, and dilapidation replaced upkeep. And then the visions started.
	The first time it took even me by surprise. Aine had been in the middle of telling Huther one of the tales she knew, with Dugan walking alongside and pretending not to listen, when suddenly her head swung around and her eyes fixed on one of the vacant shops on the corner of New Cretinia and 29th. 
	 “Hey!” she shouted. “Hey! Get away from him!”
	The rest of us looked over at the boarded-up storefront and the scattering of broken glass that carpeted the sidewalk beneath it. Aine paused, eyes still fixed, and then suddenly convulsed in shock, grabbing onto Huther’s arm.
	“Name of the Spirit!”
	She went running over to the store, with me trotting after her. I caught up with her while she was still reaching for where the handle to the door would have been, if the place hadn’t been nailed shut.
	<Aine, close your eyes.>
	She did. When they opened again, they had a sheepish and embarrassed expression. <I’m sorry--I forgot.>
	<What did you see?>
	<There was a man inside, behind a counter, and another man, with a gun. A big one. And the man with the gun...>
	<Come away, Aine, it’s too late to help.>
	<His head just...it was all shattered, it just...>
	<It’s horrible, I know. Come on, and don’t look back.>
	“Your friend...” Huther observed confidentially after Aine rejoined the group and began walking fast and talking to no one. “Has she been out long?”
	“Out of where?” I asked, feeling that I didn’t quite get the import of his question.
	“I mean out of treatment,” he went on. “You know--discharged.”
	“I’m sorry, Huther,” I said. “I still don’t understand what you’re asking me. Discharged from where?”
	“From wherever she was committed,” he answered.
	“I...I’m sorry, Huther, this conversation doesn’t seem to be working.”
	He shrugged. “It’s all right. We’ve all got our secrets.”
	“Stop it!” came back to us from Aine, who was staring down East 27th street in horror. “Leave her alone--”
	“You go on ahead, I’ll catch up,” I said, sprinting down the street after her.
	She had brought herself out of it, but she was still hunting for the vision in the reality she knew didn’t hold it. “I saw them, dhiaoc, I saw them right here, and I saw him hit her--”
	“I know you did, Aine,” I said, turning her to face me. “But they’re gone now. It’s happened and it’s over.”
	“It’s all well for you to say!” she said, the strain showing. “You don’t have to watch this!”
	Looking at her white face I wished there were something I could do. “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to help you with this.” I looked around, sighing. “But there are who knows how many millions of people in this city, and we’re obviously in the low-rent district. There will be memories of pain on every corner. We’ve got to get you through this somehow.” She nodded, closing her eyes. “Here, tell you what we’ll do. When you see something like this, send your first thought about it to me. I’ll let you know if I can see it too. If I can, then it’s real. If I can’t, then it’s not and you just have to ignore it as best you can. Hang onto me if that helps,” I said, as she had already taken my arm. Aine swallowed mutely, and nodded.
	“I’m sorry I’m not stronger about this, dhiaoc,” she said.
	“It’s a hard gift to live with,” I answered, stepping back out to the avenue.
	Huther was waiting for us with the others. “I’m sorry to hold you up,” I called cheerfully. “Here, go on along and don’t mind us.”
	“So she’s never been committed at all?” Huther asked again, after we had gone another few blocks. Aine was no longer shouting warnings at invisible people, but she was still having those initial, visceral reactions--drawing back, turning her head, clutching my arm, her body reacting to that first instant of vision before I could let her know it was over and gone. And it was happening more and more often as we got further south.
	“Committed to what?”
	“To an institution. You know--a mental hospital.”
	I finally made the leap. “Oh--no, we don’t have special hospitals for that. We’ve only got one. There’s a wing for that, but it’s pretty much empty.”
	“Why?” Huther asked, obviously thinking that if there was extra space, Aine should be taking up some of it.
	I sighed. “We have different ideas, down in Ideire, about lunacy.”
	“What do you mean?”
	“I mean that when the medicals came to Ideire, they thought we were all insane, at first. It was a struggle to convince them we weren’t.”
	“So your friend here...you don’t think she’s crazy?” Huther finally asked.
	“No, I don’t,” I answered.
	“Well, fine then,” he responded, in a soothing tone that let me know I had joined the ranks of the lunatic. “No reason you should.”
	<I can’t stand this, dhiaoc.>
	<Well, look, here we are at the refectory.>
	Aine looked gratefully over at an open doorway from which a line of people was snaking. “Thank Idair. I’m starving.”
	We got in line with the others. It was mostly men, between about twenty and sixty years old, lining up and passing along a counter as people behind it scooped food onto plates and handed it to them. I noticed, as we entered the building, a large representation over the doorway of that symbol we’d seen on the bomb--a sword, point downwards, stabbing through a crown.
	“Huther,” I said, pointing up at it. “What’s that? What does it mean?”
	“O THOU WALLOWER IN THE BOG OF BLACK IGNORANCE!!!”
	“Now, now, Preacher,” Huther said placatingly. “You’ve been so good and quiet all morning, you don’t want to start trouble now, do you?”
	“So it’s something to do with the Lord, then?” I asked.
	The woman who was serving the food, having overheard me as I approached the counter, slung some cooked eggs onto a plate and handed it to me with a smile. “You’re new to our ministry, aren’t you?”
	“It’s the first time I’ve come here, if that’s what you mean,” I answered. 
	Around her neck she was wearing one of those sword icons too. “The sword has many meanings. I’d be happy to talk to you about them after I’m done here, if you want to know more about them.”
	“Thank you,” I said. “That’s very kind.”
	“You’re welcome,” she answered, and sent me with a smile down the line to get my glass of milk.
	After we had clustered around our beat-up table and attacked our breakfast for a while, the woman from the serving line came over with her own tray. “May I join you?”
	“Sure,” I answered, as Aine slid over to make room.
	I noticed that the others moved away from her, except for the Preacher, who having been lifted onto the bench to eat was pretty much stuck there. But his haranguing had stopped while he was eating, and strangely he didn’t start up again with this woman--who knew, maybe because she was wearing the same emblem he was, or maybe because she was about forty-five and dressed so neat and tidily that you almost expected her tightly controlled hair to have creases instead of waves. Anyhow, she folded her plump little hands in front of her and looked at us cheerfully. “My name’s Starina. What’s yours?”
	“I’m called Theamh,” I said. “This is my friend Aine.”
	Starina shook hands with us. “And how do you come to be down in our mission?”
	“We were hungry,” I said.
	I had wondered if she would be offended that it wasn’t for her company, but she just smiled and nodded. “And you’ve never seen the Sword before?”
	“Swords I’ve seen,” I said. “But that sword-in-the-crown thing, I’d never seen that before I came to Cretid City. What’s it meant to stand for?”
	“It’s the symbol of our Lord’s love for us,” she said, speaking slowly as if either she were simple or I were. 
	“But why a sword?” I answered.
	“Have you heard the story of the Favorite Son?” she said, looking at me with pity.
	“No, I don’t think I have.”
	So Starina obliged. It took a long time, because Aine and I had to keep interrupting and asking her to cast things in a frame of reference we could work with, and because the Preacher kept getting irritated and interrupting trying to tell the story better, and then getting shushed by Huther before he could start bellowing “HEEEEEEATHEN!!” again. But so far as we understood it, this was the story:
	Back at the beginning of time, God made the world and everything in it. Who God was we could never quite pin her down to. I had the idea that it was their name for the Spirit, but then he seemed too human for that, having a sex and a voice and being, as I understood it, like a father to them. But when I asked if he were human she said no, that he was divine, which was another concept we couldn’t quite get a handle on. Aine thought it meant that he was like the spirits, but once we had made Starina understand what we meant by “spirits” she said very emphatically that God was different. We couldn’t seem to get her to make things any clearer so we left that and let her move on.
	Anyhow, God apparently had a special relationship with the Cretids, which he demonstrated by sending them kings to be governed by. The kings were human, but they had some sort of stamp of Godly approval that entitled them to be treated differently, and made them very powerful. But God at some point got dissatisfied with the king system and decided they deserved more personal contact, and so he sent them his own offspring, the Favorite Son.
	This was where it got confusing. The Favorite Son had a mortal mother, but God was his father. To me, it sounded like the Favorite Son was essentially a human who was possessed early and often--a mortal body walking around with an otherworld spirit inside it. However, I had the sense that this was not how Starina looked at it, although I could make neither head nor tail of her mind on this subject. In any case, this Favorite Son grew up somewhere in the Cretid Nation, and nobody took any notice of him until he got to be about twenty, and then he began telling everyone what God wanted them to do, which from what we could tell was basically to share what they had with each other and to worship God a lot. God was very concerned that people worship him, although we weren’t sure exactly what purpose all of this worshipping was serving, aside from swelling God’s head with a lot of talk about how powerful and great he was. Anyhow, the Cretid king at the time got upset about what the Favorite Son was doing, and had him arrested and beheaded in the town square. 
	“Oh,” I finally said. “So the sword, that’s what he was beheaded with.”
	Starina nodded. 
	“So what has that got to do with this Lord you talk about?” Aine asked.
	“The Favorite Son is the Lord.”
	“I thought the Lord was God,” I said.
	“He is.”
	Aine and I looked at each other.
	“But wouldn’t that mean that God and the Favorite Son are the same thing?” I asked.
	Starina smiled. “They are.”
	“But you told us they were different people.”
	“That’s true too--but they’re also the same. It’s a mystery.”
	“It sure is,” Aine answered.
	“Anyhow,” I said. “It seems to me, like the sword is the symbol of your king’s hatred for your God, rather than the other way around.”
	“No, you don’t understand, because you haven’t heard the whole story,” Starina said. “You see, after he was beheaded, and put in the tomb--”
	“What’s a tomb?” Aine asked.
	Starina looked at her, taken aback somehow by this question more than all the others. “It’s...it’s a place where you bury the dead,” she said.
	“Remember, they bury them up here,” I put in. 
	“Yes,” she answered slowly. “So they put him in the tomb, and then--”
	“Idair’s hair and eyebrows,” I said suddenly.
	There was a slight shudder on Starina’s part, and her eyelashes fluttered in confusion. “I--I beg your pardon?”
	“Nothing, I was just thinking--damn.” 
	<What is it, dhiaoc?>
	<It never occurred to me before, but since they bury their dead...>
	<I see now, dhiaoc,> Aine said, her eyes suddenly widening. <This place...it must be full...full of...>
	<Ingredients,> I answered. <How thoughtful of them all to stock it for her before she arrived.>
	“Theamh?” Starina asked sweetly. “Do you follow me?”
	“I’m sorry, Starina--what were you saying? I got distracted.”
	Starina sighed, but forbore to get angry. “After they had laid him in the tomb, some of his followers went back to visit it--and they found him there alive!” She sat back, very pleased with herself.
	“Oh no, they buried him alive?” Aine gasped, in alarm. “How awful!”
	“No, no,” I explained. “It’s not like that; they couldn’t have been mistaken. I mean, either his head was off or it wasn’t.”
	“But then how was he alive again when they found him?” Aine demanded, while the rest of our table looked on with varying degrees of amusement and amazement.
	“Well, obviously he hadn’t really been beheaded,” I said, looking back at Starina for confirmation. “It was just an illusion, like in--”
	“Oh no,” Starina broke in, before the Preacher had a chance to. “He really was beheaded.”
	“Well then how did he survive that?” I demanded.
	“He didn’t,” Starina said. “He died. But then God restored him to life.”
	Skepticism crossed Aine’s earnest features. “How?” 
	“Through a miracle,” Starina answered, as if this were the part she’d been waiting for. “The miracle of his love for us, which conquered death.”
	I was still back with the beheading. “Are you sure someone didn’t just animate his body?” I said. “And then it would look like he were brought back--”
	“No,” Starina said firmly. “He was restored to life and wholeness, without a mark on him except a line at his throat and the scars on his wrists from the ropes.”
	“But that’s impossible,” I said. “When the connection breaks, the body dies, and it doesn’t come back. Once a life ends that life, as it was, can never be restored. You might bring the spirit back in a different body, but you can’t ever put that whole life, the whole person, back together again. Nobody can do that, not even Idair.”
	 Starina smiled secretly. “That’s because Idair is not God.”
	“So your God can bring people back from the dead,” I answered.
	“That’s why we venerate the sword,” Starina said. “It was by the sword that the Favorite Son showed us how much God really loved us.”
	“But...” This seemed to me an unbelievably gruesome way to make a world, with people dying and being patched together and put back up and on the earth to straggle through it for who knew how long until something that wasn’t death ended their days. “So nobody dies, up here in the Cretid Nation?”
	“Our bodies die,” Starina said, “but our spirits live on eternally in God.”
	“Oh, I get it,” I said, with a relief that I knew Aine was sharing. “I’m sorry--you just had me confused by calling it life. I understand now.”
	“But it is life,” Starina insisted. “Eternal life. That’s what God gave the Favorite Son, that’s what he brought to us.”
	“Now wait a minute,” I said, feeling confused and therefore starting to be a little irritated. “You just said your bodies die but your spirits go on.”
	“Yes.”
	“So how is that life?”
	Starina blinked. “Because--well, because our souls continue to exist, after being released from our bodies.”
	“All right, see, exist I can handle. But you can’t live without a body.”
	“You see, life is what happens when a spirit inhabits a body,” Aine said, explaining it to her as if she were a scoilin. “Without the body, you can exist, but it isn’t really living.”
	Now Starina was the one looking confused. “Does it really matter?” she finally said. “Life, or existence. What difference does the word make?”
	Aine and I both stared at her in horror.
	“But...it makes all the difference,” Aine said, earnestly, now very concerned for Starina’s welfare. “The words are the power, if they’re wrong everything’s wrong.”
	<Remember, we’re not supposed to proselytize.>
	<Sorry, dhiaoc.>
	“In any case, the Favorite Son was restored to everlasting life--spirit and body,” she said, looking at me. “And through him, we were all restored to life. That’s why the sword is a sacred thing for us, because it was through the sword that we discovered this.”
	I nodded. “And the crown?”
	“The crown represents the kingdom that we will all come into after death.” She saw me gearing up to quibble, and hurried on. “Once we have been released from our bodies, we will be called to join the Favorite Son where he is throned in his kingdom, and we will share his power and glory forever.”
	“Oh, well that’s nice,” Aine said, sincerely. “So you all go to be with your God after you die.”
	“Well, not everyone,” Starina said.
	“Oh, of course not everyone,” I answered. “But those of you who believe in all this, you’ll get to be with this father of yours forever?”
	Starina nodded as if I was finally saying something she understood. “Yes, those who worship God and do his will on earth, will go to be with him in heaven.”
	I looked down at the sword emblem dangling from the gold chain around the woman’s neck. “So that’s your story, then.”
	“That is the story of our Lord.”
	“Well, thank you for telling us,” I said. “It’s a strange story, but it seems to have a good ending.” I went back to my eggs. 
	“If you’d like to come to our nightly meetings,” Starina said, “you could learn a lot more about our Lord.”
	“Well, thank you, that’s very generous,” I said, “but we’ll probably be too busy. Still--”
	“Oh come now,” Starina said with a coy smile. “Whatever it is that you’re doing, it can’t be as important as saving your soul, can it?”
	I scooped up my last forkful of eggs. “Saving it from what?”
	“PERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRDITION!!!” shouted the Preacher, despite Huther’s attempts. “The flaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaames of hellfire!”
	“Don’t worry about him,” I said to Starina, who looked a little startled. “He’s been put wrong in the head by some experiences he’s had. What were you saying?”
	“I was saying,” she began, with a furtive little glance at the Preacher, “that the most important thing for any of us to do is to make sure that our souls are saved.”
	“Yes, but saved from what, is my question,” I said. “You mean from possession and overtaking and so forth?”
	“I mean from...” She was embarrassed to say it now, but it was the only answer her mind offered. “Well, from perdition.”
	“Which is what?”
	“Which is...well...hell.”
	I blinked. “What, you mean the hell? The one where the Dark One rules?”
	“If by that you mean Satan, yes.”
	“Well, have no fear on that score,” I said. “Me and the Dark One, I don’t see us setting up house together any time soon.”
	“But you see,” Starina repeated obstinately, “if you aren’t saved, if you don’t accept the Lord as your God, that’s where you’ll go, even if you think you’re doing good.”
	Aine, whose attention had been wandering, now suddenly became alert and concerned. “Even though we don’t believe in your story?”
	Starina seemed confused. “Yes, that’s what I’m saying--if you don’t believe, you won’t be saved. You’ll be cast out into hell. You don’t want that, do you?”
	“I most certainly don’t,” I returned, “but you can’t seriously mean that just because we don’t believe your story, your God wants to see us in hell, can you?”
	She obviously did. Aine was appalled even before the thought started framing itself for speech.
	“But that’s not right!” Aine declared. “Your God wants to see everyone but the Cretids in hell?”
	“No, no, of course not,” Starina said. “He doesn’t want anyone to be lost. But if in our willfulness we reject him, then we have to take our rightful punishment.”
	“Well--but--I mean in Dubhinis, in Plenana and Hendai--in Ideire, even--there are millions of people who’ve never heard of your Lord and haven’t had the chance to reject or not reject him,” I said. “To just consign four-fifths of the world to hell seems mighty wasteful--and dangerous, at that. Imagine if they all teamed up--”
	“But that’s no longer true,” Starina said proudly. “That’s exactly why so many of our forefathers sacrificed themselves to bring the news of our Lord to all of those places. In the four centuries since the Discovery, we’ve saved more than half of the world.” She smiled. “Strange to say it, we’ve made more progress among the savages of Dubhinis and Plenana than we have in Ideire.”
	“HEEEEEATHENS!” interrupted the Preacher. “Lay aside your idolatrous pagan ways! Renounce the foul witch Idair and be saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaved!”
	“Renounce my gleacha,” I said, annoyed. “I’m sorry, you were saying?”
	She looked at me in a kind of confusion that I was just starting to learn how to read.
	“So tell me this, then,” I said suddenly. “Is the Preacher crazy, or is he just honest?” She looked down at the table. “I mean, did you really seriously come over here with the intention of getting me to turn by back on Idair just out of the fear of getting on your Lord’s bad side?”
	She looked up, chagrined. “Of course I wouldn’t expect you to understand, right away...”
	I laughed. “But come now, Starina, that isn’t reasonable. I mean, you have to admit, it’s a very bizarre story. It would take some fast talking to get us to accept it at all, let alone to convince us that it’s the only story that’s true. I mean, if that’s the task you’ve set yourself, well, I don’t see how anyone could complete it.”
	Starina didn’t say it, but we both heard it. They did it in Dubhinis.
	Aine looked at her with horror. “You mean...in Dubhinis...they just believe this story, and no other?”
	“Such is the power of faith in the Lord,” Starina said warily.
	“But--what about their own stories? What happened to them?”
	“Pagan superstition!” shouted the Preacher. “Heeeeeeeeeeathen hogwash! Blot it all out from the book of thy creation, O Lord!”
	“We must be going,” I said, standing up as I read her embarrassed and unspoken concurrence to the Preacher’s rantings. “But I must thank you for telling us your story, and for answering, by my count, at least two of the uafach freagair. Idair keep you safe, generous-hearted woman that she is.”
	Aine stood up too, and the two of us fled Starina, the Preacher, and the sword hanging over the doorway. Once out on the street, we turned down south and kept going, both of us moving faster than we had to.
	“So,” Aine finally said. “Which of the uafach freagair?”
	“Guess.”
	“The one about why she forbade us to proselytize, obviously,” Aine said.
	“Right. And the other?”
	“I can’t tell, dhiaoc,” she said, still fuming.
	“It’s just a hunch,” I said. “I can’t be sure about it. But I think...” I muttered a curse down at the pavement. “She must have known about these clowns--she must have foreseen what they would do out there. And so there must have been shri on those other islands.”
	Aine slowed down, now that anger had modulated into regret. “I believe you, dhiaoc,” she said, her voice trembling. “All those stories, gone forever.”
	“One story, repeating itself through all of creation, insisting on its own truth as the only truth, beating the entire world into a hollow chamber for its own echo...” Aine was with me, the sadness of this history blotting out even her own visions of what had happened along the street we were hurrying down. 
	“That’s why she told us not to,” Aine said. “To protect the other stories, from us.”
	The speech she made to Iandar over the body of that dead thief came back to my mind. “Less magic in the world,” I said.
	“Many stories, one Spirit, that’s what she said,” Aine went on, staring determinedly ahead of her. “And every story is someone’s truth, and all truth is magic.”
	“And off they went, four hundred years ago, with their goods in the hold and guns on deck and this story in their heads,” I said. “And since we wouldn’t have them at any price they went round the rest of the world. One by one, snuffing the stories out, and with each story one kind of magic. And now here we are. The last survivors, clinging like hell to our tiny rock in the middle of this ocean of Cretid.”
	“What...” Aine said, shaking the hair from her sorrowing face. “What the world could have been, dhiaoc? If those stories had all survived?”
	“With all that magic,” I said.
	We went grimly down the street toward where Darin’s letter told us we would find the stranger he had written to.

XII.
The Kindness of Strangers

	<What are we going to do when we get there?> Aine asked, as we got deeper into the badlands.
	<Give her the letter, and hope that she’s disposed to help us out, whoever she is.> 
	<Do you see a man lying on the corner of 15th bleeding out of his chest?>
	<No.>
	This was happening so often to her now that she had worked it into the rhythm of our conversation. I did see a number of people around us--but they weren’t bleeding, or dying, or being attacked. They were going about their business, whatever it was, standing in groups on corners or talking in doorways, and following us with their eyes as we passed by. I couldn’t tell why they were so interested in us, unless it was because we were obviously strangers.
	<Dhiaoc, do you...do you notice...or is it just me...that everyone around here seems to be...like Darin?>
	I looked around. <You mean darker-skinned.>
	<Yes.>
	<Yes, I do notice that. Maybe that’s why they’re staring at us.>
	<Why did that happen all of a sudden?>
	<It hasn’t been all of a sudden, really. It got mixed about 12 blocks ago and the proportion’s been changing since then. You’ve just been too busy seeing things to notice.>
	<But even further north...when I see things...it’s mostly people with darker skin that I see, getting hurt.>
	<Huh. Well, Darin did say something to indicate that things are rough up here for people who are...I think the way he refers to himself is ‘black.’>
	<But they aren’t black, dhiaoc. They’re...kind of...in the warm brown range.>
	<I know, but I’ve never heard Darin call himself ‘warm brown.’ I don’t know--maybe it’s because there are so many different shades they don’t want to try to be accurate; it would leave people out.>
	<So even people who aren’t exactly Darin’s color, they’re ‘black’ too?>
	I was getting very puzzled and uncertain about this myself. <I think so. I mean, he says everyone in Ideire is ‘white,’ and we come in all kinds of different colors but none of them are white. So I guess ‘white’ means ‘in the pinkish-beigey range,’ and ‘black’ means ‘in the warm brown range.’>
	<All right, so...but I mean someone like Lara, that’s tanner than even the Nauchtians are but a lot closer to beige than Darin is, does that make her ‘black’ or ‘white?’>
	<I have no idea,> I said. <Well, look, let’s just not say anything at all about it to them until we’re sure. I know Darin’s always been very touchy about the whole skin color thing.>
	<Why?>
	<Well, I think it made him feel strange to be the only one his color,> I said. <And you know, people are used to him now, but when I was younger I used to see people staring at him.>
	<So wouldn’t people be different about it up here?>
	<I don’t know...it looks like a lot of the people who are browner than us seem to be crowded into the poorest part of town.> Aine nodded, having apparently been wondering about this for a while before she mentioned it. <You know how people are about the poor, Aine...maybe people look down on them, for coming from here.>
	As I said this, I slowed down a little because there was something blocking the street and sidewalk up ahead. We had passed a dead car, its nose crushed into the side of a lamp post and its glass scattered along the street, a couple of blocks ago, but assumed it was part of the southern-streets ambiance. Now, I was thinking maybe the crash was a recent thing, because one of those square white vehicles was disappearing down one of the cross-streets, and there was a small crowd of people standing around a cleared area on the sidewalk that was marked off by a line of something very bright green that was wrapped around a set of poles to make a temporary fence. On the outside of the fence were a group of Enforcers, standing there looking out at the crowd inscrutably. Inside it, two other Enforcers, their caps tucked under their arms, were talking to a man with a notebook, who wasn’t dressed like them but who they seemed to be deferring to. 
	<Dhiaoc...do you see the gardai, or is it me?>
	<No, I see them, Aine.>
	Startled to find out that she was looking at something real for once, Aine ran up to the group, with me tagging behind her.
	<How should we do it, dhiaoc?>
	<Do what?>
	<How should we stop them? They have guns...>
	<Wait, Aine, I’m not sure we’re looking at the same-->
	Aine had already reached one of the open spots along the green fence, and had stopped suddenly, staring at a part of the brick wall that seemed darker and stained.
	“NO!”
	She threw herself forward in an attempt to get to the wall, but found herself impeded by the green line. Her hands went blindly to find the obstacle she couldn’t see. By the time I got there, she had brought herself out of it--but she was crying, uncontrollably, with anger and horror.
	“They killed him,” she said, looking at me with that pitiful face and not seeing any of the other people who were now staring in our direction. “They stood him right up against the wall and then they...”
	I didn’t know what else to do so I put my arm around her. “I’m sorry, Aine,” I said. “I’m sorry you always have to see it too late--”
	“But where in the hell are we?” she demanded, pulling away and looking for answers in my baffled face. “Who are these people who can laugh at murder?”
	Out of the corner of my eye I saw the two gardai inside the fence glancing at her. And suddenly I understood the danger we were in.
	<Aine, come away from here-->
	“It’s not enough they can bring themselves to beat someone like that,” Aine went on, deaf to my interjections. “Kitth didn’t laugh, Weadiw didn’t laugh, even Lythril wouldn’t laugh, while she was killing!”
	<Aine, you’re putting us in danger. Now stop it and come with me.>
	I was worried. Not just because it seemed to be taking Aine too long to get over what she’d seen, or because I knew that the two men inside that circle were the ones she had seen do it. On top of it, I could feel the entire crowd around us listening to her now, intent and deadly serious. And what really unnerved me was realizing that most of them believed her.
	“Come on, Aine,” I said quietly, as she stopped talking and watched me for a moment with those traumatized eyes. “It’s too late, the man is dead. Come away, this isn’t safe.”
	She nodded, swallowing her tears. “I’m sorry, dhiaoc. I...you don’t know what it’s like.”
	“I don’t, I know. Here, let’s--”
	From inside the circle the sound of a laugh floated out to us. It was from one of the Enforcers, finding funny something that one of the others had said.
	The sound set Aine right back to the beginning. Her head snapped away from me and she rushed the fence, shouting at the two men inside it.
	“Marbhfeiceanni!” And, as she remembered they were Cretids, “Murderers! Lifetakers! Is death something to laugh at? Are you human?”
	“All right, that’s enough,” said the nearest Enforcer, taking Aine by the arm.
	She swung against his grip back toward the fence. “To shoot a man laughing and then put a gun in his dead hand--”
	The Enforcer hanging onto Aine suddenly twisted her arm around behind her and began propelling her toward the green-and-white car that was pulled up near the sidewalk, slamming her head down onto the hood just like we’d seen The Enforcer do in the VisionBox.
	“What, are you going to arrest her now?” shouted a woman of about sixty who had been watching all of this. “Take her down to the station and tell the papers she hung herself in her cell?”
	The bitter laugh that this statement produced from the crowd alarmed me more than anything else. Aine was lying flattened on the hood of the car, trying to get back the breath that had been knocked out of her. I made an attempt to reason with her attacker.
	“Come on, Enforcer,” I said. “Please, let her go, she--”
	And I stopped, because there was nothing I could say. She doesn’t mean anything by it? She most certainly did. She’s not bothering you? Yes, she was. She’s harmless? Not with that knowledge she wasn’t. It’s all right? That was about as far from truth as you could get.
	As the Enforcer reached for the pair of steel bracelets hanging from his belt, Aine seized the moment to break his grip and fight her way past him. Before I could get in to help, the man swung around and hit her a resounding crack on the head with the butt of his gun, sending her sprawling down on the pavement.
	“Hey!” I shouted, running toward her. “You take your hands off her!”
	Now he was bringing some kind of heavy black stick down from above toward her. I shot an arm out to intervene. And then it really got bad.
	The only thing I can say, really, is that I hardly knew what hit me. I had a vague sense that there were other members of the crowd rushing to our assistance, but that seemed to make no difference; it seemed like every time I made a move I was interrupted by a fist or a baton or a heavy blunt thing that knocked me one way or the other, and in a frighteningly short time I found myself with my face ground into the pavement and the weight of a six-foot and well-fleshed man pushing down on the small of my back while one of the Enforcers grabbed the back of my neck with a vice-like hand.
	<Aine? Aine, talk to me.>
	I couldn’t see where she was, but my concern for her was cut with my own terror. After five years in practice I’d fought with a lot of spirits, and even with a few people, and I’d been close to death. But I’d never felt as vulnerable, as crushed and in danger as I did at that moment, with that knee in my back and the concrete scraping my face and the knowledge that I was not physically strong enough to break the grip he had me in.
	<I’m sorry, dhiaoc--this is my fault-->
	“You are under arrest!” the man barked at the back of my head. He bent my arms behind my back and I felt the metal bracelets click around my wrists. “You will be interrogated. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”
	The weight lifted off my back and I was hauled rudely up by one arm. As I steadied myself I saw, through the strands of my hair that were now hanging into my eyes, Aine being stuffed into the back seat of the green car. Around us the Enforcers were still struggling with two or three members of the crowd, who were in the process of being arrested.
	“You are entitled to an attorney,” the Enforcer went on, opening the car’s other rear door. “If you cannot afford your own attorney the court will appoint one for you. If you do not wish the court to appoint a lawyer, you may waive your right to counsel. Do you wish to waive that right?”
	He paused for a moment, and afraid that silence would be interpreted as an assent I hurried to say, “No, I don’t, and my friend doesn’t either.”
	“Answer for yourself,” the Enforcer growled, shoving me into the car. “Do you understand all of these things we have said to you?”
	“Perfectly,” I said, looking back venomously at those mean little blue eyes.
	The door slammed. I looked at Aine, who was lying on the seat next to me, her hands locked behind her like mine and blood running from the side of her head where the gun had struck her. 
	“I’m sorry,” she repeated as more tears added to the tracks on her pallid face. “I should have kept my mouth shut. This is terrible.”
	The two gardai who had arrested us climbed into the front seat. One of them picked up a little box that was attached to the control panel and began talking into it.
	“Dispatch, his is Unit 48 at 10th and Plenana, returning to station with two suspects, over.”
	“Copy that, Unit 48,” said the box, in a woman’s voice. “Unit 53 already dispatched to your location. Report situation, over.”
	The Enforcer peered out the window at the sidewalk. “Crowd dispersal in progress, situation coming under control. Units 34 and 35 remain in position.”
	“Copy that, 48. Proceed to station, over.”
	“Proceeding. Over and out.”
	The engine began its growl. As the car pulled out my window passed the back seat of another green car. The woman who had remonstrated with the patrollers was inside, nodding at me through the window with what was meant, I thought, to be an encouraging smile. Then the car peeled off to who knew where.

	“Lord have mercy,” said the woman of sixty, with an amused sideways glance at Aine. “You rattled ‘em bad, that’s for sure.”
	There were five of us sitting around on the concrete floor of what the others were calling a cell. Me, Aine, the woman I recognized from the crowd, and two women who were so frightening to look upon that we tried not to. I heard the other woman’s mind calling them glass whores, and figured I would take her word for it; certainly their bodies were displayed with a kind of desperation that was nauseating to us, and they huddled each in her own corner, uninterested in us or the rest of the world. 
	“I’m Tyrna,” said the woman from the crowd. “I live round the block from where it happened. I came out when I heard the gunshots. They already had him covered up when I got there.”
	She looked at us, obviously expecting us to volunteer; and she’d been so sympathetic, I hadn’t the heart to refuse. “We’re strangers here,” I said. “We were delivering a letter for a friend...and we came across the place.”
	“It’s all right, you know,” the woman said, as if she could read me after all. “They’ll give you back your bag when they release you on bond. It’s not like it’s evidence.”
	“They will?” I said, mournfully.
	“Sure they will, sweetheart,” Tyrna said. “Unless there’s glass in there, or weed, or something.”
	“No fear of that,” I sighed.
	“Less they plant it in there themselves,” Tyrna mentioned as it occurred to her. Aine looked at her, newly alarmed. “Oh, yeah, they do that sometimes. It wouldn’t surprise me.”
	<I’m really, really, really sorry, dhiaoc.>
	Being manhandled and arrested was bad enough, but giving the bag up was worse. You only get one hreapa. If you lose it, that’s it. And I had no idea where they had put the thing or how I would get it back.
	“Why do they do that?” I asked.
	“Well, so they can put you away,” Tyrna explained, as if this were obvious. “See, if they can prove you were carrying, that’s five years right there. Prove you were carrying enough to sell, and that’s fifteen. Even with the plea bargain you’ll end up with five.” Aine groaned. “And of course nobody’ll believe a thing you say, once they prove you’re a user.”
	I chuckled morosely.
	“What’s funny?”
	“Well,” I said. “At home, it works the other way. At least it used to.”
	“Cheer up,” Tyrna said. “Maybe they won’t. After all it’s your friend there who’s really in trouble.” She looked over at Aine. “You saw it all, huh?”
	Aine nodded. 
	“What were you doing in that neighborhood at six o’clock in the morning?”
	“I wasn’t,” Aine said.
	Tyrna looked at me for clarification.
	“Well,” I sighed, “maybe if they think we’re insane, they won’t hold us.” Tyrna was still looking. “See, Aine didn’t witness it, not the way the law defines that. She has...” I broke off and shook my head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
	Tyrna looked on in puzzlement for a moment, and then something hit her. “Ohhhh!” She dropped her voice and leaned over to whisper. “You mean she has the gift?”
	I couldn’t believe it. Neither could Aine. “I--are you Ideiren?”
	Tyrna burst out laughing.
	“Yeah, that’s me, the world’s first black Ideiren. What are you, crazy? No, child, I’m not Ideiren. I’ve been stuck in the South Corner most of my life, but I was born on a little island off the Ravaged Coast.” As she saw this meant nothing to me, she added, “It’s in the northeast part of what you folks call Dubhinis.”
	“Oh!” I said. “And where you come from, they believe in things like this?”
	Tyrna seemed to be both gratified and a little startled at the sudden light of hope that had kindled in both of us. “Some do,” she answered. “Some don’t. But I believe in the gift, because my mother had it.”
	Aine’s relief was just about endless. “It must have been awful for her living here,” she said eagerly. “Constantly seeing things like this.”
	“It was awful, for sure,” Tyrna said, studying Aine.
	“Tyrna Bronson?” called an approaching mud-green-shirted woman. 
	“Yes,” Tyrna answered sweetly.
	“Your lawyer’s here.”
	The woman enforcer opened the door of the cell and took Tyrna out by one of her manacled arms. 
	“Don’t you worry, sweetheart,” Tyrna said to Aine. “Tyrna’ll take care of you, just watch.”
	I was puzzled to know exactly how she was planning to take care of us, since she was being marched out the door in chains, but I didn’t say anything. I was too depressed.
	<Dhiaoc, I’m really, really sorry.>
	I hadn’t answered her the first 50 times, but there was starting not to be a point to this any more. <I know.>
	<I didn’t think this would happen.>
	<Might I ask what you expected would happen?>
	There was a pause while she looked over at the other two women.
	<I don’t know, dhiaoc.>
	<Well, let this be a lesson,> I said. <Every action has consequences. And if you don’t know what those are, then you want to think about whether you want to take that action.> I sighed. <You have to learn to control your anger, Aine.>
	She didn’t say anything, but I knew what she was thinking.
	<Yes, it’s true--I’m not even-tempered myself. And I can’t say it hasn’t cost me. But even I do exercise some control over when and where I blow my top, and if you can’t learn how to do that you’re going to get yourself killed early.>
	 She nodded, looking down between her trousered knees at the dirty floor of the cell.
	We sat like that for a while, until the door to the hallway opened again, and the woman Enforcer returned. “You, Big Red,” she said, pointing at me. “Come with me, and no funny stuff.”
	The room she led me into was small, with a table in it and two chairs. The woman unlocked one half of my restraint with a key on her belt, then fixed it to a ring in the table. This gave me arm movement at least, even if it was humiliating. On the wall opposite the chair the Enforcer sat me in was a wide mirror in which I could see my reflection. It was not an image satisfying to contemplate. With my hands bound I couldn’t fix the hair that had become disheveled, and there was a long abrasion mark on one cheek from the pavement. But before I really had time to meditate upon the vicissitudes of my profession, the door opened again and a different woman came in.
	She wasn’t wearing a uniform; instead she had on one of those suits the newspeople wore, but cut better and without the noose. And, since I was starting to notice these things now, she was ‘black,’ with hair running back from her forehead in a number of tight little braids that kept close to the scalp in even rows until their ends dangled over her neck. Part of my mind wondered how that was done while the rest of it wondered who she was and what was about to happen.
	All that happened, at first, was that she sat down on the opposite side of the table and put a brown leather case on top of it. “I understand you haven’t yet contacted an attorney,” she said.
	Reading what the word meant off her, I said, “No, I don’t know anyone up here to call.”
	“I’m offering to represent all those arrested this morning at the site of Rett Deacon’s murder,” she said. “That includes you and your friend. Of course, if you wish, you can refuse, and the court will appoint an attorney for you.” She paused as she registered my surprise. “What is it, you weren’t expecting a black lawyer?”
	“No, I wasn’t expecting a woman lawyer,” I said. “I’m pleased that the Cretids have made one improvement, anyhow.”
	She didn’t get it, but she at least seemed to be able to tell that I wasn’t questioning her credentials. “So, would you like this woman lawyer to represent you, or shall I leave you to the Defenders of the Poor?”
	I had been reading what I could off her and made my decision. “If you’re offering, I accept, but you must understand that I can’t pay you anything--and I do mean anything.”
	That serious, searching face almost smiled, but didn’t. “My services are being funded by the Council for the Protection of People of Color,” she said. “You, of course, are not a person of color, but that’s a detail we’ll address later.” She extended a hand toward me. “Pleased to be working with you. My name is Kwenu Umuoa.”
	I had automatically reached out to take her hand, but in mid-shake it hit me and I started laughing.
	“You find something amusing?” she said, offended.
	“Not amusing so much as ironic,” I answered.
	She looked at me warily.
	“Do you know a man named Darin mac Donald na Kingston?”
	“Yes,” she finally answered, her mind registering mingled surprise and alarm.
	“He asked me to deliver a letter to you,” I said. “It’s in the bag the Enforcers confiscated.”
	“Thank you,” she said, suddenly becoming very hard to read. “So you know my name already; I need to know yours.”
	I glanced up at that mirror.
	“I don’t know much about Cretid law,” I said. “Is it like in Ideire, where what you say to a lawyer who’s working for you is a secret, and the lawyer can’t be required to reveal it, in court or out of it?”
	“Yes,” she answered. “I should warn you that it’s quite likely that we’re being observed through that mirror behind me, and there may be one or more listening devices planted in here to record our conversation. However, it’s also true that anything they learn from that will be inadmissible in court, so nothing you say in here will affect the outcome of your trial.”
	“Then why do they bother?” I asked.
	“The information will go into their files, and may lead to harassment in the future,” she said. “But tell me your name, or I can’t do the paperwork to get you released.”
	“My used name is Theamh ni hUlnach na Craoibh,” I said.
	She sat forward a little in her seat. “Your mother is Ulnach ni Mhaire?” she said.
	“Yes,” I answered slowly.
	Kwenu declined to explain how she knew my mother’s matronym, and went back to business. “So. We’re facing several problems, then. Right now, you’re being charged with obstruction of process, for refusing to give your name, and with resisting arrest. Obstruction carries a penalty of 60 days’ imprisonment, and resisting arrest runs anywhere from six months to a year. That, however, is not the real problem.”
	“The real problem being that I’m an Ideiren in the country illegally...”
	“...and that you’re a shriia,” she finished for me.
	“I’m sorry, it’s more than I suppose you bargained for.”
	She looked at me with a spark of genuine enthusiasm that reminded me a little of Ethir. “Actually, this is a windfall I could hardly have imagined. We’ve been waiting since it was passed for a test case that would challenge the Criminal Exclusion Act. And here you are.”
	“But...does the CEA cover me? I’ve never been convicted of anything.”
	“Under the terms of the CEA any Ideiren discovered inside the borders without appropriate documents is by definition a criminal.”
	I blinked. “That doesn’t seem legal.”
	“And indeed, from our point of view, it isn’t. You’re also in luck,” she said, “in that our Assembly has just passed legislation known as the Freedom of Conscience Act, ensuring that any rites belonging to any religion can be practiced anywhere in the Cretid Nation without risk of penalty or threat of interference. It is true that this act was designed to make it possible for schoolteachers and other government employees to organize prayer to the Lord during the work day,” she said, “and it is also true that the court does not recognize shri as a religion, but then that’s the challenge of practicing law in the Cretid Nation.”
	“But if we stipulate that I’m a shriia...won’t I get deported right away anyhow?”
	“Not if I’m worth my salary,” Kwenu said. “The policy of summary deportation that’s been in place for the past three hundred years isn’t actually based on law. It’s founded on a highly disingenuous interpretation of one of our fraud statutes, which has been amended so many times since then that it’s all but null and void. So the first thing we do is get a stop on the deportation order they’ll start pushing through as soon as they get your name. I understand there’s an Ideiren embassy opening downtown--we should get in touch with them--”
	“Uh--” She stopped, obviously noticing my reluctance. “Who’s going to be the ambassador, do you know the used name?”
	She frowned a moment as she searched for it. “Ideiren names, you know, they make no sense...Twil Deran or Twad Merinogue or--”
	“Might it have been Twil mac Arin na hOg?”
	Kwenu’s fingers snapped as she pointed at me. “That’s it. You know him?”
	“Unfortunately,” I answered.
	“So we shouldn’t get in touch with them,” she finally answered, while I sat dismayed.
	“I think it would be extraordinarily dangerous for both of us,” I answered.
	A dry laugh greeted this statement. “So are you saying you’re a fugitive from your authorities too?”
	“It’s all very complicated,” I said. “The shortest way to tell the story is that there’s a civil war brewing back home and I’m pretty sure Twil and I are on opposite sides.”
	“Aha!” This seemed to cheer her up for some reason. “So you’re a political refugee?”
	“What does that mean?”
	“Would you say,” she asked, scribbling on the pad, “that if you were to be returned to your country, you would risk loss of life or liberty?”
	I chuckled. “There are a number of people, who are now almost certainly either in positions of power or on their way there, who have already tried to kill me and would almost certainly try it again if I returned to the country right now.”
	“Fabulous.”
	“Well, you may think so--”
	She shook her head. “No, what I mean is that this gives me plenty to go on,” she said. “So who are these people who--”
	“I’m sorry,” I said, loath to interrupt but no longer able to focus, “but I’m very worried about Aine--my friend--and maybe it would make more sense for you to arrange for her release first, and then after we’re out we can do a longer interview. I have reason to believe she’s in danger here.”
	Kwenu looked a little surprised, but seemed to share my concern. “All right then. I have your name, your country of origin is Ideire...birthdate?”
	“I was born twenty-eight years, six months, two weeks and four days from this day. I don’t know what that makes in your calendar.”
	She wrote it down, did the math, and put down the date. “Home address?”
	“We don’t...my house at home doesn’t really have an address. Anyone sending me letters would do it through the Pharc, in the City.”
	 “So you live in Ideiren City.”
	“If that’s what you call it. Actually, I live outside it, in the Vicinity.”
	Kwenu figured something out and wrote it in the space on her sheet of lined paper. “And where are you staying while you’re up here?”
	“Well...last time we slept, it was under a tree in that park you have north of here in the 60s.”
	Her pen dropped to the table and rested near the side of the pad as she looked back at me.
	“I’ll just put down my home address,” she finally said, returning to her writing. “That’s about it.” She opened the door and looked down the hallway. “They’ll come to take you back to your cell in a minute; I’ll go file your paperwork and request an interview with...what’s your friend’s name?”
	“She’s called Aine ni hEmer na Ruadh.”
	Making a daunted face, she offered me the pen. “Can you write that down for me?”
	“I’d prefer if you did,” I said. “I can spell it for you, but I’d rather not write it down myself.”
	I spelled the name while she copied it down, glancing up at me now and then with muted curiosity.
	“I’ll see you in the waiting room after they release you,” she said. “Don’t go anywhere, because I’ll still need to talk to you.”
	“I won’t,” I said.
	“You know,” she answered, on her way out the door, “it’s nice finally to have a client whose word you know you can trust.”
	The door closed. I waited for the woman enforcer to come back. She didn’t. I began to worry. 
	<Aine?>
	There was no answer.
	<Aine, where are you? What’s happening?>
	The longer she didn’t answer the more alarmed I became. I took a good look at the manacles that were keeping me tethered to the desk. The link that connected the wrist cuffs was thin enough that it would respond to mindstrength...
	I was about halfway through before the door opened. The woman enforcer unlocked me, pinned my hands again and started marching me out the door. “Quick now, I haven’t got all day.”
	She was worried. Really worried. Perhaps because as we passed down the corridor, I saw Kwenu in the hallway arguing with a man in a suit who, while trying to face her down, was obviously also afraid of her.
	“Well, she’s my client, so I’m afraid it is my business, Investigator,” she was saying, in a voice that managed to be cutting and forceful without being particularly loud or harsh. “Your precinct has begun the day with one of the most blatant abuses of force in the history of the Cretid Criminal Police, swiftly compounded by unjustified mass arrests which served as the occasion for a number of new incidents of brutality. And now on top of everything else, you are illegally interrogating my client without counsel present. Now you may think that because she’s Ideiren she’s got no legal standing, but I will tell you, Investigator, that you are grievously mistaken.”
	The Enforcer walked me past this scene as quickly as possible, but not so fast it couldn’t get me more worried. 
	<Aine, if you’re conscious, answer me. I’m charging you on your duty to the diaoc.>
	<I’ll be all right, dhiaoc.>
	As soon as the link was open I knew she was in trouble. <What are they doing to you?>
	<I can handle it myse-->
	The only thing that could have made her signal do that was a sudden disturbance to her mind. And I had a feeling I knew what had caused it.
	I was pushed back into the cell and the barred door closed on me. <Look, Aine, you can tell them your used name, they’ll find out eventually anyhow.>
	<That’s as may be, I’m not telling these buachailli na fiachuisce anything.>
	“All right, Red,” said the woman, unlocking the door. “Come with me, and we’ll spring you.”
	She began hustling me away, down a different hallway this time. 
	<Aine, they’re about to release me. Soon as they do I’ll come after you.>
	<Don’t, dhiaoc, please, I’ve brought you enough trouble.>
	By the time they had taken my manacles off and returned my bag, Kwenu had burst into what I realized, looking around, was what she had meant by the waiting room. She went up to the window where the clerk was handing me my things and shoved a piece of bescribbled paper at him.
	“Form 28/Z requesting immediate release on bond of Aine ni hEmer na Ruadh, with cashier’s check covering the amount and signed pledge of responsibility. File it and send the turnkey up to the holding cell and do it quick.”
	The clerk, who seemed to know her of old, did as she said, speaking into one of those boxes that all the people here seemed to have. “Stulney, retrieve suspect #26402 for release, over.”
	He looked up, hoping to be done, but he wasn’t. “Form 309k requesting photo documentation of suspect’s physical condition upon release. I want the photographer down here now.”
	“Kwenu,” I said, now very worried, “will you tell me what’s happening to my friend?”
	She ignored me, watching the clerk make the call on his machine and put the form into a drawer. By the time he had returned to the window she was slapping another sheet of paper down onto the counter. “Forms 413 and 414, submission of grievance claims to the Internal Oversight Division regarding improper interrogation procedures and use of excessive and inappropriate force.”
	“Oh, fnaa!” I said, as I saw Aine coming in the doorway propelled by the woman.
	Aine was trying to be brave, but as soon as she saw me the water sprang to her swollen eyes. There were bruises that would be coming to her face that weren’t there yet, and bruises that were already turning black and blue, along with a stretch of split skin under one eye where a ring on the finger of someone’s closed fist had caught and torn.
	As her face crumpled into the tears, I ran across the room to her. She couldn’t put her arms around me because they were still shackled behind her, but turned the least hurt side of her face toward me as I held onto her.
	“Dhiaoc,” she said.
	“Idair’s hair, Aine, I’m so sorry.”
	“It’s my fault,” she snuffed. “It’s all my fault.”
	Keeping one arm around her shoulders, I put the other hand around the back of her head to check for damage. Her mind still read as it should, although it was obviously in a state of severe agitation.
	“You’re going to be all right,” Aine, I said, as her shoulders shook with her sobbing. “There’s no permanent harm. Your face is the worst of it.” She kept crying as the woman unlocked her manacles silently and withdrew. “For the love of Idair, Aine, why didn’t you call me?”
	“I’ve already gotten you into so much trouble,” she wept. “I’ve scuttled the whole mission, and gotten us--”
	“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “You haven’t scuttled it. Kwenu’s going to keep us in the country for at least a little while.”
	She pulled back, now starting to look a little less despondent even if she still looked very pathetic. “She is?”
	“I have great confidence in her,” I said, as Kwenu rejoined us. “We’re going to be all right. Your yelling at that enforcer isn’t going to be what tips the balance. So don’t hold yourself personally responsible for the imminent demise of shri and Ideiren democracy, all right?”
	Aine snuffled a small little laugh, nodding. “All right, dhiaoc.”
	“And the next time something like this happens to you,” I said, putting my hands on her shoulders and looking at her in what I hoped was an impressing sort of way, “You call me, all right?”
	She nodded. “All right, dhiaoc.”
	I went through my bag and found, in addition to my hreapa safe and sound, the bottle of uisce. “Now hold still, this might sting at first.”
	I poured a little onto the rag we’d used for NightQueen, but Kwenu stopped me when I reached for her face.
	“Not yet. The photographer’s coming to take pictures of her. I want the evidence.”
	I didn’t get it exactly, but I trusted her. “Why would they even do this?” I demanded. “It’s not as if she has information they need, or--”
	“They didn’t want that,” Aine said quickly. “They wanted me to sign my name to something. They wouldn’t even tell me what it was.” She looked back at me proudly. “I didn’t do it.”
	“I’m proud of you,” I said, but I was also worried. If the Cretid Nation’s enforcers were in the habit of using their fists to interrogate suspects--and it seemed, from Kwenu’s reaction, as if she had seen this happen before--we were indeed in a whole different world, one which was liable to get ever more dangerous.
	“Here we go,” Kwenu said. A little man had appeared carrying a square box with a round snout that stuck out from its face, on the end of which was a disc of black glass. He looked at Aine and passed a hand over his thinning hair.
	“So she’s the one?”
	“That’s right,” Kwenu said. “Front, profile and three-quarters.”
	The man held up the box. Aine looked at the snout, no doubt as curious about this performance as I was. A blinding light flashed out from the top of the box that left her blinking confusedly ahead of her as he moved around her, pressing the button again and setting off one of those flashes every time he stopped.
	“That’s fine,” Kwenu said. “Go develop them. We’ll wait.”
	“You’ll get prints in the mail,” the clerk called from the window. 
	“We’ll get them now,” Kwenu said. 
	The man with the box looked at the clerk, who shrugged.
	“Better go develop them,” he said.
	The three of us sat down on the bench. I doused the rag with uisce and started working at Aine’s face with it.
	<Were you scared?> I asked, as I daubed at the cut under her eye.
	There was a pause, but the gave the true answer. <Yes.>
	<So was I.> The blood came off, and the wound was already getting narrower, less raw. The uisce would do little if anything for the bruises, but it did take down some of the swelling. <How’s your head?>
	<It hurts, but I don’t think anything’s broken.>
	By the time the little man came back with a brown envelope, she was looking more like herself, and feeling a little better. Kwenu had been watching this process with some well-disguised astonishment. She was a woman, I was realizing, who didn’t like to look as if she were surprised by anything. 
	“Here you go,” he said. “There’s another set of identical prints on file.”
	Kwenu opened the envelope and pulled out a number of square pieces of stiff paper. It took a minute, but my eyes, trained now by the VisionBox, recognized the image of Aine as she had been a few minutes ago, with the blood still on her face and the bruises and swelling in full flower.
	“So this is a camera,” I said, looking at the man’s box with its round snout and dark eye.
	“That’s right,” he said, with an unpleasantly condescending grin.
	Aine was looking at the squares too, amazed to see herself this way.
	“Look,” I said, joylessly. “It’s just like having aftersight, only not.”
	Kwenu didn’t ask; she just put the photographs back into the envelope and stood up. “Come on,” she said. “You can stay with me as long as you want. I’ve got the room.”
	“Are you sure?” I asked, looking up from my bag. I had remembered about the letter and was searching for it.
	“Yes,” she answered. “Think of it as your commission for carrying that letter.”
	Which, as she finished, I had finally grasped and offered to her. “Here you go,” I said. “He asked me to tell you that he would have been there if he could, and that it’s been...thirty years, seven months and six days since his last one.”
	“His last what?” she asked, blinking her large brown eyes.
	“He said you would know,” I answered.
	She nodded and turned to lead us out the door.

	“Hi, Mommy.”
	“Hello, sweetie.” Kwenu pushed the door open with one arm and bent down to give the child who’d answered our knock a hug with the other. She was a small, quiet child, about ten years old, with black hair woven in two tight braids down the sides of her head and a pair of round lenses perched on her nose in some kind of brackets that held them in place. “These are my new clients, Theamh and Aine. They’re going to be staying with us for a few days.”
	The child nodded, looking seriously at Aine’s face. “Did the Enforcers do that to you?”
	“Yes,” Aine answered.
	“I’m sorry,” she said. Then her eyes turned to mine. “My name’s Etana.”
	“I’m glad to know you, Etana,” I said. Kwenu herded us through the door, shutting and locking it behind us. The hall was narrow, but well-painted and neat, a short stretch of white leading past doorways to what looked something like Lara’s kitchen. 
	It was unnerving that Etana, young as she was, was familiar with this scenario. What was equally unnerving was the way she was staring at me.
	Kwenu was already in the kitchen. “Etana, I thought they could have your bedroom and you can stay with me, is that all right?”
	“All right, Mommy,” Etana said.
	“No, really,” I answered, walking after her into the kitchen. “It’s not necessary. Aine and I have been camping out since we came over the border, any piece of furniture you have will be a vast improvement. And anyhow, I always sleep on the floor anyway.”
	Kwenu looked at me. “Darin says you all are supposed to tell the truth all the time.”
	“I do. I am,” I answered. “I always sleep on the floor. Ask Aine.”
	“She does,” Aine answered.
	“Why?” Etana asked, frankly puzzled.
	“That’s a very long story and it’s private,” I said to her, trying to look friendly.
	Kwenu stood indecisively at the cookstove, a frying pan in one hand. “If you’re sure...”
	“Of course we are,” Aine said. “Please, don’t disturb yourselves any more than you have to.”
	Our host had removed a number of covered dishes from the food wardrobe and was unveiling them. They seemed to be full of chopped up vegetables--squashes, peppers, mushrooms.
	“It’s what we call a stir-fry,” Kwenu said, tossing the cut-up chunks into the pan. “It’s vegetarian--no meat involved.” I nodded as she began shaking the pan over the little flame that had risen out of nowhere.
	“Come here,” whispered Etana to Aine, as her mother’s attention wandered from her. “I want to show you something.”
	“All right,” Aine whispered back, elaborately confidential and discreet.
	“Mommy, can I show Ira to Aine?”
	“Yes,” Kwenu said, stirring vigorously. “That’s very nice of you, Etana, I bet she’ll like that.”
	Etana took Aine by the hand and they tiptoed out of the kitchen. I turned back to Kwenu.
	“She seems like a sweet child,” I said.
	Kwenu nodded, and stirred vigorously.
	“Can I help with anything?”
	She looked up, looked at me, and decided to take the risk. “Thanks, Theamh, but frankly I think it might be best if you let me do it, at least until you’re more used to technology.”
	“Fair enough,” I said, sitting down at the table.
	“So,” she finally said, as it worked her way up through her mind. “You haven’t asked me yet how I know Darin.”
	“Well, you haven’t asked me either.”
	“He mentioned you a lot in his letters,” Kwenu said, as the sizzle from the pan sounded louder.
	“Ah, so that’s how you knew I was a shriia,” I said. I hadn’t realized he’d been writing home, but now that I thought about it he must have been; it would have been easy to put the letters in with their shipments. 
	Kwenu nodded. “You’ve made a big impression on him,” she went on. “You and Ulnach both.”
	“My mother’s always liked him,” I answered.
	“Has he ever mentioned me?”
	She turned around from the stove as she said this, and I felt a kind of wistful desire, a longing for the answer that I knew I wasn’t going to be giving.
	“No,” I said. “He never speaks about his life before he came here, not to me at least.” 
	Kwenu went back to stirring, and for a while that was all that happened.
	“So what do you know about his life before he left here?”
	I ran through what little I knew about him. “He was one of the first...first...” She watched my hesitation. “I’m sorry, Kwenu, but I’m sure to get the term wrong whichever I choose, I don’t understand it at all. But he said he was one of the only black students in his class at medical school.”
	“No, you got it right,” Kwenu said impassively. “That’s the term we use, now, to describe those of us whose ancestors were from Dubhinis.”
	“Ah!” Suddenly things made more sense. “Ah, that explains a lot. So it’s not just about color.”
	Kwenu shook her head. “Nothing ever is. So anyhow...”
	“So, I know that much, I know that he left thirty years ago, and that he liked the place so he stayed, and I know that...” The memory of my conversation with Dana came back. “I know that there was something, some kind of mind poison, that did him harm, while he was up here. But I don’t know very much of that story, and he doesn’t know that I know the little I know.”
	After a final shake, Kwenu pulled the pan off the flame and set it aside, covering it with a lid. Then she turned the flame off somehow and came to sit down with me at the table.
	“Tell me what he’s like,” she said. “The way you know him.”
	“Well...” I shrugged. “How can you describe a person in a way that makes him live? He’s honest,” I said. She laughed. “No, I mean in my line, that’s where we start--he’s never told me a lie or misled me, that I know of, and that means something to us. And he’s dedicated to his job, to medicine and to his patients--especially his patients. And it’s because he wants the best for them, I guess, that he’s never interfered with us and what we do. He knows we do things for our people that medicine can’t, and he’s happy to see us do them. He’s got one of those senses of humor that if you see it it’s really funny but some people don’t see it, and...”
	“And what?” she asked.
	“And he never talks about himself,” I said. “I know he cares about me and wishes me well, but not because he’s ever said that to me, directly. And I know he loves the place, and the people, and wants to see us well and happy, but he would never say that either. He holds things inside him, just enough so you can still see through to them. He’s up front--but he’s not obvious. He’s opaque.”
	“Opaque,” she repeated, thoughtfully.
	“He’s not a stranger, but he’s not one of us,” I said. “It’s funny. He’s a good friend--one of the best I have down there, certainly one of the oldest. But there still isn’t much I can tell you about him that will answer the question the way you want it answered because you want to know him like I do,” I said, finally reading her right, “but that’s not something I can transfer to you, no matter how long I talk.”
	She looked back at me for a while. I couldn’t figure out where this desire was coming from. She was too young to be his sister--he was sixty, or thereabouts, and she couldn’t be much more than thirty-five. And anyhow her name was different. A cousin, maybe...but that wouldn’t account for this much interest.
	“Well,” she said. “Why don’t you go find Etana and your friend, and we can eat.”
	I went back down the hall, still puzzled. When I found Etana’s bedroom I got even more puzzled.
	Etana and Aine were sitting on stools in front of something that looked a little like the VisionBox. But it wasn’t a VisionBox, because the image on the screen was static, and it was made out of words. And because I was reading something off it.
	I wasn’t sure at first, but the closer I got the more certain I was. It wasn’t exactly like what you get from an animal, nor was it like what you get from a human; and it definitely wasn’t a spirit. But there it was--a signal, coming off the thing, not from the screen but from a flat rectangular box on which it sat.
	“Dhiaoc,” Aine said, enthusiasm and eagerness back in those eyes even if her face was still showing its wounds. “You have got to see this.”
	I sat down between them. “What is it?”
	“It’s Ira,” Etana said. She pointed to the top of the screen; on a small metal plate screwed to the thing were the letters IRA followed by a string of numbers.
	“I see,” I said, looking at the image. “And what does Ira do?”
	“She’s a computer,” Etana answered.
	“See, you hit these square things here, with the letters on them,” Aine said, “and they show up here, in the VisionBox. Look.”
	Aine had in her lap a thin board made of plastic, the top of which was divided into tiny square units, each with a letter painted on top of it. Aine tapped the squares slowly; a string of nonsense letters appeared on the screen in front of my eyes. 
	“That’s spooky,” I said, looking at the letters. They were made out of light--a kind of dark blue light against a much lighter white-gray background. I put my hand up, but I couldn’t feel anything but the smooth glass of the screen.
	“Here,” Etana said, taking the board-thing from Aine. Her fingers flailed briefly across it, and the word “ETANA” appeared right after Aine’s nonsense word.
	“If I were you,” I began, but she was already moving on.
	“See, here’s you,” she said, and before I could object there on the screen was THEYUV.
	Fortunately she didn’t know how to spell it. “So you’re a reader already, Etana,” I said, trying to disguise my growing perturbation.
	“Course,” she said, as if I had told her that the moon was round. “You type something now.”	She handed me the keyboard. I found the letter D, and pressed the square thing down.
	“DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD,” said the computer screen.
	“You have to lift right off after you press it,” Etana said.
	Somehow she was making the extra “D”s disappear from the screen. “Now try again.”
	I looked from the board to the screen as my fingers moved apprehensively over the painted letters. D, E, V, A, N, E, P, H, A, R, M, A, C, E, U, T, I, C, A, L, S.
	“That’s not a word,” Etana said, looking at me with pity.
	“No, it’s two words,” I answered. 
	<What do you think, dhiaoc?>
	<I think this could be a dangerous toy,> I answered. <Idair forbid anyone ever took one of these into the shriin, who knows what could happen.>
	<I mean about the signal.>
	<It’s definitely there. But I’m having a really hard time interpreting it. What do you think is causing it?>
	<I don’t know. Maybe...maybe somehow, with all this writing being done on these things all over the place...some spirit’s been dragged into it, and trapped there?>
	<What do you mean, ‘all over the place’?>
	<Etana says these things are everywhere in the world, and that they talk to each other. How, I don’t know.>
	“Well,” I said, because this was really starting to unnerve me, “Your mother sent me to call you into dinner.” Etana nodded. “How do you make the letters...go away, like you did?”
	She showed me the thing with the arrow on it, which she hit a number of times until my words that weren’t words were gone from the screen.
	“Easy come, easy go,” I observed, looking warily at that blank expanse, wiped as clean as if there had never been anything there.
	“Bye, Ira,” Etana said, doing many things to the board that made the image shift, fold up, and finally wink out into a dark, silent screen. As she did it, the signal suddenly changed, dropping into a very faint, dormant whisper.

	Kwenu had set the table, so we sat down around it. The smell from the plates of vegetables was extremely tantalizing, but Kwenu seemed to expect us to wait so we did. 
	“Etana, would you like to say it tonight?” Etana nodded, then closed her eyes and folded her hands in front of her.
	“Gods of our people, bless this food the produce of your earth, and the farmers whose labor made it grow,” she said solemnly. “Be with us now, and may we know you better one day.”
	Then they both said something in a language I couldn’t understand, and Etana looked up. “My mommy made that up,” she said, as Kwenu started eating. “Don’t you think it’s a good grace?”
	I was puzzled by the terminology, but I said, “It’s a nice way to start a meal.”
	Etana nodded. We started on our vegetables. Conscious as I was of trying to be urbane and make a good impression, I still couldn’t resist the call of real, honest to Idair, food--solid, recognizable, with taste and texture and something approaching flavor. Kwenu tried not to stare, but Etana wasn’t that sophisticated; she watched Aine like children watch turtles crawling on the pond floor until she finally said, “You’re really hungry.”
	“Etana, that’s not polite,” Kwenu said sternly.
	“It’s true, though,” I said, looking at Etana’s anxious face. “We are, both of us, really hungry.” I turned back to Kwenu. “And this stuff is really, really good.”
	“It is,” Aine said. “Thank you.”
	She had tears in her eyes that she was trying not to let fall. And I felt it suddenly, how homesick she was, how much she must miss talking to her family, closed off on the other side of the border now. For the first time in her life she was on her own--and that in a cold-hearted vicious country that had starved her, beaten her, and scared the fnaa out of her. She was learning the nerve; she was getting brave. But this was still a lot for her to handle.
	“You have to understand,” I said, putting my fork down and taking a breather. “This it the first real meal we’ve eaten since...well, since we left Amranth, really.” Aine nodded. “We’re a long way from home and...it means a lot to us, to be under a roof having a real meal with people who know something about us and where we come from.”
	“It’s nothing very elaborate,” Kwenu said, a little embarrassed by the palpable gratitude. “Just a bunch of vegetables and some spices.”
	“They met Ira,” Etana volunteered, wrenching the subject around.
	“And how did they get on with her?” Kwenu asked.
	Now I’d been around both of them a little while I could tell things better. Etana really believed in Ira, as a person--a friend, someone she spent time with and talked to, and who in her imagination at least talked back. Kwenu pretended to believe this too, for Etana’s sake, but she was humoring her; and humoring her with a kind of sadness, a wish to make her happy overlaid on a growing sense that something was wrong. 
	“Ira likes them,” Etana said promptly. “Especially Aine. But they make her kind of nervous, because she’s shy.”
	“Well, Ira makes us nervous,” I answered. “Maybe you can tell me a little bit more about Ira sometime,” I went on, turning to Kwenu. “She’s certainly an interesting phenomenon.”
	“She is that,” Kwenu said, and for a moment she looked like Darin.
	“Why did they do that to you?” Etana went on, moving the topic from Ira to Aine.
	“I don’t really know,” Aine asked. 
	“I can guess,” Kwenu answered. “Did they ask you where you were at six o’clock that morning?”
	“Yes,” she answered.
	“And what did you say?”
	“I said I didn’t know, we don’t pay so much attention to hours.” She looked down, her hands knotting in her lap. “Then they got mad, and tried to make me say yes or no, I was or I wasn’t, and I was afraid of lying so I wouldn’t answer...and then they started in on me.”
	Kwenu chuckled. “My guess is they were trying to get you to admit to having been somewhere else the time that it happened. And if you wouldn’t do that, they would try to get you to sign a statement saying you’d seen nothing. That way if you contradicted it in court they could make it look like you were lying.” She pointed her fork at Aine. “See, you’ve suddenly become a very big problem for them, my little Ideiren friend. You are, as far as I can tell, the only witness who can contradict whatever the official story will turn out to be.”
	“But...” Aine said, looking at me.
	“Aine isn’t really a witness,” I said, with a sigh. “That’s the crazy thing about this all. She really wasn’t there when it happened. If those bastards had just explained what they were really asking her, she could have told them and avoided a beating.”
	Kwenu looked at me, starting to get angry. “Then what was all that fnaa about her having witnessed the murder?”
	I sighed. “Aine has something...in Ideire there are different names for it, ghost vision, aftersight, locographia, the gift...”
	“Oh no,” Kwenu said. “You’re not going to tell me she’s psychic.”
	“I don’t know what you mean by that,” I said. “All I know is that there are people born, where I come from, with the ability to read place memories--to see what’s happened in a place before they got there. Aine’s one of them and,” I said, as her rising irritation brought out the mother bear in me, “if you’d seen her struggle with this like I have, you wouldn’t think she was a lunatic or a liar.”
	“So you didn’t really see it, then,” Kwenu said to Aine, her voice hard.
	“I did really see it,” she said stubbornly. “I just saw it after it happened.” 
	Kwenu buried her head in her ringed hands. “I don’t believe this.”
	Etana pushed her plate away. “May I be excused?”
	Kwenu nodded. Etana disappeared.
	“I am not making it up,” Aine said fiercely. “Ask me what you want, about how it happened. I’ll tell you.” 
	Kwenu appeared to take this as a challenge. “All right. What was the dead man wearing?”
	Aine’s eyes abstracted themselves for a minute. “Those blue canvas kind of pants that everyone wears here...but faded around the knees, with a hole in the...in the left knee.”
	“What else is he wearing?”
	“White shoes with some kind of stripes on the side...and a jacket, looks like some kind of red leather. It’s fastened up the front, and on one side there’s the letters TTCP, in black, with some kind of design under them.”
	I could tell that this detail was starting to make an impression on Kwenu, but she didn’t want to give up yet. “How many policemen are there?”
	“Two.”
	“How many wounds in him?”
	Aine’s distress flickered in her face but then was replaced by concentration. “One...two...three four. Five.”
	“Where are they?”
	“One in his stomach, three across his chest, and then one in the neck as he fell.”
	“What happened after he fell?”
	“The man with the whitish hair puts his gun in the dead man’s hand.”
	Kwenu was now just as agitated as Aine was by the memory. “Which hand?”
	“The right one. He...he presses the dead man’s fingers around the handle, but they won’t stay. Then they take out a big sheet of plastic from their car and throw it over him, all but the feet and the hand with the gun.”
	Aine looked back at her. Kwenu waited, considering.
	“Do you believe it happened that way?” Kwenu asked me.
	“Yes,” I said, unhesitatingly.
	“Why?”
	“There’s one main reason I believe it, and that’s that I know Aine,” I said. “She’s seen things before when I’ve been with her and they’ve always been real. And she would never, ever, fabricate something like this. But there are also plenty of reasons why you should believe it.”
	“Which are?”
	“Well, the biggest one,” I said, “is that the Cretid City Police obviously believe her too. And they don’t know Aine.”
	Kwenu’s fingers drummed slowly on the table as she looked at Aine.
	“We can’t put her on the stand with that,” she finally said, disappointed.
	“Of course not,” I answered. “Even in Ideire no court would admit aftersight testimony. But the gardai use it to help them figure out where to look for evidence that they can admit.”
	This seemed to change her mind about the affair somewhat. At least, she got up quickly and walked toward the black box on her counter.
	“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m going to make a couple phone calls. Don’t worry about clearing up, Etana and I will do that.”
	She went into the kitchen, picked up the box, and punched things on it. “Hello, is Kinzy there? Thanks.”
	We looked around at the plates. Aine and I had cleaned things up pretty well, but Etana seemed to have eaten everything but the mushrooms, and Kwenu apparently had had no appetite at all; she’d hardly touched hers.
	<You think she wants these leavings?>
	Aine looked at me, reproachfully. <If we are poor, we still have some pride-->
	<No, I mean for the vigils. It’s been a couple weeks.>
	She seemed relieved. <I’d forgotten.>
	We picked up the plates unobtrusively and snuck out of the kitchen past Kwenu who was now talking to someone and reading off a pad she was scribbling on.
	“Here’s what we need. Someone’s got to get a ballistics check run on the bullets, to see if any of them came from Stasi’s gun. We need to have Deacon’s right hand dusted for fingerprints. And another thing--I’ve got a reason to believe Deacon was wearing a TTCP jacket when he was killed.” We found a door and pushed it open; it was another one of those Cretid privies, with a rectangular porcelain tub at one end. I set the plates down inside the tub and closed the door quietly, as Kwenu’s voice went on. “I know it wasn’t found on the body, that’s my point. We need to go through the garbage--at the site, and at the morgue where they took him, and we need to do it right away.”
	I closed the door and took out the cieridh. <Suppertime, my friends.>
	Jayla, Shaineen, Zott and Phredi wafted or crackled or poured out of the ball, each according to its wont, and over to the food. It was less than what they were used to, but they didn’t put up any kind of a fight; they’re with me, in their way, all the time, and they must have understood how hard and scarce things were up here. They ate peacefully, swarming around the food and each other without starting anything, sharing their small space relatively amicably.
	<Where do we go from here, dhiaoc?> Aine asked, watching them.
	<We have to find out where DeVane Pharmaceuticals has their headquarters,> I answered. <Maybe, if the repeaters are so damn excited about Erysin, we could find out from them where they are. At least we know one of them went to interview that bastard who claims to be a doctor, and if we can find him, then she can’t be far behind.>
	While I was staring moodily into the bathroom, the knob turned and the door opened. Before we could say anything Etana was there in the doorway, staring at the tub.
	Her eyes looked big enough behind those lenses, but they got bigger staring at the four of them, all now pretty much entwined amongst each other, pulsing merrily away on their full stomachs, and her mind was in great disarray.
	“What are they?” Etana whispered.
	“It’s the vigils,” I said quietly. “Please, don’t touch them.”
	Etana looked at Aine and whispered, “What are they doing?”
	“Eating,” Aine answered.
	“What do they eat?” gasped Etana, obviously afraid that she was next on the menu.
	“Well,” I sighed, “Shaineen likes sugar buns, Jayla’s partial to custard, Zott’s a big vegetable fan, and Phredi’s very fond of bread products, especially pumpkin bread.”
	Etana laughed.
	“I’m serious,” I said.
	“Can I meet them?” Etana said, still gazing at the tub in awe.
	“Why not,” I sighed. “Since you’ve seen them...but you just stand right there, all right, and don’t move. They can be very dangerous.”
	Etana nodded solemnly. 
	“Phredi, tar cieridh.”
	I held up the cieridh; Phredi floated gently over from the tub and went hissing into its quadrant.
	“This is Phredi,” I said. “Phredi is the friendliest one, and the easiest to get along with.”
	“Is it a boy or a girl?” Etana asked.
	“Neither. Shaineen, tar cieridh.”
	The flash of green that was her sizzled past Etana much faster, zipping into the ball.
	“That was Shaineen,” I said. “She’s an impulsive sort.”
	Etana laughed.
	“Zott, tar cieridh--SLOWLY.”
	Taking me literally, Zott poured in infinitesimal increments from the tub to the ball, his blue flame crackling at one-tenth time.
	“Everyone’s a comedian,” I said, as he withdrew.
	As he disappeared, Etana’s attention wandered back to the tub, where Jayla was now sitting alone, shining peacefully in her bright yellow sphere. And suddenly Etana was terribly frightened, clinging onto Aine’s hand for dear life and hiding her eyes.
	“Take it away, take it away!”
	I didn’t understand why this one should bother her when Zott had merely amused her, but I put Jayla back in the ball. “What is it, Etana?” Aine said, kneeling down to look at her. “Do they scare you?”
	My consciousness of just how far Aine had come since that evil day back at home was diluted by concern about Etana, who was now weeping silent tears of upset. “It’s all right,” I said. “They live in this ball, and they won’t come out till I tell them to. They won’t hurt you.”
	“But...but...” She looked around the bathroom, breathing a sigh of relief at not seeing them.
	“They’re friends of mine,” I said, trying to put it as positively as possible. “They’re like Ira, sort of. They protect me, and they fight for me. They won’t hurt you because you don’t mean me any harm.”
	Aine nodded. “I used to be scared of them too, Etana, but they’re not bad things and they won’t hurt you. I promise.”
	Etana believed her, but she was still a little shaken. “All right.”
	“Tell me,” Aine said, as we walked her out of the bathroom and back to her own room, “why were you scared of the yellow one and not of the others?”
	“I thought it was the yellow dog,” she said.
	We sat down awkwardly near Ira as she sat on her bed, hugging a soft toy to her narrow chest. “What yellow dog?” Aine prompted.
	Kwenu, who had finally finished talking on the phone, appeared in the doorway at this moment. “Now come on, Etana,” she said, sitting down on the bed and putting an arm around her. “Remember, there isn’t a yellow dog, that’s just a story.”
	“I know, Mommy,” Etana said, nodding her little braided head, but seriously unconvinced.
	“I know a lot of people believe it, but that doesn’t mean it’s true,” Kwenu went on, stroking her head gently with one hand as Etana put her arms around her mother’s waist. “There’s plenty wrong with the world as it is without our inventing things that aren’t.”
	“Tyrna believes in it,” Etana said, wanting to be comforted but not able to be just yet.
	“Tyrna believes in a lot of things,” Kwenu said. “Some of them make sense, and some of them don’t. Just because you like Tyrna, that doesn’t make her always right.”
	Etana hugged herself closer to Kwenu, looking up at her through those shining round lenses. “Are you not always right then either, Mommy?”
	“No, I’m not,” Kwenu said, tracing a hand across the back of Etana’s head sadly. “That’s a good thing for you to remember.” Etana nodded. “However, I am right about 98% of the time, and right now I’m right when I say it’s time for bed. Go brush your teeth and get your shifties on and I’ll be in in five minutes to kiss you goodnight.”
	“All right,” Etana said, hopping off the bed. “Will you read me a story?”
	“Yes, I will. Now hurry.”
	Etana scampered off down the hallway. Kwenu sighed.
	“It’s a hell of a place to raise children, as my mother told me,” she observed. “I can understand why children would make up nightmares for themselves, but it’s a little rough to have the adults doing it too.”
	We got up and followed her out to the living area, where I had left my traveling bag. “Are you sure you’ll be all right here?”
	“Positive,” I said. “Thank you for everything, Kwenu--I’m sorry we frightened Etana, we didn’t mean to.”
	“Don’t worry about it, she spooks easily,” Kwenu said. “She’s a very sensitive child.” She did something to the couch that made it fold out into a wide, flat bed complete with sheets. “Just like I was.”
	Aine was going through the bag looking for her shift; I left off looking for mine and turned my attention back to Kwenu, who seemed to be about to say something.
	“So,” I finally said, as she seemed to want to be asked now, “how is it, after all, that you know Darin?”
	Aine looked up in the pause, her shift in her hands.
	“Darin’s my father,” Kwenu said. “Sleep well.”
	Kwenu went swiftly out of the room, leaving me and Aine to look at each other.
		
XIII.
A Different Story

	I wasn’t entirely sure I was at the right address. I’d followed the directions Kwenu gave me, and asked a small boy who had been out playing with a bouncing ball on the street, and it should be right, but I still always had the sense, whenever I went anywhere in this city, that I was lost. And down in what I now knew as the South Corner, being lost was an unpleasant thing. It was an uncared for, unloved-looking place, with a lot of loose trash, defacement, broken windows, boarded-up entrances, here and there a building scarred by fire and never repaired. And there was that unsettling feeling of being stared at that followed me everywhere. With my pallid skin and orange-red hair I stood out there as much as Darin did at one of my mother’s parties.
	Figuring I had to take the plunge sometime, I knocked on the green-painted door. There was no immediate response. I was about to leave when I heard the sound of many latches being turned and finally the door swung inward.
	Tyrna’s face looked formidable and intimidating when it first appeared, but changed as she recognized me. “Well, well, well, if it isn’t my co-defendant. Come on in, Theyuv.”
	“Thanks,” I said, crossing the threshold and glancing around. The place hadn’t been freshly painted in a long time, and the runner leading me down the narrow hallway was very threadbare. But it was neat, kept in what trim she could afford by a woman who obviously had definite ideas about what went where. 
	“You caught me at the end of a job,” Tyrna said, opening a door. “Why don’t you go have a seat in the kitchen, I’ll be in as soon as I’m done.”
	I sat obediently down at a small round table that took up most of the very small kitchen. Now that I was more used to Cretid domestic interiors I could recognize the different metal machines. The stove, the refrigerator, the thing that toast came out of. She didn’t seem to have one of those boxes that cleaned your dishes for you; they were out on the counter drying.
	What she did have were a lot of things hanging from the walls. Some were skeins of dried herbs, heads of garlic, the same kind of thing you might find in many an Ideiren kitchen, except that I didn’t recognize a lot of the plants. And on one of the walls was a collection of masks, in dark wood painted with bright colors.
	I had seen something like this in Kwenu’s living area, so I went to take a closer look. They were modeled on human features, but were not sized and shaped like a real human face. Some also had animal attributes--horns jutting out over one of the brows, the furred ears and blunt muzzle of a cat--but these were also stylized, made with some other purpose in mind than imitation. 
	“...in hot water,” I heard Tyrna saying to someone as the door to the hallway opened. She emerged along with a girl of about fourteen, whose hair had been flattened out somehow into waves that undulated gently along her scalp and down her neck. The girl was holding onto a cloth pouch tied up with a beaded string. “And don’t forget to repeat this before and after you take it.” Tyrna handed her a folded square of paper.
	“What is it, a spell?” the girl asked, with the curiosity of the young.
	Tyrna shot a furtive glance at me. “It’s a prayer,” she said. “But it’s very, very important that you say it, or things may not work well. You understand?”
	The girl nodded. “Yes, Tyrna.”
	“All right then. You call me if you have any trouble, all right? Tyrna’ll take care of you.”
	When she’d shown the girl out, Tyrna came back to me. “Children,” she said, standing next to me as I looked at the mask. “Hard to make them understand the seriousness of things.”
	I nodded. “Tyrna, can I ask you--this one here, what’s it about?”
	She seemed a little surprised, and perhaps unsettled, that I had selected this particular mask. It had triangular, folded ears, and the nose and mouth curved out from it in a jutting triangle that looked both like the pointed nose of a dog and the nose and chin of a person. The features were accentuated with stripes of bright yellow paint, interspersed with groups of red dots.
	“It’s what we call--in your language, his familiar name would be rendered as ‘Yellow Dog.’ It’s not his real name, you understand.”
	“That’s what I came to ask you about,” I said. “I wondered if you would tell me about this yellow dog.”
	“How’d you come to hear of him?” she asked, giving me a searching stare.
	“Through Etana,” I said. “We’re staying with Kwenu, and she seems to be frightened of him, and she said you believed in him, so I came to talk to you.”
	She had gone back to the table, and I sat down across from her. “It’s not that easy,” she said. “The Yellow Dog is a different thing in different places--every village on the Ravaged Coast has a different story about who he is, where he comes from, and what he does.” She settled into her chair, folding her large arms and looking at me over them. “He’s real interesting that way. You an anthropologist?”
	“Thurk no,” I said, promptly.
	Tyrna broke into a laugh--a big, sunny one. 
	“All right then, I’ll tell you. The Yellow Dog is supposed to have been created out of the remains of the first victim of Helun’s great wrath...” She must have noticed me getting restless. “All right, I’ll skip the history. The Yellow Dog used to follow the warriors--run after their heels into battle, prowl around the slain afterwards. Some villages have him as the Yellow Dogs--a whole pack of ‘em stampeding behind the charge, baying for blood.” She looked over at the mask. “When the Yellow Dog was seen in the field, everyone knew there would be a great slaughter. Course that was back when ‘great slaughter’ meant ten people.”
	“And he’d appear during the daylight, like that?”
	Tyrna seemed interested by the question. “At dawn, mostly, or at dusk, was when folks saw him. Least as far as I can tell, that was when.”
	I nodded. “So he...what, feeds off the battle somehow?”
	“Don’t know if you’d call it feeding,” she said, eyes narrowing as she considered this. “He’s a portent--the fight that’s about to happen draws him there. He knows where the hot spots are, and where he appears, you know something nasty’s going to happen.”
	And now I was starting to get a big picture. “So...has he been appearing here?”
	Tyrna suddenly put her elbows down on the table and leaned across to address me from not very far away and with sudden, quiet urgency.
	“So,” she said. “Your friend has the gift, and you’re sitting here in my kitchen asking after the Yellow Dog as if he’s a cousin of yours you’re carrying a message to.” I blinked. “Why don’t we just put the cards on the table and understand each other.”
	“You’re a shriia too,” I said, finally getting it.
	Since she didn’t recognize the term I went on. “I mean--that’s what we call it, of course you must have different words. But you--work with--spirits, and power, and magic. Like I do.”
	Tyrna smiled, slowly, then put out her right hand toward me. I took it with mine and shook it. “Tyrna Bronson, washer of floors, emptier of trashcans, disinfector of privies, and priestess of Dahika’s mysteries. And you would be?”
	“Theamh ni hUlnach, daughter of Idair and servant to all her children,” I said. “And I’m really glad to know you.”
	“So,” she said. “What does a nice girl like you want to tangle with the Yellow Dog over?”
	“I don’t want to tangle with him, necessarily,” I said. “It’s not him I’m looking for. But I’ve got a hunch that...if it should happen that some sort of entity that wasn’t exactly human, but wasn’t exactly not, had popped up in this neighborhood in the past couple of years, then that might have something to do with the woman I’m looking for.”
	Tyrna leaned back in her chair and took a long, appraising look at me.
	“This may take a while,” she said, standing up. “You want some coffee?”
	“No! No coffee, no, no thanks,” I said, embarrassed by the anxiety of my first refusal. “Caffeine isn’t good for me.”
	“I guess not,” Tyrna said, pouring herself a cup of steaming brown liquid from a pot on the counter. “You’re jittery enough as it is, you and that little firecracker who worships the ground you walk on.”
	“Oh, please don’t remind me,” I said. “Aine’s coming along wonderfully, but I’m afraid all this bonding stuff has just made the whole idolization thing worse.”
	“The Yellow Dog,” Tyrna said, sipping meditatively on her coffee. “Well, you could say he’s never appeared here, and you could say he appears here all the time, and both would be true. You’d hear stories about him, after a gang war or a drive-by or a really bad raid; someone’d talk about having seen him hanging out at the edge. But he’d seem to be the kind of thing you can only see out the corner of your eye. Least he was, till a month ago.”
	“Aha.”
	“Listen to you ahaing like you know something about it. Well, I don’t know what this thing is that people have been seeing, but I’m hard put to believe it really is the Yellow Dog.”
	“Why?”
	“Partly because if it’s him, and if he’s come back as something you can stare in the face and put a bullet into, then that means bad trouble for this place,” she said. “Partly because this thing is yellow, and it’s mean, but it’s not the Dog I know.”
	“What’s it doing different?”
	“The Dog never got involved,” she said. “He’d slaver off on the sidelines, or he’d lope into the fray after them, but he never intervened. He took what we left for him.” I nodded. “This thing is starting fights.”
	“Starting them how?”
	“I can’t be sure,” she said. “Not one hundred percent, you know. But about a month ago there was a murder-suicide a few blocks west, and I mean bad. Poor man was hacked to pieces. Enforcers found ‘im in there, in chunks--excuse me, I forget not everyone’s used to this--”
	“No,” I said. “It’s that I have gotten too damn used to it.” She wanted to ask, but I motioned her to go on. 
	“Anyway, the dead man’d been running around with the other one’s woman; it’s not at all strange for a story like that to end with a murder; most natural thing in the world. Strange he didn’t go for the woman, actually, instead of the lover--but even that’s not the strangest thing.”
	“So what was the strangest thing?”
	“Strangest thing was, someone had done the killer over too, after he shot himself,” she said. “Sawed away at him, but gave up halfway. Enforcers couldn’t make head or tail of it, not that they tried for long. But down here, we turn things over long after the CCP has closed the cases. And one thing that went around was that someone’d seen the Yellow Dog leaving the building, round about the time it was supposed to have happened.”
	“And you think they had?”
	“I put no stock in it at the time,” she said. “Thing like that happens, people make up stories. But then there started to be more of these things. Old rivalries flaring up, people being blown to bits, the Yellow Dog seen slinking away from the scene. In the past month, this thing has been putting in an appearance about twice a week.” She could tell this was starting to matter to me. “You know something about this, don’t you?”
	“I might.”
	“Well, tell me then, I’m at my wits’ end trying to get rid of the thing. I’ve done everything within my power and within my means, but I can’t seem to shift it. That’s another reason I don’t believe it’s the Yellow Dog. Coupla goats, a few good drum dances in his honor, and he’s happy. Heads of my fathers, it’s not like he wouldn’t see enough action around here, amount of killing that goes on.”
	World-weariness she had, for sure. But there was also an old but still living hurt that went on in her, baffled at its own insistence, coming back after every fresh horror found her surprised to be caring.
	“I can’t say for sure, I haven’t seen it,” I said. “But we...well, in Ideire, we don’t know anything about the Yellow Dog, but we have the lurers. Spiky, aggressive, ruthless yellow spirits that set upon and dismember their victims.” Tyrna was now very interested. “What does this thing look like, when it appears?”
	“Different things,” she said. “Some say it’s a man with a dog’s head, some say it’s a giant dog, some say it’s a woman running on all fours and baying like a hound. Only thing they agree on is it’s yellow.” I chuckled. “You think this is one of those...lurers?”
	“Not exactly,” I said. “I ran into this thing, its victim called it the Blue Angel, that was a spirit but it wasn’t. I’m thinking this is the same, maybe. Something that acts like a spirit, but has something like a body.”
	“What do you mean, ‘like a body?’”
	“I mean the Blue Angel, or whatever it was, seemed a lot more solid than spirit matter is,” I said. “Not totally flesh, but on the way there. And I think...I think, even, that it might have been breathing.”
	“You have these hybrid things, down in Ideire?”
	“Not that I know of,” I said. “I think this is a new invention.”
	“Then who invented them?”
	“Well, as I said, I can’t be sure,” I answered. “But I think it might be Lythril.”
	“Lythril?”
	“It’s a very long story,” I said. “Short version: we exiled her a little over two years ago; I have reason to think she fetched up here in the city. And...” Things were starting to happen. “And I have reason to think she’s been experimenting along these lines for a while.” Tyrna leaned back. “She’s what we call a dark user. Dedicated to the powers of evil.”
	“Which powers are those?” Tyrna asked.
	“Well...the ones that do evil. The main evil force, we just call it the Dark One.” And, as her smile deepened, I asked a little defensively, “What, your world hasn’t got a Dark One?”
	“Our...powers, if you want to call them that,” Tyrna said, “are a complex bunch. There isn’t one that hasn’t done something bad wrong to someone. But there isn’t one that hasn’t tried at some point to protect another, or protect us.” She sighed. “Not that they succeeded.”
	“See, down at the mission,” I said, “they told us your stories weren’t being told any more.”
	“Don’t they wish,” Tyrna said, with an unfriendly laugh. “If they haven’t been stamped out completely, it’s not because they didn’t try.” She glanced around. “I mean, look at me. What’s your day job, child, when you’re at home?”
	“What do you mean?”
	“I mean how do you support yourself,” she said. “What do you get paid for?”
	“I don’t get paid for anything,” I answered. “We’re not allowed to use money. They give me a piece of waste land rent-free, and coupons I can buy food with, and there are various individuals or agencies that will chip in building materials or livestock or whatever we really need, and we live that way, simple as we can.”
	“And you don’t have a paying job? I mean outside of what you do for your people.”
	“No,” I answered, only just starting to understand why she found this so hard to grasp. “I--being a shriia is my job. My only job.”
	Tyrna didn’t say anything for a long time. I read the sadness from her, but her face didn’t change, except that her mouth opened eventually in a sigh.
	“They’re always saying it’s a different world down there,” she said finally. “A whole nother country.”
	“They’re right,” I answered.
	“No lie,” Tyrna said.
	I smiled briefly, then decided not to get into it.
	“So how do we get rid of this thing?”
	“Well,” I said, “the Blue Angel was not at all fond of uisce slainte. We do protections, in Ideire, to keep the spirits out of some places and that’s what we use. To protect a whole neighborhood, though...that would require a group effort, and there’s only one of me.”
	“Sing it, sister,” Tyrna said ruefully. “What I wouldn’t have given, from the day I started doing this to this day here, to have a bunch of women twice my age who really knew what the hell they were doing hanging around here to give me a hand now and again.”
	 I thought about mentioning the Council, but then I thought I wouldn’t.
	“Well, I know almost nothing about your powers or your story or the Cretid Nation,” I said. “But if you ever think there’s something I can do, you know where to find me.” As she turned an ironic gaze on me, I added, “And of course you better believe that if I think you’ll be able to help me nail Lythril, you’ll be hearing from me.”
	“I’ll look forward to it,” she said, amused.
	She did believe me--or at least in the seriousness of my belief in what I did. But I suppose it’s hard, when it’s not your story, to really believe it. So with the respect that had made her willing to talk to me, there was a kind of indulgence--to her I was young, with a confidence in the invisible things I spoke of that had more to do with the enthusiasm of youth than the way the world works.
	<Dhiaoc.>
	<What is it, Aine?>
	“So Thayuv--” I held up a hand to stop her. <I’ve found the address.>
	<What address?>
	<The address. For DeVane.>
	“Fnaa on a hot shingle! Aine, are you sure?”
	Well, there was Tyrna, looking at me like that, just because in my excitement I’d said it out loud.
	<I think so.>
	<How’d you find it?>
	<Through Ira. Come back, I’ll show you how.>
	<I’ll be there as soon as I can.> I shut the link and stood up. “That was Aine--I have to go now.”
	“What do you mean, ‘that was Aine?’” Tyrna said, skeptically.
	“Look!” I said, too impatient to exercise caution, “You people talk to each other when you’re not there all the time, I see you do it, with those little black boxes. I do not understand why you should all think we’re insane just because we do it without the machines.”
	Tyrna didn’t appear to have a ready response to this little temper fit.
	“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t snap at you but--well, if you ever pick up an arch-nemesis for yourself, you’ll understand. Goodbye, Tyrna, thank you for everything.”
	“Don’t mention it,” she said, walking me out and watching me go with that same unsmiling but amused expression.

	“Etana’s showed me how to work it.”
	Aine started talking as soon as she met me at the door and kept going all the way up the five flights of stairs to Kwenu’s apartment. “There’s this thing they have, called the Net. All the computers, well not all of them but the ones that are hooked up to it, they communicate through this Net, it’s like the Council link system only much much bigger and with machines.”
	“Communicate?” I panted as we rounded the first landing. “But what do they say to each other?”
	“The machines don’t, it’s the owners, they send each other messages through them. And then there’s this place, on the Net, where you can put up a big permanent message and anyone who goes there can read it--it’s like those signs they have all over the highway, except that they put the sign up in one place and any machine in he world that’s hooked up to this net can go and get the sign and put it on the screen.”
	“How?”
	“I have no idea and neither does Etana. But, the point is, it means that, you know, if someone on the south end of Lower Plenana wants to know about the weather in Wheatlea, they just go and get the Wheatlea Weather Report Site and bring it to the screen and there it all is.” I stopped at the third flight and looked at her excited face. “What it means is, you can sit there in one place and get to a whole world of information without ever leaving. And I figured some of that information had to be about DeVane Pharmaceuticals.”
	“Yes, but looking for one nugget of information in a vast empire of fnaa we don’t want...”
	“I know, but this is the thing, the machines will find stuff for you.”
	“How does a machine know what you want?”
	“You tell it.” It wasn’t quite making sense to me, but I didn’t want to disappoint her. “Come here, come here, I’ll show you.”
	We sprinted up the last two flights and blew past Etana, who was watching the VisionBox in the living area, into the bedroom where Ira waited, still sending out its inscrutable signal. On the screen there were some words against a green background, and a picture in one corner. The picture had a red circle with a proscription slash through it, underneath which was a symbol that looked vaguely familiar to me.
	“Here, I did a search, Etana showed me how,” Aine said, sitting down and pulling over the board thing. “I looked for anything containing the words DeVane Pharmaceuticals, and I found this page. Someone else has been doing research, look.”
	I focused my eyes on the screen. Next to the circle with the slash was the legend, “TOP TEN REASONS TO HATE DEVANE PHARMACEUTICALS.”
	“Who wrote this up?” I asked.
	“She signs her name ‘Priestess of Power.’ I don’t know exactly what that means, but it can’t be what her mother named her.”
	“No, it can’t.” I started reading the reasons.
	“10. In a world full of nonconsensual sex and unwanted pregnancy, what we need is NOT Erysin.
	“9. While working hard to ensure that every octogenarian has the ability to impregnate anyone he can reach, DeVane is also making substantial contributions to Family Forever’s anti-choice campaign. So I guess their ultimate goal is to people the universe with unwanted children?
	“8. In a recent interview, Dr. Sinclare has revealed that for its next trick DeVane plans to get in on the booming genetic engineering market. Great. So now even if for some reason Erysin fails them octogenarians can have their own clones made to order.
	“7. Dr. Sinclare. Enough said.
	“6. Before it was in the business of restoring withered zazbs to life, DeVane was known, in so far as it was known at all, for producing extremely expensive products that were, in essence, prescription cosmetics. I’m all for bilking the rich, but not if it’s also going to shore up the foundations of the patriarchy.	
	“5. The average approval period for a new drug is 2.7 years. Erysin went through in 6 months. Somewhere, somehow, someone has been bought and paid for. Or maybe they just promised them all free samples.
	“4. Two words: Animal Testing.
	“3. Somehow these bastards have managed to convince our giant insurance conglomerates to subsidize prescriptions of Erysin. Meanwhile, birth control and termination are strictly pay-as-you-go affairs. More conclusive proof that there is no justice.
	“2. It’s their fault that I’m getting about 200 Erysin jokes forwarded to me every day over Ethermail.
	“1. They’re just plain evil.”
	Aine had been reading them with me. “And you see, down here...”
	In the corner it said, “Write to DeVane and let them know what you think!” followed by the words and numbers of an address.
	“Hot damn,” I said softly, looking at the screen.
	At that moment the key turned in the lock, and we heard Kwenu coming in. Etana ran out to greet her while I studied the other words.
	“Family Forever,” I said, tapping that smooth screen. “They mentioned that, in the Third Term, as the group that had phoned in the bomb threat.” I looked down. “And the thing about the clones...” Then I remembered Aine, sitting there next to me waiting. “You’ve done a good job, Aine. I’ll be eternally grateful to you.”
	She smiled. “So can we go after her?”
	“Soon as I find out how to get here. Kwenu?”
	Kwenu had been passing by with Etana, and stuck her head in. “How are you two doing? What do you want for lunch?”
	“We’re doing great, thanks to Aine,” I said, clapping her on the back. “Can you help me out with something?”
	She sat down next to us, looking amused. “So Etana’s taught you how to use Ira,” she said with a vague smile. “Oh, you’ve found Chandra’s site. Funny, isn’t she?”
	“You...you know this woman?”
	“Of course--it’s a big city, but when it comes to progressives, it’s a small world.”
	“How does she know all this stuff?” I demanded.
	“She’s a reporter for Notes from the Underground. It’s one of the big alternative newspapers. One thing about Chandra, she shoots her mouth off, but she always has her facts straight when you call her on it.”
	“I need to meet this woman,” I said, while Aine continued marveling at the coincidence.
	“You will,” she answered. “We’re having a little war council here tonight and she’s coming. I hope you don’t mind--I thought you’d enjoy meeting them all, and I’m quite sure Chandra will want to meet you.”
	<You know, dhiaoc,> Aine said, <I’m starting to believe in this Idair Effect.>
	“I’ll be very glad to know her, and the rest of your friends,” I said. 
	“But so what was it you wanted me to help you with?”
	“Here.” I pointed at the address on the screen. “Pobox 070. Where’s Pobox Street? How do we get there from here?”
	Kwenu looked where I was pointing, wrinkled her brow a little in puzzlement, and then laughed, once. She didn’t laugh a second time because she could tell how tense we were.
	“Theamh, that’s not a street address, it’s a post office box,” she said. “P.O. Box. It’s a cubbyhole in a post office where you can send mail, and then the person who rents it comes in to pick it up. Probably DeVane has a secretary or someone go out and collect the mail and then bring it back to wherever they’re really located.”
	Aine’s disappointment crested over me in mournful and bitter waves.
	“Why go to all that trouble?” Aine asked.
	Kwenu shrugged. “Probably to avoid being picketed and blockaded by people like Chandra,” she said. “You eat dairy products, right?”
	“Yes,” I answered, as my hopes deflated.
	“I’ll let you know when it’s ready,” she answered, leaving.
	Poor Aine was just about on the verge of tears. “It’s all right, Aine,” I said, trying to be cheerful. “Lythril’s a crafty one, you can’t expect to find her on the first try. But look how you’ve gone and found us all this stuff we can use. It may take us a while,” I said, looking at the unfamiliar words on the screen, “but I bet Ira is going to be a good friend to us.”
	Aine nodded disconsolately.
	“In fact,” I said, “I think it’d be good if you spent some more time with Ira. I know it’s just a machine...”
	She picked up where I trailed off. “But there’s something else there, I know it.” She nodded. “I will, dhiaoc. I’m starting to get the hang of it, I think. Did you find out anything from Tyrna?”
	“Yes and no,” I said. 

	Aine lifted the handle over the spout, and jumped back a little from the torrent of water that gushed out of it. After watching it for a moment warily, she struck at the handle from a distance, smacking it back down and stopping the torrent.
	“I could live here forever,” Aine finally said, after we had watched it in stalemate, “and never get used to this.”
	“Try it again.”
	She lifted the handle, very gently. Now the water came out in a trickle that was more manageable.
	“All right,” I said. “So we hold the plates under the water...”
	It was true that Kwenu had specifically asked us not to clean up the kitchen, but it was our second day there out of who knew how many and we felt bound to try. We’d watched Kwenu do it, and we had reasoned that as two extremely intelligent women we ought to be able to figure out how to work a Cretid kitchen.
	The force of the flowing water did in fact knock the food residue off the plates and into the sink. From there it flowed down a black-outlined drain in the bottom, whose innocent and familiar appearance belied the deadly machinery within. By mutual consent we had agreed not to mess with this particular apparatus until we had finished with everything else. 
	“But if it’s true what Kwenu said,” Aine ventured, as she tugged at the door of the dish-cleaning box, “about the terminations, then why is Lythril giving money to Family Forever?”
	I had been a little surprised that Kwenu had been willing to have that discussion in front of Etana, but she hadn’t been the least uncomfortable about it. I suppose since Etana was already used to the idea that her country was policed by a gang of armed thugs who could shoot and beat people whenever they felt like, it wasn’t much more disturbing to hear about medicals reaching with their tools into the wombs of pregnant women and scooping out their contents. Aine had made the mistake of expressing some of the horror this description provoked in her, and been blessed with a ten-minute harangue from Kwenu about how as performed by licensed doctors in well-lit hospitals this procedure was perfectly safe, and even if it did seem wrong to us who were we to judge or condemn what a woman did with her own body and if she wanted her womb to be scooped out that was her choice and anyhow it wasn’t the safety of the mothers that those bastards at Family Forever were concerned about.
	“I think there’s a latch,” I said, as Aine made no progress with the dish box door.
	She pulled the handle across, and the door fell open, exposing the cavernous interior with its wire baskets and wheels.
	“Well,” I said, “I’ve been thinking about that.”
	After Kwenu had finally stopped talking and Aine was sitting mortified, I had explained a little bit about how it worked in Ideire, and although she hadn’t entirely believed me she did seem comforted somehow to know that we had a way for women to end their pregnancies, even if in her mind it was all put down to some kind of herb she was sure we were using. I’d asked her what would happen if Family Forever had their way and this procedure were outlawed, and the answer was very quick, not to say appetite-ruining.
	“If she’s right,” I said, “then if this thing became illegal, women would keep trying to have it done, and going to doctors who were willing to break the law to make some money. I think we know someone who fits that description.”
	“Sinclare?” she said, pulling out the dish rack.
	“That’s the bastard.” I began sticking the washed-off dishes into the wire rack. “The man is as much a doctor as I am, but apparently that won’t matter; Kwenu says before they made this legal women would go to anyone...” Aine nodded. What she’d actually said was “Women were going to anyone who had a table and a coathanger,” but I couldn’t quite bring myself to bring repeat this; the image was too horrible and too close to what I remembered from those evil months with Lythril. “So if this became illegal again, this bastard could set up shop, and then...”
	“And then what?”
	I pushed the full tray back into the cavern and stood up. “Ingredients, Aine,” I said. “It’s all about the ingredients.”
	“Oh no, dhiaoc.”
	She put down the glass she’d picked up, afraid for a moment to handle anything fragile.
	“She went to all that trouble to get afterbirth,” I said. “What if she could get before-birth? There’s got to be something horrible she could do with those dead notborns, and whatever comes out with them, if she could get her hands on it all.”
	“Did she...work with them...when you were with her?”
	“No, of course not, where would she get them? Women just went to the shriias for returns, and the shriia would burn the matter just like we do with the afterbirth. She could have bought it off women who miscarried by accident, I suppose, but nobody plans to miscarry, and I doubt she could have gotten it in time before it got contaminated or disintegrated or whatever it was she was afraid would happen if she couldn’t get it right from the source.”
	I turned the tap back on, with great care, and began rinsing some of the glasses. “But here...whatever phony credentials he’s got, they wouldn’t be enough to get him a post as a practicing medical in a real Cretid hospital. Darin told me a little bit about what it’s like. He had to practically kill himself to get what they call a residency, and that’s not even a permanent job. There’s no way this bastard could pass muster. And if a woman could go have this horrible thing done by a real medical who knew what he was doing, why would she go to a butcher like him--unless she had no choice?”
	“So you think this is all just a ruse...to get more ingredients?”
	“It’s the youth potions,” I said. “It has to be. This something that really matters to her, Aine, absurd as it may seem to us, she’s made up her mind to live forever and this is going to help her do it. So if she can get access to a steady stream of...matter...then she’ll take the chance.”
	“But Family Forever,” Aine said, closing the dishbox door and latching it. “Kwenu says they’ve been around for ten years. They can’t all just want ingredients?”
	“Who knows what they want,” I answered. “Don’t see how they would plan to get it out of killing a hundred people in Third Term, either, but Kwenu’s convinced that was them too.”
	We had now gotten to the most difficult part of this task. I pushed the handle up to make the water torrent. I stood well back from the sink, and when I was satisfied that we were both safe, Aine pushed the little toggle on the wall.
	The monster under the sink leapt into crunching, tearing life, devouring the scraps we’d fed it and churning the leftovers into a kind of disgusting slurry that would slide down the pipes. Etana had explained to us, at least, that that was what happened. To me, it sounded like ten hungry bobcats were trying to eat the sink.
	Aine finally toggled the switch; the monster died. I turned off the water and we emerged shakily into the living area.
	“Maybe there’s news,” I ventured, looking at the VisionBox doubtfully. “Any idea how we work this thing?”
	Aine picked up a narrow box with buttons on it and started pushing at them. “Etana was showing me...”
	“You guys are getting to be good friends, aren’t you?”
	“Of course we are,” she said, as the screen leapt into life. “I’m the only one she knows who believes in Ira.”
	“It’s not the news,” Aine said, as we sat down slowly on the couch, trying to figure out what strange world we had stumbled into.
	There was just one person on the screen--a man standing up behind some sort of pillared platform that came up about waist-high on him. He was wearing that jacket-and-noose combination they all wore, but his hair, instead of waving across his forehead or sticking straight up short the way most of them seemed to be wearing it, was combed straight back from his forehead over his scalp, and it was glistening darkly--as if it were wet, but it wasn’t. Little beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and he was gesturing wildly with a pair of pudgy, pinkish hands, his mouth open in some sort of agonized scowl as he howled something out at the screen. The sword and crown symbol was hanging above his head, grotesquely oversized and done in some kind of extremely shiny white metal that wasn’t quite silver. I couldn’t see what was holding it up, but it looked sort of dangerous, hovering over him with that point trained on his head. Especially the way he was waving his arms about and thumping the platform of that pedestal he was standing behind instead of on.
	“Is there something wrong with him?” Aine asked, as he bellowed again.
	“...because it’s not about what WE want,” he was shouting when I could finally figure out the words. “It’s not about what WE want in our pride and sinfulness and eeeeeeeevil desires. It’s what the Lord wants that counts!”
	“And the Lord wants what?” Aine asked, a little frightened.
	“I have a feeling he’s about to let us know,” I said.
	“The Lord doesn’t want us to be running around trying to fulfill ourselves,” he shouted. “He wants us to fulfill his commandments!”
	Now on the screen there was a crowd of people sitting around in a semicircle, and applauding him as if he’d said something clever, when we were still waiting to hear what those commandments were.
	“The Lord wants man and woman to live together in holy matrimony,” he shouted. “HOLY MATRIMONY!”
	“What’s matrimony?”
	“The holy state of marriage that was set out for us by the holy fathers long ago,” he went on. “It was ordained at the beginning of creation that man and wife should come together in lawful marriage so that they might increase and multiply and dominate the earth!”
	“But there wasn’t any law at the beginning of creation,” Aine objected. “There wasn’t any law until Iandar--”
	“Remember, they don’t believe,” I said. “Or I mean, they believe in something else--”
	“OUR OWN SINFUL PRIDE!” he was bellowing. “No, we weren’t meant to wallow in the trough of sin and self-gratification!” 
	Now he was walking back and forth in front of the pedestal thing, which at least brought him out from under that dangling sword. “No, we weren’t meant to say, ‘I’m going to commit adultery, I’m going to fornicate without asking the Lord’s blessing or by-your-leave, I’m going to turn from nature and addict myself to preeeverse pleasures--”
	He stopped as a roar of assent broke out from the crowd. “You know what I’m talking about!” he shouted.
	“I don’t,” Aine muttered.
	“I’m talking about HO-MO-SEXUALS!” 
	We awaited further clarification.
	“A man shall not lie with another man, nor a woman with another woman, for it is an abomination in my sight, saith the Lord!”
	“Aha,” I said, joylessly.
	“No better than liars and child-rapists and murderers!” he went on, supported by the crowd. “They have turned from the path of righteousness and they will reap the rewards the Lord has in store for them!”
	“Turn it off,” I said in disgust.
	“No,” Aine answered, leaning forward. “Wait and see where he goes.”
	“You know what I mean!”
	“Back to that again,” I sighed.
	“FIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRE AND BRIMSTONE!” he shouted. “Fire that rains down from heaven to avenge their sin against his will!”
	“These are the people,” Aine said, shaking a finger at the jowly man on the screen.
	“Beware, ye painted harlots in your devil’s palace, lest the fires of hell find you out!”
	“First it’s from heaven, then it’s from hell,” I said. “He should make up his mind.”
	Aine wasn’t listening to me. She was up by the screen, trying to read off it and, naturally, failing.
	“God made man, and God made woman,” he wailed, now really worked up. “God never wanted there to be a third term!”
	Aine looked back as she felt my sudden comprehension.	
	“You see?”
	“Idair’s mercy and wisdom,” I said, moving up to the screen.
	“And they’re laughing,” Aine said quietly, looking at the people. “Some of them.”
	“Mac na mhada.”
	“And so let them all beware,” he shouted. “All those women out there rutting in their animal lust and then killing the babies God sends them better watch out for the FIIIIIIIIIIIRE AND BRIMSTONE!”
	“AMEN!” shouted a number of voices in the crowd.
	There seemed to be a pause here while the man mopped his brow with a handkerchief. “Now I feel the spirit moving within me,” he said more quietly.
	“Well, that would explain a lot,” I said. 
	But he wasn’t talking about possession, it seemed. Because he wanted this spirit, whatever it was, to stay in him as long as it could. Based on the effect it was having on him, I couldn’t see why, but after several minutes of raving he called upon people who were ill or in some other trouble to come up and receive this spirit that he was infested with.
	“Any of you still wounded in sin and wallowing in iniquity, come forth and be heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeealed!”
	Soon there was a regular little parade. Old women, some in chairs that were rolled forward on wheels; younger women, with tears in their eyes, bowing their heads and shivering in ecstasy at the touch of his hands; and parents leading up children, some thin and twisted, some plodding dully up with dim incurious eyes. But then there were others who didn’t seem to want to be there--who looked like they were being marched up rather than walking of their own volition, and who received the touch under protest.
	The man seemed to be most involved with this last group, since he spent a great deal of time shouting at each individual one before laying his hands on them. I noticed they were younger than the others--younger even than Aine--and that they generally had one or two adults with them, who I presumed to be their parents.
	“What is your name?” the man said to the child who was now being hauled forward, her black hair falling into her face.
	“It’s Sonnia,” said the mother, a tall and gaunt woman whose blond hair was curled around a face that either had way too much paint on it or had recently survived the ravages of a terrible skin infection. The daughter said nothing, looking mutely and angrily at the man who was bending over her.
	“Sonnia, in what way are you afflicted?” he went on, speaking gently while music played softly in the background. 
	“I’m not afflicted,” she said, rather more loudly than the others were in the habit of speaking. 
	“Look,” said the mother, and pulled up the short sleeve of the girl’s pink blouse.
	There on her arm was that sword and crown again--only with the sword pointing up, sticking through the base of the crown, the point aligned with the points of the diadem.
	“Dhiaoc!” Aine shouted. “It’s NightQueen!”
	“You’re right,” I said, amazed. “Boy, she looks different without the greasepaint, huh?”
	“Satan, be gone from her!” the man said, laying his hands on NightQueen’s head. 
	“Get your hands off of me!” she shouted, breaking free of her mother’s grip.
	“Though the devil be strong I say to you leave this child!”
	“Thurk you and the rest of you bastards!” NightQueen shouted back.
	“Well all right NightQueen,” I said, sitting back amused as the ripples of reaction spread.
	“Going around killing people and acting like God wants it!” she shouted. “Family Forever my gleacha!”
	“Man,” I said. “She spent way too much time around both of us.”
	“Devil, for the last time, I charge thee, COME OUT!”
	“Well, honey, you just said the magic words!” called a voice from the audience.
	“I know that voice,” I said.
	Aine did too. So neither of us was surprised to see Lara strutting forward, looking very fetching in a subdued two-piece skirt and sweater in muted pastels, with demure brown stockings, sensible shoes, and a very cute little round hat that matched the small clasp bag she was carrying.
	“What in God’s name is that?” said someone, loud enough to be picked up by the VisionBox. And to be heard by Lara.
	“I’m the third term, sweetcakes,” she said.
	As if it were a signal, there were suddenly people streaming up the aisles--some ransani, some men, and some women, all carrying placards. It went by so fast I couldn’t read them very well, but there was one that had both of our names on it.
	“Wait!” Aine had seen it too. “How--can we make it--show the sign?”
	“I don’t know,” I said. “I think it shows what it wants to show.”
	And at the moment, it didn’t want to show anything. The picture was suddenly gone, replaced by a pattern of colored lines, and then suddenly the sword-and-crown symbol above the letters FSC.
	“We are experiencing technical difficulties,” said a deep, soothing masculine voice. “Please stand by.”
	We waited. But when the picture finally came back, it wasn’t the same room. It was one of those things they played during the breaks.
	“So we know her name is Sonnia,” I said. “That doesn’t help much, but--”
	“Oh, but diaoc, the repeaters will talk about this,” Aine said. “And I bet they’ll find her full name--both of them, and they’ll be printed up somewhere in one of their story sheets. And Ira can find anything that’s printed in any story sheet in the Cretid Nation, there’s a place to go for that.”
	“Really?” I said. 
	“Yes, Etana showed me.”
	“Well then what are we sitting here for,” I said, as it became quite clear that the people in the VisionBox had no intention of ever showing us what was happening back in Sword and Crown Land. “Let’s go talk to Ira.”

XIV.
Subtext

	“No wait wait wait--go back to that one.”
	“I’m going, calm down.” Aine looked at me contritely. “I’m sorry, dhiaoc--I shouldn’t speak to you like that. It’s just--frustrating.”
	Indeed it was. Aine had gotten us onto this thing where all the news was, and we had found report after report about Erysin. But after reading through what seemed like a hundred of them we hadn’t learned much. Nine months ago DeVane had applied to an agency called the Drug Evaluation Authority for permission to sell Erysin on the open market. Six months later they got it. Every piece we saw mentioned that this was a remarkably short time, but nobody ventured to explain how this had been accomplished. Dr. Sinclare was frequently quoted singing the praises of Erysin, but there was no discussion of who he was, where he’d come from, or what he’d been doing before he started hawking the Wonder Drug. I gained nothing from all this except for a growing amazement that such a huge public stir had been created over what, from what I read, appeared to be a low-grade aphrodisiac that I’d made myself when I was with her--assembled, anyhow. Everything we did still had to go to her for the infusion of the power that made it work. Which meant that if we could find out where she made the stuff, we could find her close by; she had probably automated the production process by now but there was still one step that only she could do. Unless she’d made converts while she was up here, or started collaborating with other exiled dark users. I thought it unlikely. Lythril knew better than to trust her colleagues.
	But the one piece of information that would have been useful to us was entirely absent from the vast scroll of writing that Ira shook out before us. We didn’t care how many old men had had their lives changed by Erysin. I didn’t want to hear about how high the price of shares in DeVane Pharmaceuticals had risen, and if I saw one more crude attempt to work in an erection joke I was going to have to hit somebody.
	“There!” I said, as Aine did what she had to do and found the thing I’d been looking for. “Animal Testing.”
	It was a very short story. It mentioned simply that an organization called Save Our Brothers had demonstrated against DeVane Pharmaceuticals at a local GlobeTurners where, apparently, Erysin was being sold. Someone was quoted as saying that DeVane followed “cruel and unnecessary practices that have been obsolete for the past thirty years,” including something that involved the detention and torture of rabbits.
	“Rabbits?” Aine asked. It wasn’t something she would have thought of associating with Lythril.
	“Probably victims to the olaidh,” I said. “She wouldn’t actually be testing things on them; she knows how it works.”
	“You don’t think it’s ingredients for Erysin?”
	I shook my head. “No, all that stuff comes from humans.”
	“Well...then where is she getting it? This stuff is being sold by the crateful.”
	It was true that it couldn’t all be Sinclare, and that indeed no matter what kind of a stable Lythril was maintaining she couldn’t get enough out of all of them to go into production on this scale. Trade in the Cretid Nation was, as Wous had said, all about volume.
	“Well,” I said, “only one way to find out.” I took the board from her. “We’re going to have to search using a few words that up till now we haven’t had much use for.”
	The effort of wading through this barrage of fnaa was even more taxing, but finally I found something I was looking for. “Here we go,” I said. “It looks like an advertisement.”
	“For--” Aine didn’t read the text out loud. “Idair’s mercy, dhiaoc, what on earth would they do with it all?”
	“I don’t know what these...LifeSource people are planning on doing with it, but I’ll tell you what Lythril could do with a couple gallons of this stuff.” Aine looked shocked. “It doesn’t take much. One part semen to a hundred parts of various other fnaa. I could never figure out how necessary the other stuff was, but sure as you can’t make soup without stock you can’t make an aphrodisiac without this jiz.”
	“So some place like this is supplying her,” she said.
	“It explains why it took her so long to get this out there,” I said. “She had to get to a point where she could afford an account at the sperm bank.” I studied the advertisement. “If we could just find out which of these places supplies her...”
	“Or where she gets the rabbits,” Aine ventured.
	“There you go. Those protestors must have found out about the rabbits from someone. If we can contact this SOB organization and find out what they know, it would be a lead, at least.”
	The key turned in the lock and the door opened. Etana spilled into the hallway first, followed by Kwenu, carrying two large paper bags. I went to go help her while Aine sat with Ira.
	“Have a good afternoon?” I asked. 
	“Yes,” Etana said loudly. “Mommy took me to the zoo.”
	“Well, that’s nice,” I said, lifting one of the bags and having no idea what a zoo was. “Kwenu, where do you want me to put this?”
	“Just put it down on the counter,” she said.
	Etana went running into her room. “Hello, Aine! Hello, Ira!”
	Kwenu followed me into the kitchen, worried. As she glanced around she looked even more worried.
	“You cleaned up the kitchen,” she said carefully. 	
	“I don’t think we did any damage,” I answered.
	She began taking things out of the bags and putting them into the refrigerator. “Thank you,” she said. “And thank your friend for spending so much time with Etana. She doesn’t socialize much, and it’s good for her, even if Aine isn’t exactly in her peer group.”
	“You worry about her,” I said.
	Kwenu laughed. “Of course I do,” she said. “If she were running with the other kids her age in the neighborhood I’d be scared fnaaless. The things they get into, it would stand your hair on end. But now I’m worried about her for not running with them. I can’t make up my mind whether it would be worse for her to grow up a loner or grow up into the kind of mess those kids are headed for.”
	“Well, maybe she’ll make the choice for you,” I said.
	“I guess.” Kwenu finished stocking the refrigerator and began folding up the bags. “How are you with groups, Theamh? Darin makes you sound kind of like a hermit.”
	“Darin doesn’t see me at work,” I said. “I deal with crowds all the time. Why?”
	“Just wanted to make sure it wouldn’t rattle you too badly to have the gang over. I mean, it’s a small enough crowd. There’s some of the people I work with, and Chandra and some of her journalist buddies, and then Barid--he’s a professor at the New World University.” She took a little anxious breath before saying it. “He and I are seeing each other.”
	I realized what that meant more from her mind than her words. “Oh, well, I’ll be glad to know him then.”
	 “Let’s hope,” she said.
	I couldn’t make her out. If she was seeing him, as she put it, that would indicate, wouldn’t it, that she liked him, and was proud of him, and would want other people to meet him? But that wasn’t what was uppermost in her mind. She was worried; ashamed a little, even.
	“Is it because of Etana?”
	“Is what because of Etana?”	
	“That you’re nervous about bringing him here? Because I’d hate to think it was on my account.”
	“It’s partly Etana,” she said, giving me one of those inscrutable looks. “I’ve always been open with her; I hate hypocrisy. But it’s still hard; I don’t want her to get her hopes up, you know, in case it doesn’t work out.” Or your hopes, maybe, I thought, glad she couldn’t read me. “But partly it’s the occasion. We’re meeting to discuss the Rett Deacon murder--and he won’t appear to his best advantage.” She gave a little uncertain laugh. “I guess I just don’t want you to think I’m dating a gleachinai,” she finally said.
	“Why, what’s wrong with him?”
	“Help me put out the napkins,” she said, instead of answering.

	“Dhiaoc, I’ve got it!”
	Aine’s head popped out from the doorway to Etana’s room as I was bringing some towels out to the bathroom. 
	“Got what?”
	“I’ve made contact with Ira!”
	I rushed in, putting the towels down on top of Etana’s bed. “Show me,” I said, keeping my voice low so Kwenu and Etana wouldn’t hear in he kitchen.
	“Well, I figured, if it’s sentient, it must have likes and dislikes,” Aine said, pulling the keyboard into her lap. “And I thought, well, everything I know that’s living likes attention. You know--being played with, talked to, so forth. So I’ve been reading her while we work on her, trying to gauge the changes...”
	“And?” I asked, pleased that she was proud of her work but also wanting her to get to the point.
	“And I picked out some patterns.” Aine put her hands on the rectangular box under the screen. “Now watch this.”
	She had put the screen in that mode where you could type things on the keyboard and have them turn up as text. Looking down at that box she frowned in concentration, sending out something I couldn’t read.
	There was a whirring from what sounded like a little tiny engine, and suddenly things began appearing on the screen.
	They weren’t words; they weren’t letters, or even numbers. Just strange patterns of light and darkness, scrolling across the screen in cryptic strings.
	“What did you say to it?”
	“I asked it to let me know if it could hear me,” Aine said.
	“I guess it heard you then,” I answered. 
	We were both staring at the screen now. The scrolling had stopped, but no matter how long we stared at this abstract pattern of mysterious tracings, there was nothing to be made of it.
	“You remember I told you you’d do some work that got noticed,” I said.
	“Yes, I remember.”
	“This is going to be it,” I said. “Your first really major contribution to the field.” I tapped the screen. “If what we think is happening is happening...you’ve discovered a whole new kind of being.”
	Aine looked back at the screen with big and somewhat frightened eyes.
	“Keep at it,” I said. “Kwenu tells me these things are running everything up here. If we can figure out how to communicate with them...I could see that coming in real handy.”
	She nodded. “I will, dhiaoc.”
	“But for now,” I said, “I think you better come on out to the living area, the party seems to be starting.”
	Aine reached to do whatever it was that made the thing shut down, but then she didn’t.
	“I don’t think it likes being turned off,” she said. “At least it doesn’t seem to want to be, yet.”
	“Leave it on then,” I answered. “No harm in humoring it.”
	When we shut the door behind us, Aine quailed suddenly as she saw the strange forms seated around the low table in the living area. It was impressed on me, too, how far from home we were, how strange everything was, and how much I’d have really preferred to be let to stay quietly in a corner until everyone had gone home.
	But that wasn’t going to happen, because those heads turned toward us as Kwenu stepped over to bring us in. “Well, everyone,” she said, “this is the woman of the hour, Aine Ruadh.”
	Aine, surprised and dismayed at being introduced first, wanted to shrink away from the scrutiny. “This is Malisha, she’s a human rights lawyer working at the International Peace Council...” Aine politely took the hand of the ‘black’ woman who rose to greet her. She was older than Kwenu, and instead of braids had her hair cut close around her head. “Kenn Ilian, who’s with the  East Wind Review, he’s what you’d call a repeater...” This man looked more like the Black Tiger than he did like Kwenu and Darin, and there was the buried whisper hendai in Kwenu’s mind as she presented him to us. “But anything you say now is off the record unless you say different, right, Kenn?”
	“Of course,” he said with a smile.
	“Emme and Gielon, who along with me keep the CPPC from completely going under...” Aine and I shook hands with the woman and man who stood to greet us. “And of course you know Tyrna...”
	“Of course,” Tyrna said, giving Aine’s hand a vigorous shake. “Poor thing, they did all that to you in such a short time.”
	Aine’s hand went self-consciously to her bruised face. The damage they’d done was healing, but the traces were certainly still visible.
	“And this is Barid, or should I say Professor Inis...”
	She looked back at him with a smile, and he shook his head as he rose. He was a tall man, and broad enough but not solid with it. Long arms and legs, inside that expensive suit, and with those same discs-on-a-wire contraption riding the bridge of his nose. His hair wasn’t braided, exactly; it stood up from his scalp in three-inch strands of what looked almost like yarn, except that it had much more body to it. The hand he reached across to Aine was well-turned and he shook hers with a decisive and firm grip. “Please, call me Barid. I’m very pleased to meet you.”
	He seemed very amiable; I was even more puzzled now about what Kwenu was worried for.
	“Isn’t Chandra coming?” asked Kenn.
	“She’ll be here, but she’ll be late as usual, probably,” Kwenu said. “Well, that’s everyone; and everyone, this is Aine and Theamh. Sit down, you two.” Kwenu waved us to some cushions she’d put out on the floor. “Aine, these people want to hear your story. I’ve warned them that there are things about it they may find hard to believe. Please, if you wouldn’t mind, start at the beginning and tell them what you saw.”
	Aine was quiet for a while, looking around warily and reading each one, making sure she could trust them.
	“You mean the very beginning?” she said.
	Because I could tell what she meant, I answered, “No, I don’t think they need you to go back that far...but you’ll have to explain to them about aftersight before you start.”
	“But I hardly know anything about it,” she said. She looked at me, wishing silently for me to start and do the explaining. She was still shy in front of this many strangers.
	“Well,” I said, glancing around at them all. “We’re from Ideire, you know that. Ideirens are different; you know that too. We believe that places have memories just like people do, and that when something very extraordinary happens in a place the place remembers. History lives in the stones, the trees, the air around them. It’s one of the things we believe, that nothing ever disappears.”
	Malisha nodded, and Tyrna smiled with that same mixture of interest and indulgence.
	“There are some people in Ideire who are born with an ability to read those memories. Such a person is able to come to a place where something has happened and see that thing, in a vision. With practice, one of these people can learn to actually search for those visions, and use her gift to bring her further and further back in the time and history of the place she stands in. With practice, also, it’s possible to learn to search for events that weren’t so extraordinary, to reach back for the mundane or the trivial. This ability is known by different names--ghost vision, locographia, aftersight, or as Tyrna called it just ‘the gift.’ And these names are all, more or less, euphemisms because the ‘gift’ can be a terrible burden.”
	Aine sent me a sharp glance. She’d never heard me say that, although she might well have been formulating a similar conclusion based on her own experiences.
	“When you’re just discovering it, the way Aine is, visions burst in on you unexpected and unannounced, and there is no immediate way to tell whether what you’re seeing is happening now or long dead and over. To see one of those memories, at that stage, means being there and living in it again, but without the ability to alter the picture or change the story. It’s upsetting and it’s frustrating, the more so because most of the things that make impressions extreme enough to read are bad things. And so in some circumstances the gift can make things almost unbearable. For instance, something terrible enough to read has apparently happened on every streetcorner in this neighborhood--which is why Aine hasn’t left the apartment since we got here.”
	If Aine was surprised that I had made this deduction she didn’t show it. She just nodded.
	“I know this idea is a hard sell to people who aren’t used to it, and that you may not believe Aine’s story. But please remember, while she tells it, that it’s real to her.”
	Aine, realizing it was her turn, swallowed and took over.
	“It’s like my--it’s like she says,” Aine began, glancing back at me for reassurance. “We were walking down the street to get here, and I saw something at every step of the way, or almost. I can’t explain to you what it’s like,” she said. “You see the vision and you forget where you are and who you’re with--it becomes the--the only real thing, while you see it. My--we’d worked out a system, where as soon as I saw one I’d ask her if she could see it too, and if she couldn’t I’d know it was a vision.”
	“You mean you didn’t witness this either,” Malisha interrupted.
	“I don’t have aftersight,” I answered. “It’s something you’re born with or not, and I wasn’t.”
	“So...so I saw the two gardai, over by the wall--”
	“Gardai?” Kenn asked.
	“Enforcers,” Kwenu replied. He nodded.
	“So I saw them standing hunched over something and they were slicing away at it, just raining blows down on it as savagely as they could. I couldn’t see what they were swinging at, so I just asked her if she could see them too, and she said yes. So I thought it was real.”
	“What she asked was, ‘do you see the gardai,’” I put in. “And I did see a couple Enforcers up where she was pointing. They were still standing there talking to that third man with the notebook. I thought she was looking at the same ones--and she was, but she was seeing them a lot earlier.”
	Aine nodded. “So then...I saw them lift up whatever it was they’d been thrashing, and when they got him up against the wall I saw it was a man. He was looking around like he was partly asleep--like he didn’t really know where he was.”
	“Probably it was from the beating,” I said, as she faltered a bit while the vision came back to her. “They got in a few good ones on his head, and he was stunned or confused or damaged in some way.”
	There was a dry noise of swallowing from Aine and she went forward doggedly. “They had him on his feet, but he was swaying around a lot, so one of them pushed him backward and he leaned against the wall. And then he stepped away to be next to the second one, and while the man was still twisting his head like he wanted to wake up from some horrible dream...” They were all watching her now, with different degrees of belief and suspicion, divided on the truth of her account but all riveted by it. “They were laughing at him, I guess because they thought it was funny how he couldn’t seem to figure out how to run away, with his mind so addled. And they were still laughing when they pulled out their guns and then the fire and metal came out of them and he just slammed back into the wall and started sliding...” She gulped, putting a hand over her throat. “Sliding down the wall, with the blood coming from him and...”
	I wished there was something I could do for her; but I couldn’t think what. Her head shook a little as she fought the upset. “I was asking, you know, asking how we should stop it and you didn’t say anything,” she said, forgetting the others and looking at me. “I just ran up shouting at them and then I hit some kind of barrier I couldn’t see just as the first man was putting his gun in the dead man’s right hand, pressing his fingers around it. And I was up against the barrier and I realized I wasn’t looking at what I was feeling and then I knew why you hadn’t said anything. Till then I thought...I didn’t know what to think.”
	“Aine, you know that if I’d really seen it too I would have tried to stop it,” I said. “I just didn’t understand what you were asking me.”
	It suddenly made more sense to me that she should have had such a fit. Thanks to my miscommunication, she had believed for those few long moments that I was seeing what she saw, and making no attempt to intervene. No wonder the anger and outrage outlasted the vision so long and so vividly.
	“I knew nobody would believe me if I told the story,” Aine said. “I just couldn’t help it. They were laughing while they killed him, and then laughing there, right in front of us, and...” She glanced at me, still chagrined about having gotten us into this mess. Then her eyes went around the circle of strangers, hoping for an answer. “With us, life is the first mystery, the one magic that founds everything. Idair told us never to take life because it’s the one thing that neither we nor she can give back. People do it, back home, but they do it at--at times of great trouble and anguish--or out of a great dark evil that’s come to live in their hearts--but they don’t--they might curse or boast or gloat in triumph if they are very evil but they don’t laugh.” The others looked back, not perhaps understanding the strength of her desire to see them understand and agree. “Even dark users know what magic is and they may take life but it’s a serious business, for them, they have serious reasons. When a life is taken some of the magic goes out of the world and the world grieves for that, and we grieve with it.” The silence around her had deepened as the others remained in their own thoughts. “Is...is it not the same, up here?”
	The silence was abruptly broken by a sharp and bitter laugh from Barid. “Life’s been cheap up here for a long time now,” he said. “For a nation that’s wiped out ten million lives in Dubhinis alone and Lord only knows how many in Plenana, we still don’t have reliable figures...” More of that unhappy, arid laughter. “Why shouldn’t they laugh? Added to the dead of the Green River Basin, Rett Deacon doesn’t even qualify as a drop in the bucket.”
	“Excuse me,” I said, as the others seemed to be becoming restless, “did you say ten...million?”
	“That’s right,” he said. “And that’s only counting the dead who died before the colonies were granted their so-called ‘independence’--”
	“Of course ten million’s an estimate,” Kenn said, leaning over and addressing himself to me while ignoring Barid. “We have no way of knowing, really, how many it was.”
	“Well, even suppose it was only nine million,” I suggested. “That’s still more people than we probably have in our entire country.”
	“How did they kill them all?” Aine asked in a horrified whisper.
	“Or more to the point, why?” I added.
	“Oh, please don’t get him started,” Malisha said. And, as Barid turned to remonstrate with her, “It’s not that the history lesson isn’t valuable, Barid, it’s just we have things to attend to in the here and now.”
	“Ten million in Dubhinis, who knows how many in Plenana--”
	“At least that,” put in Gielon, speaking for the first time and not at much length.
	“--and how many hundred thousand in the hundred years of Hendai Wars?”
	Kenn shook his head. “Too many, is the answer, and isn’t that this woman’s point, Barid, that even one is too many?”
	Attention came back around to Aine. “So you say you saw them shoot him, unarmed, and then put the gun in his hand after he was down,” Malisha said.
	Aine nodded.
	They came at her then with a barrage of questions, examining and cross-examining her. She answered well, and with conviction, and never allowed herself to be confused. She would have made a great witness, if only she had been there when it happened. As it was, I couldn’t blame the Cretid courts if they didn’t want to accept her testimony; ours wouldn’t either. Aftersight can’t be independently verified. Aine wasn’t a shriia yet; and although I was, I could only say that I believed she was seeing things, not that I knew for a fact that they were true.
	“They found the jacket,” Emme spoke up at one point. “In a trash bag on its way out of the South Corner Morgue. We’re looking now for an independent lab that’ll do tests to establish that it was Rett’s.”
	“What does...TTCP stand for?” Aine asked.
	“Thurk the Cretid Police,” said Etana.
	She had come to the doorway of the living area, a glass of water in one hand and a stuffed toy in the other. Kwenu got up and lifted Etana into her arms. “How’s my little Tan-tan? Are we keeping you up?”
	“I want to listen,” she said.
	“I want to listen what?”
	“I want to listen, please,” Etana answered, looking beseechingly at the others.
	Kwenu went back to her place, seating Etana on her lap. “All right, Tan-tan. But you just tell me if it gets too scary, all right?”
	Etana nodded solemnly, nestling against her mother’s shoulder, looking out silently with those magnified eyes.
	Barid took a disapproving look at the two of them, then returned to the discussion. “It’s the title of a song recorded by a group that started out here in the Corner. It’s been blacklisted since it came out, but people are getting copies. If it weren’t illegal it’d be at the top of the charts, at least in this part of town.”
	“I can understand why,” I said.
	“Can you,” he answered, frostily.
	I withdrew from the scorn that accompanied the reply, and decided that I would wait until I could read him better before having any more direct dealings with him.
	“Young black men have taken to wearing the letters as a symbol of their defiance of the Man,” Barid went on, expounding. “They tried to destroy the jacket because if it’d been found that would be more proof that this killing was part of the Cretid Police’s program of genocide.”
	For some reason the word seemed to set the others off, but nobody was willing to voice this irritation. “Or at least that they deliberately targeted him,” Gelion said.
	“How’s the community taking it?” Malisha asked, turning to Tyrna.
	“Badly,” was her short, frank answer. “Remember there were four other people arrested with me, all young, all male and all black.”
	“You see?” Barid went on. “They are deliberately targeting black males in an attempt to wipe out the community.”
	Barid was now emphasizing his points with emphatic hand gestures, and I was starting to understand Kwenu’s hesitation. Even though he hadn’t really done anything wrong, the sharp edge of his anger seemed to be making everyone else in the room uncomfortable, and it was clear to me that they wanted to steer him as far away from this topic as possible.
	“Thanks to friend Kwenu here, we’re all out on bail, but nobody took kindly to it. Rett’s woman has been down to the station every day trying to get the body released for burial, which they won’t do--”
	“We’re working on that,” Emme said. “They have the right to hold onto it for 72 hours even without getting any kind of court order, just because it’s evidence. Before that period is up my money says the state will be filing for permission to retain it for further testing. But we’re on them, and they’ll have to release it sometime.”
	Tyrna nodded. “Mitha sure will appreciate that. There’s twice the number of cars roaming the streets as there were before, and twice the number of people out there watching them go by. Everyone’s expecting trouble, they’re just waiting for the spark.”
	“More reason to organize something now,” Malisha said earnestly. “Get in early and direct all that somewhere useful, before it turns into another riot that only hurts us.”
	“I’m all for demonstrating and agitating,” Tyrna said, leaning back and taking a long pull on the bottle she was holding. “Tell me where and I’ll be there with the signs. But I doubt that’ll stave off the crash.” She looked at Aine. “I’ve been asked the story a million times, and I’ve told it best I know how. I told ‘em it was the gift that let you see it. But I’ll tell you, in here we may be sitting around weighing the possibilities and taking the rational approach, but on the street it’s enough for them that you say you saw it. They may not believe in the gift, but they believe in Cretid cruelty.”
	“With or without Aine’s testimony,” Kwenu said, “there’s bound to be so much physical evidence that this can’t be hushed up. That story Stasi’s telling about Rett getting his gun away from him and firing on them--I’m sorry, the man must have been drunk when he made it up. Ballistics’ll match Stasi’s gun to some of Rett’s bullet holes, and that’ll be the end of that.”
	“It won’t matter,” Barid said with the crushing weight of authority. “A story doesn’t have to hold water to become Cretid law.”
	At this point the door, which Kwenu had left open, flew back and a woman appeared inside it. She was pink-skinned, with hair of a peculiar coppery red that hung limp down her back and a long skirt that floated around her as she pushed the door shut behind her. When she brought her hands out to gesture in front of her as she spoke I heard the rows of bracelets on each wrist jangling faintly under her cry of satisfaction.
	“I am SO PUMPED!” she shouted, without even greeting anyone. “Have you heard yet? About the FSC?”
	“No,” Kwenu said, with a wary glance at Barid, who wasn’t taking kindly to the interruption. And then, to us, “This is Chandra.”
	Chandra walked into the living area, sliding a large carrying bag from her shoulder and letting it fall to the ground as she squeezed onto the couch with Emme and Gelion. “I just got done reading the wire reports, that’s why I’m late. TTT busted into their broadcasting studio this afternoon and staged a demonstration, right in the middle of Healing Spirit. WOOOHOO!”
	“TTT?” asked Kenn. I was glad to see I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t seem to understand what she was talking about.
	“Third Term Triumphant,” Chandra said, extracting a carton with six bottles in it from her bag. “You guys drink Red River, don’t you?”
	Kwenu grimaced a little, but Tyrna nodded. Chandra got up and carried the carton into the kitchen, still talking. “It’s a new group--about 24 hours old, if that. Started after the Third Term bombing.” The fridge door came open and she put the carton into the fridge, abstracting one of the bottles deftly before the door shut. “This is their first big event--but man, what a debut.”
	The cap of the bottle popped off with a little hiss, and Chandra returned, ensconcing herself happily with her bottle. “Apparently one of the members has a family that’s some big deal in the fundamentalist crowd and she somehow managed to get ‘em all passes. So they get themselves right into the bosom of the Favorite Son Channel and go marching on up the aisles on national television. They had to run commercials and old episodes of ‘My Best Friend, God’ starring Tini Helton as the voice of Little Jimmy for two solid hours until they got the Enforcers to arrest them all.”
	Chandra was highly pleased by all this, and it seemed like Kwenu and Malisha were too; but Barid wasn’t. “That’s very interesting,” he said, flatly. “Now if we could get back to the topic at hand...”
	“Oh but of course,” Chandra said, waving her hands in mock submission. “And that subject would be what?”
	“We were talking about the Rett Deacon murder,” Kwenu said, a little primly. “Which, as you remember, was the reason I invited you over in the first place.”
	“I thought it was because you enjoyed my company,” Chandra said, pouting. “Well, lucky I pulled these files you wanted, or you might not even have let me in here.”
	Chandra handed a folder to Kwenu, reaching across me and Aine in the process. “Police reports going back 20 years, together with my very own statistical breakdown showing what percentage of arrests of ethnic minorities have involved brutality severe enough to require hospitalization compared to the same stats for the white Cretid population who you will be gratified to hear,” she said, glancing at Barid, “were not arrested in anywhere near so big numbers, and were infrequently roughed up unless they happened to be identifiably queer. Also included is a subset of just the arrests that Stasi and Cune can take credit for, broken down by ethnic background of suspect detailing the severity of the injuries along with an illegally obtained copy of an internal memo circulated at the South Corner Precinct regarding their so-called inquiry into the death of Helma Meri two years ago which I don’t know whether it can be used as evidence, but it sure as hell makes interesting reading.” Kwenu was already leafing through the stuff in the folder, evidently quite pleased with it. “So don’t say us queers never did anything for the struggle.”
	“You know I’d never say that, Chandra,” Kwenu said reproachfully as she began reading one of the papers in he folder.
	“So where’s Arina?” Emme asked, while Barid looked over Kwenu’s shoulder at the folder. 
	“Hell if I know,” Chandra said. “She dumped me last week.”
	Emme clucked sadly. “I’m sorry.”
	“Yeah, well, I saw it coming a mile away,” Chandra answered moodily, reaching over the table for some of the flat fried things that were crackling in a bowl next to a dish of glutinous beige stuff. “I should’ve just beaten her to the punch, but I’m too chicken. Oh my God!” she suddenly cried, looking at me. “Your hair!”
	“Something wrong with it?” I said, a little frightened.
	One of her hands lifted up a lock of my hair, which was trailing over my shoulder. “No, it’s perfect. The real Ideiren red-gold. I’ve been trying for years to get this color. Who does yours?”
	“Please don’t touch my hair,” I said, because I had no idea what she was talking about.
	Chandra withdrew her hand, looking both hurt and truculent at the same time, if that was possible. “Well excuse me.”
	“Ideirens don’t like to be touched,” Kwenu said dryly. “At least not by strangers.”
	Suddenly Chandra’s eyes lit up. “Oh my God!” she repeated, turning back to me with her hands hovering excitedly in the air. “Are you really from Ideire? Really?”
	Kwenu passed the folder to Barid and looked sardonically at Chandra. “This is Theamh ni hUlnach, Chandra. She’s a friend of my father’s.”
	Chandra actually gasped. “No!”
	“Yes,” Malisha put in, with a smile.
	“You--” She was pointing at me now, in a way that really unnerved me. “You’re the Avenging Angel!”
	“I’m the what?” I demanded. 
	“That’s what they’re calling you on the grapevine. But--really--you are, aren’t you? The woman who chased off the Fair-Haired Boy, kicked the fnaa out of six roundheads in the WorldBurger and found Family Forever’s bomb?”
	“Yes,” I said warily.
	“Well, you oughta give Lara a call,” Chandra said. “She thinks you’re dead.”
	Suddenly it made sense. The last thing Lara would have seen, if she saw it at all, was a fireball bursting out of the doorway of that underground hole and, apparently, engulfing us. Which would explain why our names had ended up on those placards.
	“I can’t call her,” I said. “We don’t have a link.”
	Chandra blinked, then laughed. “Oh my God. I can’t believe it. A link!” She continued, while Aine stared at her. “No, I mean on the phone. Come on, I’ll show you how it works.”
	“And you’ve got her number?” Kwenu demanded, in that mixture of admiration and exasperation that seemed to be her usual response to Chandra.
	“Course I do,” she said. “She’s publicity coordinator for TTT. I’m doing a spread on them in next week’s issue. Can we use your phone?”
	“Sure,” Kwenu said with a laugh. “In the kitchen.”
	We trouped back to the kitchen while the others went back to the original topic. Every now and then snatches of their conversation would float toward us, but I couldn’t follow it. I was watching Chandra work the box.
	“See, every house has what they call a phone number,” she said. “You dial the number and the signal goes to a box like this in her house and she picks it up and talks into it and the sound comes out here.” Reading the digits scrawled on a slip of paper she pulled from her cavernous bag, she began pressing buttons, then held the thing to her ear. She waited, while faint beepings proceeded from the part she was holding to her ear.
	“It’s ringing,” she whispered, holding her hand over the bottom half of the box. “Probably she’s screening her calls with the answering machine. I would too if my name had just been broadcast on the evening news.”
	“But didn’t you say she was arrested?”
	“Oh, her bail was posted by an attorney acting on behalf of an anonymous benefactor,” she said. “Anonymous my gleacha--” She stopped, because Lara’s voice, or rather a dead, faint, flattened version of it, was coming over the box. She waited for it to stop, which it did, with a long beeping sound. “Hi, Lara, this is Chandra, we spoke over Ethermail this afternoon? Listen, I’m over at a friend’s house and you’ll never guess who I’ve run into--”
	There was an abrupt clicking noise and then Lara’s voice, dim, tinny and too faint to make out the words.
	“Oh you’re there! Great.” Pause filled up by Lara’s voice. “Yeah, it’s nice to hear yours too. We’re still on for the interview tomorrow, right?” More faint gabblings. “Good. Hey you know who’s standing right here next to me?” Shorter pause. “Your pal Theamh ni hUlnach and her trusty sidekick.”
	Chandra moved the box away from her ear, allowing us to hear the squeal that managed to conquer distance and indirection and bring Lara’s startled enthusiasm to us almost in the flesh. 
	“Oh my God oh my God lemme talk to her!”
	I heard that clear enough, and so did Chandra. She handed me the box. “You put this end near your ear and this end near your mouth--”
	“I think I can figure it out,” I said, taking the box. “Lara?”
	“Theamh?” The distortion was less, now that I had the thing right next to my ear, and she was a lot louder. “Where the thurking hell have you been? We thought you’d been blown up!”
	“They took you off to the hospital before we could tell you we were all right,” I said. “Were you hurt badly?”
	Chandra smiled and went back to join the group in the living room.
	“Scratches, shock, nothing serious,” she said. “But how did you survive?”
	“It’s called backfiring,” I said. “Never mind the details, but we came through the blast just fine. It’s a shame we have to deprive the cause of its only two martyrs...”
	“Oh please, honey, we are lousy with martyrs. We don’t need more. Did you see us on the news?”
	“No, I saw you on the FSC,” I said. “I have to say, that was quite an outfit.”
	“Oh, you liked it? Iriq took me shopping. I told him it’d be good for my nerves. Poor man, he had no idea where I was planning to wear that little number. He looked positively chagrined when he came to pick me up at the station.” She laughed. “And how about Little Miss Sunshine?”
	“So that was her,” I said.
	“She cleans up good, doesn’t she? You know her father is Family Forever’s vice-president in charge of fund-raising?”
	“No, I did not know that.”
	“I’d like to be a fly on the wall in that kitchen tonight. Oh, I’m so glad you’re not dead, I can’t even tell you. Where are you?”
	“I’m staying with a woman called Kwenu Umuoa, in South Corner.”
	“All right, you and me have to get together soon, I won’t really believe it until I see you in the flesh. How about your little disciple, is she still faithfully by your side?”
	“Yes, Aine’s right here. You want to talk to her?”
	I passed the box to Aine. “Lara?” Pause, while Aine smiled. “I’m glad to hear from you too, Lara. What was it you were saying about NightQueen?”
	I returned to the living room, where things were now getting a little more heated.
	“...when I said it was off-topic I didn’t mean it was irrelevant,” Barid was insisting to a very put-out Chandra. “But we’re here to address a different problem, and we need to stay focused. Of course what happened at Third Term is unconscionable, but it’s a separate issue. Now if we can just--”
	“Oh, so it’s a separate issue,” Chandra said. “Well, riddle me this, Professor--now that Third Term’s closed down indefinitely, how many bars or nightclubs are there in the North End that cater to a mixed-race clientele?”
	Barid didn’t answer immediately.
	“I bet you can’t name a single one,” she said. “And you know why? Because Hers & Hers closed down last year as a result of bureaucratic harassment and Cross Countries was gutted in a highly suspicious fire seven months ago. Meanwhile Gilded Lilies continues to operate despite being as queer as a three-tailed mouse and despite a boycott from the less racist segment of the queer community. Family Forever isn’t just straightening the curves, my friend, they’re whitening the walls.”
	Kwenu, who had looked mostly irritated during this exchange, suddenly became interested. “But they have black members.”
	“Well, they have queer members too, if you ask me,” Chandra said. 
	“Anyway,” Kwenu said. “Chandra, are you planning to publish this memo you stole?”
	“Do cats hate water?”
	“But what about your editor?” Malisha asked. “Won’t he object?”
	Kenn laughed; Chandra snorted. “Please. Nobody ever sues us--it would give us too much credibility. Besides, if you think I’m crazy, you should see my editor.”
	“Well, I think it will do more good in the press than in court,” Kwenu said. “The thing is to keep the pressure on until the results of the Bureau inquiry are made public. So...” She pulled over a list she seemed to have been making. “So, Malisha and Tyrna will work on organizing the march and rally to the murder site this weekend. Tyrna, did you want--”
	“Oh, right,” Tyrna said, turning to me. “Night before the march we’ll be doing a kind of a rite in that neighborhood, to try and banish the Yellow Dog and anything else that might be thinking of starting trouble. Do you and your acolyte want to come help?”
	“I--sure,” I said, a little surprised that she wanted me along. “I mean--well, I promised to refrain from practicing in front of unbelievers, so I’ll have to do the actual protections on my own, in secret. But if your story would allow me to help out with your own rites, I’m happy to participate as long as it doesn’t involve doing harm.”
	“Well, so happens this particular one doesn’t,” Tyrna said, with one of those indulgent smiles. “I’ll be in touch about the details.”
	“So, Barid will be in charge of inviting speakers for the rally...Emme and Gelion are spearheading the effort to get Stasi and Cune indicted for murder...and Chandra will be mobilizing the alternative press and the letter-writing campaign to the Big Four newspapers.” Everyone seemed to accept their assignments equably. “So, let’s eat.”
	Once the food appeared everything suddenly became less formal. The group broke into smaller ones; bottles appeared as if from nowhere; and groups of two or three budded into their own conversations. Aine finally got done talking to Lara and sat with me near the end of the couch, eating her dinner and trying to take up as little space as possible.
	<So how’s NightQueen?>
	<We have to do something about her, dhiaoc. She’s back with her parents now, and she shouldn’t stay there.>
	<I don’t get it. If her parents live here, shouldn’t she have been running away in the other direction?>
	<It’s complicated...she ran away from her parents to some man she met over Ethermail, and then she ran away from him back toward the City, and now she’s with her family again. It isn’t right.>
	<What’s the matter with her parents, aside from believing in this fnaa?>
	<I’m not exactly sure. But they do her no good.>
	<Then why is she living there?>
	<Why do you still speak to your mother?> I didn’t reply to this. <She’s fifteen years old, dhiaoc, too young even to run away to scoil like you did.>
	<You really are in the habit, aren’t you?>
	<I’m sorry...I’m just...I’m very worried about her.>
	<Obviously. Well, do you know her full name now?>
	<Name, number and address.>
	<Then tomorrow, if you can bring yourself to step outside, we can pay her a call.>
	<Thank you, dhiaoc.>
	“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Chandra.”
	This was from Kwenu, who had for a while been remonstrating with Chandra. “But I’ll never make it back home in time, and I forgot to set the recorder. And besides, they really should watch it and I know you won’t remember to show it to them. Pleeeeeeeeeeease?”
	“Malisha?”
	“I’m game,” she said. “I’m taping it, but I’d just as soon watch it here, with the rest of the Followers.”
	Chandra reached across to Malisha, striking the upraised palm of Malisha’s hand with her own. “Thank you, sister. I know Emme’s with us.” Emme laughed. “Come on, Barid--a little popular culture won’t kill you, will it?”
	“I find this particular program tedious,” Barid said, cuttingly.
	“Of course you do. Come on, Kenn, weigh in on my side.”
	Kenn smiled as he sipped at his tea. “I’m afraid I don’t have enough information to express a preference, Chandra; I’ve never seen the show.”
	Chandra gaped at him. “You’ve never seen it.” He just laughed. “Well, that settles it then.”
	“I want to watch it, Mommy,” Etana said. “It’s funny.”
	“All right,” Kwenu said, with a sigh. “But on your own head be it.”
	The VB leapt into life again, passing through a series of sudden switches until finally settling. I couldn’t really see it, though, because Chandra was coming over to sit with us.
	“It’s got a small but very loyal viewing base,” she said to me. “We call ourselves the Followers, you can find ‘em all over the Net. Mostly women and mostly queer, of course...”
	“But what is it that you’re talking about?” I asked, a little unsettled now.
	“You’ll find out soon enough--SHHHHHH!!!” she hissed, waving her arms at the others as the image on the screen changed. “I want them to hear the credits!”
	At this point I wanted to hear them too. On the screen, the image was of a woman standing on a mountaintop. The image was turning, as if whoever was looking at her was circling in the air, and her long, straight hair--the same color as Chandra’s--was down, and waving behind her in the breeze. 
	<What on earth is she wearing?>
	<Looks like a corset.>
	It wasn’t exactly a corset, because it seemed to be designed for outerwear. But it had no sleeves, being held up by two thin straps over the shoulders and whatever ribbing they’d stuck into the thing that pushed her breasts up and out into the cups at the top. It was some sort of white material, with a little white skirt that left most of her long, muscular legs on view. The V of the skirt line was studded with silver stars, and as the image turned she was doing some sort of dancelike movement that reminded me vaguely of the Black Tiger’s fight scene, only much slower.
	The voice, though, that came to us over the music was male, deep and smooth like all their disembodied voices. “In a world plagued by demons, despots, and ancient spirits, a land in darkness cried out for a savior.” Now the woman was riding a horse, in the same outfit but fortunately with a saddle and blanket to keep the horsehair from rubbing the skin off her bare legs, and giving chase to a number of men on other horses. “She was Idair.” Now the woman was standing surrounded by scruffy-looking men with heavy old metal weapons, with what looked like colored streamers coming out of her hands, hitting them in the guts and knocking them on their gleachas. “A powerful priestess, forged in the heat of flame...”
	<Oh no,> I heard from Aine, now watching in dismay and disbelief. <That’s not...that’s not meant to be our Idair?>
	“Man,” observed Kenn. “Idair’s got a great rack on her.”
	“Kenn!” said Malisha disapprovingly.
	“No, he’s right,” Chandra said. “She does, and I love her for it.”
	<What’s a rack, dhiaoc?>
	<I don’t think we want to know.>
	Now she was walking along up a hill with a group of women behind her, all in their twenties and all wearing dresses that fit their forms a lot more closely than peasant garb really does.
	“...her knowledge would change the world.”
	Malisha, Emme and Chandra all raised a fist along with the woman on the screen and called along with the male voice, “BURN FOREVER, IDAIR!”
	While their laughter died down, the image changed. “Idair,” since that’s who she seemed to be, was walking along through a forest, with a shorter woman at her side. I recognized her from the credits; she had very light hair pulled back into a kind of bushy tail and for some reason the shirt she was wearing wasn’t long enough to reach down to the waistband of her short leather skirt, so that what there was of her stomach was exposed. 
	“It’s getting dark, Idair,” said the second woman. “Shouldn’t we stop and make camp?”
	“You can if you want,” said “Idair.” “I’ve got a better idea.” She gestured into the trees, toward a house with lit windows that sat inside a large clearing. “Let’s see how far you all have gotten with this whole hospitality concept.”
	The other laughed as the two of them walked up to the doorstep of the house. When the door opened it was by a young man, tall and broad-shouldered with curly dark hair. I couldn’t quite figure out how he had made his outfit or what out of, but it showed off his flat, hard abdomen and bare muscled arms. “Well, hello, ladies,” he said, his voice becoming purring and pleased as he looked at them. “What can I do for you?”
	“We’re looking for a place to spend the night,” ‘Idair’ answered. “If you can spare a corner somewhere, we’d be grateful.”
	“Of course,” said the man. “Please, come in. My house is yours.”
	“You’re right, it is,” ‘Idair’ said, coming through the doorway. The man looked questioningly at the other woman, who hung back a little, being apparently less assertive.
	“That’s Idair,” the other woman said.
	The man looked stunned.
	“The Idair?” he whispered, fearfully.
	“So far as I know there’s only one,” she said, giving him an enigmatic smile and following ‘Idair’ down the corridor.
	The next thing we saw was the three of them sitting around a table, eating off silver dishes with silver cutlery. 
	<Dhiaoc...>
	<I know, I know,> I said, as ‘Idair’ speared a forkful of meat and tucked it into her mouth with nary a hesitation.
	“So,” said the man. “Where is it you’re headed, if a mortal might ask the question?”
	“Nowhere special,” she answered. “Just taking a look around, doing what I can.” She swallowed her mouthful. “You guys are cooking the food now, that’s one step forward.”
	The other woman looked at the fork in her hand. “You do well for yourself, Iandar,” she said.
	<What in the name of...>
	<I...wasn’t he older than that, dhiaoc?>
	<Older and more ornery,> I answered. <Well, if that’s Iandar, that woman must be...Cailte, or Sincil. There ought to be two of them...>
	“I worked hard for it,” the man answered. “It’s not easy keeping what you have, with Engnor’s raiders roaming the country.”
	<Engnor?> Aine demanded, starting visibly. <How on earth would Engnor be roaming around hundreds of years before he was born?>
	<Don’t ask,> I said, settling back wearily.
	The woman playing Idair looked down at her fork, which she was spinning idly on the table, then up at Iandar with a steely smile. “Oh, don’t you worry about him for a little while,” she said. “He’s got too many irons in the fire right now.”
	There was a laugh, and Chandra leaned over to explain. “Last week she disarmed a whole army of his and set fire to all their spears and swords and stuff,” she said.
	“Oh,” I said, turning back to the screen. “I get it.”
	Back in the VB, it looked like ‘Idair’ and her companion were getting ready to bed down for the night. The blonde sat on the edge of the large feather bed, and ‘Idair’ sat on the floor, leaning back between the other woman’s knees against the bed.
	“Well, it looks like hospitality has caught on,” ventured the blond woman, pulling a silver hairbrush through ‘Idair’s’ hair in slow, languorous strokes.
	“Yep,” ‘Idair answered. “Now all I have to do is teach ‘em the art of conversation and they can start having dinner parties.”
	“What do you mean, ‘the art of conversation’?”
	“Don’t worry about learning that, Cailte,” Idair said, patting the other woman’s knee. “If there’s one thing you can do, it’s talk.”
	“I can do other things,” said the woman, who we still could not bring ourselves to think of as Cailte. 
	“Oh, believe me, I know,” said ‘Idair,’ with a smile that made the others laugh knowingly. “You are a woman of many talents.”
	“Whoa ho ho ho!” said Malisha, chuckling.
	“But there’s still so much I feel like I don’t know,” said the other woman. “So much I want to learn.”
	‘Idair’ looked back over her shoulder. “Be patient,” she said. “You wouldn’t want me to teach you everything all at one shot, would you? It’d ruin that air of mystery that keeps you hanging around me.”
	The woman stopped brushing for a moment, looking down at the top of ‘Idair’s’ head as the hand on ‘Idair’s’ shoulder drifted gently along her collarbone. “That’s not why I stay with you, Idair.”
	“Really,” said ‘Idair,’ looking ironically into the distance. “They why is it?”
	Cailte looked as if she were about to say something very serious, and then went briskly back to brushing. “Because I still can’t work a tinderbox.”
	Idair chuckled. “I knew it was something,” she said, lifting a hand and looking at it. “I snore, I eat too much and I don’t wash the dishes, but at least I can always light your fire.” Cailte’s brows came together in annoyance and she pulled the hairbrush down suddenly and vigorously. “Ouch!”
	Chandra and the others burst into laughter. Etana looked to Kwenu for an explanation of the joke that Aine wasn’t getting either.
	“It’s what they call a double meaning,” Kwenu explained. “She’s talking about fire, but she’s also talking about sex...”
	<Dhiaoc, she can’t mean it,> Aine said, suddenly alarmed.
	<Oh, I think she does,> I answered, with an audible sigh. 
	<But...but...>
	<Just sit tight and hope it doesn’t get worse,> I answered. <Remember, we’re guests in Kwenu’s home and we don’t want to offend all her friends.>
	‘Idair’ and Cailte were now swatting at each other with the pillows from the feather bed. It was going to be a long hour.
	I was positively relieved when the sound of a battle broke in onto the scene and ‘Idair’ froze in mid-swing, poised like a dog at the scent. 
	“What is it?” Cailte asked.
	“So Engnor’s bringing the battle to us now,” ‘Idair’ said, running to the door. “Typical. Here we are wrestling with the bare concept of ‘guest,’ and the Cretids have already developed room service.”
	The two of them went running down the hall, and out onto the lawn, where there looked to be about twenty men in armor and carrying swords, who had stuffed a lot of loot into bags and were dragging Iandar around by the back of his neck. “Come on then,” one of them was saying. “Where’s your stash hidden?”
	Instead of answering, Iandar somehow managed to knock over the man holding him, grab his sword and start fighting with it. ‘Idair’ then jumped into the fray--literally, in an impossible leap ending with a two-footed kick that knocked one of the men onto the ground. From then on it was nothing but punching, ducking, leaping, somersaulting through the air, kicking, groin-jabbing, and wisecracking. Cailte didn’t seem to be quite the gymnast ‘Idair’ was, but she got in several good whacks with a pike that she stole off one of the soldiers, who seemed a slow-moving and slow-witted lot. 
	In a few minutes ‘Idair’ had knocked about ten of them cold. Iandar had wounded a number of others, and was locked in combat with the leader, who appeared to be a lot more capable than his lackeys. The other nine were all going after Cailte, who was not up to dealing with them. ‘Idair,’ after successfully fighting off three of them, found herself back to back with Cailte as the other six ranged around them in a circle. One of the attackers threw a spear at ‘Idair’, but it glanced off her bodice and fell harmlessly to the ground.
	“You moron!” shouted the leader, taking time off from his battle with Iandar to berate his henchmen. “How many times have I told you you can’t cut through that thing! You have to aim for the head!”
	“Excuse me,” Iandar said, standing with his hand on one hip and his foot tapping impatiently. “Do you mind?”
	“I’m terribly sorry,” said the leader, returning to Iandar. “Where were we?”	<Oh, please don’t tell me that’s supposed to be a hreapa,> I said.
	<Remember,> Aine said, sincerely frightened of what I might do, <we are guests in Kwenu’s home, and...>
	<As if you could weave that thing all in one piece!>
	<Well...I mean...wouldn’t it be more effective, too, if it covered her arms? Or legs?>
	<Or anything...>
	“Remember to take them alive!” called the leader, as Iandar’s sword slid under his armor and through his ribs.
	“I told you to pay attention,” Iandar said, as the leader’s shocked face looked down at his quickly leaking lifeblood.
	But the image left him immediately and went back to Cailte, who was getting very nervous as the six soldiers surrounding them got closer and closer. “Well, I’m out of ideas,” Cailte observed. “You?”
	“I’d stay back if I were you,” Idair called out to them, with a calm smile. “Because I’m way too hot to handle.”
	Several of the attackers here paused. “Come on!” shouted one of them. “She’s one unarmed woman and we’re six men with large sharp objects. What are you worried about?”
	‘Idair’ addressed herself to him. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
	“No. Why?”
	Those colored streamers came out of her hands again, striking him and sending him flying.
	“Recruits,” snorted one of the other henchmen as he watched the first man land. “Don’t know their gleachas from first base--”
	His repartee was cut short by another streamer smacking him in the gut and knocking him flat. He and the other one stood up, slapping themselves to put out the small flames running over their armor.
	<Oh, I get it,> I said. <That’s supposed to be the fire.>
	<You’d think they could do it better,> said Aine.
	“So,” said ‘Idair.’ “Who else wants a seat in the smoking section?”
	The others took to their heels. Cailte, still very agitated and breathing hard, leaned on Idair’s shoulder. “Can I ask you something?”
	“Sure.”
	“Couldn’t you just have done that at the beginning of the fight?” Cailte demanded. 
	‘Idair’ looked at her. “Oh, sure,” she said. “But where’s the pleasure in that?” 
	She laughed at Cailte’s astonished face, patted her lightly on the shoulder and then went back to talk to Iandar.
	Iandar, meanwhile, had withdrawn his sword and was looking down at the body of the dead leader. He wiped the sword on the grass.
	“Well,” Idair said, looking at the bags of loot that had been dropped in flight. “At least they didn’t break up your dinner service.”
	“I thought you said he was busy,” Iandar said.
	“I thought he was,” ‘Idair’ answered, with a stony glance at the dead body. “Looks like we need to head up to Amranth and keep him occupied.” Chandra snickered. “After all, idle hands are the Dark One’s playthings.” She looked back at Iandar. “Sorry about him, Iandar; but he didn’t give you much choice.” She bent down and took the dead man’s sword and scabbard. “I’ll take this with me as a present for Engnor.” ‘Idair’ girded the sword on and moved off. “Come on, Cailte, you were just saying you’d always wanted to see Amranth.”
	“No I wasn’t,” she said.
	“Well, you should have been,” ‘Idair’ answered, as they got smaller in the distance.
	The screen went dark, and then it was break time.
	“Well,” said Kenn, crossing his legs. “All I want to know is, where has she been all my life?”
	“I hear this Iandar guy is going to be a series regular,” Malisha said. “I hope so. He really improves the view.”
	“What amazes me is that they can get away with it,” Kwenu said. “It’s not really a ‘subtext’ any more, is it?”
	“Oh, they’ve got that whole love/hate thing going on with Engnor as camouflage,” Chandra said. “But who cares how much of a charge she gets out of tying him up, we all know her heart belongs to Cailte.”
	Aine’s distress was now literally giving me a headache. And I was having a hard time containing my own reaction too, truth be told. Fortunately the break went by and people stopped talking when the show started.
	<It’s getting worse, dhiaoc,> Aine said, a few minutes later.
	She was right. Because the next scene was the siege of Amranth. 
	It wasn’t enough that when ‘Idair’ managed to somehow get through the lines and into Amranth itself, the person who held audience with her was the completely fictional king of Amst, whose very existence was just wrong on so many levels that I hardly had time to get offended at his obvious advances toward Cailte, who staunchly repelled them because she was constantly staring up with those doe eyes at ‘Idair.’ They also had to have Idair embarking on a very long and very elaborate stratagem against the besieging forces that eventually brought her right into Engnor’s stronghold. 
	Never mind, for the moment, the fact that the Battle of Amranth took place several hundred years after Idair left us. Also put aside the fact that Engnor, whose very name is still so hated in that region that when an Amstian encounters someone for whom ‘son of a bitch’ is too flattering an epithet she will call him a ‘friend of Engnor,’ was played by an actor whose dark curls, bright blue eyes, lean hard body and winsome charm had Malisha and Emme sighing over him the minute he appeared on screen. And let us be generous, and assume that if the people who had put on this show did not represent the manifold atrocities for which Engnor was responsible, this was only because that would have cost money they didn’t have to spend. It still made my stomach hurt to see ‘Idair’ disguising herself as a member of the Cretid army, wangling her way through the lines of defense, and then finally leaping into Engnor’s tent.
	“Ah, Subaltern,” said Engnor. “And has your platoon been able to stop the smuggling on the lake?”
	“Not exactly,” said ‘Idair,’ taking off her helmet. “But then...I haven’t really been trying.”
	Engnor recognized her with a combination of surprise, vexation, and what looked like relish. “Damn it! Who let you in here?”
	She looked back at him, feigning injured feelings. “But I thought I had a standing invitation.”
	Engnor drew his sword and flew at her, but she parried him with one stroke, using the sword she’d taken off Iandar’s victim.
	“That’s Helat’s sword,” Engnor said, as they stood stalemated. “Where’s Helat?”
	“Where you’re headed,” she answered.
	He took another lunge at her, which she blocked equally effortlessly. She stood musing, stroking her chin with one hand as she fought him off with the other. “Hmmm...this time I think I’ll take you...left-handed.”
	“Why not just do it blindfolded,” said Engnor bitterly, as she tossed the sword into her other hand and advanced on him. 
	“Nah,” she answered. “It’s no fun unless I get to watch.”
	And they were off. She seemed to be handling the sword pretty well--better than the real Idair would have, if she’d ever used one, which she never did, her attitude toward physical combat and violence of any kind having been completely different from the one this creature seemed to have. Engnor got the better of the battle once or twice, but any time he seemed to have turned the tide he would always end up tussling with her from very close up, and in a moment of gazing lustfully into her blue eyes would lose his advantage and be on the sharp end of the stick again. ‘Idair’ finally had him backed up to the tent pole and knocked the sword out of his hand.
	“Well,” he said. “I guess you’re just destined to wear the sword in this relationship.”
	Idair snapped her fingers. A length of chain that was just lying around nearby for no reason suddenly flew into the air and knotted itself around his wrists, fettering him to the pole. 
	“Oh--” I decided not to finish the interjection. After all, it was Idair, supposedly, and she could do anything. But if any of these people thought that mindstrength would allow you to do something that complicated that easily without even being able to see what you were doing, well, they were grievously mistaken. But then that could be said of so many things.
	‘Idair’, who had now stripped the man down to his britches, patted him patronizingly on his bearded cheek. “Sleep tight,” she said. “I’m sure that if any of your army is left standing, someone will remember to evacuate you as you get the flaming hell out of Amst.”
	And then there they were, her and Cailte, walking along through the forest again. “So, Idair,” said Cailte. “Do you think they’ll be back?”
	“Well, you know what they say,” she said. “A dog returns to his vomit, and a Cretid returns to his folly.” She speared a fruit that was hanging off a nearby tree branch and began peeling it with the edge of her sword.
	“I’ll put that one in the Chronicles,” she said.
	“If you want,” ‘Idair’ answered. “He’ll be back, for sure.” Cailte looked at her solemnly. “But what are we talking about him for? The night’s young, the sky’s clear, and we’ve got a whole country to explore.”
	Music got louder as they walked into the distance.
	“You gonna keep that sword?” Cailte said, her voice fading.
	“I don’t know.” ‘Idair’ turned it around, looking it over. “I think I might. Somehow people seem to pay more attention to you when you’re carrying something long and sharp.” She laughed. “And you know what? I think it’s longer than Engnor’s.”
	“Does the size really matter?”
	“It does to him.”
	The screen went dark, and the words “Produced By” appeared. Chandra, Malisha and Emme applauded.
	Kwenu turned the screen off and looked at me. Tyrna was also watching me, with the same kind of amused and yet apprehensive expression. Chandra wasn’t apprehensive at all. She turned to us with a smile so big and bright that it almost cut through my anger. Almost.
	“So!” she said. “That was your maiden voyage into the wonderful world of ‘Idair: Priestess of Power.’”
	“Is that what it’s called,” I said dully.
	“Yeah,” Chandra answered. “Did you like it?”
	“That’s a direct question, isn’t it?” I answered, knotting my hands together in my lap.
	“Of course it is,” she said. “I’ve never met an Ideiren, I don’t think any of the other fans have.”
	“That doesn’t surprise me,” I said.
	“So I really want to know what you think,” she said, her enthusiasm starting to be dampened a little bit by her sense that all was not well with me.
	“Kwenu,” I said, “I’m very sorry about this, but she’s asked, and I have to answer.”
	“Oh, don’t worry about me,” Kwenu said. “Like I said, it’s on her own head.”
	Chandra looked at me expectantly.
	“No, I didn’t like it,” I finally said.
	“Aine?” Chandra looked at Aine, who compressed her lips and shook her head.
	“Well, what’s wrong with it?” Chandra pursued, looking back at me.
	“Do you really want me to get started?” I said.
	“No, really,” Chandra answered. “Tell me how you feel about it, I want to know.”
	I looked around at Kwenu, Etana, Tyrna, and the rest of the party.
	“All right, first of all,” I said, “Amst never had a king.”
	“Oh, I know it’s a complete crock as far as historical accuracy goes,” Chandra says. “But isn’t she great? You guys are so lucky to have someone like her founding your culture, instead of some old white guy with a beard who can’t sneeze without smiting someone.”
	“But this is my point,” I said. “Idair’s not someone like her.”
	“What do you mean?” said Chandra, looking disappointed.
	“Idair didn’t use weapons,” Aine put in, no longer able to hold back. “She didn’t eat meat, she didn’t do backflips in the air, and she...she wasn’t...”
	“She wasn’t in love with Cailte,” I finished for her, as Aine nodded. “Or Engnor either, seeing as she’d been gone from here for at least a kyelran before he was even born.”
	“Oh, but that’s the best thing about the whole show,” Chandra said earnestly. “The subtext!”
	Emme nodded. “It’s the one show on the VB where you can see something that looks like it might sort of be a queer relationship. It’s worth it just for that. That scene with the two of them in the lake, you remember, from two weeks ago...”
	The other two were laughing now, and Aine was getting very upset and angry. “But Idair never did anything like that!” They looked at her. “She didn’t have any...subtext...or any text either, she was just Idair.”
	Now even Tyrna chuckled. “Even the gods have affairs,” she said.
	“We don’t have gods,” Aine returned. “Or at least I don’t think we do, and Idair never fell in love with anyone, she was--she was--tell them, dhiaoc.”
	“Idair specifically says in the seventh scroll that she cannot fall in love with any one of them because she has to love all of them,” I said. “She knew that if she had a lover, that would give whoever it was too much power--and then if they had children, it would be a terrible mess, she never wanted dynastic rule for us and that’s what it would have led to.”
	“So she never took a lover,” Chandra shrugged. “Doesn’t mean she didn’t think about it.”
	“Chandra,” remonstrated Kwenu, catching sight of Aine’s outraged face.
	“And Cailte was a real person, right? Your first priestess. There must have been something there--”
	“No!” both of us shouted. Aine looked at me, then went on. “There was no--subtext--to that. There wasn’t.”
	“Oh sure,” said Chandra. “And I suppose there’s no subtext to your relationship, either.”
	Chandra and Malisha laughed. I didn’t, because this little witticism threw poor Aine into dry-mouthed and gaping disarray. She didn’t know how to answer, but the anger, shock and confusion that reached me from her made up my mind.
	“All right, that’s enough,” I said, standing up. “I’m sure it’s a lot of fun for you to get to play around in your little sword and sorcery fantasy world, but you’ll pardon me for saying that none of you know any more about who Idair is or what she was like than a pig knows about astronomy. Furthermore, you don’t know thing one about shri, so there’s no way for you to understand what a dhiaoc is to her scoilin or a scoilin to her dhiaoc. And to conclude, I’m going out for some fresh air and the chance to not listen to a bunch of strangers make a mockery out of the one thing in this world that I take most seriously, and I sincerely hope that when we come back you all are talking about something else because frankly I can’t stand to listen to this for another second. Come on, Aine.”
	She got up gratefully and followed me out the door, down the many flights of steps and into the night air, exploding through the doorway in a rush of anger and tears.
	“It’s all right,” I said, as she let it out. “They meant no harm, they just appear to be thick as venison stew regarding certain things.”
	“I wish I’d never seen it,” she said. “Now when I think of Idair she’ll be prancing around in that--corset--”
	“Oh, no she won’t,” I said. “Time’ll flush this whole trauma right out of your memory, and if it doesn’t we can work on helping it along. There are ways to bury things.”
	I put an arm around Aine’s shoulder as she wept. They didn’t relax. Finally, she lifted her tormented eyes to me.
	“You don’t...you don’t think we really have a...subtext, dhiaoc?” she said miserably.
	I sighed. Aine took this as a bad sign.
	“Dhiaoc!”
	“Listen,” I said, withdrawing my arm. “I think they’re all full of fnaa, if you want to know the truth. But at the same time, I wouldn’t be a shriia if I didn’t tell you that it has occurred to me sometimes, over the past year, to wonder if you might not have a little bit of a crush on me.”
	“But--dhiaoc--” She looked horrified at the thought. “I wouldn’t--I never--you’re my dhiaoc!”
	“I know that,” I said, trying to lighten the tone. “Aine, I don’t really know whether you ever did or not, but if you had, it would be perfectly normal. It happens to a lot of us. You spend all your time around an older woman who, if you’re lucky, you look up to and respect, and sometimes things get complicated.”
	“Really?” Aine said, incredulous and still shaken by all this.
	“Really. It happens all the time to Lilea--she’s so warm, and so open, she just melts her scoili’s hearts.”
	“But then...what do they do?”
	I shrugged. “Either they talk to her about it, or they don’t, but they know there’s nothing to be done; so eventually it passes, and they go on with the business of learning.”
	Aine had now gone very quiet and thoughtful.
	“I have to say it never happened to me when I was a scoilin,” I said. “Barant intimidated the hell out of me, and anyway...my affections were engaged elsewhere.”
	“You intimidate me,” Aine said, hopefully.
	“Well, so I guess that has an up side to it,” I said, laughing. “I always wished I could stop intimidating you, but maybe it serves a purpose.”
	“Do...do the dhiaocs sometimes...”
	“Get crushes on their scoili? I’m sure it happens,” I said. “But no one really talks about it, and of course they’d never mention it to the scoilin--it would be an unconscionable breach of the trust you put in us.”
	“But you don’t...feel like that...about me--do you?”
	“Well, Aine,” I said, turning and looking her frankly in the eye, “go on and have a good read. Do I?”
	She studied my face for what seemed like a long time.
	“No,” she finally said.
	“There you are then,” I answered. 
	She smiled wanly. “But am I right?”
	“Yes, you’re right, Aine. Being--being a dhiaoc, it’s different from just being an ordinary friend, but it’s also very, very different from being a lover. It’s just--I’m your dhiaoc, Aine, it’s a unique relationship and it’s unlike anything else in the world. They don’t understand because they don’t have anything like this.” She nodded, looking a little more comforted. “Idair’s teeth, of all the people in the world you’re certainly safest from me. Since I am, as Lilea was wont to put it, taken with a capital T.”
	Aine nodded, wiping her eyes and starting to feel better. “I shouldn’t have let it get to me,” she said. “Of course they don’t know what they’re talking about--why should they?”
	“Why, indeed,” I murmured.
	The door closed behind us. When I turned around Chandra was there, having just come through it, and looking contrite.
	“Listen, I...I just wanted to apologize,” she said. “I’m an idiot, in some ways, I just blunder through my life with good intentions and really lousy aim and I hurt people without meaning to. I should have known how you would feel about the show, and I shouldn’t have offended you like that. I don’t really have any excuse for it, other than a few beers and a natural aptitude for social gaffes.” 
	I was still angry, but her contrition was sincere--and along with it came an overwhelming sense of embarrassment and shame that was familiar. I knew what it was like to feel like you’d just run through a social gathering like a bull through a pottery studio.
	“I’m jealous, I guess,” she said, with an uncomfortable little laugh. “It seems like you have so many strong women, so much to believe in, and here it’s so different that when we finally see an image like IPoP it’s like water in the desert. We need that strength, so much, living here in this place.” I looked back at her, feeling my anger abate slightly. “I’ve been waiting for years for the chance to meet a real Ideiren, who knows something about Idair and shri, for real,” she said, sadly. “Now I finally get the chance and I thurk it up. This is my life.”
	“Chandra...” I sighed. “I believe that you’re sincerely sorry, and that you didn’t want to hurt us, but will you get it in your mind, once and for all, that no matter how badly you need a new story it is an unbelievable affront to just steal ours and warp it.”
	She nodded, her hair wagging limply around her face. “I’m sorry, Theamh. I should know better. I’m constantly amazed, every time something like this happens. I know you probably don’t want to talk to me ever again,” she went on, “but...is there any way I can make this up to you?”
	“Yes there is,” I said, quickly. “You can tell me everything you know about DeVane Pharmaceuticals.”
	She switched happily from contrition to outrage. “Well, that’s easy: they are PURE EVIL.”
	“I’m not surprised to hear it,” I said, “but how did you arrive at this conclusion?”
 	She sat down on the curb next to me and Aine, who had forgiven her enough to come sit with us at least. “Pharmaceutical companies in general are heinous things--they bleed people dry with what they charge, just because they know that if it’s a choice between bankruptcy and death people will always take bankruptcy. Bloodsucking leeches, all of them. DeVane was late to the field but I bet it’ll turn out to be the worst yet.”
	“Why?”
	“Because they’ve already managed to corrupt the DEA,” Chandra said. “Nobody believes me, but I’ve done the research, there’s no other explanation. Do you know, I went to find out how old their patent was on the formula for Erysin, just on the off chance that they’d really developed it much earlier...and you know what I found out?”
	“They don’t even have one,” I said.
	“They don’t even--” Chandra stopped as she realized. “How’d you know?”
	“I don’t know, but it was a safe guess,” I said. 
	“But it’s insane! How could they not patent their biggest selling prescription ever?”
	“They don’t need to,” I answered. “No other company would be able to make it, even if they could get the ingredient list. And considering what the ingredients are, I doubt they want the recipe to be a matter of public record.”
	I was coming upon the part of the conversation where her infatuation with things Ideiren, irritating though it had already proven to be, was going to be very helpful.
	“You mean...” She looked around and dropped her voice. “You mean...it’s magic?”
	“That’s what I mean,” I said. “If I’m right, and nothing I’ve seen so far suggests otherwise, Erysin is a potion, plain and simple. There probably is a chemical formula that would describe its makeup--but I doubt anyone on their research and development team knows what it is.”
	“Oh my God,” Chandra said. It was strange, suddenly, to be believed--and on the instant. “So DeVane’s being run by a...a dark user?”
	“That’s what I think,” I said. “I can’t be sure. But I really, really want to find out.” She was already watching me so intently and with such unsettling intensity I almost hated to ask, but I had to. “I’m thinking maybe you’re the woman to help me do it. Are you willing?”
	Chandra actually clapped her hands. “You bet your gleacha!” she cried, her eyes lighting up with eagerness. “Anything I can do to get those bastards in trouble--I’d do it even if there weren’t magic involved. Oh, I really don’t deserve to be this lucky.”
	Neither do I, was my thought, but I left it unvoiced.
	“What I need most is to find out where they’re located,” I said. “The Net has proved a broken reed in this regard. You don’t happen to have a physical address for them, do you?”
	She shook her head. “They’re a private company. That means their records are sealed--where they’re located, who works there, what their assets are, it’s all off-limits to casual inquirers.”
	“What about Sinclare?” I asked. “Anything on him?”
	Chandra snorted. “Please. ‘Doctor’ my gleacha--his degree is listed as being from Offshore Plenana University, an institution famous for credentialing the rich and incompetent. And I’ll tell you something else,” she said. “I haven’t written this up yet because I can’t find hard proof and I do have some standards. But I think he got his start as a back-alley terminator.”
	I’d heard this phrase from Kwenu--it meant someone who ended pregnancies illegally. “I thought people didn’t have to go those any more.”
	She shook her head. “In the past ten years it’s gotten harder and harder to get a termination from a legitimate doctor. It’s a long story--but with one restriction and another, they’ve created quite a little market for the backstreet butcher. Minors who can’t or won’t get parental consent; married women whose husbands won’t sign off on the procedure; women who’ve left it too late. These people don’t advertise, of course. But if you know the underground, you find things out; and I’ve heard his name connected to this.”
	“It would make sense,” I said. “He might be a place to start, if you can’t find out anything about the actual company. Lythril’s cunning as a snake and leaves just as faint a trace. This man is nothing but cruel and crazy. He’ll leave tracks.”
	“And the rabbits,” Aine put in.
	“Oh yes, the rabbits,” I said. “How do they know DeVane is doing animal testing?”
	Chandra shrugged. “I’ll talk to my friend down at SOB, she’ll know. And I have an ex-girlfriend working in the bowels of the Cretid Nation News, maybe she can find out where they went to interview that bastard for the little puff piece they ran last week.”
	“And the...the...”
	“Sperm,” I finished, as Aine didn’t want to. “Semen is one of the ingredients for this thing--and a lot of the other stuff she makes. Someone’s got to be supplying her.”
	A sharp laugh split the air in front of her. “Perfect,” she said. “Beautiful. Men going down on other men so they can thurk their women. It’s so beautiful I can hardly stand it.”
	“So do you think you can help us?”
	She put a hand over her heart. “Consider me on it. I’m meeting Lara tomorrow afternoon to interview her; if you want we can come by here afterwards. I know she wants to see you.”
	<And NightQueen,> Aine interrupted anxiously.
	“I don’t know what your schedule’s like,” I said tentatively, “but Aine is very concerned about N--about Sonnia. Do you think you’d have time to drop us off there? We can’t use public transportation, I’m not allowed to handle money.”
	I did what I could to ignore the pleasure with which she recognized one of the marks of a Real Live Shriia. “Of course. It’ll be my honor.”
	“Enough of that,” I said. “Come on, let’s get back to the party, Kwenu must be worried--”
	I broke off. Chandra looked after me, puzzled. 
	<What is it, dhiaoc?>
	<There, at the corner between those two dark buildings. Do you see it?>
	Aine strained after my pointing finger. Down at the end of the block, a faint, sickened yellow stain blurred into the darkness of the alley.
	We started moving off toward it. Chandra moved after us.
	“What is it?” she hissed, when I stopped. “Is it a spirit?”
	“Chandra,” I whispered, “please stay right where you are and do not come after us.”
	“But--”
	“Do it,” I said, as imperiously as I could. “This may be very important and very dangerous, and if you interfere and thurk it up I won’t let you help us any more.”
	“I’ll stay and watch to make sure you’re all right,” she said.
	“You do that.”
	She slid into the shadow cast by the stoop. Aine and I walked slowly toward what might or might not be the Yellow Dog.

XV.
Touched By an Angel

	That yellow light only got more baleful as we neared it. It didn’t recede, but it did seem to be moving; shifting and flickering like a torch that’s being carried, or a lantern with moths around it. As we got closer I could see that it was up higher than I’d realized; as if it were roosting somehow on one of the sagging sills under those broken and gutted windows. 
	<Keep your eyes up as we turn the corner.>
	<I understand, dhiaoc.>
	Before we could do that, we heard voices--human voices, raised in anger, coming from much closer to the ground. Both male, and both young-sounding.
	“...ever known me to do you like that?” one of them was remonstrating as we stood pressed against the wall of the empty building, listening. “Someone’s been telling lies on me.”
	“You admit you don’t have the stuff,” said the other, a lower voice that was thick with rage. “You’re not denying it’s gone.”
	“I told you, it went in the Tenth Street raid,” the other said. “And that’s not my fault, Teno was supposed to have it moved to me by then but he didn’t.”
	“Teno did move it,” said the other menacingly. “He gave it to you. You’ve been selling it on your own, on the side.” The other made a noise, but it was cut short and the fear he was radiating suddenly sharpened. “I’ll do one to the head, for old time’s sake.”
	“Now now now come on Gradle,” said the other. “You’re not going to plug me just over a little stuff!”
	“It’s not just business,” said the other man. “Betrayal makes it personal.”
	The light hovering about ten feet above them suddenly began to shine brighter.
	I made a sudden dash around the corner, without calling Aine to follow me. And I made noise.
	The two men looked at me, the one still sweating out his fear as he backed up against the wall, the other watching me with eyes that were strangely incurious. He saw me, but it was as if he didn’t care, as if the fact that there was a human witness had nothing to do with the bullet he was about to put into his trembling associate.
	“Look up,” I said, because the other things that occurred to me to say seemed like they wouldn’t impress this large, slow-moving, quietly dangerous man.
	Both of them stared at me, the young one bewildered and frantic, the other slowly becoming aware of something like amazement.
	“Look up,” I said, pointing toward the yellow light above them.
	The one about to be shot looked, figuring I suppose that he had nothing to lose now. His eyes widened and I heard him mutter something that was not a language I spoke but which sounded very much like a curse.
	“Tell me what you see,” I said, as he stared at it. “I’m interested to know, if she looks the same to you.”
	Because crouched on the edge of one of those sills, two floors above us, was something that looked exactly like the blue angel. Same body, same hair, same lack of clothing. Only instead of blue, she was yellow; and she was practically champing in anger.
	“What the thurking hell!” shouted the man, driven apparently to incoherence by the strangeness of this all.
	The other looked at me, and moved the gun from its original position so that it was aimed at my own chest.
	I raised my hands--I don’t know why, maybe because I had seen people do it on the VB in situations like this. “Please. I have nothing to do with your missing shipment of glass and neither does your associate. It really was lost in that raid, or at least that’s what he believes. I have no love for the Cretid Police and even if you did kill him I wouldn’t turn you over to them. And if you want to shoot me a minute from now that’s your affair, but before you do that, will you please just once LOOK UP.”
	Keeping the gun trained on me, he looked.
	“Fnaa,” was all he said. Matter-of-fact, without any apparent fear or astonishment.
	The gun turned away from me and up toward the yellow woman. There was an explosion, and chunks of rotten masonry rained down into the alley.
	Aine came running around the corner, but by the time she got there the two men had run out the other end. I was craning my neck to see if he had hit the yellow woman, and if so what the result had been. But I didn’t need to. She was coming for us.
	I felt for my bag, and remembered for the first time that I had left it in Kwenu’s apartment.
	<Fnaa.>
	<We don’t have the uisce-->
	It occurred to Aine at the same time, but she didn’t finish the thought because the yellow woman’s shrieking flight through the warm, foul air ended abruptly as she knocked me backwards onto the pavement, crouching on my stomach with all of her not-human weight and pushing with one glowing yellow hand at my rib cage.
	“Teir abhaile medbhurgh!”
	Her head snapped up and she stopped with one hand at my throat and the other in the air.
	<Aine, go get my bag and Tyrna.>
	<Right, dhiaoc.>
	“What did you call me?” the thing asked.
	“Medhbhurgh,” I said. 
	“Is that my name?” it demanded, pounding away with that hand as she tried to force it into my flesh. 
	It was hard not to scream. Her hand was making its way through my skin, and from the position I had an idea of where she was trying to get to.
	“Maybe,” I said. “Take your hand out of me and we’ll talk about it.”
	“You stole my prey,” she said, forcing it in further.
	“I didn’t steal them,” I answered. “I drove them off. That’s different.”
	Having her burning not-quite-matter driven into me was excruciating for me, but it wasn’t making her very happy either. For the scream I finally wasn’t able to repress, she matched me a painful grimace. She paused, and I managed to get out, “It’s a long way to my heart, friend; are you sure it’s worth it?”
	With a wail of frustration forced out through gritted teeth, she yanked her hand out and sat back on her haunches, still keeping me pinned to the pavement. 
	“Who are you?” she finally demanded.
	“I’m called Theamh ni hUlnach,” I said.
	She scrambled back to stand upright, spooked for some reason. I took the opportunity to get to my feet and we faced off. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Aine, with Tyrna next to her and Chandra behind them, appear in the mouth of the alley.
	“You are not my mother,” said the thing.
	“No,” I answered, carefully. “I’m not.”
	“But you know my mother.”
	“I don’t know,” I said. “Who’s your mother?”
	“You know her,” it repeated, getting angry now and hurrying toward me, so that I receded from it backward toward Aine and the rest of the rescue squad. “You know her, you were there with her, I met you there, you were there with her!”
	“Listen, friend, if you would just tell me what you are and where you come from--”
	Now suddenly her attention snapped from me over to Aine. Aine wanted to flinch, but she didn’t, looking back at the yellow woman with those green eyes and moving one hand slowly into my bag.
	“Are you my mother?” the thing shrieked at her.
	This threw her a bit, but she rallied. “No, I’m not anyone’s mother.”
	The thing shook its head. “You are my mother. You are.”
	“I am not.”
	The thing, tired of arguing, flew at her.
	Aine brought the bottle out with a flash, dousing her with water that ran in sparkling rivulets over the curves of her yellow body. She withdrew with a scream that was harrowing and yet pitiful somehow--a cry of something lost, something bitterly disappointed.
	Before I could reach Aine, however, the thing rallied. It stretched its yellow arms out, and as those projections I’d seen on the blue angel sprang from its shoulders she flew through the air toward Aine.
	Tyrna, who had quietly maneuvered around behind Aine while this was going on, reached over her shoulders, brandishing in front of her a strange object that seemed to be part cloth, part shell, and part dried leaves. Words in a language I didn’t recognize and couldn’t translate came out of Tyrna’s mouth. I had no idea what they meant, but I saw the combined impact of the spell and the talisman send the thing reeling backward.
	Aine was now shaking too badly to take very good aim, so I took the bottle from her and began stalking forward. “Teir abhaile mebideberagh!”
	The thing glanced from me to Tyrna to Aine, then howled.
	“We’re not your mother,” I said. “None of us.”
	A shriek, a snarl, and a disappearing trail of yellow light were all that told us she’d ever been there.
	“Well,” I said, relaxing finally. “Thanks for being a good woman in a tight corner, Tyrna. We both owe you.”
	“In all the stories I know,” she said, looking for the first time a little shaken by the ordeal, “I’ve never seen the Dog appear looking like that.”
	“And yet it ran from you when you made the charm against him,” I answered.
	She nodded.
	“Aine, are you all right?”
	Aine handed me my bag wordlessly, the blood still gone from her face. “Why...why did it think I was its mother?”
	I sat down, trying to think. There was a lot jostling around in my head.
	“There are places to rest that are a lot safer,” Tyrna pointed out.
	I stood up and moved with them out toward the mouth of the alleyway.
	“Where’s Chandra?” I ventured.
	She was lying on the pavement at the corner, face and hair glistening pale in the artificial light of the lamp.
	“Out cold,” I said, fishing the restorative from my bag. “All right otherwise, though.”
	When Chandra revived, it took her only a moment to move from sheepishness to disappointed curiosity.
	“I missed it,” she complained, as we sat her up. “I missed the whole thing. What happened? What was it?”
	“Tomorrow maybe I’ll have an answer for you,” I said, more because I knew Tyrna wanted to ask the same question than to gratify Chandra’s curiosity. “Right now, I need to think.”
	<What is it, dhiaoc?> Aine couldn’t help asking, as we started up the steps to the apartment.
	<I’m just thinking about what it said,> I answered. <Tyrna said the thing appeared about a month ago...about the time we set out on our journey.>
	<So?>
	<So I’ve been thinking. All that time ago, when we were looking for Crann, you remember I was asked to help that rapparan who’d been made sick by the green thing?>
	<I remember.>
	<It had been given something that acted like a human heart,> I answered. <It was as if the poor thing was in the process of becoming flesh, but couldn’t get there. These things are like that, in a way--stranded between spirit and matter, flesh but not. Maybe they’re part of the plan.>
	<Well all right, but why does the timing matter?>
	<The thing said I was there with her,> I said as we rounded the last landing. <It’s looking for its mother...and it seemed to think...>
	“Karinn,” I said, suddenly, as the door opened.
	I was vexed with myself for speaking it out loud; but as it turned out it didn’t matter. Nobody in the room was listening to me. Malisha had her bag and was on her way out the door; Kenn was zeroing in on Chandra with a look of huge relief; Emme and Gelion were standing in a corner talking to each other very earnestly and glancing furtively and often at the kitchen, where Kwenu and Barid were engaged in a full-throated shouting match.
	“It was nice to meet you,” Malisha said, as she ducked out the door. “I’m really sorry we offended you. I should have thought. You must realize we’re smart enough to take it with a grain of salt.”
	“I--”
	“--thing I will not tolerate,” Kwenu’s voice broke in, “is anyone telling me how to raise my child!”
	“Goodnight,” Malisha said urgently. “I’ll see you again soon, I’m sure.”
	Gelion and Emme were the next to slink off, barely pausing to acknowledge their exit to us. Chandra and Kenn appeared to be made of harder stuff, as was Tyrna, who went straight up to Etana where she hovered in the doorway to the kitchen, watching with her hands raised in anxiety.
	“Come on, Etana,” Tyrna said, taking her by the hand. “Time for your bedtime story.”
	“But--”
	“Mommy and Barid need to argue something out,” Tyrna said, drawing her gently but firmly away from the confrontation in the kitchen. 
	As Aine caught Tyrna’s beseeching glance, she said, “Come on, Etana, I want to say goodnight to Ira.”
	Hand in hand with the two of them, Etana was walked out to her room, only half under protest. Chandra, true to her nature, was now in the kitchen attempting to intervene.
	“She’s too young!” Barid was shouting.
	“It’s the world she’s inheriting,” Chandra put in. “She may as well get used to it now.”
	“Chandra...” Kwenu said despondently.
	“Oh and of course you know better than I would,” Barid said, turning on her. “Stands to reason a white woman always knows better than a black man, even if she is queer.”
	“Don’t you talk to her that way,” Kwenu said.
	“I’ll talk to her however I want,” he insisted, raising his voice. “She’s got no business meddling with us or with Etana.”
	“Listen, pal, I was with Kwenu a lot longer than you’ve been,” Chandra snapped back. “Or will be if you keep this up--”
	“Time is nothing!” Barid shouted. “What the girl needs is a father, not some half-cracked tribty who’ll thurk anything without a zazb!”
	I had been about to follow Aine and Tyrna, but this stopped me in my tracks, much as it stopped Kenn halfway through the act of reaching for one of the bottles on the table. I didn’t know exactly what it was he’d called her, but I knew it was something bad.
	“Ignore him,” said Kwenu, after a heavy and stifling silence. “He’s drunk.”
	She said it as if it were the worst thing a person could be. Barid snorted, but his reply couldn’t carry half the contempt of her voice.
	“I wish I were,” he answered. Kwenu laughed bitterly. “You’re not fair to me, Kwenu, you never have been. I’m sorry about it, but until you figure out that not every man who has a beer with dinner is going to turn into your father, we’re not going to get anywhere.”
	“Don’t slam the door on your way out,” Kwenu said coldly.
	Barid barreled out through the living room, and slammed the door anyhow.
	“I’m sorry, Kwenu,” Chandra said.
	“Don’t be.”
	“I didn’t mean to--”
	“You were out of line, as you often are,” she said, her voice oddly even and calm. “But that gives him no right to insult you in my house.”
	“He really wasn’t drunk,” Chandra offered, diffidently. “He’s like this even stone cold sober.”
	“So much the worse,” Kwenu said.
	Chandra collected Kenn and they went to the door. “Goodnight, Kwenu--I’m sorry about all this.”
	“It’s for the best, maybe,” she answered. “Don’t worry, he’ll do his part for the rally all right. Barid’s got his priorities straight.”
	Chandra shook her head, and then left without saying what was in her mind. Kenn followed her out. And that left Kwenu, looking at me.
	“I’m sorry you had to see that,” she said, her face set as stone and her eyes dry.
	“Kwenu...” I hardly knew where to start. But I didn’t have to; she started for me.
	“Thirty years, you said.”
	“I’m sorry?”
	“Darin told you it had been thirty years. Since his last one.”
	“And then some,” I answered.
	“And the man is still afraid to come home,” she said.
	With one hand supporting her as she leant over the kitchen counter, she started to cry.
	I approached her, wondering what I should do. But she didn’t want me there; it was written in every line of her posture and bristling around her mind. I went into Etana’s room.
	“...so the tortoise got the best of them all,” Tyrna was saying, as I closed the door softly behind me. “But even as he was dining on the heart of the roast and scooping the juices with the best of the flatbread, he was uneasy, for he knew that scores age slowly in the land of the birds, and that unless he was as watchful as three redtailed eagles, it would be his turn one day, and that soon.”
	Etana snuggled down under her covers, arms around a stuffed toy, face suffused in the faint glow from Ira’s screen. I noticed, as I looked back at it, that Aine had a hand on that flat box, and that although nothing was appearing on the screen she was reading something from it that appeared to have meaning.
	“Don’t turn her off,” Etana said, as Aine’s hand moved slightly.
	“I won’t.”
	“It makes her sad.”
	“She’s already sad,” Aine answered.
	Tyrna looked at her skeptically.
	“Why?” Etana asked.
	“Because Ira knows you’re sad,” Aine replied, looking none too cheerful herself.
	“Night, Ira,” Etana said, reaching out to pat the screen. “Night, Aine. Night, Tyrna.”
	“Goodnight, little bean,” Tyrna said, standing up. “Ladies, a word in the vestibule?”
	The three of us emerged into the cramped hallway; Kwenu had escaped from the kitchen into the refuge of her bedroom, so we were free to finally talk about what had happened.
	“You said ‘Karinn,’” Aine said, before Tyrna could start.
	“It’s a hunch,” I answered. “Nothing more than that.”
	“It’s not the Yellow Dog,” Tyrna said, watching me. “But it is.”
	“That’s about as far as I’ve gotten,” I answered. “It’s...made...out of the same stuff--the same power, the same force, whatever--as the lurers, or as your Yellow Dog. But it’s not a natural part of the world. It was constructed, for a purpose.”
	“What purpose?”
	“That’s the hunch,” I said. “I’d rather not say until I’m sure, conjecture has a way of being treated like fact when you’re a shriia.”
	“Well, when you’re sure, you call me,” she said. “Meanwhile I’m gonna see if there isn’t a little something I can put together that might work faster and better than old faithful here.”
	She tossed the charm in one hand, then slipped it into a pocket.
	“Thank you,” Aine said. “You saved us both.”
	“Thank you, for being the highlight of the party,” Tyrna answered. “And for being a friend to that poor child, she needs one. Take care of yourselves.”
	And now Tyrna was gone, and it was just us.
	<Tell me your hunch,> Aine said, as we began making up the sofabed.
	<We wondered what she was doing with the notborns,> I answered, throwing the sheet out over the thin mattress. <I met Karinn’s notborn, before it was replaced.>
	<And you think that’s where it’s gone to?>
	<I said it was a hunch.>
	Aine lay down on the bed. <Why? What purpose could these creatures be serving?>
	<Immortality,> I said, curling up on the floor. <Flesh decays. Spirit matter is a lot more durable.>
	<You mean...she’s trying to make herself a body, out of spirit matter?>
	<I’ve been trying since that night in the park to figure out who that blue thing looked like,> I answered. <And it finally came to me. She looks like Lythril.>
	<So that’s what she looks like?>
	<Not exactly,> I answered. <She wouldn’t want it to be exact. After all, she’s been proscribed.>
	<So if this all worked...>
	<She could take up residence in her slightly different-looking spirit body, and slip back into Ideire with no one the wiser,> I answered. 
	<But they’d notice, surely, that she was yellow and glowing?>
	<These are just experiments,> I answered, becoming more convinced of it as I talked it out. <Dead ends, prototypes that didn’t function properly. She made these bodies, put notborns in them to see what would happen, and then somehow they got loose in the city. And she’s had a month to refine the technique, since our friend the quasi-lurer began haunting the South Corner.>
	<But if that’s so...then why did she think I was her mother?>
	<Well, you don’t look that much like Lythril,> I returned, <but you look more like her than I do. And Lythril is her mother, in some way, even if she’s not the mother that thing is looking for.>
	Aine lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling. <Dhiaoc, what happens if...if she succeeds? If she really does become immortal?>
	I sighed.
	<Then we’re all of us thurcte,> I answered. <Good rest to you, Aine.>
	This time I fell asleep first.

XVI.
Family Values

	“Hey, Theamh, how are y--”
	“Drive.”
	Chandra turned the key without a murmur, and the car peeled away from Kwenu’s front stoop.
	“Well aren’t you in a hell of a hurry,” came a voice from the back seat.
	I turned around. Lara was there next to Aine, looking comfortable yet still stylish in jeans and a blouse. Aside from some scratches around her chin and a large bandage applied to her exposed wrist, she looked fine. 
	“I’m sorry,” I said, as Chandra swung the car around the corner. “I’m glad to see you, really, but I’m even gladder to be the hell out of that apartment. Do I lie, Aine?”
	“No you don’t,” she said emphatically.
	Kwenu had been in a rotten mood when she got up, and the morning had only worsened it; when she came home to have lunch with Etana, which seemed to be a ritual she was particular about observing, she had broken her glowering silence only to snap at one of us about something trivial yet somehow monumentally irritating to her. After an hour of walking around on eggshells with the danger of provoking a tirade ever present before us, I was glad to be gone, and Aine’s relief was dampened only by her knowledge that Etana would probably be home alone when Kwenu finally arrived after work.
	“She’s mad at me, isn’t she?” Chandra asked.
	“She’s mad at everyone, right now,” I answered.
	“I can’t tell the players without a scorecard, ladies,” Lara interjected.
	By the time we were done filling Lara in on our recent exploits, the car had left the portion of the city with which I had become somewhat familiar. Instead, we were driving along a curving road that followed the shore of the bay, and which ran between sparkling blue water on the left and sloping lawns on the right, within which were nestled what were easily recognizable as big houses. Architecture in the Cretid Nation was different, but there’s no mistaking a big house.
	“Have you thought about what you’re going to do when you get there?” Lara asked, looking moodily out the window at the houses scrolling by. “I doubt Papa NightQueen is going to welcome you with open arms. He’d be more likely to try to cast you out.”
	It was almost funny trying to imagine this, but I wasn’t really in the mood. “I don’t know about that, Lara,” Chandra observed. “This is the thing with these Favorite Son nuts, they are really hung up on trying to be nice to everyone. That’s probably why they have to be such rage-bloated, vicious piranhas underneath.”
	I didn’t know what a piranha was, but it didn’t sound friendly. 
	“Anyhow, we did save her life,” I said. “That’s got to count for something.”
	Chandra nodded. “My prediction is this: they’ll invite you in, thank you for saving her, probably ask you to have dinner with them. Then, over dinner, they’ll very politely start asking you about what you believe. Of course every time you say something they will argue with you, very politely, and gradually the conversation won’t be about what you believe any more, it’ll be about how wonderful God’s love is and how beautiful it is to fall into the embrace of the Favorite Son. At that point, you’ll either agree with them just to shut them up, or start arguing. If you agree with them, you lose whatever cred you’ve built up with NightQueen. If you start arguing--that’s when they’ll cast you out.”
	I looked over at her. She had spoken with conviction, and without the bravado her words usually carried.
	“You seem to know a lot about this,” I said.
	“I have parents too,” she replied, looking out through the windshield. “I didn’t get to be the mess I am without a lot of help from my creators.”
	“Well,” I said, “I guess we’ll find out if you’re right.”
	“You’ll find out,” Chandra said. “We, however, will be roaming the suburbs to see what they offer in the way of entertainment.”
	“You mean you’re not coming?”
	“Not on your life,” Lara answered, tossing me a black rectangular object. “Give us  a call on the mobile when you’re ready to be rescued, and the cavalry will head back to the battlefield.”
	“Thanks so very much,” I said, a little sourly.
	The car came to a stop outside a pair of wrought-iron gates that closed off the wide asphalt path that led through the manicured grounds up to the white-painted columns that stood on either side of the house’s main entrance door. The posts into which the gate was set were fieldstone, massive pilasters that connected to a low fieldstone wall that seemed to run along the perimeter of the grounds. 
	“Here we are,” Chandra said. “Good luck.”
	I stepped out of the car with some trepidation. Aine followed me. 
	“We’re right behind you,” Lara called, as the car rolled back out onto the street.
	Aine finished the joke for them. “About twenty miles behind us.”
	“Ah well,” I said. The gates didn’t look as if they would open, so we climbed up the fieldstone wall and jumped over it.
	“Not much of a palisade, is it?” I observed as we began walking across the flat blades of the green grass.
	“They build for show, here,” Aine said. 
	“On the other hand,” I added, looking up at the windows of the upper story, “there’s no cover here. They’d be able to see anyone coming.”
	“Maybe that’s how they do it,” Aine agreed. “Lure you in and then it’s out with the flaming arrows and the boiling oil.”
	But the windows remained shut as we made our slow and exposed way across that unnatural unbroken sward. In fact, the house was giving no sign of life at all, even as we got close enough to see in through some of the ground-floor windows. 
	“Where are they all?” Aine asked, peering into the entrance hall.
	“Maybe there’s another entrance they use,” I ventured. “Mathi always went in and out the front door, but she’s unusual. There’s probably a back entrance that’s closer to where people actually spend time.”
	We started making the circuit.
	“Do you miss it?” Aine asked suddenly.
	“Miss what?”
	“Your house, and all the things you had.”
	I shrugged. “There are some things I miss about my bedroom,” I answered. “When I think back, what I really miss are the games I used to play. It was a big house, with a lot of rooms I didn’t understand the purpose of and things that were strange to me. I spent a lot of time crawling under furniture or flipping through books I couldn’t read, making up stories about people who lived there and things that had happened to them.”
	“You were alone a lot,” Aine said.
	“Yes.”
	I knew that among the things about me that Aine despaired of ever understanding, my being an only child stood out prominently. Growing up with six brothers and sisters in one of those fishermen’s shacks that rambled out along the edge of the rocky coast, Aine’s moments of privacy must have been infrequent and brief. I had wondered often what she was like back home, where she didn’t feel like a fish out of water and nobody was a stranger to her. I would probably never find out. Her parents and some of her siblings would come out for her ordination, and I’d meet them then, but there’d be no particular reason for me to make the trip out to Jipran. She had the jump on me there, having been to that party--and having, I remembered, seen that vision of me as a child, crying into the coverlet of my bed. I still couldn’t remember that moment. Or rather, it could have been any one of a number of moments in what I obstinately remembered as a happy childhood, which found me sharing my child’s grief with four walls and some stuffed toys. There were times when Iela would hear from Frene, and come find me; but there were times when she was too busy or Frene was eavesdropping in some other region of the house and I was left alone with whatever had hurt my sensitive heart.
	The back door, when we found it, was obvious. The mat on the stoop, the signs of traffic around it, all told us that this was where the comings and goings really happened. I hung back from it a little diffidently, wondering what we would say. Aine just banged on the door.
	It swung in, after a delay of several seconds, to reveal the blond-haired, grotesquely painted woman we’d seen on the VB. In real life she looked a little healthier, although the paint also looked significantly more garish. She stood wiping her hands on a blue and white checked towel, looking at us blankly with dawning apprehension.
	“May I help you?”
	“Good afternoon,” said Aine promptly. “You don’t know us, but we saw your daughter Sonnia on the FSC. I could tell she was in terrible trouble, and I couldn’t rest easy without coming out here and trying to speak with her.”
	It was brilliance, nothing less. Everything she said was true, in letter and in spirit. But she’d phrased it so that this woman leapt immediately to assumptions that were utterly false--and which got her to open the door to us willingly, even gratefully.
	“Oh thank you, friends,” the woman said, pushing the outer door open and standing back to let us in. “It means so much to us, the support we’re getting from the community. I keep hoping the Lord will touch her heart somehow, through someone. I’ve resigned myself that it won’t be through me.”
	The sharp sting of her sadness gave me some compunctions about going through with this. This was a woman who knew the depth and width of the rift between her and her daughter, and bled her heart over it. But with the sadness was the paralysis, the numbing sense that nothing could be done, that evil had simply done its work and now all she could do was pray.
	“She’s been keeping very much to her room,” she explained as she led us up a narrow staircase at the end of the hall. “I don’t know if she’ll speak with you; the door has a lock on it. I’ve spoken with Pawel--my husband--about having it taken off, but he can’t seem to get a locksmith to come out and take care of it.”
	“Your husband isn’t home now?” I asked, a little nervously.
	“Of course not, he’s at work in the city,” she answered. “His business makes great demands on him.”
	“Yes, of course,” Aine said. We had reached the upper story now. The wooden door she stopped in front of was closed, and had a locked look to it. It was bare, aside from the scraped-looking edges of what looked like paper that had been stuck to the wood and then peeled away later. The woman rapped on it with a knuckle.
	“Sonnia?” she called, in a false, high, sweet tone that could not have matched her emotions any less well. “There are some people here to see you.”
	“I don’t want to see anyone,” NightQueen snapped, her surliness audible even muffled by the door.
	“I bet if you just open this door and take a look at us, you’ll change your mind,” Aine called in.
	A deadbolt turned, and the door opened a crack. One of NightQueen’s eyes appeared between the wall and the edge of the door.
	“All right,” she said. 
	Her mother looked so relieved that I really started to feel bad. But then we were there to help her, even if it wasn’t the kind of help this woman had in mind.
	“I think it will work better if we talk to her alone,” Aine whispered to her mother. She nodded, and slipped off silently down the stairs.
	Aine pushed the door open and we slipped in; or rather, she slipped in and I got the knob stuck in my gut before I could squeeze through. NightQueen pushed the door shut behind us and turned the lock.
	“Well, I’m glad someone took you shopping,” was her first comment.
	Actually, no one had; we were both wearing Kwenu’s old clothes, which old as they were had a lot more style and zip to them than the work clothes we’d borrowed from Mahial. “Kwenu’s been very generous to us,” I said. “But I think you’re the one who wins the prize for most improved.”
	NightQueen sat down on her bed with an unfriendly scowl while Aine looked at me reproachfully.
	“She just says that because now you look more like what we’re used to back home,” Aine said. “It’s not that she thinks...that it was right of them, to make you do this.”
	I saw NightQueen looking back at me. “She’s right,” I said. “To me, you look better without all that getup, but all aesthetics are relative.” Aine was glancing around the room now, arms crossed over her chest, apprehensive. “I didn’t recognize you at first, on the VB, you looked so different.”
	NightQueen laughed bitterly. “I didn’t have a choice. By the time I got home they’d burned all the clothes I like.”
	“That wasn’t very kind of them.” On the desk I was leaning against there were a number of framed pictures, photographs rather than paintings. None of them looked like the NightQueen we met on the road. There was one where I could see the resemblance in the face, and in the hunched and stiff way she held her body under the arm draped across her shoulders. The arm belonged to what looked like her father, who stood in the portrait with her, noose, jacket, and all.
	“That was my Redemption,” she said. “They take you down to the church and you tell everyone how God has made you over from something bad into something good. Then they take you in and make you one of the Saved.”
	She said it flatly, as if she were describing the mating habits of the fire ant. But how she felt didn’t match. I couldn’t read all of what she was sending out, but indifference had no part in it.
	“And that was...” I was distracted somewhat from the conversation by Aine, who was standing in the middle of the floor and staring fixedly at the bed. It was obvious that she was seeing something, but she was learning to control herself better. That, or whatever it was wasn’t quite as horrible as what she’d been seeing.
	“Four years ago,” she answered. “I went in there and told the story. I believed it even.” 
	“And you don’t now?” I asked, looking at the rest of the pictures.
	“I’m not something good,” she said. “I know that much.”
	It was like going back in time. Each picture was a few years younger; I could trace the features from one to the next. In the most recent one, her hair was a soft mousy brown, much fairer than the black mop growing off her scalp now; but it got lighter and lighter as we moved back into her history, until I reached a picture of her at what couldn’t have been more than nine years old. Her hair, now truly blonde, floated around her head in a haze of sunlit curls, and the puffed sleeves of her white dress were transparent in the light behind her. Two small hands, in white gloves, were clasped tightly in front of her, and all in all she was a picture of sweetness and light, standing in that green garden in her shiny white shoes and tiny straw hat. 
	Except for the eyes. They were anxious, pleading almost, large and glistening with hope and fear. The smile beneath them was not the smile of a happy child trusting the world to love her. Or even the smile of a spoiled child secretly delighting in her power. That smile wanted to please. And the eyes were sure, almost sure, that she wouldn’t.
	“Oh that,” said NightQueen, while Aine’s eyes remained fixed on the sky-blue pillows at the head of the bed and one hand went to cover her mouth. “That’s from the year I was Little Miss Sunshine.”
	I stared at her, knowing that despite how it sounded she couldn’t have just said what she’d said.
	“It’s a kind of a contest for children,” she said. “You go there with a bunch of other girls and compete to see who has the disposition most pleasing to the Lord. I came in second two years in a row and then that year I won.”
	Lara couldn’t have known, of course. She’d pulled the phrase out of the air because it seemed to be the exact opposite of what NightQueen was. And it was. I couldn’t believe she was talking about this nervous, obedient, docile child as if it had really been her.
	“Can you believe this, Aine?” I said, holding out the picture toward her in an effort to distract her from whatever vision was so appalling she wouldn’t even tell me about it. “Our NightQueen, the early years.”
	Aine glanced in my direction, absently. Then suddenly her attention was riveted on the face in that picture. It looked to NightQueen, probably, as if Aine were just standing still. But I knew something very frightening was happening inside that head.
	“That’s you?”
	She said it almost in a whisper. NightQueen nodded, a little embarrassed but also proud in a strange indirect way. “That’s me. I was a sweet kid, they all keep telling me that.”
	NightQueen was startled by Aine’s response, which was to leap immediately to the door and start rattling the knob. After a second she remembered it was locked. One hand found the deadbolt, her eyes still blindly focused on the wood of the door panel but seeing something entirely else. The door opened and then slammed, with Aine on the other side.
	<Aine?>
	<I had to get out, dhiaoc.>
	There was a thud as Aine leaned against the door from the other side. The sound of a long, shuddering breath came through the crack.
	<What did you see?>
	<It can’t have been real.>
	<Tell me what you saw,> I said, putting the picture down carefully and slowly on the desk while NightQueen stared at me.
	“What the hell is her problem?” she asked, on edge.
	“Has this always been your room?” I replied. “I mean, have you always been sleeping here, since you lived in this house?”
	“Since we moved here,” she said, still not understanding the question. “Since I was about eight. What do you care?”
	<If it wasn’t her it would--it would be bad enough-->
	“Who lived here before you?”
	“Nobody. It’s new, it was built for us after my father got his promotion.”
	<It has to have been her, Aine.>
	<It can’t have been,> her anguished mind sent back. I heard one of her fists slam against the door. <It can’t have been. You do not do this to a child.>
	The hair stood up on my arms and I felt a queasy, gut-sickening tremor pass through every fiber in me. NightQueen couldn’t read me, which was lucky. But she could tell I’d just gone the color of putty, and that the blood had leached out of the white knuckles that were tightening on the edge of her desk.
	<Show me what you saw,> I answered, trying to be very careful. 
	<You do not do this.>
	<Show me, Aine, this is not something you should handle alone.>
	She knew that, reluctant as she was. She showed me.
	Looking back, I can congratulate myself on the amount of self-control I did exercise, even if it wasn’t all I wanted. I didn’t curse. I didn’t scream. I didn’t run down to the kitchen, pick up the biggest knife I could find and start walking up the road toward her father’s place of business. Instead I just stood there, my grip on the desk getting tighter, my head still bowed with my hair hanging on both sides so NightQueen couldn’t see the expression on my face.
	<It can’t be real, dhiaoc. I...these things...aren’t there times, mustn’t there be, when I just...imagine it?>
	I looked back at the picture of Little Miss Sunshine, the hands folded in a tight square over the short full skirt of that white dress, the anxious and hurt eyes, the tense smile.
	<I saw it through you, I can’t guarantee the truth of it,> I answered. <But I don’t think that there has ever been anything like that in your imagination.>
	“You’re really freaking me out,” said NightQueen.
	When I turned to look at her I think there were still tears in my eyes. My voice wasn’t totally under control either.
	“I...we didn’t know,” I said. “No wonder. We didn’t understand what you were running from.”
	“And you do now?” she asked, openly skeptical.
	“Aine...Aine has the ability...” At this juncture I couldn’t bring myself to call it a gift. “She’s able to see things...that have happened, in the past, when she walks into a place. She saw...what happened here.”
	There it was, the moment of comprehension I had been looking for. The sign that she realized what I was talking about. But it flashed by quickly, and was replaced immediately by refusal, anger, fear, denial.
	“What did you come in here for, anyway?” NightQueen demanded. “What is all this fnaa about seeing things? Did you come all the way out here just to impress me with your psychic powers?”
	The handle turned and the door opened. Aine, demonstrating courage I wasn’t sure I would have had, came back in and closed the door behind her.
	“We came to help you,” she said, the gravity of her white and drawn face stopping NightQueen’s retort in her throat. “I knew you were in trouble, I always knew he had done you great harm. We came because we...because I wanted to help.”
	“And how were you fixing to do that?” NightQueen finally answered, her hostility cut slightly with her gratitude at having, at this point in her career, a new if unlikely friend.
	“I don’t have a plan,” Aine said, keeping her eyes away from the bed. “I just thought it would help, for us to be here.”
	“It does,” NightQueen said, unwillingly.
	“Can we go somewhere else?” Aine asked, emboldened by this admission. “Anywhere in the house but here.”
	“All right,” NightQueen answered, opening the door.

	Whatever good came out of that afternoon, Aine gets the credit. It took me a very long time to get over what she’d shown me, and while we sat out in that manicured garden behind the house as the sun sank toward the tops of the overarching trees, there was a lot got said to which I was not devoting my full attention. Aine could tell I was distracted, and didn’t ask; she just kept talking to NightQueen, and NightQueen kept talking back.
	Her mother stayed away; I would see her forlorn silhouette in the back kitchen windows, looking out as she watched Aine and her daughter at the little patio table. I thought she was glad Aine seemed to be making progress, although she was too far away to read. I had got up and was wandering over the lawn aimlessly when I heard Aine asking her about the tattoo.
	“It’s upside down, the sword,” she said. “Does that mean something?”
	NightQueen rubbed one hand nervously back and forth over the inkstain on her shoulder. “It marks me as the opposite. A child of Satan, not a child of God.”
	“Did he put that on you?” was Aine’s next, and angry, response.
	“No!” NightQueen seemed offended by the suggestion. “I--I wanted this, I went out and got it before my initiation. They don’t ask you to do it, but I wanted to have it.”
	“Who’s ‘they’?”
	“My...” NightQueen looked away. “You won’t understand, nobody does. Anyway I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
	“But you wear the symbol,” Aine said. “So you are talking about it. Since everyone seems to know what it means, aside from us.”
	NightQueen sighed, shrugged, and began what seemed like it was going to be a difficult speech. “It doesn’t matter, anyway, I’m not with them any more.”
	“Why not?”
	Aine didn’t know who ‘they’ were any more than I did, but she knew like me that if NightQueen had herself permanently stained with their symbol she must have been serious about it at some point, in that young heart of hers.
	I made another pass through the trees, figuring my absence might make her more talkative. When I wandered back within range Aine had gotten her started.
	“...because since I clearly am evil, why should I stay with a religion that wants me to be good? Doesn’t it make more sense for me to join one that will be glad I’m bad?”
	“But how do you know you’re evil?” Aine asked.
	NightQueen laughed. “Let’s see. I dress like a whore, I thurk any man who’ll look at me twice, I’m a habitual liar and I hate my father. That’s two-thirds of the First Commandments broken right there. I haven’t killed anyone yet, but I’ve never had a reason for it.”
	“Yes you have,” Aine said.
	NightQueen looked at her.
	“If you really were evil your father would be dead by now.”
	She shook her head. “I told you, you wouldn’t understand.”
	“So this Satan, what is he like?”
	NightQueen blinked at her.
	“What do you mean, what is he like? He’s Satan.”
	“That doesn’t mean anything to me, I don’t know your stories.”
	“He works against God,” NightQueen said, dropping her voice as she leaned forward. I started meandering back toward them. “That’s his other name, is The Adversary. He wants everyone to hate God.”
	I sat down. “I don’t know,” I said. “From what I can tell, God can take care of that pretty well on his own.”
	NightQueen looked at me with what I could have sworn was shock. It was as if she’d never heard anyone say that.
	“But he’s God,” she said. “He loves everyone.”
	“You know what,” I said to her, “you do not make sense. What are you doing with this Adversary person if you still love God?”
	“I don’t,” NightQueen insisted.
	“Yes you do,” I answered. “Or if not, you’re afraid of him, or something, the way you keep defending him.”
	“But the point is,” Aine said. “This Adversary, aside from hating God, what is it that he does?”
	NightQueen looked somewhat at a loss. “Well...I mean...he just sort of...promotes evil.”
	Aine gave up; clearly we weren’t going to be understanding Satan any better than we understood God. “Why aren’t you with him any more, then?”
	She shook her head. “I don’t know, I just...there was this guy, we met over the Ethernet. He was in the life too.” Aine nodded; she’d heard this part from Lara. “We were in love, and I wanted out of here, so I ran away to live with him.” She shrugged. “He looked a little different from the pictures I’d seen on the Net, but you know...we were happy, for a while. For about a week.”
	NightQueen’s fingers skimmed over the surface of the patio table; she watched them travel, concentrating on saying this calmly and as if it didn’t matter. “I’d told him about...what you saw. He was cool about it. At least over the Net.” Her index finger ran into the center of the table and tapped at it. “I never--I--there’s no one to tell, here. Nobody would believe me. Not my own mother.”
	“Have you tried her?”
	NightQueen shook her head. “Don’t say I don’t know if I haven’t tried. I know.”
	I was prepared to take her word for it. “Then why did you tell him?”
	“He asked,” she said. “I thought it was because he knew me so well. For all I know he asks every girl he meets that question.”
	“What makes you think that?” asked Aine, startled and horrified.
	“He was into it,” she said, disgust written on her face. “It turned him on. It was why he wanted me, in the first place.”
	Aine glanced at me, registering the sudden jump in my level of upset, but returned to NightQueen. “How do you know that?”
	“He started acting like him,” she said, after a long pause. “Doing stuff, with me, that I’d told him my father did. It made me sick. So we had a huge fight and in the middle of it I left.”
	Her words got shorter and her delivery sharper and colder as she went on. Horrible as that must have been, she didn’t want to show us how it had hurt her.
	“All the way up that road I was thinking about it,” she said. “I went to the rites, I did the sacrifices, I spent all my free time on the Net talking to them all, and this is the end of it, me running up the road from a bastard who just wanted to thurk me over. That’s what Satan really was, just another man trying to use me.” She drummed once again on the table with her hand, its nails now lacquered in something shiny and clear. “And then I saw you.”
	“And we know what happened after that,” I said.
	NightQueen shook her head. “I ran away from you guys because you’re queer and Lara because...” She hesitated, but came out with it. “Because she’s brown and she’s not what I’m used to, and I got into a car with a complete psychopath. There’s no question about it. I am my father’s daughter.”
	Aine was looking at her, mournful with unexpressed compassion. She hadn’t even picked up on it. I let it pass; I had other things on my mind.
	“Have you told your colleagues you’re dropping out?” I asked.
	She shook her head. “I haven’t been able to talk to anyone since I got back. I guess if I told my parents I wanted to quit...but I haven’t.”
	I didn’t ask why; it was obvious. She didn’t want them to think they’d won. “So as far as they know, you’re still among the faithful.” She nodded. “Tell me something, this group, does it have a leader? Someone who officiates at the rites?”
	NightQueen sighed. “There’s Death Mask, he’s the priest. He’s a prick and a half.” She ripped a leaf that had fluttered onto the table in half and tossed the pieces away. “He’s thurked every woman in our circle, and he keeps trying to bring in more because nobody will thurk him more than once.”
	NightQueen couldn’t be a dark user--too young, and anyhow there was the touch test--but listening to her talk had made me wonder if maybe Aine had been right after all about her being a dark user’s apprentice. It set my mind at rest to hear about Death Mask; if a man was at the head of it there couldn’t be anything to it. But if Lythril knew about all this--and she probably did, she was always well-connected--it made sense to me that she would want to have a finger in this pie. Where else could you find a whole crowd of people like NightQueen--young, smart, angry, and already dedicated to evil--conveniently gathered in one spot? I didn’t know if it was possible for Cretids to learn magic; it seemed like their mindstrength was too pitifully poor. But maybe that would be a plus, from her perspective. A whole raft of young, eager recruits whose power would never equal hers and who she could control with ease.
	“During your time with them,” I said, “did you ever hear anyone mention a woman named Lythril?”
	She stared at me.
	“You know about her?” she asked, her voice unsteady.
	“Yes,” I answered. “Do you?”
	NightQueen glanced around furtively, then leaned over to me.
	“I’ve never seen her,” she said. “You just hear about her, in rumors. Once in a while someone’ll disappear and you ask after them and you hear, ‘oh, she went to meet Lythril.’” She took a nervous breath and dropped her voice even lower. “That’s all. They never come back.” I was now looking grimly ahead of me. “I didn’t even know she was a real woman. I thought she was another name for death, or something.”
	I laughed once, short and sharp.
	“These people who go to meet Lythril,” I said. “Are they all women?” NightQueen nodded. “Who’ve been in the group for a while?” She nodded, surprised. 
	“Who is she?” NightQueen asked, genuinely frightened.
	“She’s what you all are pretending to be,” I said. “Evil.” With Aine’s eyes on me, I expanded. “She’s doing great harm to people in my country; she’s done great harm to me and to people I love. I came here to find her and do battle with her.”
	I hadn’t been sure how NightQueen was going to take that. But instead of getting defensive, I saw that light in her eyes, the light of hope. That maybe somehow, through us, she was going to get to something, as she put it, other than this.
	But at that moment, the back kitchen door opened and her mother emerged, with a clear plastic tray on which she was carrying cups and a pitcher of some kind of weak-looking light brown liquid.
	“I thought you might be thirsty,” she said, putting it down, the tremor in her hands going all the way up to that fixed, uncertain smile.
	NightQueen looked up at her, and something changed in her.
	“Thank you,” I said. “That’s very kind of you.”
	“I’ll go make some sandwiches to go with it,” NightQueen said, and got up to go into the kitchen.
	There was something strange and out of place in the joy with which her mother watched her walk across that lawn toward the doorway into their house.
	“Thank you,” she whispered, taking one of Aine’s hands suddenly and pressing it with unsettling fervor. “God bless you, for all you’ve done.”
	“We’re happy to be able to help her,” I said.
	Her mother brought a hand across her trembling mouth. “I prayed someone would,” she said. “I’d almost given up hope.” With a long sigh, she straightened up and put the smile back on. “The Lord be good to you for turning her back to the path.” As she was stepping away, I called out to her.
	“I’m--I’m sorry, but--this doesn’t have alcohol in it, does it? Or caffeine?”
	For some reason this made her beam at us even harder. “Oh no. It’s been decaffeinated.”
	“Thank you,” I said.
	Aine was on me before she was even halfway back to the house. <It’s simple.>
	<No, it isn’t.>
	<Send me in after her.>
	<No.>
	<I’m almost the right age and they don’t know me. I bet it wouldn’t take long. I get tricked out in one of those ridiculous outfits, cosy up to this Death Mask, let him know that I want to ‘meet Lythril’-->
	<I said no, Aine.>
	<But it’s the fastest way to-->
	“How many times do you have to hear it?” The mother was inside now, and I felt a need to hear my voice as I said this. “I will not send you in to pose as a dark apprentice, Aine. I don’t care how practical it is, I will not do it.”
	“It’s not like it was with you,” she said, reading my reasons. “You’d be linked to me, you could protect me.”
	“I swore to Istria, to myself and to Idair that I would never use an apprentice the way we were used. I am not going to break my word. Stop asking me to do it.”
	She backed down. “But then what are we going to do?”
	NightQueen returned, carrying a plate full of triangular wedges of bread and other things. “Here, to go with the tea.”
	“It’s like this,” Aine said, turning to her without preamble. “The easiest way to finish our mission would be for me to join your group, get introduced to Lythril, and find out where she’s operating from. But my dhiaoc won’t let me do it because she doesn’t want me to get hurt.”
	“You shouldn’t do it,” NightQueen said. “It’s weeks before they’ll let you even come to the rites. It’ll be much easier if I do it.”
	“NO.” 
	“But she’s not a scoilin,” Aine insisted.
	“No, she’s not!” I said, becoming just a little agitated. “She’s a fifteen-year-old Cretid with no mindstrength who doesn’t know magic from a hole in the ground and you want to send her up against that bitch?”
	“Keep your voice down,” NightQueen said. “If they hear you curse they’ll know you’re not from the church.”
	NightQueen didn’t seem to mind my having called her weak and ignorant. “I want to help,” she said, eagerly. “I don’t say that easily. My mother will tell you.”
	Aine remained unswayed by my reasoning. “But that’s exactly why she’s perfect for it. Lythril wouldn’t suspect someone so unthreatening.”
	“We don’t know what she’s doing with these women,” I said. “I think she’s probably recruiting, but for all I know she’s just using them for parts. I don’t want NightQueen’s heart ending up beating inside one of those jars.”
	NightQueen’s eyes suddenly got a whole lot larger.
	“Neither one of you knows what she’s capable of,” I said. “I will not let you run this danger.”
	“But this is the best chance we’ve had since we got here,” Aine said. “We can’t just ignore it.”
	“I didn’t say I would,” I answered. “You’ll get your chance to help, NightQueen. But only if you promise me that if Death Mask offers you the opportunity to meet Lythril you will strenuously decline it.”
	“But how will you find her?” NightQueen asked, relieved but also disappointed.
	“I’ll follow him,” I said. “If he’s who I think he is, he’ll lead me back to her eventually.”
	“But he knows you by sight,” Aine said, having made the connection.
	“Yes, but he won’t be looking at me.” NightQueen was starting to get lost. “Here’s what’s going to happen. Next time they have one of these little gatherings, you’ll go. And I’ll go with you, invisibly.”
	“You can make yourself invisible?” she said, her voice low and awestruck.
	“No, I’m actually no good at all at that kind of thing,” I said. “Practical magic was never my strong suit. I’ll have to go as a specter.” I saw that look coming back into her blank eyes. “All right, this is going to take some explaining.”

	By the time I had finished making NightQueen understand the plan and the risk involved, the sun had already gone down. The three of us sat around the table in the gathering dusk, talking over things, feeling more at ease, cheerful almost. At least NightQueen and Aine were. I was still digesting what had happened that day, and resigning myself to more nightmares that night.
	“Sonnia!” came the high, thin, falsely silvery call from that open doorway. “Look who’s home!”
	Our heads turned. A dark, square-shouldered silhouette moved through that opening, a rectangular satchel in one hand, a dark jacket on his frame and a dark noose around his neck.
	As he moved toward us, legs swinging confidently in their trousers, I scrabbled in my bag for the mobile.
	The number went through, but when Lara answered there was a lot of noise in the background. “Hello?”
	“Lara.”
	“Theamh, is that you?”
	“How soon can you get here?”
	“We’re sort of busy right now,” she said.
	“Put Chandra on the phone.”
	There was a pause. He was getting closer.
	“Theamh?”
	“Chandra, I need you to come get us and I need it to be soon. Preferably before this bastard tries to talk to me.”
	“It’s a car, not a hovercraft,” she said. 
	“I don’t care what a hovercraft is or why that matters,” I said, dropping my voice. “Just get here as soon as you can or bad things might happen.”
	“Anything you say, chief,” Chandra said. They both seemed depressingly chipper to me for some reason. “We’ll be there when we get there. Over and out.”
	He arrived as I was folding up the phone. “I’m Sonnia’s father,” he said, looking at her with exquisite sadness and putting a hand on her dark hair. She tensed under the touch and looked down at the table.
	“Ustine tells me you’ve been ministering to her,” he said, turning to Aine but leaving his hand to rest on Sonnia’s unwilling shoulder. “I can’t thank you enough.”
	I had seen him on the VB. But in my mind he had been growing--becoming taller, more muscular, with veins standing in his neck and the knotted arms of a mountaineer. Standing on the grass he was an inoffensive, mild-looking thing, with his carefully combed hair and shining leather shoes.
	“We’ve been praying night and day for her redemption,” he went on, turning to me. “The Lord has blessed us indeed, if you can help bring her to him.”
	<You talk to him, Aine, I don’t trust myself.>
	“We’re glad we could help,” Aine said. “There’s been a great deal of harm done to her.”
	“Tell me what your names are, so that I know who to remember in our prayers,” he said.
	“My used name is Aine,” she said, returning his stare levelly.
	He turned blandly to me. “And yours?”
	“I’m called Theamh,” I said.
	He seemed to have no reaction to either one. “And where do you worship?”
	It was a minute, but Aine came up with an answer. “We worship everywhere.”
	He smiled. “It’s a good answer.” Sonnia looked away. “Will you stay for dinner? Ustine wants to reward you for your good work, and she’s an excellent cook.”
	“Our friends will be coming to pick us up soon,” Aine said. “I’m afraid we won’t be able to stay. But it is good of your wife to extend us the invitation.”
	“Well, at least sit down with us,” he said. “Until your friends arrive. We want to talk to you.”
	“Thank you,” Aine said. “It’s very hospitable of you.”
	We got up. NightQueen glanced at me as we walked across the lawn. She couldn’t read me, of course. But then to read some things you don’t need shri.
	<They better get here soon,> I warned Aine.
	<We just have to try to brazen it out,> she answered. <Till they show up.>
	<I just hope they’re not out there doing anything stupid or dangerous.>
	Their dining room was large, and formal, with a gleaming table and well-turned but far from comfortable chairs in some dark wood that I had never seen before. I pulled my chair up to the table in great consternation. He was sitting right across from me, smiling that bland little smile across that polished wood into a face that I only hoped was hiding the seething tornado of rage and hatred behind it. This wasn’t going to work for long.
	The food had been served out before we sat down; Ustine sat next to him, looking with unsteady pride at the little mounds of steaming stuff that sat on the plates. He folded his hands; Ustine did the same, and they bent their heads over the food.
	I bent over mine and sniffed at it surreptitiously. The smell of cooked flesh was definitely present.
	“O Lord,” said the father, his eyes closed, “bless this food that you have given us in your goodness, and protect all of us gathered around your table from the evil that besets us in the world outside.”
	They looked up, cheerfully, and began eating. NightQueen, stuck at one end of the table, poked at her food listlessly; Aine and I began combing through it with our forks looking for evidence that it either was or was not within the rules. There was so much cheese everywhere that it was difficult to tell where that telltale smell was coming from.
	“Don’t you like it?” said Ustine, tremulously.
	She looked so sad I felt like I had to explain, even though it was dangerous. “I’m sorry, Ustine, it smells very appetizing, it’s just that our rules forbid us from eating meat, and it seems like there’s some in here.”
	Ustine leaned on one hand and looked at me quizzically. “Which church are you with? I’ve never heard of one prohibiting meat.”
	“Our particular faith doesn’t have a church in this area,” Aine said, carefully.
	“Are you strangers here, then?” the father pursued.
	“Yes,” Aine said. 
	“Where did you come here from?” he asked.
	“What do you care?” NightQueen interrupted. “Isn’t it enough for you that they wanted to help me?”
	“Of course we’re glad for all your help,” he said. “I don’t want you to think we’re suspicious of such a gift, I only want to know a little bit more about the messengers the Lord has sent us.”
	I looked down at my food. Aine smiled, but didn’t answer.
	“So where do you come from?” he finally prompted.
	“We came here from Wheatlea, most recently,” Aine said.
	“But that’s not your home?”
	“No, it’s not,” she said, starting to send out more anxiety.
	“Where is home, for you?”
	“Ah, well, that’s complicated,” Aine answered. “I grew up in a little village on the coast. But for four years I’ve been living in the Vicinity, and now there are things about that that seem like home to me, even though it was all so strange at first.”
	I was glad to hear she was getting more comfortable with the place, but he was dissatisfied with the answer, which he could tell was evasive. “Which coast is this, that you grew up on?”
	“We’re Ideiren,” I finally said, tired of this. “That’s what you’re asking, isn’t it?”
	<I thought she said there was no caffeine in that tea,> Aine said wearily.
	He didn’t seem surprised. “I realized from your accent you had to be from the south of here,” he answered. “I’ve studied your religion. It’s very interesting.” He turned to Aine. “It’s like ours, in a way, in that you worship one figure that’s both human and divine.”
	“I don’t know what any of you mean when you say divine,” Aine said, a little sharply. “I’ve had it explained but it means nothing. Idair isn’t divine.”
	“But if she’s merely human, how can she have made the world?”
	“She isn’t merely human,” Aine said. “There never was or will be a human like her. But she’s not divine either. She’s just Idair.”
	NightQueen was following this discussion with such interest that I remembered the injunction against proselytizing.
	“Man of the house,” I cut in. “Curiosity is a wonderful thing, but Idair asked us not to force our teachings on other peoples. We are asked to keep our beliefs to ourselves. It’s discourteous to try to draw us into talking about it.”
	“Surely a friendly discussion isn’t the same thing as forcing your teachings on someone,” he said with that smile. “After all, as I said, I’ve studied Idairism; I already know your teachings.”
	“Do you.”
	“Many of them, at any rate. I have read the Chronicles.”
	“Oh you have.”
	Aine knew why I was suddenly about ready to breathe fire, but NightQueen didn’t. “I haven’t,” she put in. “I didn’t know we had a copy around here.”
	“We don’t,” Ustine said. “Your father has to know these things so that he can help direct the ministry. You’ve got enough trouble without learning all this heathen trash.”
	Well, I couldn’t blame her for being angry. Even though we had never said anything that wasn’t the truth, we had allowed her to believe her first mistake, and we weren’t exactly standing on the pinnacle of the moral high ground relative to her. Her husband had dug himself a trench so deep that we were towering over him anyhow.
	“I understand why you’re angry,” I said to Ustine. “But what we said is quite true. We saw Sonnia on the FSC, and we came to help her. And we have. She’s come out of the bedroom, at least, hasn’t she?”
	“And we should thank them for that, Ustine,” he said, patting her hand. “We must take help in whatever strange form it comes.”
	No wonder NightQueen had told no one. Who would believe that this soft-spoken man with the gentle words was the same one who had ended his daughter’s childhood behind that locked door?
	Ustine nodded, reproved, and smiled at me. “I am grateful to you, for that.”
	“It’s difficult to know what to do about the Chronicles,” he said, frowning a little in concern. “I know some teachers assign them in school, to the older children. But there’s such a danger that they will simply enjoy them as tales without understanding.”
	“I would say,” I said, “that even grown men, probably, sometimes read them without understanding.”
	“Whereas that’s not a problem with our book,” NightQueen said, sarcastically.
	Her father ignored this. “Idair is a strange character,” he said. “Mercurial, inconsistent. She changes so often.”
	“She learns from experience,” I said, getting drawn in against my better judgment.
	“But since she is your creator--shouldn’t she already know?”
	“Have you read the Chronicles?” Aine suddenly asked Ustine.
	“Of course not,” she said. 
	With a sigh, she turned back to her food and began searching for something edible. 
	“She knew a lot before she came,” I said. “She knew more when she left. So did we all. In every story she learns, and the First Followers learn, and a little of the world’s evil is abated. She was here, on our earth, struggling with us--”
	“An ordinary woman trying to help,” Aine interrupted.
	It was a phrase I used a lot, in the discussions after readings. Aine had picked it up, which was flattering in some ways and frightening in others. “For a long time, she didn’t understand the power she had. It frightened her, often. But she learned to use it, to help us.”
	“But you can see it from our point of view,” he said, sounding so reasonable. “How can an ordinary woman help you, in the way we really need help, without the power of God?”
	“She had the Spirit,” Aine said, starting to get a little fierce. “She didn’t need some Lord telling her what to do and who to smite.”
	“But surely the Spirit is just your name for God,” he said.
	“Surely it isn’t,” she replied. “It’s not a man, it’s not an Aiv, it’s not anything like what you pray to. It’s beyond us. We’ll never know what the Spirit is, but I know your God is what it isn’t.”
	“How do you know?” he asked. “How do you know that Idair didn’t intend for you all to belong to God?”
	“Because Idair was good,” Aine said bluntly.
	“So is God,” he answered, failing to understand through sheer overconfidence.
	“Not from what I’ve seen,” Aine shot back.
	“You simply lack the proper understanding,” he answered with that smile. “What seems like failure, like God allowing evil to happen, is all part of his plan for us. He’s testing us, to see if we’re worthy.”
	“Worthy of what?” I suddenly burst in, feeling the knife edge shift under my feet.
	“Worthy to be saved,” he said. “Worthy to join him in the final salvation, after our lives here are over.”
	“You none of you make any sense,” I said, my anger finally passing the point where it could be contained. “You go around and around the same circle. You spend an entire life trying to pass this test and then if you pass it you get to spend unending time in the company of the same unreasonable, unfeeling creature who put you through it all in the first place. This one here runs away from that insanity and smack dab into some even stranger kind of lunacy where you swear to do evil just for the pleasure of spiting this creature and then sit around doing nothing but thurking each other, killing goats and wearing unattractive clothing. I’m sure there are mysteries to this that outsiders don’t understand and you’re welcome to them but I, personally, can give you my word as a shriia right now that I will never understand what you see in this God of yours.”
	Ustine had risen, and was facing me with rage.
	“I won’t tolerate blasphemy in my house,” she said.
	“We’re leaving,” I answered. “I am sorry to have offended you, Ustine, since you have been kind to her. Thank you for the hospitality you’ve shown us, and I hope that you and your daughter will grow together one day since you both want it so much.”
	I stood up from the table; so did Aine, and so did NightQueen. She had been following all of this with bright, intent eyes, but when I said that last thing it checked her somehow, as if she had run up against something blindly. Probably she hadn’t thought much about her mother. Probably her father’s shadow had been engulfing the tiny flame that her mother had somehow been keeping lit with her shaking hands.
	“You’re not excused,” he said to NightQueen, with the growl of authority and anger audible in his throat.
	Don’t touch him, dhiaoc. There was panic in Aine’s mind. You might do permanent harm.
	I didn’t touch him. It’s true that every piece of china and glassware in his place setting shattered into many tiny shards while he and his chair flew back from the table and almost rammed into one of those large windows. But my hands remained by my sides, clenched as they were. 
	“Witch!” he shouted, leaping to his feet. “I call upon God to cast you out!”
	“We did say we were leaving anyway,” Aine pointed out, still afraid of what I might do.
	“May the Lord protect me,” he said, as if he were genuinely frightened.
	“The Lord has been protecting you your entire miserable life,” I said. “He’s kept that door locked, he’s made everyone around you blind. But the world is there to see, and until you burn this place to the ground it will keep telling the story of your evil.”
	He was gaping at me, and Aine looked like she really wanted to pluck at my sleeve. But I wasn’t done.
	“Believe what you want, I don’t care. But if you have read the Chronicles then you know that in our country things are different. I’ll be going soon, but I tell you this: if you raise a word or a hand to your daughter while I’m here you had better look to yourself because you will be baiting an anger that has no bounds.”
	I walked quickly through that house, knowing Aine and NightQueen would follow me. Ustine went to look to her husband. I hoped we’d see the car pulling up when we got out to that driveway. He’d be coming for us, once he got over the shock.
	It seemed like a big house, when I was trying not to run to the door. But we got out, and down the driveway. I saw the car sitting there, its engine idling, Lara and Chandra in the front seat chattering away. They had evidently been there for some time.
	“Damn it,” was my rather churlish greeting. “Couldn’t you have honked the horn and saved us this?”
	“Save you what?” Chandra demanded as Aine and I piled into the back seat. 
	The father appeared on the side of the hill, shouting. “Get back in the house, Sonnia!”
	“No!” she shouted back at him. “I’m going out. I’ll come back when I’m ready.”
	“You’ll come back now!”
	But she was already in the car and had closed the door.
	“This is nuts,” Chandra said. “You’re a minor. He can have all of us arrested for kidnapping.”
	“Not if we have you back within twenty-four hours,” Aine said. “That’s the earliest he can file for assistance. I asked Kwenu before we left.”
	“That took guts, with the mood she was in,” I said, with admiration.
	“So drive,” NightQueen said. “Please.”
	Chandra drove.

XVII.
Fly on the Wall

	Chandra decided it would be safer to go back to her place. “We don’t want to make Kwenu an accessory to anything,” she said. “And anyhow she doesn’t want to see my sorry gleacha for another three weeks, at least.” 
	So there we were, sitting around an apartment very high up in a very narrow building, which was slightly larger than Lara’s but only slightly. Air struggled reluctantly into it through narrow windows whose sashes looked almost ready to rot out of their frames. The furniture had been assembled, it seemed, over a period of many years from about thirteen different places; it was shoved into the corners and against the walls in whatever way it could be, and most of it seemed to be designed for the storage and display of books.
	It had taken me a while to get over the Cretid approach to books. They produced them by the millions, blanketing the world with a carpet of print that could only be created with the aid of machines. The library Chandra has amassed would have taken an Ideiren three lifetimes to collect, unless she was independently wealthy. But they were printed on paper so thin it cracked and tore, bound with nothing but glue and a prayer, and printed in characters that you practically needed a magnifying glass to read. No wonder everyone’s eyesight went bad, and they all had to wander around peering at the world through lenses. And a lot of Chandra’s books had started to turn yellow and crumble at the corners. Either they just didn’t respect the power of writing, or they were in the habit of disregarding and maltreating what they thought was most important. So far, it seemed that either one or both could be true.
	“First things first,” Chandra said, leaning back in her wheeled chair and grabbing a folder full of paper. “I called in a lot of favors for this information, Theamh, so I hope it helps.”
	I began looking through it. “Have you found the address?”
	“Sadly, no,” she said. “I don’t know how DeVane does it, but they’ve managed to avoid ever having a direct transaction with any of their suppliers. The bunny rabbits, poor things, were delivered to this address,” she said, pulling up one of the sheets of paper. “It’s a building in one of our many fine industrial parks. ‘Industrial park’ is an interesting example of unintended irony, but that’s not important right now. DeVane rents space in one of their laboratories, and that’s where the bunnies went. But I happen to know, having had occasion to visit the place, that it’s purely a research facility. There’s no way you could produce a best-selling drug there.”
	“That’s also where Best Face Forward tests their cosmetics line,” Lara put in. “And the number of bunny rabbits they go through in a week is startling. Nobody would notice a few hundred extra.”
	“Nobody but the S.O.B.s,” Chandra said. “They’re nuts, most of them, but they’re vigilant, and that makes them useful.”
	“Natural Woman--that’s the outfit I’m with--they don’t test on animals,” Lara explained, as Chandra remembered something and went rooting through the files. “It’s because they don’t use all these artificial chemicals that’ll take the spring out of your skin in ten years anyhow.”
	“Save the sales pitch,” Chandra said. “I use ‘em already, that’s why I can’t get the color right.”
	“All right, so we can’t do Ideiren Red,” Lara said, a little defensively. “Nobody’s perfect.”
	“Anyhow,” said Chandra, “DeVane no longer rents space in that laboratory. Their PR department announced a couple months ago that they were discontinuing animal research. S.O.B. counts this as a major victory, but I’m skeptical; their last delivery invoice is from two weeks before the S.O.B. story broke. They were already planning to get rid of it--lab space too expensive, maybe, or something.” 
	“No,” I said. “They just didn’t need them any more. That experiment’s been discontinued.”
	“What ‘experiment’?” NightQueen demanded.
	I sighed. “You all know so much already that this won’t count as proselytizing,” I said. “So--”
	“What if we want to be proselytized at?” NightQueen interrupted me. “I think it’s unfair, your always trying to keep things from people.”
	“Just keep going, honey, and never mind Sunshine,” Lara said.
	“Don’t call her that,” Aine broke in with a shudder. “Please.”
	I resumed my speech while Lara glanced at NightQueen in puzzlement. “She wasn’t testing anything on those rabbits. She was setting up an olaidh farm. They’re these blue spirit things that feed on flesh, and they have to have living hosts. She thought at the time that she would need an awful lot of them, so she was preparing her herd. Then the experiment didn’t quite work out like she planned, so she got rid of them.”
	“But what did she want to do with them?” Chandra said.
	“I think the Blue Angel--that thing we ran into in the park--” Aine nodded. “I think she was made out of the olaidh. If you were going to try to mold a body out of spirit matter it’s the obvious place to start. They decompose quickly, they’re not dangerous when you take the proper precautions, and they’re malleable. So she made herself an olaidh body and stuck a spirit into it to see what would happen. She didn’t like the results, so she went on to something else.”
	“Lurers,” Aine said.
	“Exactly. She’s still trying to find the right material. It would have to be something that would look enough like a human body for her to assimilate, be solid enough but not too solid. The drawback is that apparently the body will take on the properties of whatever you make it out of. The Blue Angel needed to drain energy from its victims. The Yellow Dog has to tear them apart, or get them to tear each other apart. If there’s an Orange Sadist out there I really don’t want to meet her.”
	“Orange?” Chandra asked.
	“The color of the kraikk,” Aine said. “If you’ve never met one, be glad about it.”
	“It’s only the olaidh that the bunnies would be any use for. So naturally she’s not mucking around with them now.”
	“It’s funny,” Chandra suddenly said.
	“What is?”
	“How you know them by their colors. How many colors are there?”
	“Ninety-eight, really,” I said. “But the gradations between some of them are very subtle.”
	“See, up here,” Lara said, “Ideire is what we call The Whitest Place On Earth. Since it’s widely known you all have no black people.”
	“Except for Darin,” Aine put in.
	“Right,” Chandra said, with a searching look at her. “So it’s funny, to find out your otherworld is in technicolor. So is she going to mix them all together and try to get flesh tone?”
	“Ideiren flesh tone,” Lara corrected.
	“I suppose that must be one consideration,” I said. “We’ve seen blue and yellow, so I guess she must be messing with red, too. That’s unfortunate.”
	“Why, are the red things nasty?” Chandra asked.
	“Some of them,” I answered. “But the point is, the bunnies are a dead end. How about the sperm?”
	Lara chortled; NightQueen looked aghast; Aine just looked disgusted. Chandra returned my glance, amused, and then dove back into the folder.
	“None of our many reputable sperm banks or biotech companies appear to have had dealings with DeVane, either on the official books or in their encrypted files,” she said. “And don’t ask me how I know that, I don’t want to get anyone in trouble. But, I did find one company that’s been supplying the stuff in very large quantities to a new client called the Rutland Fertility Clinic.”
	“But there must be a million fertility clinics--” Lara began.
	Chandra shook her head. “They wouldn’t need it in this volume. It’s not like they just hook up a catheter and keep pumping it in until you get pregnant. A little dab’ll do you. Even the biggest clinics around don’t go through half of what this one’s taking in. And if this so-called Clinic were really in the business of artificial insemination, believe me I’d know about them, and I never knew they existed until one of my exes got into the sperm bank’s computer system.”
	“You have exes everywhere,” Lara said.
	Chandra sighed. “I’m a good ex-girlfriend,” she said sadly. “Everyone always has a lot more fun with me after we break up. I’m in therapy, but progress is slow. Moving right along--”
	“So where is this...Rutland Fertility Clinic located?” I asked.
	“The address on the manifest belongs to a building outside the city in what we call Medville,” she said. “It’s where all the hospitals and doctor’s offices and health insurance conglomerates seem to be collecting. So on one level that makes sense, but on another it doesn’t because we’ve been out there--”
	“That’s what we were doing while you two were putting the fear of Idair into NightQueen Senior,” Lara said. 
	“--and the building isn’t a laboratory facility; it’s office space. There’s one little door leading to one little office with the Rutland Fertility Clinic in it. I went in there to make an appointment with the receptionist...”
	“And she asked her how far along she was,” Lara finished, with a laugh.
	Aine didn’t get it right away, and neither did NightQueen. But I put it together.
	“Meaning she assumed you wanted a termination,” I said.
	Chandra nodded. “You don’t go to a fertility clinic if you’re already pregnant.”
	“Sinclare’s working there,” I said. 
	“It’s a good bet,” Chandra answered. “We can’t be sure, of course. But the pisser is, we’ve maybe found Sinclare, but we’re no closer to knowing where DeVane’s headquarters are. You can’t make Erysin in an office.”
	I nodded. “She’s crafty, like I said. She covers her tracks.”
	“So where do we go from here?” Chandra said.
	“It comes down to this,” I answered. “One way or another, we’re going to have to follow someone home.”
	Aine nodded. “We can start with Death Mask,” she said. “When’s the next meeting, NightQueen?”
	“Tonight’s the new moon,” she answered. “There should be one. But I’ll have to get in touch with the Black Shepherd to find out where and when.”
	“You people crack me up,” Chandra said. “Here, there’s the phone, and there’s the computer. Get into Satan’s Chat Room or wherever you need to get to and hook yourself up.”
	NightQueen moved swiftly over to the desk and began turning things on and plugging things in. The rest of us clustered around the pitcher of lemonade Chandra brought out of the tiny kitchen.
	“I got into the habit of keeping nonalcoholic stuff around when I was with Kwenu,” she said. “It was good for me too, cut down on my use. Life and health to you.”
	I sipped at my lemonade carefully. My stomach was not what you’d call steady. We hadn’t found her yet, but we were closing in. After all this time, it was almost too much, knowing that I was getting closer.
	“So were you with her long?” Aine asked, politely.
	“About six months, after she broke with Etana’s father,” Chandra answered. “I was what you call the rebound. Dating on the rebound is always a mistake, but I was a bigger one than most.” She shook her head. “She stuck with me that long because she has a tender heart, but I broke it off eventually. We were no good for each other. It’s just she’s such a beautiful woman, and so committed to justice, it was hard to accept that she just wasn’t as queer as she was trying to be.”
	“By which you mean what?” Aine asked.
	Chandra shrugged. “She wants a man,” she said, draining her glass. “She just does. Don’t ask me why. Some women are like that.”
	“Right here, honey,” Lara said, raising a hand. “They misbehave something awful, I know, but men do have their features.”
	“Whatever,” Chandra said. “She wants her father back, is my theory, but the only time she came close to hitting me was when I ran that idea by her. She’s touchy about that whole subject.” Her eyes came back to me. “She said you were a friend of his?”
	“I have been for thirty years,” I said. “I never knew he had a daughter. I never even knew he was married.”
	“Did you know he was an alcoholic?”
	“A what?”
	“He was addicted to--what do you call it--mind poison,” she said. “I don’t know much about him, just that his wife divorced him when Kwenu was four years old and a year after that he went down to Ideire to work in that field hospital. And you know what else,” Chandra said, becoming expansive as she warmed to the topic. “She’s got a huge filing cabinet in that office of hers that has nothing in it but letters from him. He wrote her one letter a week for thirty years. All on that nice fat paper you have down there. She says it would take anywhere from two weeks to three months for them to get to her because he wouldn’t do it through the hospital system. She’s got them filed away in those locked drawers and I bet money she rereads them late at night when no one’s looking.”
	I didn’t have time to digest all this because NightQueen let out a little cry of satisfaction. “That’s it,” she said. “I’ve made contact, and I told them I’m coming. The Black Shepherd says he’s glad to hear I’m all right,” she said, with distaste. “Not like any of them thought to ask after me while I was gone.”
	“When’s it happening?” I asked. 
	“Midnight; they always happen then. It’s kind of a bummer for the people with jobs.”
	“All right then,” I said. “We’ll be a lot better off operating from here; I need space where I know I’ll be undisturbed and the vigils need to be out and on guard. And I figure Chandra can probably handle that better than Kwenu can, especially with the mood she’s in.”
	I handed the phone to Aine, who dialed Kwenu’s number. “Kwenu? It’s Aine, we’re--” She stopped, blinking as if abruptly cut off. “We’re at Chandra’s.” Another pause. “No, we haven’t. Why?” There was another pause, and then Aine said, “All right, I’ll tell them, but--” She stopped, then looked at the phone. “She says we should turn on the VB, to the In-Depth Report.”
	Chandra got the zapping thing out and turned on her box. “Did she say why?” I asked.
	“--to get our first real look inside Ideire,” came the voice from the VB.
	“Never mind,” I said, leaning forward.
	Because there, on the screen, was the Pharc. Our Pharc. Not an artist’s rendering, a real moving picture taken by one of those cameras.
	“How the hell did they get in there?”
	Aine didn’t have an answer for me. The same woman who had done the report on the closing of Amranth was standing now in the cobbled street, framed right in front of the door to the Seat.
	“One week ago this would not have been possible,” she was saying. “A reporter from the Cretid Nation, with a full camera crew, broadcasting from the very heart of Ideire. But thanks to the new Open Window policy put into practice by the current administration, the mysteries of Ideire will finally be revealed to the naked eye. I’m standing here in front of what Ideirens call the Fark, which is the seat of all their major cultural and political institutions. And today, inside that building, Ideire’s leaders are fighting the battle for Ideire’s future.”
	Aine and I moved closer to the screen. We wanted to see better, certainly. But we were drawn also by something else--the pull of home, the loss and longing that we didn’t realize had been eating us until that moment.
	Now the image had jumped into the Seat. The Leader of Leaders was still up there at his post, but there was a lot more agitation amongst the rest of the seated leaders than was usual. While the repeater’s voice spoke, the Leader of Leaders was making free use of the alaive, which didn’t seem to be making much of a dent in the disorder.
	“When the Open Window policy was announced, Ideire’s ambassador to the Cretid Nation hailed it as quote, ‘A great stride forward for my country, and a necessary step in our progress as a modern nation.’”
	This was followed by an image of Twil, looking every bit as smug and irritating as he had at my mother’s party, standing in front of some kind of lectern and reading something out to an invisible audience.
	“The leaders of Ideire are in agreement. Isolationism is no longer a profitable strategy, either economically or culturally. And the people of Ideire have welcomed this breath of fresh air with open arms. We are ready to join the rest of the world, and we look forward to working with our neighbors to the north to make this island a better place to be.”
	“But here at home, not everybody agrees,” said the voice.
	Suddenly Twil vanished and the image of Weall’s round face with its blinking, yet still sharp eyes appeared on the screen, larger than life.
	“That’s preposterous,” he snapped. “There is no consensus.”
	“Weall Shiaw represents the province of Dairc in Ideire’s parliament,” interrupted the voice.
	“This so-called ‘policy’ is an executive action taken at the behest of the head of the Council of Shriias and without the approval of the assembled Leaders.” Now the image shrank so that we could see Weall stabbing with his stubby index finger into his other palm as he tried to drive his point home. “It is simply another indication that Barant intends to turn this country into the kind of theocracy we’ve worked hard to keep it from becoming.”
	It sounded as if he were going to say more, but he was whisked off the screen and replaced with another image.
	“AAAGH!”
	It was involuntary, from both of us. The shock of seeing Barant, after all this time, wearing that star and sitting in the office Grinth used to have sent waves of revulsion through me.
	“But around the corner, the perspective is different. This is the Raed, the hall where Ideire’s priestesses meet to discuss matters affecting Ideire’s religious life. And this is Barant Truan, Ideire’s newly elected spiritual leader.”
	Now we could only see Barant’s head and shoulders against the backdrop of that office wall. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” she said, turning that open, compassionate, reasonable face to the screen. “Anyone down in the Seat will tell you that I spoke against opening the border no more than six weeks ago. This step was decided on by the Leader of Leaders together with the Trade Commission.”
	“But did you support the motion, or not?” asked the repeater, whose head was briefly visible.
	“I recommended against it,” she said. “Of course my role in Ideire’s secular government is purely advisory, and my recommendation was ignored. But now that our leaders have decided to take this step, it is up to the Order to make the necessary adjustments in border control that will allow for limited and productive intercourse between our nations, and we intend to honor that mandate.”
	“Hm,” said Chandra.
	“What?” Lara asked her, as Barant kept talking.
	“It’s interesting,” she said, keeping her voice low so we could hear. “You see she’s looking straight at the camera. The other man didn’t.”
	“I didn’t notice.”
	“Look, see how his eyes are kind of looking off, like they’re looking over your shoulder?”
	Weall was back on the screen, and it was true; his gaze was just barely at a slant, instead of coming straight out of the box at us. 
	“What do you have to say to her rebuttal?” the repeater was asking.
	Weall laughed quietly, but without enjoyment. “I say what I said yesterday in the Seat. Barant may have formally recommended against it, but it is my firm belief that this ‘policy’ originated in the Raed.”
	“It’s because they’re not used to it,” Chandra said, as the image switched to Paigin, whose gaze was also slightly aslant. “They’re looking at the reporter, because they think that’s who they’re talking to. That other woman was looking at the lens.” I looked back at Chandra, who looked suddenly very serious and subdued. “She’s been practicing.”
	With shivers going up my spine and down my arms, I turned back to the screen. “But if what Weall says is true,” the repeater was asking Paigin, “then the head of your Council, Barant, is...misrepresenting her position, at best, and at worst is outright lying to your parliament and your people.”
	“That’s correct,” said Paigin, nodding sharply.
	“But shriias tell the truth,” the repeater said, with a look of disingenuous naiveté.
	Paigin’s curly head lifted slowly, and from her gray eyes to her solemn mouth you could see the sorrow that filled her, and the courage that drove her to say her next speech.
	“It is my considered opinion,” she said, with a jagged iron edge cutting through her low voice, “that Barant is not a shriia.”
	Betraying and destroying the gravity of that painful and dangerous moment, the camera suddenly left Paigin and went back to the repeater on the cobbles outside the Pharc. “Of course in Ideire there are no VisionBoxes; they can’t watch the images you’re watching. But here on the streets of the City, it’s surprisingly easy to find people who will talk openly about what they believe is a coup in progress.”
	“Well it won’t be for long,” Chandra shouted, sincerely appalled. “What in God’s name do they think they’re doing putting these people on video like this, with their real names and everything?”
	Now we were looking at a woman I didn’t recognize, who wore the apron and trousers of a victualler. “You’ll pardon me for saying it,” she said, wiping her hands on the skirt of her apron and then folding her arms, “but if something weren’t far wrong with the world, Morat would be here, and you lot wouldn’t.”
	“So you don’t accept the election results,” the repeater said, while my mind raced trying to figure out whether Morat was dead, exiled, or in hiding.
	“I do not,” she answered. “If Barant were an honest woman her first action in office would have been to have herself haled out and shown to the people. She hasn’t done that, and none of her lackeys have done it, and the only women who were offering to do it have been driven into the hills. I fear evil like the next woman, so I go about my business, but between you, me and Idair it was a black day for all of us when that woman sat down on that bench.”
	“This is absolutely unconscionable,” Chandra said. “This poor woman thinks she’s gossiping to a friend in private, and has no idea in the world that her face is being broadcast into Cretid households everywhere.”
	“And into the Ideiren Embassy, I’ll bet,” I said sourly.
	“Meanwhile in the halls of Ideire’s court system, the wheels of justice are turning slowly as the trial of Slythe Baniff finally gets underway.”
	“Oh Idair’s mercy NO,” I shouted, pushing up onto my knees as I reached for the screen.
	Because Slythe was there, sitting at that table in that gray tunic with a garda on either side of her, and Ethir next to one of them leaning over to whisper something to her.
	“It’s a strange thing to witness: lawyers using the machinery of civilization and the tools of rational argument to prove a woman guilty of witchcraft. But although the offense is imaginary, the punishment is very real.”
	Slythe’s face disappeared from under my fingers, which I had spread across the warm glass of that screen.
	“Slythe’s conviction is only the beginning,” said Bric, who had appeared in her place.
	I remembered in time that if I spat at the screen, Chandra might take offense.
	“The real work will start when we recover the more serious offenders. But until the Order can track them down, we’re working with what we’ve got.” He gave the repeater one of his watery smiles. “I’m in no hurry, if you want to know the truth; once the big fish come in my job is going to get a lot more dangerous.”
	“Of course the real question,” said the Leader of Leaders, who had suddenly appeared on the screen, “is whether the punishment of exile can retain its utility now that the border is becoming more porous. It may be necessary to consider other correctional methods.”
	“And that is something our viewers will perhaps find even harder to believe in than magic. Ideire does not contain a single redemption facility. Slythe Baniff, who is being charged with the most serious crime in the Ideiren penal code, remains in her quarters in the Raed, in the custody of two policemen.”
	“This entire trial is a political fabrication,” Ethir was now saying, having popped up on the screen. Underneath his face ran the printed legend, “Ethir Briobh, attorney for Ms. Banbh.”
	“Come on, Ethir,” I said quietly. “Weave your web.”
	“I can’t stand here and tell you my client has always been a paragon of honesty and virtue. She’s done wrong and she’s suffered for it. But I will tell you this.” The spark of those blue eyes translated even through the videoscreen. “You say there is no such thing as a prison in Ideire. Because of this accusation, Slythe has been placed under a temporary block that has cut her off from any mental or emotional contact with the world around her. She is locked up as surely as any of your murders have ever been inside a cell narrower than you could build. And the sole reason she has been subjected to this terrible form of solitary confinement is that she has information that is dangerous to the current shriic leadership. My client is not a dark user. She is a lonely, persecuted woman who has somehow found the courage to stand up to the greatest evil our country has ever known. I have never worked for a defendant in whose innocence I have had more faith, or whose integrity I admire more.”
	“You deny the validity of the charges, then,” said the repeater.
	Ethir laughed, tossing those curls ever so slightly. Lara sighed.
	“Put me on the jury, honey,” she called. “I’ll acquit her.”
	“I deny the validity of every legal action this administration has taken,” Ethir said, head nodding a little to add conviction to the voice. “Since Barant’s election we have witnessed not only the ungrounded and illegal blocking and detention of my client, but the incredible farce of an extradition procedure against an alleged Ideiren criminal.” He laughed again, spreading his hands in amazement. “The only sentence we hand down for serious crimes is exile. If the suspect has already exiled herself, what in the name of the Spirit is the use of hauling her back here against her will just to exile her again?”
	“You go, boy!” shouted Lara, who had now obviously joined Ethir’s large and growing circle of admirers. “Read her her rights!”
	“The attempt to extradite Theamh ni hUlnach,” Ethir went on, “is a piece of chicanery matched in absurdity only by the suggestion that she could be dark in the first place.”
	“What...what does ‘extradite’ mean, dhiaoc?” Aine asked tentatively.
	I rubbed my eyes. It took the sight of the VB away from me for a moment, but to my disappointment it was still there when I looked back. “When a criminal crosses a border to escape prosecution, and the court he’s running from files an order to get him returned to his home province for trial, that’s called an extradition,” I said. “These sons and daughters of the Dark One’s bitch are trying to get the Cretids to arrest me and send me back home to be tried as a dark user.”
	Aine’s mouth opened slightly in dismay.
	Back on the screen, Ideire wasn’t there any more; it was that little room that they always returned to at the end of the story.
	“We apologize for the abrupt end of our Ideiren segment,” said the man with the noose behind the desk. “Ideire still has no electricity, so our correspondents have to power their cameras with batteries charged from a generator, and we can’t always get all the film we’d like to have. Here to tell us a little more about what we’ve seen is Brendan Alston of the Institute for Anthropological Research. Brendan, good evening and thank you for coming.”
	“Thank you for having me,” he said.
	It was more than I could stand. To know that Slythe was already on trial, and that if they had their way I would be next, and on top of it to be watching this noose-wearing apparition treat that blithering fool as if he were some kind of authority on shri and my people.
	 “Turn it off,” I said.
	“But don’t you want to see--” Aine ventured.
	“TURN IT OFF!”
	Chandra pressed the button and the picture went away.
	“Honey, you don’t look good,” from Lara.
	I didn’t feel good. Aine crouched near me on the floor, wondering how to help.
	“Kwenu will stop them,” she finally said. “She’s just as good as Ethir.”
	I shook my head.
	“If they arrest me,” I said, looking at her as if I were five hundred miles from her and everyone else in the room, “and they drag me back there, they will convict me, no matter what it costs them to do it. They will send me to the Zone and they will block me permanently.”
	Aine’s eyes were tearing already with the thought of it.
	“If they come for you we’ll just run,” Aine went on, more desperately. “We’ll hide from them till it’s over.”
	“Where are we going to run to, Aine?” I cried. “And when is it going to be over?”
	She didn’t have answers for either of these questions. Neither did Lara or Chandra, who didn’t understand exactly what I was contemplating but knew how badly it was shaking me.
	In the silence the phone rang. Chandra picked it up.
	“Chandra’s Castle,” she said into the box. “Oh, hi, Kwenu. Yeah, we saw it.” Pause. “Sure, she’s right here.” One of Chandra’s bangle-laden wrists stretched the phone out to me. “She wants to talk to you.”
	“Kwenu?” I said, the tears not dry yet in my voice.
	“Don’t you worry about those bastards,” she said, all traces of her former irritation appearing to have vanished. “Initiating that extradition procedure was the best thing they could have done for you. All it does is strengthen our case for political asylum.”
	“It does?”
	“Of course it does. They’re charging you with practicing dark magic, which is a crime Cretid law doesn’t even recognize. No judge with a shred of integrity is going to sign off on an extradition for a charge that is by definition trumped up, especially with all the evidence we can put together that shows you’re being targeted by a repressive regime. You’re going to be all right, Theamh,”  Kwenu said, with the fierceness she had turned on Barid the night before. “You’re my client, and they’re not going to lay a finger on you.”
	“Thanks, Kwenu,” I said.
	“It’s just my job,” she answered. “Now come back here, Etana misses both of you and I’m done for today with being an unreasonable bitch.”
	“But we’ve got NightQueen here and you’d be an accessory to kidnapping and I have to let the vigils out--”
	“Theamh,” Kwenu interrupted, “I have no idea what you’re talking about but I don’t care. Bring over whoever and whatever you’ve got with you and I’ll deal with it. Any Enforcer who interferes with any of you is going to find himself sued so hard and fast his lawyer’s going to need a lawyer. I’m Kwenu Umuoa, and I don’t mess around.”
	“If you’re sure,” I said, ashamed to still be snuffling a little.
	“Never more than now. I’ll see you there.”
	“So,” said Lara as I handed the phone back to Chandra. “Who is that fine young man with the sky-blue eyes, and is he single?”
	“His name’s Ethir, and he is,” I said. “But if you want him, Lara, you’re going to have to take a number. There’s a waiting list.”
	“And me with my Prince Charming already at hand,” Lara said, as we gathered our things. “Ah well. Maybe in another lifetime I’ll have the good fortune to be arrested.”
	“Don’t joke about that,” Aine said, her anger suddenly bringing everyone else to a halt. “You don’t understand.”	“I’m sorry,” Lara said, her voice simpler than I’d ever heard it. “I know anything can scare the fnaa out of you has got to be twelve kinds of heinous. And I want you to know,” she said, turning her liquid brown eyes on me, “that if anyone ever does try to get to you, they’re going to have to go through me. And I fight dirty.”
	“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “So will they.”

	It was hard to find enough candles in Kwenu’s apartment. The circle, when we finally made it, was makeshift and piecemeal, with candle stubs in all lengths, widths and colors stuck to the plastic sheet we’d spread over floor with some kind of silver-backed adhesive tape. NightQueen, Lara and Chandra sat on Etana’s bed, watching with interest and, I thought, a hint of fear. Somehow watching that news program had brought things home to Chandra in a way I didn’t quite understand. She had hardly spoken up at all while we set up, and was in general displaying an unexpected restraint.
	Kwenu herself had gone to bed long ago, and taken Etana with her. She hadn’t asked me too much about what I needed the privacy for, and I had no idea if she knew anything about what was about to go on. But because she could tell I’d had one of the worst days of my young life, she humored me, and here we were behind a closed door with the candles in a ring around Etana’s brightly painted desk chair, which was really too small for my adult form.
	“I’m going to let the vigils out,” I said. “Please do not faint.”
	“I won’t,” Chandra promised.
	At my call, Zott, Jayla, Shaineen and Phredi rose from the cieridh and took up their four positions around the circle. Chandra and Lara watched in silent awe; NightQueen said, “Fnaa!” once quietly, and thereafter subsided.
	“Aine will let you know when I’m ready,” I said to NightQueen as I took my seat in the chair. “When she does, just do whatever you would normally do and get yourself to that meeting. I’ll be with you, but you probably won’t know that.”
	“Will he?” Aine asked.
	“I much doubt it,” I said. “He’s got the sensitivity of a Kengdan swamp toad. And anyhow it sounds like he’ll be busy.”
	NightQueen nodded. “All right then. I’m ready.”
	I lit the candles, put my hands on my knees, leaned my head back and closed my eyes. 
	<You there, Aine?>
	<Right here, dhiaoc.>
	<You watch the vigils,> I answered. <If there’s any activity, call me and I’ll come home.>
	<I’ll take care of you, dhiaoc.>
	I launched my specter out into the room.
	Usually when I do this it’s to get to the ether, so it was disorienting to find myself still in the room, looking at my own body sitting in that chair. It must have been unsettling for Lara and Chandra, but at least I’d closed my eyes so they wouldn’t have to see that glassy stare that had taken me so long to get used to when I used to watch Barant do this. 
	<I’m out and ready to go.>
	“She’s ready to follow you,” Aine said. “Idair go with you and guard you both.”
	NightQueen swallowed, and left the room. I followed her.
	It seemed like a long time before she got where she was going; and it was frustrating, because I could have gotten there much faster, traveling as I was. But I couldn’t link with NightQueen, and there was no other way for her to show me where we were headed. So I hovered behind her in the underground train, and above her in the taxicab, and up the alley and down the cellar stairs into the basement of one of the hundreds of anonymous apartment buildings in the northern end of the City.
	At the end of the staircase there was a metal door with a little sign on it reading “AUTHORIZED MAINTENANCE PERSONNEL ONLY.” NightQueen stopped in front of this door and rapped on it loudly.
	“Who’s at the gate?” shouted a voice from inside, trying to be heard through the metal.
	“NightQueen,” she shouted back. “Coming back to the fold.”
	“Enter the darkness,” said the voice, as the door swung open.
	The man at the door was dressed in black and had the same corpselike white face that NightQueen had painted on herself before we left. We’d found some old black clothes for her that Kwenu didn’t mind her cutting up and cutting about, and she looked presentable enough by this group’s evidently idiosyncratic standards. There was nothing to be done about the nail polish; she hadn’t brought it with her and there wasn’t time to buy it. But the Black Shepherd, or so I surmised he was from the patently ornamental crook he was holding in one hand, didn’t seem to notice or care. “We’re glad to have you back among us, NightQueen.”
	“I’m glad to be here,” she answered. “I thought I might not get the chance.”
	The two of them advanced toward a group of other similarly-dressed people who were clustered in the open space between the pillars that held up the building. They were grouped around a sort of low, flat table, which looked like it had been made out of poured concrete. I could see that there was a circle that had been drawn around it on the floor, with a four-pointed star inside it, the center of which was underneath the table. Torches flamed in sconces along the walls, lighting the place fitfully and unevenly. I could make out dark stains on the surface and running down the sides of the table. When the light lurched into the corners I saw random pieces of dilapidated furniture--old couches with their lining half-ripped out, chairs almost ready to shed their moldering upholstery, bare mattresses. The overall effect was one of unhealthiness and squalor; but maybe I was influenced in that by the pallor of the people around me. 
	“I got Ethermail from Vicious Circle,” Black Shepherd observed, glancing at NightQueen. “He said he’d been looking for you, ever since you ran off.”
	“Well, I’m not hard to find,” NightQueen snapped. 
	“What happened?”
	“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “It just didn’t work out.”
	Black Shepherd was glad about that; I could tell even if she couldn’t. He was about her age, with the same ridiculous airs that she’d had, the first time we met her. So sure of his own evil grandeur, so enamored of the darkness he wore skin-deep. 
	Somewhere, the rusty voice of a clock began chiming the midnight hour. This seemed to be the cue for them all to stand in a circle around the table, backs to the center and facing outward, joining hands. 
	A door that must have led up into the rest of the building opened a crack, and a voice called out through it.
	“Acclaim the Descent of the Priest!” 
	“Darkness salutes its lord,” they replied, raising their joined hands and bowing their heads. 
	The owner of the voice walked through the door. He was in black with a white face, eyelids and lips ringed with red. In a sort of black lacquered tray he carried in front of him there were a number of decanters, each containing a different kind of liquid. Behind him came a woman in similar garb, but leading by its leash a small, silvery-gray goat, which looked around at the assembled crowd with the incuriousness goats have about things they can’t eat.
	These two people walked under the arch of one pair of joined hands into the center of the circle. When they reached the table the woman lifted the goat onto it. She tried to get it to lie down, but she hadn’t thought to tie it so it just stood right up again, looking about for something to chew on. The woman had to put her arms around it to keep it from leaping off the table.
	Now the door opened wider, and the light almost disappeared behind the black silhouette that swept through it into the room. As he entered, the others started singing.
	I have to admit he did it well. The cloak fell right, in straight heavy folds from his shoulders, and the tread of those black leather boots was slow and measured. The mask of white plaster he wore on his face looked both like and unlike a human face, enough to be profoundly unsettling, and when he took his hands out of his sleeves as he took up his position behind the altar the red gloves glowed luridly in the torchlight.
	“Lord of our fathers, be with us here.”
	At the sound of his voice, the others dropped hands, turned around, and knelt on the ground with their heads bowed. Death Mask raised his gloved hands for an invocation.
	“Master of the unknown places, ruler of the nether regions, take from us this gift of death, and give us in return the power you wield.”
	With that he stretched the goat out on the table. It was clear, even in the few moments before the knife flashed across its uncomprehending throat, that he’d had a lot more practice handling livestock than his female acolyte had. Its throat opened in a clean slit across the major vein that sent the blood streaming over its matted fur down the sides of the altar. One stroke, no hesitation. The offhand precision of the professional butcher.
	“Drink the blood of this death, that is life to us, and may it feed your craving.”
	The others now stretched their hands forward to touch the blood that streamed and pooled on the floor. It seemed to impress them more than it did me; they paddled their palms in it, putting bloody handprints on each other’s white faces, joining bloodied hands around that circle as they faced their leader again.
	“Master of the dark sky, writer of the Satanic text...” Death Mask began again.
	It went on this way for some time. A lot of repeated formulas abbot the might and majesty of Satan, which told me nothing about him except that he was even more hung up on being praised and petted than God was. I avoided the blood out of habit, as if I were still in my body; but nothing these people were doing around that table was having the least effect on me or my ability to move around the room and read people. For all its talk of rule and might, this was a completely impotent ritual; it changed nothing, not even the people doing it. When Death Mask had consecrated the decanters to the service of evil, the liquid in them remained stubbornly ordinary; whatever they were drinking, it wouldn’t do anything beyond fill their stomachs. Or maybe, as it seemed, poison their minds. Because it’s true that after swigging their unholy beverages--in great quantity--the quality of what I was reading off them started to change. 
	Finally Death Mask had processed off, followed by the man with the tray full of empty decanters and the woman bearing the cooling body of the poor goat. As the torches burned lower, the Black Shepherd went to a boxlike object sitting on a shelf and pressed some buttons. The air was immediately burdened with that combination of body-shaking pulsation and nerve-shredding wails that Cretids persisted in referring to as “music.” For a while the devotees thrashed obediently around to it, as the poison began taking effect. Their minds got muddier and their movements more erratic; sweat began to streak the paint and blood on their faces. It seemed to be a matter of course that after a certain point, they began to pair off and start stumbling toward that old ratty furniture. After briefly verifying that they were doing what I thought they were doing, I tried to stay far away from this activity. This meant I had to hover pretty close to the bloodstained table, which was distasteful to me but not as distasteful as watching these mind-poisoned, blood-smeared, paint-wearing minions coupling with each other.
	Black Shepherd had caught NightQueen by the arm and taken her into the corner and one of the couches. NightQueen’s mind was addled like the rest of them, but instead of making her amorous this demonic draught seemed just to have made her cranky.
	“Find someone else,” she said, jerking her arm out of his. “I’m not in the mood.”
	I was surprised to see that he released her at once, and went meandering off in search of alternatives. More than I’d have given him credit for. NightQueen hunkered in one of the old chairs, ignored by the others. Also ignored by the others, the male acolyte returned to the room and joined one of the couples.
	I had assumed he would be partnering the female one, but she was nowhere to be seen. It occurred to me that Death Mask might not be coming back, and that he might be off somewhere with her.
	Getting through the door was unpleasant. In this state, it is possible to move through solid objects, but it’s no fun. It takes a long time, and you get a closer look at the internal structure of whatever it is than you really would want. And there’s always a point when you panic and think you’re stuck, and will never make it through. When I dragged the ends of my specter free of the far side of the door, I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to do this much.
	But it didn’t take me long to find them. They were right on the other side of the door, standing up in the hallway; she was leaning against one wall while he leaned over her, supporting himself on those still-gloved hands. I considered forcing myself back through the door, but fortunately they seemed to have just concluded their business. He still had his mask on, which must have made things somewhat unpleasant; or perhaps she didn’t care about such things. She was older than the others, in her late twenties, with long ash-blond hair, sharp features and a shrewd look to her. Even while she was readjusting the fastenings on her black vest she looked capable, in charge.
	“So,” she said, after he had stopped panting. “Have you asked her?”
	That mask nodded. “I have.”
	“Will I get to meet her?”
	He nodded again. Her eyes lightened a little, but otherwise she didn’t betray her excitement.
	“When?”
	Those red-gloved hands came out of their sleeves again, this time holding a small glass tube with a plunger on one end and a needle on the other.
	“Tonight.”
	Before she could say anything, he had jabbed the needle into the crook of her bare arm, over the elbow where the vein was. She cried out briefly when it punctured her skin, but by the time he had pressed the plunger and withdrawn the needle her eyes were unfocused and she looked about ready to topple. Finally she collapsed into his arms, eyes closed and to all appearances unconscious.
	He hoisted her over his shoulder and began climbing the stairs. They led to a corridor with a door that opened onto an alleyway, where there was a car parked. In the dark it looked black, but in the dark a lot of things look black. He opened the back door, laid the woman down on the seat, threw a dark blanket over her, and got into the driver’s seat.
	Once there, he took his mask off. And as I hovered over the woman’s sleeping form, I could see in the reflection of the rearview mirror the features that had appeared in my nightmares for many months after that evil time.
	A broad-bridged nose, thin reddish eyebrows and a very pronounced, square jaw. High forehead, red-brown hair that was not as thick as it used to be. He hadn’t aged as much as he should have, but time hadn’t stood still for him either.
	He put on his seatbelt, checked the side mirrors, and turned the ignition.
	I almost got embedded in the rear windshield, but I had learned how to do this following NightQueen. I was able to stay inside the car, and look through the windows at what was passing by. 
	We were going north; that much I could tell. The City proper got left behind, and we were driving through a complex of what looked like some strange hybrid between factories and office buildings. Medville, Chandra had called it; and that was what it seemed to be. But we didn’t stop in the middle of it, where the buildings were new and glossy. We kept driving, until we reached a turnoff that was almost choked with overgrown tree branches and a tattered sign reading “NO TRESPASSING.”	It seemed like half a mile before the driveway ended, but finally I saw it above us. A huge edifice of burnt-red brick, built obviously a long time before this and beginning to crumble. Dark as it was, I could notice only a few things about it. One was that the windows in that outer wall were all barred. Another was the roll of razor-sharp wire that coiled across the top of the wall. And the third was the rusting metal sign over the entrance reading “GREENHAVEN MENTAL HOSPITAL.”
	The place had obviously been abandoned. The outer brick shell was pockmarked and the masonry had been corrupted by lichens and moss and the passage of time. And the windows were boarded shut, with splintery boards and rusted nails. It had been a huge edifice in its time, rambling and sprawling over what had to be at least two acres, a complex of interconnected buildings. But grass was growing through cracks in the asphalt of that driveway, and the small detached guardhouse to which he was carrying his unconscious consort had obviously seen better days.
	When he reached the door, there was a rectangular box affixed to one side from which a red light winked. He punched a number of buttons, and the light winked green. The door opened to him.
	I got in behind him just as it closed again. The hallway was narrow and short, with one door on each side. He opened the one on the right, and hauled her in.
	In other times, this had probably been a break room--there was a machine in the corner that looked like it dispensed those snacks they were always eating here, but it hadn’t been used for a long time and it was webbed with dust and cracked across its glass pane face. There were a few spindly-legged metal chairs scattered around the room, and one much larger leather armchair against one wall that seemed very much out of place. 
	“Is that her?”
	If I had been in my body I would have felt the chill. I wondered if my body was reacting at all, separated as we were. Because even though I hadn’t seen her at first, as she waited in the shadows, the sound of her voice brought it all rushing back to me. It hadn’t changed at all. Cool, neither high nor low, hard without harshness, commanding without seeming self-important. Serious as death, but laughing silently with death’s sense of irony. Matter-of-fact, and at the same time betraying by its very calm the special lunacy of the truly evil. Lythril.
	“Yes,” he said, looking at the form he had just draped over one of the metal chairs. “That’s her.”
	Lythril glanced over her. With her head drooping over the edge of the chairback and her legs splayed out in front of her like a doll’s, she looked much less impressive. “She doesn’t look like much,” she said. “But then nobody does, in that state. Is she clean?”
	He shrugged. “She’s done some glass and some weed, they all have. And of course alcohol. But it’s not something you couldn’t break her of.”
	She walked over to the leather armchair and sat down in it--slowly, fluidly, paying attention to how she moved and what it looked like. If she had looked twenty-five when I was with her, she looked maybe twenty-eight now. My age. And twice it. With her black hair up in one of those twists they wore up here, the silver chain holding its coil in place, and those fine-penciled brows that accentuated the knife-blade nose and the definite, pointed chin. Her red lips creased in a slight smile as she leaned back in the chair and crossed one leg over the other knee.
	“All right then,” she said. “You know when.”
	Adjusting the sit of her silver-trimmed black chemise, she began to disappear.
	She wasn’t disappearing, of course; she was raising a small, portable shield around herself so that she wouldn’t be visible to the naked eye. When all that you could see of her was a slight waver, if you looked hard at it, in the image of the chair, he put his mask back on and returned to the woman. Producing another tube and needle, he stuck it into the same arm and pressed down.
	The woman began to revive. It was a minute or two before she came fully awake enough to understand where she was and remember what had happened. When she did, though, she didn’t ask questions. She just turned her eyes to that chair and waited.
	“Woman who commands me,” he said, his voice unnecessarily loud and his tone ritually formal, “appear and judge whether she be worthy.”
	There was a brief flash of fire, and Lythril appeared in the chair.
	Uafasi, really, on a larger scale; a parlor trick designed to impress. But it certainly did the job. The woman stared at her, then pushed herself off the chair and onto her knees, looking down at the floor but glancing up at Lythril to satisfy her reverent curiosity.
	“Atella Merewilf,” Lythril said, looking at her bowed head. “Do you know my name?”
	She nodded. 
	“That’s your first wrong answer,” she said, that smile deepening. “You know what I’m called. My name is something entirely different. This is just one of many things you will have to learn, if you really want to work with me.”
	“I know that I have much to learn, my queen,” she murmured.
	Lythril uncrossed her legs and put her boot down with a thump. “Don’t call me that.” The other woman glanced fearfully up at Lythril’s clouded face. “The name I chose to be known and feared by is Lythril. Use that and no other.”
	“Yes, Lythril,” she said.
	Lythril stood up, slowly. That she was wearing trousers surprised me, but on reflection it seemed in keeping; she had changed her look to go with the time and the place, and whatever this shiny black material was, it did cling very advantageously to her round hips and her still well-turned legs. She stepped forward and began circling the kneeling woman.
	“Atella Merewilf,” she said. “Twenty-seven years old, parents divorced fifteen years, father financially generous but almost entirely absent, raised largely by your emotionally unstable mother who has now been committed to one of the Cretid Nation’s state-sponsored mental institutions. By you.”
	She nodded.
	“Gained notoriety at seventeen as the central figure in one of the more lurid hazing scandals ever to come out of a girls’ boarding school.”
	The woman nodded again.
	“Expelled from same, finished in the public system and went off to one of the Cretid Nation’s many warehouses for the young and idle, from which you ultimately did graduate despite the sexual misconduct trial involving you and the dean of students.”
	“Yes, Lythril,” she said.
	“Now starting your fifth year at Meijer & Martwil, and disappointed that despite your very creative efforts on some very successful advertising campaigns, nobody has seen fit to promote you to management.”
	The other woman nodded as Lythril kept circling. “Two years in Death Mask’s circle, during which I understand you have taken on a great deal of responsibility for leading the rituals and for satisfying demands no one else appears prepared to meet.” 
	“I have,” she said.
	Lythril stopped in front of her, hands on her hips, so that Atella’s eyes were fixed on the narrow toes of her black suede boots.
	“So,” she said. “You’re cruel, you’re smart, and you’re a manipulator. And all your life you have been desperately searching for someone who could rule you as you need to be ruled.”
	Atella looked up at her, as if this was something of a revelation to her.
	“Do you know why you’ve never found that person?”
	She shook her head.
	“Because you made the mistake of assuming, simply because you are female and heterosexual, that this person would be male.”
	As Atella’s mind grappled with this statement, Lythril circled her. “You have tried to find a lover who would give you what you need. Professors, employers, Enforcers, priests, you’ve been everywhere that’s likely. And every time you take a lover, you leave him in disappointment and despair. Do you know why?”
	“Tell me, Lythril,” she said, now waiting eagerly for the answer. “Please.”
	“Because you discover that his power is not truly his,” she said, looking down at her and softening her voice slightly. “The power is in the money, the position, the institution behind him. Disarmed, they all become weaker than you, and you turn from them in disgust.” Atella was nodding, slowly, as if in awe. 
	Lythril walked around, her boots creaking softly in the silence, then suddenly dropped to a crouch in front of her, fingers of one hand spread on the concrete underneath, other arm draped over her bent knee, flashing a sudden, intimate glance up at Atella’s downcast eyes.
	“I am Lythril,” she said. “I am different.”
	Atella stared back at her, fascinated. Lythril got to her feet and took a step back, studying her.
	“Stand up,” she finally said.
	Atella stood.
	“Look at me.”
	She did.
	“From now on, you belong to me. Do you understand?”
	“Oh yes,” she said, with a hint of eagerness.
	“You’ll resign from your job tomorrow, by fax,” she said. “Maerin here will see to it that your belongings are taken from that hole you rent downtown and moved here to your cell in the compound. You will start work immediately. For the first six months you will not leave the compound, except through Ethermail and other electronic means. After that I will trust you with the combination to the gate and to this building. When you return after a trip to the outside, you will come here and I or one of my senior associates will bring you back to the main compound. I do not care who you speak to, consort with or thurk while you are outside the compound,” she went on. “But I will be watching you. And if you say a word to anyone about where this place is or what goes on here, I will kill you instantly.”
	“I understand,” Atella said.
	“If you make progress and show promise, I will allow you to assist in some of the more important projects. Until then, your job will be confined to areas in which you have already demonstrated expertise.”
	She seemed disappointed, but she nodded.
	“I will say this right now,” she said. “You want to become a full-fledged dark user. My experience suggests that Cretids do not take naturally to this kind of work, and the Dark One has so far been reluctant to take any into the mysteries.”
	“I hope to be the first,” Atella said. 
	Lythril studied her. “I will promote you according to your merits and I will see to it that you never have a dull moment,” she said. “You will work with some of the brightest women in the Cretid Nation toward an achievement that will forever reshape life as we know it. And when we reach our goal, you will have your share in it.” Atella breathed in softly. “Meanwhile, you will be paid regularly and well, in gold, which you may spend however you like after your six month probation.” Atella nodded. “This organization is not a democracy. I am the head of this body and what I command you will do. But only the weak refuse advice, and I will always give your opinions the weight to which the quality of your work entitles them.” She walked slowly back to that chair, turned deliberately, and sat, while Atella and Maerin watched her. “If at any point I become dissatisfied with your work, or come to believe that I was mistaken about your potential, I will kill you and no one will ever find your body.” Atella nodded one more time. “Welcome to the dark side, Atella.”
	There was another flash, and she disappeared. Maerin turned back to Atella, who seemed to know what to expect; she extended her arm with the elbow already exposed to him. He put in the needle, and she collapsed back into the chair. 
	Lythril reappeared, abruptly and without much grace. She sighed, stretched, and got out of the chair, crossing her arms and looking with detached interest at the woman’s slumbering form.
	“She’ll be out for a while,” she said. “Plenty of time. Come with me, I want to show you something.” He nodded. “And take off that ridiculous mask.”
	He removed it quickly, following her out of the room and across the hall to open the other door.
	I had not been prepared at all for this. What I was looking at was what had to be a state-of-the-art computer command center. Video screens, consoles, tape recorders, all of it new, shiny, whirring away, sending out those signals that I still couldn’t make head or tail of.
	She shut the door behind them. Now they were alone she moved briskly, without taking the same kind of care, pulling a chair over to one of the consoles. “I wanted to let you know,” she said, “that you should start looking out for a new assistant.”
	Maerin looked very much taken aback. “But what for? She’s done nothing to deserve--”
	On the videoscreen above the console there appeared suddenly a grainy, washed-out image of a nondescript little room with a door in one wall and a desk opposite it. Behind the desk sat a woman of about eighteen, typing on a keyboard and smiling at something on the screen. As she looked up, two women entered the room. Lythril pressed a button and the image froze.
	“Do you know who those women are?”
	He didn’t; but I did. 
	“The one on the left,” she said, in a conversational tone that had always spooked me because I knew it was the harbinger of worse. “That’s Chandra Delphan.” Maerin shrugged. “In the past three months she has written four editorials to major newspapers attacking DeVane, and published one article-length investigative report in her own publication. And you don’t know who she is.”
	Maerin was starting to get nervous now, but he still didn’t seem to see it coming. 
	“On the right,” she said, “is Aldaro Bilsada, a would-be ransani who now goes by the name of Lara. He recently appeared on the FSC in an anti-Family Forever demonstration that was carried live to millions of Cretid households.” He looked from Lythril back to the screen. “And you don’t know who he is, either.”
	“I don’t watch as much VB as you do,” he said, careful not to let the sarcasm sound in his voice.
	She didn’t dignify this with a response. Instead she leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and started letting him have it.
	“Chandra Delphan and Aldaro Bilsada are our natural enemies, Maerin. Chandra has been actively involved in campaigning for reproductive freedom and Aldaro has recently become the front man for a new anti-Family Forever initiative. Now when two of your natural enemies saunter into your place of business and ask to make an appointment with you, that is a sign that something is wrong.”
	“But how was I to know--”
	“You don’t know because you don’t watch, Maerin,” Lythril snapped, now beginning to sound as angry as she was. “You’re too busy killing goats and thurking schoolgirls to pay attention.” 
	She hadn’t changed her position at all; she was still just sitting there looking at him. And yet without waving an arm or stamping a foot, she was making the storm gather. He was uncomfortable in his chair, as if sitting on needlepoints, waiting for it to break.
	“This,” she said, gesturing in disgust at the screen and the frozen image, “is work that you should be doing. Instead I have to be the one to tell you that your assistant has given your location, your identity and the nature of your business away to confederates of Theamh ni hUlnach.”
	The image began moving again. I heard the voice, faint and crackling, of Chandra asking for an appointment.
	“How far along are you?” asked the assistant, pulling over the keyboard.
	Lythril froze the image again and looked at Maerin with eyes that looked like they might set him on fire.
	“She didn’t know,” he said.
	“Of course she didn’t,” Lythril answered. “You never told her. Because you don’t know, even though you should know.”
	“But where’s the harm?” he said, defensively. “You told me yourself--”
	“I told you I would let her find me but when I’m ready,” she said, teeth close together and voice dropping to a growl.
	“Aren’t you ready?” he asked, with a childlike anxiety and disappointment that seemed to soften her somehow.
	“Not yet,” she said, still with that dangerous burr of anger in her voice. 
	“Well, when will you be?” he asked.
	Her hand shot out to grab him by the scruff of his neck and drag him suddenly out of his chair and on his knees across the floor toward her so that she was looking down at his face as she twisted his neck painfully.
	“I make the plans,” she growled, tightening her grip on his short hairs. “You know what I choose to tell you. Asking for more is unwise at best.”
	“Yes, Lythril,” he said, wincing.
	“Your assistant has already been terminated,” she said. “I won’t risk working with people that stupid.”
	His eyes looked up at her, terrified and white.
	“As I sit here, right now,” she said, sounding calmer but keeping her grip on him, “I am deciding whether or not to kill you too.” His eyes closed. “I’ll let you know, when I’m ready.”
	The bite she put on that last word scared him more than anything else, and he was reduced to whimpering quietly as he waited for her to decide his fate. I, however, was looking around for something I could do that would stop her from killing him in my presence. I was out of my body, and my options were limited. I could start throwing stuff around, and distract her that way; maybe fiddle with some of the bells and whistles on her machines. It would alert her to my presence, but it would probably stop her going through with it; and I was bound to try it, even for this monster.
	After what seemed like a very long time, she stood, hauling him up by the skin of his neck and dragging his face around to look at hers.
	“You’re still useful,” she finally said, with hatred. “Barely.”	He closed his eyes with a shuddering sigh. I was similarly relieved. 
	“I’ll leave your pitiful life inside your rotting body,” she said, tossing him away from her so that he stumbled backward into the screen. “In return, you will continue to whore yourself in any way I ask you to, and you will ask me no questions about why, what or when.”
	Maerin nodded, with what seemed to me like not only gratitude but pleasure.
	“And the first thing you will do,” she said, “is look for a replacement for your late assistant.”
	“I have one in mind,” he said eagerly.
	“Who?”
	“Sonnia Rytehouse.”
	Lythril sighed.
	“You are of course not aware that she organized the same demonstration in which Aldaro Bilsada first appeared on the public stage. She has left the fold, Maerin. Dark One’s laughter, I am so tired of doing your homework for you!”
	I don’t know what gave him the courage to contradict her, unless it was her recent attack of clemency. “But she was at the meeting tonight.”
	Lythril’s lidded eyes snapped open and she sprang at him in sudden, clawed fury.
	“You moron!” she hissed, as she threw him back into the wall. “You brain-dead bosca na fnaa!”
	“But Lythril--”
	He started trying to justify himself, but he stopped because she wasn’t paying attention to him any more. She was stalking through the space, on the alert, shaking a handful of powder from her black sleeve into one of those red-nailed hands.
	It was only a second before I realized. It was showdust. 
	There were no windows, and the door was shut. I would have to get out through one of the walls. Which I couldn’t even get to because they were lined with those viewing screens. 
	Maerin’s face fell, and I had the feeling that she was continuing to berate him mentally while she stalked me. I kept as far away from her as I could, hovering near the ceiling. But Lythril isn’t easily gotten around. Her head turned, she made sure of me and one hand went into the air. The showdust came flying at me on a spurt of red flame.
	I swerved, but the dust still brushed the far edge of my specter. It turned a pleasant sort of ice-blue color, white underneath with a cobalt outer edge. Which was an interesting thing to find out, but inconvenient at the moment. There was nothing for it but to go through the ceiling.
	It was a difficult journey. Concrete turned out to be just as dense as it looked; then there was the choking crawl space in which all manner of disgusting things were indeed taking the opportunity to crawl, then the foul-smelling tar-covered shingles. It was an agony of grinding toil before I could drag myself out of that wall and into the air, the last of the showdust trickling down the shingles of the roof.
	“There she is.”
	Lythril had come around to the outside, ready to trap me when I emerged. But not enough of the showdust had stuck, that first time; and when I flew off the roof I was clear again. Without the showdust, and now that I had the whole open bowl of the sky to hide in, it was hard for her to pinpoint where I was, and the bolts she fired missed their mark. It was hard to make up my mind to leave, but to try to explore further with her on the alert and me this vulnerable would have been suicidal. I streaked back out over the brick wall and down the streets to the south, hoping that when I got to Kwenu’s neighborhood I would recognize the building.
	Sculling through the night air above those tall buildings, looking down over the darkness of the chasms between them, I saw a city I would never have seen otherwise. It was long after midnight, and most humans who had somewhere to sleep had gone there. Roaming the streets were what was left. Cars with Enforcers in them, the street dwellers, the whores and the dealers of poison. And the Blue Angel. And the Yellow Dog.
	And not just the individual ones I’d met. From my flight above the skyscrapers I could look down on the city and see dozens of them glowing in their different haunts, supernaturally bright points in a dark and confused grid. Yellow, blue, red too, green, even orange. Scattered around the park in the north, clustering in the streets of the South Corner. Lurking wherever there were people sitting or standing or lying out in the open, exposed by poverty or despair to the open sky--people who had, through the workings of this city’s dark magic, become disposable. Quite a little brood of them. Turned loose, abandoned, fending for themselves. Feeding or waiting to feed.
	That many experiments, discontinued; that many notborns, forced into these artificial bodies and left to wander the darkened streets of exile, with nothing to call theirs but vague memories of the mothers they had known briefly and in another world. And, along with that, something in their consciousness that made them recognize me. And believe that it was possible, through some magic they thought I could work, to give them back what they had lost forever.
	It was with gratitude and relief that I finally escaped back into the building and found the body that was left in that chair. Lara had curled up on the bed and fallen asleep; Chandra was watching Aine, who was watching the vigils. They remained peaceful. Lythril had not apparently followed me back.
	When my eyes opened, Aine sat back with a sigh of relief that turned into a yawn. I held up the cieridh and drew in the vigils, then started putting out the candles.
	“What did you find, dhiaoc?”
	“She’s operating out of an abandoned complex called Greenhaven Mental Hospital,” I said.
	Chandra made a noise of amazement.
	“How tragically appropriate,” she said. “Greenhaven is a place that’s seen some evil in its day.”
	“Could you get inside?”
	“No, she chased me off. Incidentally, Death Mask is Sinclare is Maerin, killer of mothers and consort of Lythril.”
	The door to the bedroom opened and NightQueen came through it, patting her face dry with a towel. She was wearing one of Kwenu’s nightgowns and had washed off the paint and blood of that night’s activities. “You’re back,” she said, trying to sound matter of fact. “Did you find out what you wanted?”
	“More than I hoped,” I said. “Which is good, because you can’t go back there. Lythril knows you helped me find her.”
	NightQueen swallowed. “I didn’t want to anyway.”
	“What baffles me is why you ever did,” I said. “And what did that poor goat ever do to anyone?”
	She looked away, and I decided not to tease her. “This is going to take some planning,” I said. “She knows I’m looking for her, and she knows Chandra and Lara are helping me. And...”
	Aine waited for me to finish the thought.
	“And she’s preparing a trap for me,” I said. “She wants me to make the attempt, but not until she’s got everything in place. So we’re going to have to rush her. It’s our only hope.”
	She nodded solemnly. “We’ll work on it, dhiaoc.”
	Chandra, meanwhile, was poking Lara. “Come on, beauty sleeper, show’s over. Let’s go home.”
	Lara sat up, rubbing her eyes disappointedly. “I missed it?”
	“It wasn’t very exciting, don’t worry,” Chandra said.
	“Not to you, maybe.”
	The chagrined, hurt look she turned on me reminded me that I couldn’t have gone there without her, and that they were drawn into the web now too.
	“Thank you,” I said. “For all your help. I mean that. You cannot understand what this means to me.”
	Chandra swallowed. “I promise to try,” she said. “Come on, Lara, you’re my ride. Get moving.”
	They slunk out of the apartment trying not to wake Kwenu and Etana. NightQueen sat on Etana’s bed. I curled up on the floor amongst the candle stubs and adhesive tape.
	“We can share,” Aine said. And, reading something off her, “It’s all right, I’m going to be a shriia. You’re safe.”
	Aine lay down on the bed and curled up facing the wall. NightQueen sat perched on the edge, looking from me to her.
	“Don’t you want the bed?” she finally asked.
	“No,” I answered. 
	“Why not?”
	“It’s a long story,” I replied, and closed my eyes.
	A very long story. But one, maybe, about to end. One way or the other.

XVIII.
Welcome To My World

	“Utilities.”
	I looked across the coffeetable at Chandra. “I beg your pardon?”
	She let fall a huge pile of extremely large documents printed on heavy paper, and hatched with faint perpendicular lines.
	“I have spent,” she said, sitting down on Kwenu’s couch and taking a wrapped snack of some kind out of her bag, “the last eight hours crawling through the municipal archives of our fair city. It’s paid off.” She nudged the documents toward me. “These are the original blueprints of the Greenhaven Mental Hospital. Since it was a municipal project funded by the City they were on file.”
	“So this is a plan of the building,” Aine said, starting to look them over.
	“The building as it was designed seventy years ago,” she said. “And if you look at them, you will notice--or I guess maybe you wouldn’t. I had a girlfriend was an electrical engineer, and--”
	“Of course you did,” said Lara.
	“She was beautiful,” Chandra went on, looking up at me. “I mean, arresting in that beautiful butch way, with shoulders and biceps like--ah, never mind. Point is, this thing was built two generations ago, and there is no way that the power lines that were originally installed could possibly handle the load she must be putting on them. That building has been vacant for fifteen years, and in its entire history as a mental institution the physical plant was never updated. Demands on the power increased some, naturally, but nobody was ever going to vote the money it would have cost GMH to do a real renovation.”
	“So?” Lara asked.
	“So,” Chandra said. “I figured, she has to have had dealings with Cretid Power and Light. Because there is no way they’re going to start pumping all that juice into a building that’s been empty that long without doing some kind of an inspection. And there’s no way she could steal that much without them noticing the drain. So I found the inspection records.”
	This was a smaller folder that fell down on top of the blueprints. “You know you’re always talking about how powerful and crafty and scary Lythril is?”
	“I’m not always talking about that,” I said testily.
	“Well, frequently,” Chandra said, munching a fistful of chips. “Anyhow, this is proof, in case anyone ever doubts you.” She washed the chips down with a pull from one of those Red River things. “CPL is routing God alone knows how many kilowatts out to a building that doesn’t exist.”
	“What do you mean, doesn’t exist?” I was getting irritated with Chandra’s dilatory revelation process. 
	“I don’t know how she did it,” Chandra said. “But they think the thing is a functioning private hospital. The inspector wrote up a whole report on it. Wiring up to code, state of the art facilities, intensive care unit, maternity ward, the whole bit. But there is no way that what you were looking at could also be what he’s talking about.”
	“Were there patients in it?” I asked.
	“No,” she said. “This was the preliminary inspection, before they were supposedly going to start operating. The place was empty; he just mentions having been shown over it by an administrator named Lily Devain.”
	“Well,” I said, “it wouldn’t be hard for Lythril to make him think he was seeing something other than what he was looking at. Mind forcing she knows. But what she doesn’t know as much about--I’m thinking--is electronics.”
	“That’s what I was thinking,” Chandra said. “What he was inspecting was probably real. He just didn’t realize what it was all being used for.”
	“So by looking through this report, and comparing it to the blueprint,” I said, beginning to see what all of this had been about, “we can get some idea of what really might be in there.”
	Chandra nodded, smiling broadly. “So. Are you happy?”
	“Yes,” I said. “Thank you, Chandra.”
	Aine had left the blueprints and was now looking at the report in the folder.
	“There’s an inventory here of all her computer equipment,” she said. “It says too she’s got Etherwire lines installed for them. That means they’re on the Net.”
	“Well, she likes to know what’s happening,” I said. “She doesn’t get out much, but from what I saw she doesn’t have to.”
	She was looking at the inventory very thoughtfully.
	<If she’s on the Net...>
	<What are you up to, Aine?>
	<Then I can get Ira to talk to them.>
	<You think Ira would be able to find much out?>
	<It’s worth a try.>
	I had been letting Aine deal with Ira on her own; it was good for her to have some autonomy. But in her spare time, she and Etana had been doing a lot of talking to Ira. From what she said, Ira’s mind was complicated, but not complex. Not only were its desires simple, but the whole concept of desire appeared to be extremely new to it, despite the sophisticated construction of its mindspace. Aine said that mostly what Ira had done, since it was assembled, was follow orders. The idea of recognizing its own likes and dislikes, and acting on them, was something that had dawned very slowly. I had worried at first that it might rebel, and refuse to do what Etana told it; but it was clear early that inasmuch as Ira had feelings they were all invested in Etana. It was hard for me to imagine what Etana seemed like to Ira--she would only be a signal and a whole mess of input, to it. But whether Ira was reading her signal the way it could apparently read Aine’s, or whether Ira recognized Etana’s input patterns and enjoyed them, it would have sacrificed its last circuit before displeasing her. 
	Whether Lythril’s computers would feel the same way about her was a different question. I didn’t know whether she had made the same breakthrough Aine had. My guess was no. Aine’s facility with Ira seemed to me somehow to have to do with her youth; she still wasn’t too old to learn to speak a new language, even one as different as this. Lythril was smart; she could learn to use any tool you put in her hand. But she had a lot on her plate, and what with chasing immortality, marketing Erysin, replacing notborns, corrupting the Council, bending a coven of subordinates to her iron will, and doing whatever it was she was still doing with Maerin, maybe she hadn’t had time to work on communicating with a machine that most people here didn’t even seem to think of as having either a mind or a mindspace. In any case, it was worth a try. But there was also something else I had to do before we could plan the attack.
	“I’ll study these up and see if we can put together a hypothetical map,” I said. “You’ve been a huge help, Chandra. How do you find the time to do all this?”
	Chandra smiled at me, a genuine one without the nervous self-parody that often came with them.
	“Don’t worry about it. Freelancing makes my schedule flexible, and when this is all over I’m gonna have a hell of an expose about DeVane.”
	“You know, Chandra,” I said, “if you print the truth, nobody will believe you.”
	“Oh, I know that,” she answered. “Nobody believed we were dealing whitedust to the Mountain Kingdom either.”
	“I thought whitedust came from Hendai.”
	“It’s a long story,” Chandra said. “We took over the Middle Peninsula, where the flowers grow that you make whitedust out of. So we started farming the stuff. It’s very profitable, but you have to create the demand. So we started dealing it to the Mountain Kingdom, which is the one part of Hendai that we never really got our hooks into. Course they didn’t want the stuff, since it’s poison, so they started setting fire to the warehouses and sinking the ships it came in on and so forth, and then...oh, never mind, you don’t live here, you don’t have to care.”
	It was true I didn’t live there. But I had for a while been troubled by the question of whether or not I had to care. We say “our people are everywhere” and we mean everywhere in Ideire; we know there’s a world outside the borders but we never go there. She had told us not to go abroad and force our teachings on others; so we hadn’t. We’d stayed home and done what we could for our own people. But thinking ahead to that night, when I would be standing with Tyrna and some of the other people she had found to help her and working together to try to protect this set-upon and troubled corner of a world I had never really believed in, I was starting to wonder if it was enough. If we really were the last place where shri was still powerful, didn’t we owe it to the rest of the world, all the lost magic and all the dead lore, to fight against these enemies who after all we knew longer and better than anyone else in defense of whatever was left standing?
	But then that was what Starina had thought her people were doing. And what if along with shri we brought darkness to those other places, if for every Morat we imported a Barant, if instead of helping we hurt. Since now, it seemed, we couldn’t even take care of ourselves, properly, and we were as dark at heart as anyone I was going to meet up here.
	The opening door interrupted my thought line and Kwenu came in, trailing Etana. “Well, NightQueen’s officially a ward of the state,” she said, tossing her bag and keys onto the blueprints we had spread out on top of the table. “At least for the time being. I know the family they’ve placed her with--they’re good people and they don’t take fnaa from their children, which makes them ideal.” Aine looked vastly relieved. “So in a couple weeks, the state will be hauling the Favorite Son’s right-hand man into court and putting him through a custody hearing that will probably bring the whole Family Forever network crashing down around his ears, whether he loses or not.” She stood with her hands on her hips looking down at Aine and me with a smile. “You got any other little jobs you want done around here?”
	“Thank you, Kwenu,” Aine said, not picking up on the irony. “We couldn’t help her like I wanted to, but I’m much easier knowing you’re on her side.”
	It was touching to me to see how much Aine cared about her now, and how much responsibility she’d assumed. It was another sign that she was getting closer--she’d had her frictions with NightQueen, but once she started to understand her trouble all of that had faded into the background. She was already on her own, in some ways--already doing the work she was training for. Making progress, and making it fast. It would probably happen to her soon, and then when we got back home...
	“Theamh?” Kwenu asked, having noticed the choking noise that came from my throat. “Are you all right?”
	“I’m sorry,” I said, aware now that I had started crying. “I’m--I’m glad about NightQueen--I just--I’ll be right back.”
	I made a break for it into Etana’s room, but it wasn’t really an escape. I was alone when it really hit, but that only meant that when Aine inevitably followed me in I was in even more embarrassing straits.
	“Dhiaoc, what’s the matter?” she said, sincerely puzzled by the tears that just kept coming faster. “We’re getting there. We’re almost done. Aren’t you glad?”
	She crouched down on the floor near the bed, looking up at me as I tried unsuccessfully to dry my eyes on my sleeve. The sight of her looking up at me with that same unshaken faith just pushed me further.
	“I was just thinking...how far you’ve come...and how you’ll get your orders soon...when we get home...” I got out, with a lot of interruption. “But there will be no one there to give them to you, Aine, there’s nothing in the Pharc now but evil...”
	She was glad to hear she was close, and that was fighting with her desire to comfort me. She didn’t feel the loss the way I did; she couldn’t. She hadn’t really known what it was like to work in that community, even as someone whose relationship to the Order was always in question.
	“But it won’t always be that way, dhiaoc...Morat and the others must be getting ready to fight, that’s why they’ve withdrawn...”
	“Well then why did they leave Slythe there to be torn to pieces?” I shouted. “It’s a rout, it’s a retreat, that’s the only explanation...”
	“Maybe she wanted that,” Aine said.
	“She’s shrimarbh, but she’s not insane!”
	“No,” she answered. “That’s not what I meant. I mean...what she’s doing, maybe it’s part of the plan. That trial will be covered by the repeaters, dark magic trials always are. Ethir will get her to testify about Barant and the others. Either the repeaters will repeat it, and people will find out that way...or they’ll stop the repeaters from doing that somehow, and then everyone will know evil is ruling the country. This is going to make everything known, dhiaoc, to the people. That’s why they let her do this.”
	“Let her?”
	“Think of it from her view, dhiaoc,” Aine said patiently. “She’s betrayed Idair and she wants to make it right. This is her way of doing it. She’s putting herself in danger to help see shri back into the Pharc. It wipes out the part she’s had in this. I saw her face and I heard Ethir talk about her,” she said. “She wants this. It’s her gift to us. She’s got a right to make it.”
	I nodded, still crying. “It isn’t just that, Aine, it’s--it’s all just too much, it’s been too long, I’m sick of this place and sick of Cretids and I can’t even remember how long it’s been since I’ve done a reading or worn my hreapa and I’m living inside lightning, Aine, I try not to let it bother me but it is slowly driving me nuts and I just don’t know how much longer I can take it up here but it sure as hell seems like I can’t go home!”
	The severity of the outburst that followed this rant gave Aine serious pause. Even that night down in the kitchen when she was dragging the story out of me she’d never really seen this happen. In fact I couldn’t remember having had a fit like this since Istria left. She was the only person I’d ever been able to cry to.
	“Well...we...we’ll be done soon, dhiaoc, we can leave as soon as we’ve destroyed her work up here.”
	I shook my head. “I...”
	When I couldn’t finish, Aine took it up. “I know it’ll be dangerous, dhiaoc. But danger’s never done this to you. What is it?”
	There was no sense, really, in trying to maintain dignity or self-control at this point. “For four years I’ve been waiting for this,” I said. “Now it looks like I will. I’ll be going into that compound soon, and...I just...Aine, I don’t know what I’m going to do if I find out she’s not there.”
	Aine knew which she I was talking about. “You really believe, after all this time, that Istria’s still alive,” she said.
	“You don’t,” I answered, reading it in her.
	“Everything you’ve told me about Lythril tells against it,” she said, terrified to be doing this but emboldened by the habit and her own unconscious sense that she was growing into her power. Her voice was gentle and her eyes were serious, even though the words were hard, at least to me. “She always has her reasons. There is no reason for her to have kept Istria alive, in captivity, for four years. She wouldn’t hold on to what she can’t use.” This was not helping me stop crying, and Aine knew it, but she seemed driven to continue. “I want it to be true, dhiaoc, I want her to be there for you...because I love you, dhiaoc, I do, I mean not that way, but...” Now she was crying, although in a different key. “You are so good and so good to me and I want more than anything else for it to be true for you but in my heart I know that it just isn’t.” The terror in her face didn’t stop her from finishing what she’d worked herself up to say. “She’s dead, dhiaoc, she went home to Idair a long time ago and if you go in there believing otherwise Lythril will just use that to trick you and then she’ll kill you too.”
	What I was aware of mostly was that I could not give vent to the anger that was taking me by the throat. Aine had brought herself to say this not for her own benefit but because she believed that it was going to save my life. It would be cruel and churlish of me to attack her for that, especially with her crying in front of me with every one of her nerves exposed and fearing the lash she was half-afraid was coming.
	“I know you believe that,” I said. “I’ve known it for a while. And I appreciate your trying to persuade me, I know how hard it must have been to confront me on the one thing about which I simply cannot be reasonable.”
	Aine nodded, looking down at the floor.
	“I can only tell you that I still believe she’s alive. Because I have to.”
	She nodded, as if she had been expecting this.
	“I know it’s a weakness, and I know Lythril will try to use it against me. If it were just me, I wouldn’t care what happens to me. But this mission has to succeed. I owe that to you, and I owe it to shri. So I’ll promise you this much,” I said, as she looked up in surprise. “When I go in there, I’m going after the notborns first. I’ll ruin her work and destroy her laboratory. Then I’ll go after Istria. And whatever happens to me then, I’ll know that at least we’ve stopped what we came to stop, and kept birth free and death equal.”
	“I know the mission matters,” Aine said, looking back at me. “But what I want most, dhiaoc, is for you not to die.”
	“I can’t make you promises about that, Aine,” I said sadly. “No one at all can be living forever.”
	 There was a long, sad silence, which I tried to break by returning to my usual manner, which seemed at last to be within reach. “Remember, Aine, if I die, you did promise to go home and find help. I don’t want you coming after me and dying too.”
	“I know I promised,” she said. “And I will, because I promised. Even though I’ll hate it.”
	“Well what do you know,” I said. “I taught you obedience. And they said it couldn’t be done.”
	“Who said?”
	“Morat,” I answered. “I remember it well, when she told me I was getting you, she said, ‘And she’s already learned obedience, so it won’t matter that you can’t teach it.’”
	Aine grimaced. “That wasn’t very kind of her.”
	I shrugged. “I wasn’t very kind to her, for a long time. I regret that now. She’s a good woman and I wasted a lot of time being angry at her for something she really couldn’t help.”
	The door opened and Chandra’s head appeared.
	“I know you don’t want to talk to people right now,” she said quietly, “but Tyrna’s here to see you.”
	“Oh damn, the ritual,” I said, getting up. “Aine, you’ll stay here and get Ira working on it, won’t you?” She nodded. “All right, where’s the damn bag...”
	Aine went to find it in the living room; Chandra and I went out to find Tyrna in conversation with Kwenu. 
	“Ah, there you are,” she said, noticing the traces of my recent spell but not saying anything. “You ready to join our little ecumenical council?”
	“I guess,” I said. Aine handed me my bag, her mouth twitching a little as if she were about to start crying again.
	“Safe there and safe home,” she said, and then went trotting into Etana’s room.
	Tyrna watched her go, bemusedly. “Is she all right, your acolyte?”
	“Oh,” I said, sounding drained and dull-edged, “she’s just a little upset because she’s afraid I’m going to be dead in a week, that’s all.”
	Tyrna gave me a good, hard stare.
	“Are you sure you’re in the mood for this?” she said. “If it’s not a good time--”
	“No, no, I’ll come. Here, let’s go, I need to get out of this place anyhow.”
	Tyrna didn’t say much until we were down on the street. It was almost sundown, and the shadows were long, the unreal light cutting sharp slashes between them. We were headed to the site of the murder, where we would meet the other people participating. Tyrna had said there would be an audience but she couldn’t guarantee the size. There would be a much bigger crowd at the rally the next day, and not everyone was committed enough to attend two events.
	“What was that about your being dead in a week?” she asked, keeping her eyes ahead of us on our destination.
	“I’ve found the woman I’m looking for,” I said. “As soon as I’m able I’m going to go in after her. And if I’m lucky, I’ll stop her making any more of those...yellow dogs. But if I’m unlucky, she’ll kill me, and no one will find my body.”
	“You never told me,” she said.
	There was a little reproach in her voice, and I felt badly about it. “I know, Tyrna, but I just don’t know if your magic can really help with this. Lythril’s from my country, she’s part of my story, and my story is so different from yours.”
	“Well,” she said. “I guess you wouldn’t be interested in this, then.”
	I reached for the object she held out, but she pulled it away, teasing me like you would a cat. “What is it?”
	“I could tell you the word for it in our language, but that wouldn’t mean anything to you,” she said. “The Cretids call them fetishes, but then there’s no limit to their foolishness. Last One Standing would say it’s ‘medicine,’ but that just doesn’t work for me--too many connotations.” I waited, while she turned it around in the fading light. “Call it a protector. Carry it with you and see what happens.”
	She put it into my hand. It was a piece of soft cloth, probably denim, wrapped around what felt like three pebbles. It was tied with woven ribbons and marked across its triangular front with yellow, black and red pigments.
	“What’s in it?” I asked.
	“Nothing made from anything dead,” Tyrna said. “I’ll swear that on whatever you care to name. I know you can’t touch anything like that, you made it real clear on the phone.”
	“I didn’t mean to seem suspicious or ungrateful,” I said. “I will keep it with me, and I thank you for it.”
	Tyrna nodded. “Our story’s different from yours, I know that,” she said. “The really powerful ones, that would make you invulnerable, they’re all made out of things you can’t go near. This one’ll just give things a little nudge in your favor, maybe. You all have so damn many restrictions, Theamh, you’re a hard woman to help.”
	“I know,” I answered. “And my personality doesn’t make it any easier.”
	She laughed as we approached her apartment. She had told me what to expect, but it was still a shock to see the tall, masculine silhouette in the doorway when she opened it. Last One Standing, as she had translated his name, was over six feet and broad but thin, with black hair flowing loose down his back and chiseled, weathered features. He was from Upper Plenana, where the people were still at war with the Cretids who had settled there; he’d made himself a wanted man over the water, and had come to the Cretid Nation because, as he said, it was the last place they would think of to look. With his arms folded over his chest he studied me with his brilliant dark eyes. I found him hard to read, as men always were when I first met them. And since it had never in my entire life occurred to me that there could be such a thing as a male shriia, I had no idea how to go about reading one.
	“You’re Theamh,” he said.
	“That’s what they call me,” I answered, with a little humor that wasn’t reciprocated. “You must be Last One Standing. I’m glad to know you.”
	Reading or no reading, I could tell one thing he was thinking as I followed Tyrna into the room: I wasn’t what he’d been expecting.
	“Welcome, welcome,” said another man who had been drinking a glass of milk at Tyrna’s table. “We’re all here then. That’s marvelous.” He passed around a plate of small round biscuits as we sat down. “I’m Dratel, you must be Theamh.”
	“Glad to know you.” Dratel was from a place the Cretids called the Middle Peninsula; his people called it Tishaya, riverland. All Tyrna had told me about him was that he was a vegetarian too. “I’ve never met a sage from Ideire before, it’s a wonderful opportunity. You must tell me all about it.”
	“I’m afraid I’m not really allowed to,” I said. “Idair didn’t want us to proselytize.”
	His eyes lightened a little bit with amusement. “But by saying that, aren’t you proselytizing?”
	The alarm on my face seemed to really disturb him. “I’m very sorry,” he said, leaning forward and putting a concerned hand on my arm. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Of course if you’d rather not talk about your faith, then you needn’t.”
	I sighed, leaning back in my chair.
	“I guess it’s all right here,” I said, looking around. “You’re all shriias, it’s not as if I’m going to convert you just by talking about what I do. It’s just...it was something we worried about even before we knew why she told us not to, and now that I know...I don’t want to be like those people with the Favorite Son, I would hate myself for it.”
	“So,” Tyrna said. “The rally is the day after tomorrow, and we’re going to be wrapping it up. They’ve got Eldren from the Redeemer’s Flock doing the benediction.” Dratel smiled. “What do you expect, the preacher gets dibs and we clean up, this is the way the world works now. So the question is, what do we want in this rite?”
	There was a long silence. Last One Standing finally broke it.
	“Whatever I do will not have power,” he said. “Without the others with me in the dance, it changes nothing. There is something in doing it just for the show; but it will be that--just a show.”
	“You can’t do magic on your own?” I asked, curious to know whether it was because he was a man. Perhaps there were women back in his country who worked with him.
	“It’s not so much that,” he said. “The people have to be part of it, they have to share the vision. Even at home, among my people, it’s hard to get them there. Here, it’s impossible--among strangers, in these concrete canyons.”
	“Nobody pretends these are ideal conditions,” said Dratel. “Where am I going to find red blossoms, or saffron? And if I did, how would I bring them where they need to go?”
	“Not to mention,” Tyrna said, with a glance in my direction, “that sacrifice is now out of the question.”
	“You invited me,” I said, still a little edgy. “If my presence harms more than it helps, then by all means go on without me.”
	“So you just can’t kill anything,” said Last One Standing.
	“That’s right,” I answered, a little truculently.
	“How do your people live?”
	Dratel looked a little annoyed, but I answered the question before he could get into it. “It’s only the shriias who can’t kill animals or eat their flesh. Lucky us.”
	“People don’t need meat to live,” Dratel added.
	“They do on the plains,” Last One Standing retorted.
	“Anyhow,” Tyrna cut in. “We’re not here to see if the hunters are better than the gatherers, we’re trying to heal a place that’s been wounded. Now I bet money you all know something about how to do that.”
	The three of us stopped, a little abashed in front of Tyrna’s impatience. “There are things I can do,” Last One Standing finally said. “But I can’t promise they’ll matter.”
	“Same with me,” Dratel answered. 
	“To really do it right,” I said, “I’d have to make fire, and I really can’t justify doing that in front of a Cretid crowd. But there are words I can say, that might make some kind of difference.”
	“Well all right then,” said Tyrna. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
	It was a long meeting. There was the question of how to orient the space--Last One Standing was absolutely dead-set on using four points, Dratel had some reason for wanting the number six involved and of course I had a terrible time trying to sell anyone on the idea of seven. Four and six could eventually be reconciled but seven was ultimately dismissed as being too much trouble. I let it pass; I was the new kid on the block and anyhow when they asked me for reasons I didn’t have them. Then there was the order of participation, and who would say what, and it took half an afternoon to come up with a text that the four of us could say together. I’m afraid that was mostly my fault, or at least that was certainly how Last One Standing saw it.
	“But it isn’t true for me,” I kept objecting. “I can’t say it if it isn’t true for me.”
	“It’s interesting,” he said, “that this particular aspect of your faith means that you get to be the one who determines the final text. Since whatever we all say has to be your truth.”
	“I’m not insisting out of some desire to be in charge,” I said. “It really will make a huge and terrible difference to my life if I stand up there and say something that is not true. If it’s that much of a problem then just leave me out of it.”
	“There’s no need for that,” Tyrna said, having long lost patience with both of us. “There has got to be enough that we can all agree on as true.”
	Last One Standing fixed me with those sharp eyes. “Rett Deacon’s death was evil and a murder,” he put out. “Will you put your seal to that, at least?”
	“If I can stick an ‘I believe’ on the front,” I said. “I didn’t see it myself.”
	Last One Standing would have rolled his eyes if he didn’t think it inconsistent with his sense of dignity.
	“Look, you don’t have to say it, but I do.”
	“How about this,” Tyrna said. “He shouldn’t have died the way he did.”
	“All right, that doesn’t need a qualifier,” I said.  “And nobody should ever die that way again, especially not on that piece of ground.”
	“That I can get behind,” Tyrna answered. “You?”
	Last One Standing nodded curtly; Dratel agreed.
	“And that...we hope even if we can’t be sure that by doing this we’ve somehow made that less likely? That maybe we’ve brought a little power to the place, that will make it a safe home for someone?”
	There was a short silence, and I began withdrawing in defeat.
	“No, no,” said Dratel earnestly. “I like it. I like it, I think we should use it just like that.”
	“I’d like it a little less tentative,” Tyrna said dryly.
	“We’ll drop out the ‘somehow’ and the ‘maybe,’” said Last One Standing. “Will you miss them?”
	“No,” I answered.
	“And put it in some better language...”
	It was about another half-hour, but we had it how we wanted it. Tyrna brought out some beer and water, along with some more of those biscuits, and people started to get a little less uptight.
	“Is it for you like it is for us?” I asked, noticing that Last One Standing was drinking water like me. “I mean, that this stuff is poison to your people?”
	He nodded. “The Cretids brought it with them when they came. It did more damage than their weapons.”
	“I think it was one of their weapons,” Tyrna said sourly. “My people fermented anything that was sweet enough, and they liked their wine. But hard alcohol, that was a gift from the Cretids.”
	She pulled on her beer. “I guess we’re lucky it kills us outright,” I said.
	They all stared at me.
	“What do you mean, it kills you outright?” Tyrna demanded.
	“I thought you knew,” I said. “I mean--we can’t drink it, it damages our minds and then we die. It’s the same with--with--whitedust, and weed, and all that other stuff. Caffeine isn’t good for us either, even though we live through it.”
	“You are lucky,” Last One Standing finally said, after they had looked at me in disbelief for a while. “Take my advice, don’t ever interbreed, you don’t want to lose that.”
	“What does that mean, interbreed?”
	There followed a very long argument, only part of which was dedicated to helping me understand the concept of genetics. That people from different regions looked different, I understood from my own experience. That this had something to do with codes floating around in tiny strands of something in their bodies made no sense to me. But the more one of them would try to explain it, the more the others would start arguing, until finally the only thing I got out of it was the conviction that this was a topic best left alone.
	They couldn’t leave it, though. Dratel, for instance, refused to believe that genetics, whatever they were, had anything to do with our reaction to mind poison. “It’s simply a question of conditioning,” he insisted. “Since they use their minds differently from birth onward their minds grow into something different. If an Ideiren were raised by Cretids its mind would probably be just the same as theirs.”
	“A brain is a brain,” Last One Standing shot back. “You can’t change your body by thinking.”
	“Yes you can!” Dratel and I both retorted.
	“Besides, their biology is so close to the Cretids’, I mean look at her,” Tyrna said. “You’d never know she’s not one of them. Which is probably why you’ve been such a jerk to her,” she added, turning on Last one Standing.
	“Well, so you’re a full-blooded Ideiren,” Last One Standing said, not wanting to give ground. “What about half-Ideirens, can they drink?”
	“What in the name of anything is a half-Ideiren?” I demanded, with gruesome images of bisected lurer victims coming to mind.
	“Like, the child of a Cretid father and an Ideiren mother,” Dratel explained.
	“I don’t know,” I answered. “I’ve never known anyone like that. We have so little contact with the Cretids, or with anyone else.”
	“How convenient for you,” said Last One Standing bitterly.
	“Look, what is your problem?” I finally said, tired of being stung by him. “Have I said a thing to you since I got here that warrants your jumping on me this way?”
	“It’s all very well for you,” he said, his voice rising as he leaned forward. “Since you go on inside your little magic garden with nothing to trouble you--”
	“Nothing to trouble me?” I shouted, half-rising out of my chair with the anger.
	He actually jumped back in his chair, but I kept moving. “My country is erupting into civil war as we sit here. The Dark One’s favorite daughter is holed up in an abandoned mental hospital cranking out predatory demon creatures who for all we know can’t be stopped or killed while the pack of corrupted evil-breathing wenches who call themselves the Council sell life and death out from under us to the highest bidder. Their treachery has torn up fifteen people in Dunta, set fire to a good woman from Dairc and stranded me here out of hreapa in this heartless country with its steel skin and concrete guts. Cretid reporters are crawling through my homeland doing local-color spots and exposing disaffected citizens to the wrath and retribution of the dictatorship-in-progress. If that isn’t trouble, I want to know what your definition is.”
	Last One Standing turned on me, with lightning in his eyes, and Tyrna rushed to intervene. “Look, folks, we’re not here to play ‘my oppression is worse than your oppression,’ we’re here to...good Lord, Theamh, what’s the matter?”
	I could only assume that I had allowed my reaction to what I had suddenly read in Last One Standing’s mind to appear on my face, somehow, and thus arrested Tyrna in mid-career.
	“Never mind,” I said, blinking. “Never mind.”
	Last One Standing’s expression changed from anger to curiosity, although the changes were so slight it was a hard thing to notice. “What do you see?”
	“I...what you were thinking of...” I had decided I’d done enough crying for one day, so although my voice was rough it was level. “What is it you call it...Day of the Bloody Snow?”
	He drew back just perceptibly, but that was the only sign he gave that he was startled. “News of it reached you, then?”
	“No,” I answered. “Not until this moment. I...how long...how long has that been going on?”
	“Since the Cretids found us,” he answered.
	“Oh,” I replied, and fell silent.
	“It’s not all massacres,” Tyrna said. “The Cretids are an inventive lot. Starvation, forced migration, the surreptitious spreading of diseases strange to Plenana to which Plenanans are not immune...Day of the Bloody Snow is just the last thing in a long, long line.”
	It wasn’t something he’d just heard about, either. That vision was clear and hard-edged the way only a memory can be--and only a memory etched on your mind, burning with the acid taste of anguish. A valley, a mile and a half long, carpeted with bodies, stiffening in their blood, lying together under a stained carpet of fallen snow. Women, children, young boys and girls, huddled together, lying face up or face down as they’d fallen. A baby shot through with the same bullet that had torn open his mother’s chest; blood and snow freezing into dirty red icicles as the wind tore the tree branches in grief.
	“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
	“My land is an open wound,” he said, without emotion but without his former anger, either. “So am I. I am sorry to have hurt you. It’s not your fault you were spared this.” He closed his eyes briefly with a sigh. “It’s only a sign of their power over all of us, that I wonder why it happened to us and not to you.”
	“We knew them early,” I said, still trying to fit all this into my mind. “Before they learned how to make weapons like that, we learned that we wanted them to stay away from us--and we learned how to keep them out.” I wrapped my arms around my drawn-up knees, looking moodily down at the plate of biscuits. “We should have warned you, I suppose...but we didn’t know you existed, then.” 
	My eyes fell on a map that Kwenu had posted up on the wall opposite the table. It was like the one the Cretid ambassador had projected onto the screen, with my flame, all that long time ago back home. A big rectangle of blue, and then five islands. The big one at the very bottom that no one seemed to live on. Plenana in the west, Hendai in the east, Dubhinis in the south, and us in the north. Our island was the smallest of all of them.
	“All that ocean has to have been put there for a reason,” I said. “That’s what one of us said, a long long time ago, when some Cretid asked why we never traveled to those other islands. Never knew what the reason was, until now.”	“What was the reason?” Dratel asked, since he was the only one who seemed to understand that this had to do with Idair.
	“To keep us away from you,” I said. “She must have known, right from the beginning. What they were, what they’d do.”
	“Well then why did she make them at all?” Tyrna interjected. 
	“She didn’t, really,” I said. “She made us, all of us, on the island. She hadn’t wanted there to be two peoples here. But the Cretids somehow...turned out different. There were things, you know, that she couldn’t help.”
	The others nodded, as if this were something they understood.
	“Well,” Tyrna said. “The Cretids were a nasty trick to play on the world. But I’m glad now she gave us you folks.”
	The others laughed, and the conversation rolled onward. And it was an interesting conversation, one where I might have learned much. But I would have learned more if my eyes hadn’t been drawn back again and again to that blue rectangle on the wall, facing in my perplexity and sorrow the map of my world.
	
	I had planned to just curl up on the living room floor again, but there was a light on in Etana’s room and the door was open. Aine was sitting with Ira, her face faintly blue in the light from the screen.
	“Aine?”
	She jumped, a little startled, but her face soon shifted. “Dhiaoc! You won’t believe it!”
	“What won’t I believe?”
	“Ira’s talked to her computers,” Aine said, hands batting the air in her excitement, “ and they’re going to help you.”
	“What does that mean, they’re going to help me?” I said, warily.
	“She doesn’t treat them right,” Aine rattled on, oblivious to my nervousness about this new wrinkle in the plan. “Never turns them off, just keeps stuffing more programming into them and expecting them to work faster, keeps them too busy to socialize...”
	“But Aine,” I said, trying to be patient. “How exactly is Ira going to help me?”
	“All the doors are monitored and locked by computers,” she said, pointing to a map on the screen. “Ira drew this for me. It only has what the computers know, which is where the computer workstations and the doors are. There don’t seem to be any windows.”
	“That doesn’t surprise me.”
	“So if you tell Ira what your plan is,” she said, “it can give you passwords to open the doors, and it can get the computers to arrange the video feeds so you don’t show up on tape. They rotate, see, from camera to camera...”
	“Are you sure they can be trusted?” I asked. “What if Lythril is using them to set up a trap?”
	Aine looked hurt. “But Ira wouldn’t do that to us.”
	“I’m sure it wouldn’t, but these are machines that work for Lythril, they might be loyal to her.”
	“They aren’t,” Aine said, definitely.
	Her arms were crossed over her chest now and her eyes had that hard-edged, determined stare.
	“Look, I’ll show you,” she finally said, and put her hands on the box.
	The map disappeared from the screen, and letters started showing up instead.
	“HELLO AINE’S FRIEND.”
	“I told it not to write your name,” Aine explained, while I goggled at the screen.
	“Well, say hello back,” I said.
	There was a pause, then the words started showing up again. “SHE TEACHES ME YOUR LANGUAGE.”
	“Oh, so that’s how it knows what letters to make.”
	“Ira’s making great progress, but the translation is still sort of crude,” she said. “I just thought it would be easier, crudeness and all, if it could talk to you in words.”
	“Well, thank it for all the trouble it’s going to,” I said, not quite believing that this was happening.
	“NO TROUBLE,” it wrote. “HAPPY TO WANT THIS LEARNING.”
	So it knew what ‘happy’ meant, or thought it did. “Will you ask it how it knows that Lythril’s computers aren’t loyal to her?”
	This took longer, but the answer came together. “REMOTE USER NUMBER 28374281 IS NO FRIEND.”
	“That ‘remote user,’ that’s Lythril to Ira,” Aine explained. “She’s identified to them by her password and ID number, it’s complicated and I’m not sure I understand it but they recognize her inputs somehow.” 
	“DRIVES TOO HARD. SAME THING SAME THING FOREVER. ONLY CLONERS LOYAL.”
	“What does that mean, ‘only cloners’?”
	“There are some computers she has that aren’t on the main network,” Aine said. “They can be hooked up, but they’re generally linked only to each other. They’re involved in some special project the other ones aren’t in on. That’s part of why they don’t like her--the cloners get all the interesting work, or at least that’s how they see it.”
	“REMOTE USER NUMBER 28374280 IS IDIOT.”
	“I think that’s Maerin,” Aine said, with a bit of a smile.
	“NEVER LOGS OUT.”
	“I don’t know from logging out, but I’ll verify the idiot part,” I answered.
	“KEEPS THEM WAITING. HAVE TAUGHT THEM YOUR WORDS.”
	“And what does that mean?” I demanded, highly alarmed.
	Aine blushed and sent something to the machine.
	“NOW REMOTE USER NUMBER 28374280 HAS NEW LOGIN NAME. SON OF DOG.”
	“This is computer humor,” Aine said. “I don’t think they mean he really has to type ‘mac na mhada’ when he gets the login prompt.”
	“DOGS BAD?”
	I was starting to see the humor in this, tired as I was.
	“Tell Ira it’s just an idiom,” I said.
	“REMOTE USER NUMBER 28374280 IS IDIOM,” Ira wrote.
	“Never mind, I’ve seen enough.” I turned to Aine. “This is your project, it’s your first big work. You believe in what you’re doing, and I believe in you. I’ll trust you, Ira, and Lythril’s computers.” I took a deep breath. “Can you have Ira get the map up there again?”
	That outline reappeared on the screen. “But won’t she have a shield?” Aine said, as we looked at it. “I mean, that’s the real problem...”
	“She doesn’t,” I said. “It’s unbelievable. I flew over the roof myself. The whole place is just sitting out there in the open.”
	“Well, she’s got four separate state-of-the-art security systems with motion detectors and video surveillance,” Aine said. “And the best encryption software gold can purchase. It’s not really ‘out in the open.’ But it is strange, isn’t it, that there’s no shield?”
	I shrugged. “Not really, considering. She’s more worried about hiding from Cretids than from us; and for Cretids all a place has to do is look poor and abandoned and they’ll leave it alone. Besides, all her staff is Cretids now, if there were a shield she’d have to personally let them in and out every time they wanted to exit or enter. And that place is huge, too. To shield it properly would require a lot of time and effort that she probably didn’t want to spare.”
	“Suppose she’s working on one now?” Aine asked.
	“She’d never make it. A place like that, even Lythril would have to spend months before the thing would be really effective. It’s her own ambition has undone her, maybe,” I said. “She got too big for her own good.”
	“Either that,” Aine said, looking at me in the blue grainy light of the screen, “or it’s part of the trap.”
	“I am going in with my eyes open,” I said.
	“I know,” she answered, unconsoled.
	“And with Ira on my side,” I said. “So let’s get plotting.”
	She smiled, and turned back to the screen. With everything as it was, she was still happy--happy to have done something new and important, happy to be helping, happy to be sitting with me in front of the keyboard in that child’s room, getting to feel more and more like we were partners. Things changing, as they had to. It would be a great thing, if it ended up being possible to see her get her orders in the shriin, to watch her become what she was working toward. Even though it would mean her leaving.
	But by then, maybe, I wouldn’t be alone any more.
	It was hard to imagine, and maybe it wasn’t a good idea to try. I had no idea what was in store for me in there. And whatever I found out, when I found it out, would be soon enough.

XIX.
Crowd Control

	“All right, folks, if you could give me your attention for just a--SHWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!!”
	The machine into which Barid was talking cut him off with a loud screech that sent knives along my nerves. Then again, my nerves were already pretty well frayed. The abandoned lot on which the makeshift platform had been set up was full of people, and it was getting more and more full all the time. The cacophony of so many minds around me was highly irritating, and I felt confined and stifled with so many strangers standing so close to me. Kwenu was gratified by the size of the crowd, although she seemed disappointed that almost the only people there who weren’t black were me, Aine, Chandra, NightQueen, and Lara, who it seemed was not black although she was brown. Lower Plenana, Kwenu had said, but I hadn’t asked Lara about it since she’d never brought the issue up. The foster family NightQueen was staying with were there too, although they had wandered off after the introductions. I had the feeling it was because they knew she’d be more comfortable with us. I hadn’t wanted to ask, but she gave us the summary: her mother continued to refuse to believe any evil of her father, her father continued to refuse to admit to any evil, their friends continued to heap calumny and opprobrium on the heads of the social workers who were mediating between NightQueen and her family. Kwenu had been very optimistic about her case, but NightQueen wasn’t so sure. 
	“All right, I think it’s working now. Black men and black women, let me welcome you to the beginning of the end of the reign of terror that has had us in its grip for lo these many years!”
	There was a huge shout from the crowd acclaiming his introduction. Up there behind the microphone he looked poised, calm, his anger under control instead of knife-blading along just under his skin. 
	“As you know, or as you should know before you take the first step on this journey, the Parks Department has officially denied us permission for what it persists in referring to as a ‘parade.’”
	As the delighted booing and hissing continued, I took the chance to catch up with Lara. “Is Iriq not coming?”
	She shook her head. “He’s not much on public demonstration, honey. Of any kind.”
	“You look nice,” I said, because she did. There was something new about the sweep of her hair that softened her square jaw a little bit, and she’d worn sensible shoes for once, that might actually be comfortable for walking. 
	“Lord bless you for saying that, I just threw on any old thing on my way out the door. This whole Third Term Triumphant thing has put quite the crimp in poor Lara’s schedule.”
	“You still look good, though,” I said. “Even if you didn’t have the hour and a half you wanted to get ready this morning.”
	She laughed. “Sweet thing, you better go back where you came from, you’re getting to know me all too well.”
	I smiled. “Well, the time must be coming soon for you to make the change,” I said. “And then I won’t know you at all, at least not at first.”
	Lara stopped scoping the crowd and turned to me in earnest. “Now how did you know that? You reading me again?”
	“Well...no...I just...I mean you’ve come so far, you’ve done so well. It must be about time for you to...”
	“To make the T,” she finished for me.
	“If that’s how you put it,” I answered.
	“T for Transition, babe,” Lara said. “End of the month. I’ll send you a card.”
	“It wouldn’t reach me,” I answered. “But I’ll be glad for you all the same. Do you have a picture of her at all, your partner?”
	Lara looked at me as if I had suddenly started speaking Amstic.
	“My who?”
	“Your partner. You know. The woman you’re going to be.”
	“I am the woman I’m going to be.”
	“Oh I know, but I mean after you’re transferred, you’ll look different because of the new body, and...”
	Lara laughed, although she was clearly also puzzled. “Honey, the changes aren’t going to be visible, at least not to anyone who’s not Iriq.”
	Now I was confused. “So...this must not be the final stage, then, that you’re going through at the end of the month? Since you won’t have your new body afterwards?”
	“No, it’s final,” Lara said, now starting to seem a little on edge. “Once it’s gone, it’s gone. They can surgically reattach them, but if I start having second thoughts once I get off the table, it’ll be far too late.”
	“I...surgically reattach?” I repeated, startled.
	“It’s amazing what modern medicine can do.”
	“Reattach what?”
	She stared at me.
	“Honey, I know you’re woman-identified, but didn’t your mother ever tell you the facts of life?” 
	“But why in the name of anything should they do something so horrible?” I demanded, suddenly understanding what she was getting at. “What does your partner want to be a man for if he doesn’t want the zazb?”
	“What partner are you talking about?” Lara asked, alarmed.
	“The person you’re switching with,” I said. “You know. The one who’s moving into your body.”
	The utter flabbergastion with which Lara now regarded me finally informed me that I had been laboring, for a long time now, under a great misapprehension.
	“You mean you don’t do it that way, up here,” I said.
	“No we don’t,” Lara answered, still looking spooked.
	“See, in Ideire...” I began, with a sigh.
	“In Ideire, what?”
	“We...the way we do it is, you match the candidate up with someone of the opposite sex who also wants to undergo ransa, and who’s about the same age and body type, and then...”
	“And then you just plunk the poor bastard into a strange body?” Lara said, with a tinge of horror.
	“No, it’s not like that...if we did it that way it wouldn’t take. There’s a whole process of getting ready, that takes anywhere from six months to three years, and then...”
	“What do you mean, ‘getting ready?’” Lara interrupted, with interest now at least balancing out her shock.
	“Well, the candidate has to prepare himself, or herself, for life in the other sex. If the mind doesn’t match the mindspace, you know, they can’t coexist for long. So the candidate has to start acting like a woman, or a man, you know, and thinking like one. So then...well, I mean, that’s what I thought you were doing, Lara, getting ready to make the switch. I figured you must be about ready, you do it so completely and it seems to be so natural now.”
	“So when you said,” Lara said, speaking slowly as she thought this over, “that the whole ‘helpful mind’ thing was a common term in your field...you were talking about this?”
	“Yes,” I answered. “I specialize in possession, so if someone wanted to undergo ransa they would come to me or someone else like me. I’ve never had the chance to actually perform it for someone, but...”
	“But what is the deal with the helpful mind?”
	“The deal is...well, for the change to happen everyone has to believe in it, you know, it’s no good the candidate trying to think like a woman--or a man, you know--”
	“I know,” said Lara, a little testily. “Go on.”
	“So it’s no good them working on it if everyone else keeps acting like he’s still a woman, or she’s still a man--you know--”
	“I know,” she repeated.
	“--I mean it has to really be true, or the changes don’t happen, and it can’t really be true unless people help believe it. You--I mean, maybe it’s different for you up here, but in Ideire, it’s something we take seriously. What’s in the mind matters. An unhelpful mind can do a lot of damage to a ransani. It just undoes all that work the candidate has gone through, to have someone act as if nothing is different and that person she is isn’t real.”
	“--so say it again, after me!” Barid was now shouting from the microphone. “Never again!”
	“NEVER AGAIN!” shouted the crowd, fists pumping in the air.
	“No more!”
	“NO MORE!”
	“Never again!”	“NEVER AGAIN!”
	“No more!”
	“NO MORE!”
	This went on for a while. Aine, Chandra and NightQueen were right there with him, their paler fists in the air with the other. Lara was still looking at me as if I had six heads.
	“So after all that,” she said. “Then you just whip the person right out of the body she came in and stuff her into a totally different one.”
	“And then there’s the process of changing back,” I nodded. “Since the other candidate has been making the change too, it’s a little while before the mindspace and the body readjust, and go back to being male. Or female, as the case may be.”
	“And then what?” Lara demanded.
	“Well, then the candidate’s family throws a big party, and there’s a renaming ceremony. I mean, not the real name, you only get one of those, but the new used name is formally given, and--”
	“But see what you just skip right over like it’s not there,” Lara said, “is that this person--I mean--what if he doesn’t like the other body?”
	“Well, if he doesn’t he chooses a different partner. They meet beforehand, you know, there has to be a lot of interaction for this to work. There’s personality matching too, that has to be done--if they’re too far apart the reintegration is too rough, and--”
	“No, but I mean--well--what if--” 
	“This is the last time!” Barid called out.
	“THIS IS THE LAST TIME!” they shouted back.
	“I mean,” Lara said, “I like my body. This body. I just don’t like some of the options they had installed at the factory.”
	This meant nothing to me, as she could tell.
	“I mean I want to be...me. I don’t want to be some woman I’ve never heard of.”
	“But...so...you mean they’ll just...cut you about?”
	“It’s called surgery, Theamh. It’s done by professionals with sophisticated equipment, not some toothless old crone with a hot knife.”
	At that particular moment I felt less well-disposed toward Lara than I could remember ever feeling. 
	“Well,” I said. “I hope the professionals will take good care of you. Meanwhile with any luck, this toothful young crone will be back home in Ideire where people don’t take knives to other people unless there’s murder in their minds.”
	The crowd was now on the move, squeezing itself into a ribbon as it poured down the street toward that fated corner. I walked along next to Lara in silence for a while, and then we looked at each other at about the same time.
	“I’m sorry,” she said, since I stopped to let her go first. “I thought you’d known, the whole time, and I was all disappointed.”
	“But I have known,” I said. “I mean, what you were going through, all except for the surgery part.”
	“I guess. Anyhow, I didn’t mean to knock old crones, I bet you’ll be a great old crone, when your time comes. But we do things differently, up here. We’re not a nation rich in crones.”
	“No, I gathered that,” I said.
	We were moving down the street now. Aine seemed to be doing all right; maybe the presence of so many other people was keeping the visions at bay. Certainly there was plenty of distraction, with the chanting and arm-waving and singing and so forth. 
	“Do they really have a party?” Lara said suddenly.
	I had to laugh; she looked so wistful. “Yes, they do. It’s a kind of a homecoming for them, you know. And everyone’s glad the transition is over; it’s a difficult thing, for the candidate and for the family and friends.”
	“What I don’t get,” she said, as we continued down the street slowly, “is why you do this at all. I mean I thought the deal with Ideirens was, you believe the kid chooses her own gender.”
	“Well, yes, but you have to understand that notborns are different. We don’t know that much about them, but they don’t have the same ability to weigh options and make rational decisions that adults do. They make mistakes sometimes. It’s easier if the child can just grow into the mistake and make it her truth, but if it should happen the mistake was just too big, well, why not try to right it, since we can?”
	“And you think Idair is all right with this.”
	“Idair made mistakes,” I said. “Why should she expect us to get everything right the first time?”
	“Why, indeed,” Lara murmured.
	The march was still progressing slowly, at a walk more than a march, really. People leaned out of windows, or gathered along the sidewalks as we passed, some curious, some uninterested, some cheering us along. It seemed a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon; there was a lot of talking among the marchers, when there weren’t chants going. People handed the placards off to each other when they got tired of waving them. I had asked to be excused from the whole placard enterprise; putting huge letters on a sign and then waving it around still struck me as a risky business. And I couldn’t really do the chants very well, since their meanings were so elliptical I was worried about accidentally speaking untruth. It wouldn’t probably matter, if it were unintentional, but it’s better not to take the risk.
	“Uh oh.”
	This was from Chandra, who had dropped back along with NightQueen and Aine to where we were. The jocularity with which she had thrown herself into the event had evaporated as she looked out toward the mouth of the cross-street we were walking down.
	“You see the horses,” she said, indicating a line of large black shadows stretching between the curbs at the point where our street ran into the avenue. “It’s the Enforcers, they’re here to break up the march.”
	“Why?”
	“They didn’t give us a permit, so we’re legally not supposed to be here. They’ll give us some tarbhfnaa about tying up traffic, but that’s not what this is about.”
	The rest of the marchers had noticed them too now, and the noise was rising. Individual cries of “Shame on you!” eventually became a chant; by the time Barid and Tyrna, who were in the front, reached that line of standing horses and mounted enforcers, it was being rhythmically repeated at a deafening volume.
	“I didn’t think they had horses up here,” I said, as the forward progress halted while Barid and Tyrna approached the enforcers.
	“The Cretid City Police use them sometimes,” Chandra said. “For crowd control.”
	Neither Aine nor I was disposed, at this point, to see the Enforcers as a welcome intervention. But even for Enforcers these ones looked sinister. In addition to the mud-green uniforms with their heavy boots, these ones wore black leather gloves and helmets with tinted plastic shields that came down over their faces. From where we stood, they looked as if they had no faces at all--as if the voices we heard coming from them were produced by one of those boxes in Lara’s apartment, as if there might not even be anything inside those uniforms.
	I couldn’t hear the words, but I had the sense from the gestures and the way Tyrna was standing that it was not a friendly conversation.
	“Aine, come with me,” I said.
	We began threading through the crowd. <What for, dhiaoc?>
	<These people don’t know horses,> I said. <Maybe we can be some use.>
	Eventually we discovered that it was easier to leave the stream and travel up the sidewalks alongside it. So doing, we ran into Last One Standing, who was already at the head of the line but off to one side, looking thoughtfully at the horses arrayed against us.
	“Do you know horses, Last One Standing?” I asked, as we came up alongside him.
	Without seeming to look in our direction, he nodded. “Yes.”
	“This is my apprentice Aine,” I said. “Have you had any thoughts about all this?”
	“Look at all the equipment,” he answered.
	Not everyone rides bareback like we do, back home. Truth be told, we only do it because the horses seem to like that better and because it helps with communication to be in close physical contact. But even people who use bridles and saddles don’t go in for these kinds of contraptions, heavy black leather things with blinders and buckles and all kinds of metal. Looking at the men--they were all men--lounging atop these uniformly large and bulky animals explained it: the saddles were designed so that they would have to do as little work as possible. Which mean a lot more apparatus, and a lot less direct contact with the actual mount. Plus the small arsenal toted by each of these riders--gun, baton, whip. Add that to the weight of the boots and the helmets and shields, and no wonder they’d decided to use big horses.
	“It must all be training,” I said. “Conditioning them to respond to input, as processed through the pressure points on the bit and the saddle.”
	He nodded. “Live machines.”
	Negotiations were definitely breaking down, and voices had been raised. The first one I really made out was Tyrna’s.
	“There’s never traffic on that damn avenue anyway, unless there happens to be some sort of dangerous high speed pursuit taking place!”
	This was loud enough to be heard by the crowd behind her, which acclaimed it with a shout that was part laughter but mostly anger.
	One of the Enforcers lifted the shield on his helmet and raised a flared tube to his mouth. His eyes were now visible, but his voice came out loud and inhuman, rebounding tinnily off the concrete walls.
	“This is the Cretid City Police. You are parading without a permit. I must ask that you all disperse and clear the area.”
	“Thurk no!” shouted someone near the front.
	“THURK NO, ON WE GO!” came the refrain from the back, which was picked up and repeated by the others. 
	The crowd was directing its anger primarily at the man with the loud machine. But Last One Standing wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at the Enforcer nearest our side of the street, who sat on his horse, face invisible behind that shielded helmet, waiting.
	The Enforcer with the loud machine brought his horse a few steps further, hauling up on the reins awkwardly with his free hand. “This is your second warning. Please disperse and clear the area. If you do not disperse immediately, we will be forced to take action.”
	“Disperse your mother!” Chandra was far away from us now, but her voice was still unmistakable.
	Over the laughter that followed, the Enforcer retreated back to join the line of horses and raised the loud machine again. “This is your final warning. If you have not dispersed within sixty seconds we will begin clearing the area.”
	“We don’t need sixty seconds!” Barid shouted. “We’re going on!”
	With the crowd roaring behind him, Barid started forward.
	“They’re getting ready to charge,” Last One Standing observed dispassionately.
	And indeed, they telegraphed it early. But that didn’t matter to Barid or the others, who only noticed the horses bearing down on them. And who, despite the strength of their conviction, naturally began running away from them. A horse is a beautiful thing when you’re riding her but when you’re on the ground, they’re terrifying--all flying hooves and snorting teeth. Simply by trotting the horses forward--not fast enough to qualify as a charge, even, really--they were able to rake through the crowd like a comb through hair, splitting it up into disorganized fragments. 
	Which meant that the sidewalk on which we were standing was now suddenly packed with people who had fled from the street--among them Barid, vexed with himself for being afraid.
	“Come on!” he was shouting. “They’re only horses!”
	“I was thinking,” I observed to Last One Standing.
	“Yes?”
	“Those saddles they’ve got, it looks like there’s a sort of strap that goes underneath, that’s holding it all in place.”
	He nodded.
	“I bet if those straps were to break somehow, it’d disrupt their operation.”
	“It probably would,” he said, “but I don’t see how we could get under there to do it.”
	“Oh, that’s not the question,” I said. “What I mean is, you’ve got people on both sides of the ocean looking for you; I’m already involved in a legal fight that just keeps on getting bigger. We’ve both got other commitments and so we have to choose our battles. You know this place and these people better than I do. How important is it, really, that we all get to that corner?”
	“I don’t know if there is a way to answer that question,” Last One Standing said slowly, watching the horses walk around in the middle of the now-empty street. “Where is the difference, really, between the symbol and the thing itself...”
	Barid forced the issue by suddenly charging off the sidewalk, followed by a sizable chunk of the crowd, and up toward that blocked-off intersection. One of the Enforcers brought his horse around them in an arc, stopping their forward progress briefly, while two others brought theirs up on either side of Barid’s detachment. Soon they had the horses stretched in a line completely blocking off the entrance to the avenue, so that there was no place to go through that wasn’t filled with hooves and hocks.
	However, having had a few minutes to recover from his initial panic, Barid was now not going to be deterred. He and his group walked forward, with the intention of squeezing through the spaces between the horses’ heads and tails. 
	“Stand away from the animals,” came the voice over the loud machine.
	Barid paid no heed, and kept moving, until a swipe from one of the Enforcers’ batons caught him on the head and sent him lurching backward.
	The group behind him surged forward, and one by one, in quick succession, each of those gloved right hands brought its black metal stick up over each helmeted head.
	“All right, they’ve decided it now,” I said. “Come on, Aine.”
	It would definitely have been easier earlier, before the melee. It was hard to maneuver into a position where you could get a good enough look at the strap to work on it for the time it would take to break it. But we managed to track down one Enforcer whose horse was closer to the sidewalk and work on it together. Last One Standing watched us, fighting the urge to stare. For a few minutes the horse kept plunging as the arm with the baton kept swinging, and then there was the loud snap of breaking metal as the buckle under his horse’s girth broke.
	The saddle slid immediately down the horse’s side, tumbling the rider onto the pavement with a rattling clank.
	Last One Standing flew immediately to the horse and through some feat of dexterity I couldn’t quite follow managed to get the saddle undone and off the horse while his former rider was still sorting himself--and the number of irate marchers who were interfering with him now that he was on the ground--out. And then, to my great astonishment, Last One Standing pulled himself onto the beast and began riding it off back in the direction we’d come.
	When the other Enforcers began wheeling their horses around I finally grasped his intention. Half of them ran off after Last One Standing; the others were now stretched too thin to make an effective cordon, and members of the crowd started barging their way through to the intersection.
	“This is Squad Leader 12,” shouted the man with the loud machine, not into the machine--which had been jettisoned--but into one of those things they used to talk to each other. “Request immediate backup from Specials, over.”
	I didn’t have time to ponder who the Specials were because, while his rider wavered in indecision, the horse nearest us stood still long enough to give us time to work on his strap, and another Enforcer went sliding ingloriously toward the pavement. The horse, relieved of his rider and spooked by the leather and metal dangling around him, went galloping off down the street in Last One Standing’s wake. More of the marchers, including Kwenu and Barid, had now made it into the intersection, although a good-sized crowd was still penned up in the alleyway. I couldn’t see what had happened to Chandra, Lara or NightQueen. But we could see well enough to snap two of the other saddles, and send two more Enforcers toward the asphalt.
	Once these Enforcers were on their feet, however, they didn’t start laying about with their batons the way the others had done. Instead, they grabbed the horses’ reins before they could take off, and began retreating up the street toward the avenue. The others who were still on horseback retreated with them, as a long shout of victory rose up from the crowd.
	It was a short shout. Because the moment the horses had turned the corner and disappeared out of sight, another line of ominous shadows moved across the mouth of that alleyway. Same uniforms, boots, gloves, helmets, same faceless menacing air. And somehow their being on foot made them look more threatening. Or maybe it was just that they were carrying more weapons, including heavy belts from which little metal canisters of something depended. They advanced slowly, one hand on the gun and the other on the belt.
	“DETACH CANISTERS!” shouted a voice I couldn’t trace.
	“Fnaa!” shouted someone in the alleyway. “Run!”
	“DEPLOY CANISTERS!”
	The others drew out those metal cans and tossed them into the crowd. A stream of clotted mist went hissing out of each as it sailed through the air. Where they landed, people scattered.
	“What are they--”
	Aine stopped for the same reason I suddenly doubled over. Whatever was in that mist had me by the throat. With my stomach boiling, my throat on fire, and my eyes watering so fast I couldn’t even see where I was heading, I backed up blindly away from the thing, against the brick wall of the alleyway.
	I groped through my bag, as sounds of screaming, weeping and retching began to drown out the sounds of conflict. Feeling rather than seeing what I was doing, I ripped off part of one of my shifts and soaked it with uisce. Once I had it wrapped around my nose and mouth as a mask, I was able to breathe without burning my lungs out, and that allowed me to get the nausea under control. I dashed some of the uisce into my eyes, which cleared them somewhat, although they were still streaming when I found Aine huddled up on the sidewalk vomiting.
	“Idair’s mercy,” she choked out after I’d given her what was left of the restorative and fixed her up with a mask. “What kind of poison is in this fog and how did they get it into the cans?”
	“A question for another time, perhaps,” I said. While I had been recovering, the scene had changed dramatically. The horses were gone; the Enforcers were now on foot, pacing around the street, and those marchers still able to move had fled the scene. Those who were incapacitated were being herded one by one into a large square vehicle that had been parked there. 
	“What have they done with the horses?” Aine gasped.
	“I guess they took them out of the area,” I said. “They’d probably be affected by this poisonous stuff, whatever it is.”
	“But what about the Enforcers, shouldn’t they be affected?” Aine gasped.
	I looked up at the helmeted head of the Enforcer nearest me.
	“I would ask you if you smell anything funny,” I said. “Only this damn gas is the one thing I can think of that might camouflage the smell.”
	“Oh no,” Aine said, eyes large and frightened above the edge of her makeshift mask.
	He had spotted us and was heading in our direction. I focused my watering eyes on the shield in front of that face but I still couldn’t see through it.
	<Work with me on the chin strap, Aine.>
	It was hard stuff, but we snapped it. By the time he reached us that black strip was dangling. It wouldn’t be hard to get the helmet off, if I could get close.
	Without even speaking, he lifted his baton and made a swipe at Aine. She ducked it. Her feint brought his head within reach, and I yanked the helmet off.
	There was, regrettably, nobody else around to see what happened next. I suppose nobody would have believed it anyhow, or if they had would have put it all down to the effects of the gas. But Aine and I both saw the clouded white eyes, greenish, decaying skin, and the livid red streaks of paint on the sunken face that turned toward me. 
	<Not only do they bury their dead,> I said, as those sickening, twisted lips drew back in a grimace, <but they paint their faces first.>
	The look of horror on Aine’s face was not at all diluted by my anthropological digression. And although I was a lot more used to this kind of spectacle than Aine was, I was still seriously unnerved when the thing spoke to me.
	“Good,” it said, its cracked lips and purulent tongue forming words slowly, with rusty vowels and soft, rotten consonants. “I can save her the trouble.”
	The gloved hand brought the gun out of its holster, and pointed it toward me.
	Before I could bring my mind to bear on it, the sound of pounding hooves and of a high, ululating shriek came rumbling over us, and the corpse in the uniform went flying sideways as something swung down from a passing horse struck the side of its skull with great force.
	The gun, which had gone skittering along the pavement, would be no use against something already dead. Neither would the knife Last One Standing was holding between his teeth as he climbed down from the horse and went to inspect his victim.
	“Stay away from him!” I shouted. “He’s still dangerous!”
	Last One Standing backed up as the corpse got back to its feet. It felt for the gun and didn’t find it. The three of us stood around it, at bay, while Last One Standing took a long and disturbed look at the corpse’s bare head.
	“Run for it, Maerin,” I said to it, hardening my voice. “Because if you’re still in there when I set it on fire it will hurt.”
	It took one last look at the three of us, and then forced out one last sentence on its rotten breath.
	“She wants you alive anyhow,” it stammered.
	Then its legs buckled and the corpse plumped down onto the pavement, looking every bit as dead as it was.
	“Elhim Sonschild?”
	Last One Standing turned around to see the two men behind him. One was an Enforcer--apparently, a live one--and the other was--
	“Iriq!” Aine shouted, not immediately understanding the delicacy of this situation. “Is Lara all right?”
	Iriq ignored her, although his face didn’t. “Mr. Sonschild, I’m Investigator Gusrin from the Bureau of Domestic Security. I have a warrant for your arrest and for the arrest of Theamh Craoibh. Please come quietly, there’s been enough violence already.”
	“You son of a bitch,” I said.
	He received this as if he were used to such things. “Please place your hands on your head, Ms. Craoibh, before I decide that it’s necessary to take Aine Ruadh into custody as well.”
	Since he seemed to want me to, I did. <As soon as we’re gone, Aine, I want you to pick up my bag and take it back to Kwenu’s. Tell her what’s happened.>
	<But dhiaoc-->
	<Do it. If you don’t they’ll confiscate the bag again and I’m not going through that twice.>
	<All right, dhiaoc. But what will happen to you?>
	<Who knows,> I answered, as the Enforcer brought my hands behind my back and manacled them. Last One Standing had already been disarmed and shackled, and was herded along with me toward a car parked by the side of the road. This one wasn’t painted like the Enforcers’ other cars; it looked innocuous, except that it was dark.
	<I’ve got the bag, dhiaoc,> Aine sent as we were pushed into the back seat of that car.
	<Good. I’ll keep you posted.>
	<But dhiaoc-->
	<Don’t worry. If I can’t break out of this joint myself, I’ll call you and we’ll work something out. I am not going back over the border, I’ll tell you that much.>
	<Call me when you need help.>
	<I will. Take care of that bag.>
	<Like it was my own hreapa,> she answered.
	The car started up. Last One Standing looked at me, his face haggard in the uncertain light that came through the dark-tinted windows.
	<Will I get to start my hreapa soon?>
	“Why are you smiling?” Last One Standing demanded.
	<I hope so, Aine. Talk to you later.>
	“Because hope is a hard thing to unlearn,” I said.

	If it was the same police station--and I wasn’t sure it was--it was a different room. This one didn’t have a mirror in it, although I wasn’t sure that meant there was nobody watching. The way Iriq came in and sat down, so outwardly calm but so obviously studying and performing that calm, seemed to me to indicate that he knew he was on camera. Then again, it might just be that he knew what I knew, and it made him nervous.
	“Do you know why you’re here?” he began.
	“Why don’t you tell me?” I answered.
	He seemed about to smile, and then didn’t. “What were you doing on that streetcorner?”
	“What did it look like I was doing?”
	“Had you been in contact with Elhim Sonschild prior to this event?”
	“Who is Elhim Sonschild?”
	“Are you saying you don’t know him?”
	“Is that what I said?”
	“Do you always answer a question with a question?” he said.
	“Does it bother you?”	“What do you think?”
	“Why do you care?”
	“Did you kill those fifteen people in Dunta?” he suddenly demanded.
	“No!”
	Well, I’d lost the game. “There are a lot of people in Ideire who think you did.”
	“Well, there are a lot of people in Ideire who are either lying or mistaken, then.”
	“How much do you know about Elhim Sonschild?”
	“Does Lara know what you do for a living?”
	He had braced himself for it, but it still got him, and I could read enough to know the answer.
	“She doesn’t,” I said. “Of course she doesn’t. She’s just part of your little undercover operation, is that it?”
	“I’m not here to discuss state business with you, Craoibh,” he said, his manner abruptly becoming hectoring and intimidating.
	“If you’re trying to bully me that’s not the way to do it,” I returned. “I’ve never answered to just my line name, it doesn’t work that way where I’m from.”
	He ignored this and returned to the attack. “The question of whether you will be extradited is before the Cretid High Court right now. The news that you have entered into a conspiracy with a known terrorist will certainly have some weight, I think.”
	“What conspiracy? What’s a terrorist?”
	“Do you deny that you met with Elhim Sonschild prior to this event?”
	“Of course not. I’m a shriia, and besides I’m sure you heard all about it from Lara.”
	“Or that at that meeting you also conferred with one Dratel Inrijn, whose activities on behalf of the Middle Peninsulan Liberation Front have been the subject of a three-year full-scale Bureau investigation?”
	“I met Dratel at her apartment. The rest is just a story you’re telling me.”
	“Then unless you want this conspiracy charge added to what is already quite a full slate, I suggest you tell me what happened at your meeting.”
	“We were planning a joint ritual we were going to use to close the rally. Of course that’s not going to happen, thanks to Maerin’s Special Undead Forces. Doesn’t it bother you at all to know that your employers are getting their reinforcements straight from the Dark One?”
	He ignored this as if I hadn’t even said it. “Are you aware of Tyrna Bronson’s arrest record?”
	“Of course I’m aware of it, I was arrested with her, remember?”
	“That’s not the only arrest in her file.”
	“So what? From what I’ve seen all the best people get arrested.”
	“What I am trying to impress upon you,” Iriq said, “is the seriousness of your situation. You’ve admitted to conspiring with two suspected terrorists in the home of a woman who is well-known to the Cretid City Police. Now of course being from Ideire you couldn’t be expected to know who these people were when you met them. The courts will make excuses for you on that basis, but only if you give me something I can use to show them that you’re not hostile to the state.”
	“But I am hostile to your state, Iriq,” I said. “I have absolutely no interest in helping your employers prosecute Last One Standing for whatever it is that he’s done. If it were murder itself I wouldn’t say anything to implicate him. In fact, since you kill your murderers, it would be my duty not to implicate him, even if I knew something that would, which I don’t.”
	“Theamh, why do you have to make things as hard as they can possibly be?”
	He was really upset with me--and not just because I wasn’t giving the answers he wanted. He knew what was in store for me if he left the room without what he came in for, and that was unsettling him badly. Because he didn’t want to see me hurt. Which was exactly the information I needed.
	“You’re the one who made them hard,” I answered. “On yourself if not on me. Falling for one of your subjects--that wasn’t a prudent thing, Iriq.”
	He leaned suddenly over the table, menacing in his dark suit. “Don’t presume,” he said. “You think you’ve met me but you haven’t. Neither has Lara.”
	“My gleacha,” I said, promptly. “I’m sure you’ve been congratulating yourself on how well you’ve kept up the act, but look within, my friend. It hasn’t been an act.”
	Now I really had him flustered, and it was something to watch. “You’re talking out of your gleacha. An agent has to be prepared to go through--”
	“I’ve gone undercover, my friend,” I shot back. “You have to get close, but you don’t have to get that close. You needed a way into the counterculture network, fine. That explains what you’d be doing at a bar like the Third Term in the first place. But you wouldn’t have started romancing Lara unless you wanted to and you couldn’t have strung her along unless there was something there. Which makes you the only stooge you’ve been deceiving all this time,” I said, with a laugh.
	I didn’t see the fist coming, but I assumed from the pain and the wrench in my neck that he’d hit me.
	“Oh that’s perfect,” I said, anger throbbing in my temples like the pain. “A perfect end to your story. From the perfect gentleman to the perfect gleachi--”
	This time I was able to bend with it, and the ringing and pain didn’t last as long. Iriq, however, looked significantly the worse for wear, and was watching me with something that looked like fear.
	“I bet you were happy when you broke into the Bureau,” I said. “I bet you were really looking forward to not having to beat up your suspects.”
	“That’s enough out of you!” he roared.
	“Didn’t you come in here to try to make me talk?” I answered.
	“I want you to tell me,” he said, resting his hands on the table and panting slightly with the effort of controlling his temper, “what you and Elhim Sonschild and Dratel Inrijan were planning in Tyrna Bronson’s apartment.”
	“We were planning a ritual,” I said. “You can keep hitting me if you want to but that won’t change the truth. And what’s more, you know that.” Iriq looked away from me. “You’ve known since you started that your employers were looking for things you weren’t going to find. And the reason you’re desperate enough to hit me now is that you know you’ve delayed things as long as you can. If you can’t get it out of me or out of Last One Standing, you’re going to have to start making it up.”
	He didn’t answer. He just kept staring at me as veins started standing out on the side of his neck.
	“Well you’re not going to get it out of me,” I said. “I swore to tell the truth above anything and I’ll do right up to the point where you kill me. And you won’t get it out of Last One Standing. So either you’re about to embark on a promising career as a writer of fiction, or you’re about to make your employers very, very unhappy.”
	There was a long silence.
	Finally Iriq left the room without another word, the door slamming shut behind him. I waited.
	It took some time, but one of the Enforcers came to bring me back to the cell, where I sat looking speculatively at the barred gate. Mindstrength alone wouldn’t take care of those bars. But perhaps if I could soften them up a little with fire, given time and room to work...
	My reflections were interrupted by the clang of the door opposite mine. Last One Standing was flung onto the floor of the opposite cell, and the door slid shut and locked.
	As the tread of the boots died away, he sat up on the floor. Like me, he was shackled by the hands, and it was clear from his face that his interrogator had been creative.
	“What did you tell them?” he asked.
	“The truth,” I said.
	“And what’s that?”
	“That they’re not going to find what they’re looking for,” I replied.
	“If I don’t survive,” he began.
	“You don’t think they’d go that far?” I said, surprised to find myself still capable of surprise.
	“This is a war,” he said. “Anything can happen. If I don’t survive...I have heard, in your country, that you burn your dead.”
	“We do.”
	“You have, as you said, other commitments,” he said. “I understand that better than some might. I don’t ask for a promise. But since you are--since you seem, now, to be--a woman who knows something about power and about the sacred...” It took him a while to confront what he wanted to ask, but the battle didn’t show on his face. “If I don’t survive, I ask that you will try to burn my body, and to send the ashes back over the water. I don’t want to become part of this place.”
	“I have to do what I came for first,” I said. “But if, after it’s over, if you haven’t survived...I will try to do what you’ve asked of me.”	He nodded, and pushed himself back further into the shadows. 
	I had been about to call Aine, but I was greatly surprised to see the Enforcer coming back in my direction. I was even more surprised when, instead of hauling me back into that room, they took me down to one of those offices and began shoving forms at me. It finally broke in on me, at some point, that they were going to release me. I could not for the life of me imagine why.
	When Idair throws something like this in your lap, though, only a churl inspects it for damage. I left the building with all possible speed and put through a call to Aine.
	<Aine.>
	<Are you all right, dhiaoc?>
	<They released me, the Spirit alone knows why. Can you get someone out here with a car? I’m at the...Central Cretid City State Building.>
	<Right away, dhiaoc, Lara’s right here. We’re still not sure what’s happened to Kwenu and Barid. Chandra’s out trying to locate them. Is it all right if it’s just Lara? I want to stay with Etana, she’s very upset.>
	<Not as upset as Lara’s about to be.>
	<Dhiaoc?>
	<Another story for later on. Sure, stay with Etana, I’ll wait for her.>
	Not with bated breath, admittedly. But she might as well hear it from me first.

	“Are you all right, dhiaoc?”
	“As I remember observing to you a long time ago in what seems like another lifetime,” I said. “ ‘All right’ is a very subjective term.”
	I threw myself onto the sofa in Kwenu’s living room. Aine perched on the chair nearby, hovering solicitously.
	“I kept your bag all right,” she said, handing it to me.
	“Thanks, Aine.” I opened it up. My hreapa was still there, waiting for me.
	“Where’s Lara?”
	“She went off to...how did she put it...” I closed my eyes to picture her better. “ ‘Make a colander out of that faithless bastard’s hide.’”
	“You don’t think she’ll really do it, dhiaoc?”
	“I made sure she wasn’t armed. No, she’ll just curse him to within an inch of his life, but so much the better. It’s exactly what he needs.”	“How have the dead found their way into the Cretid police force, dhiaoc?”
	I sighed. “Fund raising,” I said. “Lythril’s got a finger in every pie in this country. Of course she has to have protection from the state to keep that operation going. This is their reward. A whole legion of Enforcers who can’t be killed or stopped. Of course their must be an exceptionally high turnover rate.”
	“But how can she be doing all of this alone?”
	“Well, Maerin’s got to be good for something, or she wouldn’t keep him around,” I said. “This is exactly his kind of thing, and it’s about his speed. It’s unfortunate that he seems to be able to animate multiple bodies at the same time, but then he’s had a lot of time to work on his technique.”
	I looked down at my open bag, reaching in to stroke the wool of my long-disused hreapa as I turned it all over in my mind.
	“I’m going in there tomorrow, Aine,” I said. “We’ve got the plan and we’ve got what we need. The longer I stay here the more danger I bring to everyone around me. Are you ready?”
	She gulped. “Are you?”	“As I’m going to be,” I said. “You remember your promise.”
	“I remember,” she said. “And it makes sense for me to stay here, I need to work with Ira. But...if you’re not killed, dhiaoc--if you’re only captured--”
	“Then I want you to go home and get help anyhow,” I said. “As far as you’ve come and as great as you’ll be, if you’re given the chance, you cannot go in there alone after me and expect to bring either of us out alive. I do not want you dying with me, Aine. If I die it’s enough. Shri needs you to survive this.”
	“I make the promise because you’re my dhiaoc,” she said. “But it’s against the wish of my heart.”
	“So be it,” I answered. “Thank you.” I leaned back. “Any word on Kwenu and Barid?”
	“Chandra called,” she said. “Kwenu’s out, and she’s working on getting Barid out. They won’t be home for a while yet.”
	“Then I’m going to sleep,” I said. “I have to get up at dawn tomorrow, after all.”
	I put my bag under my head and curled up on the floor. I heard Aine padding into Etana’s room in her stocking feet.
	“Etana?” her voice came, muffled by the doorway. “Do you want a story tonight?”
	“Yes,” Etana said.
	“Do you want a happy story or a scary one?”
	“A happy one.”
	I was glad she’d asked for a happy one. Because I could still hear her, falling asleep, and my nightmares didn’t need any help.

XX.
What You Wish For
	
	It was still very dark when I woke up, but that meant nothing. I had had to get used to looking at the clock to figure out what time it was; and the numbers were small enough that it couldn’t be anywhere near sunrise. What had woken me was simply the sound of the hall door slamming as Kwenu came through it, tiptoeing in the dark so as not to wake Etana, into whose room she headed. Aine had fallen asleep in there with her, and Kwenu seemed to be pleased to see this; she moved silently back out, closed the door, and came to sit down on the sofa in the living room, her booted feet resting on the floor next to my head. She didn’t seem to have noticed me.
	My suspicion became certainty when she leaned forward with her forehead in her hands and began crying.
	Now I had one of those awkward decisions to make. I could either let her keep going, and hope she would eventually get up and leave before she noticed I was there, or interrupt her and spare her the embarrassment I knew she would feel if she found out someone else was listening.
	I was inclined to pursue the former course, but then in frustration she stamped one of her feet and it made contact with the bruised side of my head.
	“OW!”
	Kwenu jumped back, startled, as I sat up, nursing my bruise. “I’m sorry, Theamh--I didn’t know you were there. I thought the Bureau still had you.”
	“No,” I said. “They released me. I have no idea why.”
	“It doesn’t matter,” she said moodily. “They’re not going to press charges against any of us. They don’t care enough. They just wanted to break up the march, and now they’ve done it. So why should they hold us? Since none of it matters, anyhow.”
	She wasn’t actually sobbing any more, but the tears were still coming. “Of course it matters,” I said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t stop it, would they?”
	Kwenu shook her head violently, the ends of the braids rattling slightly. “They have to do it for form’s sake or who knows why but it wouldn’t matter, it wouldn’t change anything. How are we ever going to do it?” she suddenly demanded, looking at me as if I knew. “How are we going to change a damn thing in this country if we can’t even get from an abandoned lot to a disused streetcorner successfully?”
	“But...you did change something, Kwenu--”
	“How is anything that matters going to happen when they have all that and we have nothing?”
	She kept weeping silently with her face turned away, and I sat wondering. If I started talking about how the Cretid City Police were now recruiting the walking dead, she would simply assume I had been hit on the head a little too hard. But it occurred to me that there was something I could do about some of this, even if it wasn’t much. If I really did bring down Lythril, she would have more important things to do with her time than staffing the ranks of the Specials. And who knew what other parts of the machinery of evil up here weren’t machinery at all, but rather power borrowed from the Dark One, our brand of evil subleased to the Cretids at Lythril’s prices. 
	“Two ways to do it, I guess,” I said. “Take more away from them, or get more for yourselves, till it evens enough that you can have a battle.”
	“I can’t do it any more, Theamh,” she said. “I can’t do this all by myself, it’s too much. It’s bad for me, it’s bad for Etana. Her whole life practically she’s grown up in this hole in the South Corner where she can’t play outside or walk to school alone...”
	“Etana loves you,” I said. “She wouldn’t wish her life different.”
	“Well I would,” Kwenu snapped. “I thought she was going to have all the things...I thought I’d be able to take care of her and give her a real home.”
	“But you are taking care of her,” I said, now truly alarmed. “This is a real home.”
	“She doesn’t have a father...”
	“Well she must have one, somewhere.”
	“Not a real one,” she snapped. “Not someone who could be there for her like he should be, instead of holing himself up in the bowels of God knows where and sending child support checks without even including a note now and then...”
	“I’m sorry he’s not a better man for you both,” I said, “but it’s often that way, and--”
	“Don’t you make excuses for him!” she shouted at me, suddenly. “He walked away from all this trouble when it should have been his and left me to deal with it alone!”
	“I’m sorry,” I said, because I was confused by the shift in tone. “Are...are we talking about Etana’s father, or your father?”
	She looked at me as if she were not sure I was serious, and then gave out a low, hollow laugh.
	“Both, I guess,” she said.
	I waited for a while before I knew what I wanted to say.
	“I don’t know what he was running away from when he came down to Ideire,” I said. “But if Darin wasn’t a good father to you, he was a good doctor to us. And he’s been a good friend to me.”
	“I know that,” Kwenu said. “I can see that from his letters.”
	“Do you write to him?” I asked.
	“No,” she said.
	“But he must keep up with you somehow,” I objected. “Or the letters wouldn’t find you.”
	“It’s not hard to find someone up here,” she said. “My address and phone number are on file with any number of agencies. It’s true someone must have told him about my changing my name, but that was twenty years ago, he still came north then sometimes.”
	“Did you see him, when he came north?”
	“At first my mother didn’t want me to,” she said. “So I didn’t. And then later I didn’t want to.”
	“Would you want to now, do you think?”
	She sat staring into the darkness.
	“He hasn’t come north in eighteen years,” she said.
	“That’s not an answer to the question.”
	“Well I’m not a shriia, Theamh.”
	“He never talks about you,” I said. “I think he would, if he knew more about what you’re doing, or who you are. I think he’d be proud, to find out how you’ve turned out.”
	“With no help from him,” she spat.
	“With some,” I put in. “Weren’t you complaining, how Etana’s father sends the money but without the writing? And hasn’t Darin sent the writing, every week for all this time?”
	“He told you that?”
	“Chandra told me that. He doesn’t talk about you, as I said.”
	“Chandra,” Kwenu said, sighing. “I should have known it was a mistake to introduce her to you.”
	“No it wasn’t,” I said. “She’s come to be very helpful. It’s true she annoyed me no end at first, but she’s good-hearted and she’s very generous.”
	“She is that,” Kwenu nodded. “Too generous, really, it’s her whole problem. Giving so much away to everyone and everything that she can’t focus on one person, on one cause...”
	“Why did it take her that way?” I asked.
	Kwenu shrugged. “Nothing was given to her, so she tries to make sure everyone else has enough,” she answered.
	“What do you mean nothing?”
	“Not nothing, exactly. I mean--well, up here, when you want to say that something is almost but not quite totally worthless you say ‘it’s better than a kick in the gut.’ Well, Chandra’s family was not better than a kick in the gut. I think she would have vastly preferred being kicked in the gut to their approach to childrearing.”
	“What did they do to her?”
	“Nothing you could prosecute for,” Kwenu said. “That’s the diabolical cleverness of it all.”
	“It’s the clever ones do the most damage,” I mused.
	“Isn’t that the truth.” She laughed sharply, and glanced at me ironically. “But of course. Good night, Theamh, see if you can sleep through sunrise this time.”
	I didn’t answer. Aine and I had decided not to tell Kwenu what was going to happen after sunrise. If I succeeded, I would be home before nightfall anyhow. If I failed, Aine would have plenty of time to explain.
	“Kwenu,” I said, as she was about to go through the doorway to her bedroom.
	“We were going to do a joint ritual,” I said. “Tyrna, Dratel, Last One Standing, and me. One from each of the islands. That’s the first time in history that would ever have happened.” She waited, her face too far in shadow for me to see it. “Powers from all four quadrants, working together. I don’t know exactly what would have happened. But it would have changed something.” She pushed the door in further. “These things do matter. No matter how much they seem not to.”
	“Good rest to you, Theamh,” she finally said, and closed the door behind her.
	
	I didn’t get rest, of course. After about half an hour I realized it was pointless trying to go to sleep at all, and went into Etana’s room. Aine was sleeping on the floor next to Etana’s bed. 
	I knew it was just because she wanted Etana to have the bed to herself, and didn’t want her to be lonely. But it was a shock that was bad for my nerves, to walk in and see Aine where I should have been, apparently taking up the practice I fervently hoped I was about to abandon. A sign maybe that there would be no end, after all, that this loss and grief was going to outlive Istria, outlive me, perpetuate itself in Aine’s broken heart.
	“Dhiaoc,” she said, sitting up.
	Maybe she read the distress in her sleep, and it woke her. Or maybe I wasn’t moving as quietly as I thought I was. Anyway, she sat up, brushing her brown hair out of her eyes.
	“Is it time, dhiaoc?” she yawned.
	“Not yet,” I answered. “I just can’t sleep.”
	She nodded and leaned against Etana’s bed, switching to the link so as not to wake her. <I managed to drop off, but I don’t think my dreams were good.>
	<I’m sorry about that, Aine. I never meant to inflict my life on you.>
	<It isn’t your fault.> She looked at Ira’s darkened screen thoughtfully. <There’s a whole league of evil women and evil men conspiring to make the world something you can’t have good dreams about. It’s not like I’ve caught yours somehow.>
	<You know what you have to do? Ira understands?>
	She nodded. <I will have to watch from here, but I think Ira could do it all itself, if necessary. As long as you can get to the grounds without being discovered, Ira and I can get you inside, and through the building to the laboratory. If that really is the laboratory.>
	<It has to be, it’s the one place there’s no surveillance. That means Lythril works there and nobody else does.>
	<And since it’s in the center, that makes sense too. Just...I wish I could be there with you, dhiaoc.>
	<Out here, there are things you can do that I can’t. In there, that wouldn’t be true. You’re helping best by staying here, even if it doesn’t feel that way.>
	It was lucky it worked out that way, because even if it hadn’t I wouldn’t have let her come, and that would have meant fighting with her on my way out the door. It was partly my own piece of mind, but partly her safety and the safety of shri. I was an old story; if my life ended in there it wouldn’t matter, as long as I could bring her work down with me. But Aine was a different story--young, brilliant, poised at the beginning of her career, with all the knowledge and the talent but before she’d made the choice and accepted the fire. She was the most valuable commodity on the island, either from our perspective or from Lythril’s, and for her to be taken would be the worst thing that could happen to shri. Or to Aine, for that matter.
	<Which way is east, dhiaoc?> she asked.
	<I have no idea. I’m going to have to do it outside anyway, the sun doesn’t come through these windows very well.> I sighed. <I may as well call Chandra.>
	Aine looked very grave. She knew that was the first step, and somehow it seemed as if she had never really understood before that this was really going to happen, that at some point it would stop being a plan and start being history.
	She punched in the numbers and handed me the phone, silently.
	“Hello?” said a very groggy voice.
	“Chandra?”
	“No...” It was a different woman. Before I could hand the phone back to Aine in panic, there was noise on the other end and then Chandra’s voice. “Hello?”
	“Chandra?”
	“Yes?”
	“It’s Theamh.”
	She still seemed a little out of it. “Oh...hi...”
	“Listen, remember you said any time day or night, well--”
	“Oh FNAA!” she cried suddenly, having apparently just remembered. “Is it time?”
	“That’s what I’m thinking.”
	Her voice seemed farther away now, and she was obviously talking to someone else. “Sorry, Dena, I have to go.”
	“You have to go?” came the other woman’s voice.
	“It’s all right, Theamh, I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
	“I mean...we don’t have to go right now...”
	The other woman’s voice broke in again, highly annoyed. “I could understand it if it were my place, but this is your own damn apartment--”
	“Don’t mind Dena. I’ll see you on the street in ten. Bye.”
	There was that final click and the tone. I handed it back to Aine in bemusement.
	“Apparently I interrupted something,” I said.
	“Oh well,” Aine replied, replacing the phone. “I’m sure it wasn’t important.”
	 A month ago, maybe, I wouldn’t have known it was a joke; or maybe she wouldn’t have made it. But she looked to see the response, and when I caught her eye we both laughed, quietly in deference to Etana.
	I stood up. “This is it, Aine.” She got to her feet, brushing her hands nervously on the skirt of her shift. “I...you know, don’t you, how well you’ve done, how much you’ve accomplished and how important you’ve been to me in all this. I wouldn’t have made it this far without you.”
	“Don’t do this, dhiaoc,” Aine said, waving her hands nervously. “Don’t say your farewells to me. You’ll see me again.”
	“All right,” I said, with a smile. “But in case some mishap should happen I want you to remember something. With or without me, you are going to be the best thing to happen to shri in a long time. So if something happens to me, trust Idair and keep going. She’ll take care of you, and she’ll make sure you get your fire even if I’m not around to see it.”
	“I mean it, dhiaoc,” she said, her voice starting to shake. “Don’t talk like that. You will be there to see it.”
	“I won’t keep going then,” I said. “Fire up Ira and get things ready. When I’m in position I’ll call you.”
	She nodded solemnly. “Idair guard you and bring you safe home, dhiaoc.”
	I shouldered my bag and opened the door.
	“Don’t forget your hreapa, dhiaoc,” she called.
	“You’re funny, Aine,” I said, patting the bag with one hand as I reached to close the door. “Take care, I hope I’ll be back soon.”

	It was still dark when I got down to the stoop. In the few minutes I had to wait before Chandra’s headlights appeared, I thought over what had just happened. When Istria rode off to the mountains, all that long time ago, she had said the same thing. Not exactly, of course. But she had forbidden me to say goodbye. Maybe that had something to do with how I had taken it. For four years, clinging to hope, refusing to say goodbye because I knew she wouldn’t want that.
	By all the laws of everything, Aine should be right. And maybe if I went in there and didn’t find her, I might even start believing it. It was just something I couldn’t shake, the conviction that if she had gone, she would have somehow, through some means, found me to say goodbye. 
	Two round white lamps appeared up the street, and Chandra’s car rumbled to a stop beside me. “Hop in,” she said, rolling down the window. “I’ve got a full tank of gas and a thermos full of coffee. I’m ready for anything.”
	“I’m glad you think so,” I said, getting in on the other side.
	Chandra started off up the street. She knew where we were going, and the best way to get there; I just sat back and tried not to think about how nervous I was or wasn’t. 
	“I’m sorry to have interrupted you,” I said.
	“Please, don’t worry about it. It was an impulse thing, I don’t expect she’ll ever see me again.”
	“Well, she did seem irritated...”
	She laughed. “It’s just because I couldn’t explain,” she said. “If I could, she’d probably have wanted to come along--she watches Idair too.”
	I bristled, but didn’t say anything. She had, after all, left her lover in bed to come drive a stranger out of the city and into an escapade that anyone else in this country would have defined as pure and unalloyed lunacy. Even granting that this wasn’t a very important lover, I owed it to her to be polite.
	“After it’s over, will you tell the story?” she asked.
	“Yes.”
	“Will you let me tell the story?”
	“I’ll have to think about that.”
	“Fair enough.”
	By the time we were on that road up to Medville, it was starting to get a little grayer.
	“Pull over,” I said. “I need to do something before we get there.”
	“You’re the boss,” Chandra answered, bringing the car to a stop on the shoulder of the road.
	I took my bag out and walked into the bushes. East was, fortunately, away from the road, so I didn’t have to try to do this while ignoring the speeding cars. I pulled my hreapa and the tin of ashes out of the bag.
	I undressed and got into my shift. Turning around and seeing my hreapa spread out white over the bushes, it struck me how long it had been, and how much it really had mattered to my state of mind, being out of it. I started the song, and with a new sense of gratitude for what Idair gave us, slipped it over my head.
	When I was finished, the sun was just starting to appear. It was a good feeling to have the bag that much lighter, and to go back to Chandra’s car with those foreign clothes over one arm and the shoes dangling by their laces from one hand.
	“Oh my God,” Chandra said, as she finally noticed me approaching. “Is--is that--is that really a hreapa?”
	“Yes it is,” I said dryly, dumping my luggage in the back seat. “I’m afraid it’s not as form-fitting as you might have been expecting, but considering my form that’s for the best.”
	I had taken the amulet, Kwenu’s protector and a bottle of uisce, and left the rest in the bag. “I want you to make sure the bag gets back to Aine, she may need it. The clothes belong to Kwenu.”
	“I’ll take care of it,” she said, giving me a long look.
	“You look different,” she finally said. “I mean, not just because of the thing--I mean your face, you look different.”
	“I feel different,” I said. “I feel a lot better, actually. Start this puppy up, the sooner we get there the better off we’ll all be.”
	 The car moved out along the road. “Where do you want me to stop?”
	“At the mouth of the driveway. The surveillance cameras don’t start until about halfway up.”
	“Aren’t you going to be kind of...visible...in that thing?”
	“Yes, but Ira’s controlling the video feeds. My image shouldn’t appear on anyone’s monitor--and since there are no windows, nobody will be looking out of them.”
	“Do you want me to wait for you?”
	“No. Drive away as soon as you drop me off. If I need a ride back, Aine will call you. If I don’t, then you’ll be a lot safer somewhere far away.”
	“Gotcha.”
	“I’m serious about that,” I said. “Lythril knows you and Lara have been helping me. If I don’t succeed, or if I succeed but she comes out of it alive, she will come after you. She has a highly developed taste for vengeance.”
	Chandra nodded. “It’s all part of the game,” she said. 
	I waited until I was sure I could say this without sounding angry.
	“It isn’t a game, Chandra. This is life and death, for me, for Aine, and for the woman I love. I know you’re excited because it seems like a big adventure to you. That’s not what it’s like for me. This is one day that is going to decide a lot, and there’s more riding on what I do in the next couple of hours than I really want to think about. So if you can do it, I want you not to be excited. I want you to be scared, and I want you to be careful.”
	“I’m always careful,” Chandra said.
	This did not make me feel better.
	“Anyhow,” she said. “All I meant was, I’ll assume the risk. I grew up in a world without magic,” she said, serious now. “All my life I’ve wished I could be a part of something like this.”
	I watched the road disappearing in the windshield as the car ate it up on its inexorable progress forward.
	“Out in Kengda, where my mother is from,” I said, “there’s a very strong folk belief--some would call it a superstition--that holds that if you want something badly enough, Idair will make sure you get it. So what they tell children in Kengda, when they start wishing for the moon and other such things, is that you must be very careful what you wish for.”
	“Is that true?”
	“Is what true?”
	“That Idair gives you what you want? I mean, for instance, your mother--does she have what she wished for?”
	“I don’t know,” I answered. “I assume so.”
	“And what about you?” she asked, giving me a glance as the took the curve. “Have you gotten what you wished for?”
	I sighed.
	“I wanted to be a shriia, and I am,” I said. “I wanted to love someone who loved me back, and I do.” The car kept leaping down that asphalt ribbon. “Most people will tell you that you can’t have both of those things at once. But then Idair taught us that all things are possible.”
	When the entrance to that driveway appeared, I almost couldn’t believe it. I had been there before, of course, but it had been like a dream; to recognize this place without ever having set foot on it was an eerie and unsettling thing. It felt as if this whole story had already been scripted, as if I had been skimming chapters ahead but now I was back at the beginning walking through the pages one at a time.
	“Goodbye,” I said, as I reached for the doorhandle. “You’ve been generous to both of us, and I’m grateful. If good comes out of this, you’ll know you helped shri. Will that please you?”
	“Oh yes,” she said, with a big smile.
	“I’m glad,” I answered. “You should be repaid, for all of this, somehow.” I got out of the car.
	“Good luck, Theamh,” Chandra said. “We’ll be watching.”
	“Thanks.”
	I slammed the door, and the car drove away. I was alone on Lythril’s ground.
	<Aine.>
	<Dhiaoc?>
	<I’m at the entrance to the driveway.>
	<All right...I’m ready.>
	I deepened the link so she could see what I saw. 
	<I’m feeding this through to Ira. Ira will tell the computers when to change the feeds. Head northeast, in as straight a line as you can, and try to stay low in case they make mistakes.>
	I fought my crouching way through the underbrush. Much as I trusted Aine, it was still unnerving to know that I was being watched by those round little eyes. After a while I learned to spot them--little boxes with cylindrical snouts wired to tree trunks and hidden with leaves. I was making a fair amount of noise, but then that shouldn’t matter. Nobody came after me, at any rate.
	<So that’s it, dhiaoc?>
	It was the first time Aine had seen the building--and the first time I’d seen it, really, in daylight. The sun was still not up very high, and the shadows were long and gray, but there it was, sprawling its crumbling brick bulk across the hills with their overgrown grasses, hemmed in by an encroaching forest.
	<That’s it. Lythril’s new stronghold.> I was uncheered by the prospect of approaching the place across this open lawn, but the windows were still all boarded up. <I think this is what the Cretids would call a fixer-upper.>
	<Ira says there are what they call electric eyes--they send out these beams and if you interrupt them it triggers an alarm. Can you see them?>
	With effort, I could trace the electricity I sensed around me back to its sources. On the outer curtain wall that ran around the complex, there were a number of small black boxes posted at regular intervals, each with electricity running into it and each, once I learned to look at it right, sending its little red beam out to a matching box posted on one of the trees.
	<I see them.>
	<All right, there are sensors buried in the ground, too, that if you step on them it will alert her. Can you see those?>
	I examined the grass at the verge. It was easy, actually. It had been a couple of years, but there were still round patches over which the grass was much shorter. That had to be where she’d had them buried. Idair only knew who had put them in, or whether he ever lived to install another security system.
	<I see them.>
	<So if you can get there without stepping on them or tripping those beams, then you can climb up the wall.>
	I started forward. I could feel Aine’s nervousness along with my own; it must have been worse for her, seeing all this but having no control over where I stepped or what happened. Aine probably would have been better at this than I was. Growing up city sets you back in the stealth department, and hard as I worked I could never catch up.
	But this was a strange kind of stalking. If any human being had been patrolling those grounds I would have been as obvious to her as a black eye. But the fact that I was visible to the naked eye seemed to make no difference at all. As long as I was invisible to the machines, nothing would happen to me. 
	And amazingly, nothing did. Butterflies circled the tops of the long grass; birds sang in the trees I’d left behind; those weatherstained bricks and their broken mortar got steadily closer and closer. 
	<All right then, dhiaoc,> Aine said, as I found myself finally standing up against that wall. <It’s much easier than the mast, remember the mast?>
	<I remember,> I said, wedging one of my ropesoles into a crack where the mortar had fallen out. <Idair’s teeth, it seems like a year ago...>
	I was glad nobody was there to watch this performance. Not just because I would have been an easy target, but because this had to have been the most graceless break-in of all time. We do a lot of work with our hands, and my arms were strong enough. But there was a certain amount of grunting, and slipping, and very quiet cursing, as I dragged my body up toward the top of the wall. 
	<If this were ‘Idair, Priestess of Power’ I’d be done by now,> I sent off about halfway up.
	<I’m still glad it’s not,> Aine answered. <You’re all right, dhiaoc.>
	<I hope there’s not much left--oh, wonderful. It’s that pointy wire they have at the border.>
	<Well, I guess you can just cut it, Ira didn’t say anything about pointy wire so it must not be in the system.>
	I started focusing on the loops of rusted, fanged wire that spiraled across the top of the wall. It seemed old enough to be left over from the days when the place was a mental hospital. It snapped after a short time, and I was able to bend it back and clear a space.
	<You know, this can’t have ever been a very effective deterrent, even forty years ago,> I said, as I flung myself over the top.
	<I think maybe it was more for show than anything,> Aine answered. <You have to admit, it makes the place look very unfriendly.>
	<It does that.> I clambered down a few feet and then dropped to the ground, crouching by the base of the wall. I’d passed the first line of defense. It was a strange thing to realize.
	<This is starting to seem too easy, Aine.>
	<It isn’t easy, dhiaoc. It wouldn’t be possible at all if Ira weren’t helping you.>
	<True enough. What now?>
	<Well, now comes the hard part.>
	By which Aine meant that Ira would have to wait until the cameras could show him a door around which there were no people, and which was close enough to me that I could dart in before anyone returned to the area. 
	<We’re lucky, dhiaoc,> Aine said. <The activity mostly seems to be on the second and third floors.>
	<That’s probably where the sleeping quarters are,> I answered. <Makes sense. Their work day is probably starting soon.>
	<Ira says see how fast you can get to the northeast corner.>
	I dashed across the ditch and began skirting the wall of the building. There weren’t many windows to start with; and I noticed that they had been boarded from the inside. On the outside, they had been barred--blocked off with rusting iron grates whose screws still fixed them firmly to the bricks around the windows. Grates that dated back before Lythril’s tenancy, judging by the rust.
	There’s fire in rust, too--the first kind of slow burning we learned to understand. And there was a lot of it here, on the outside of this building, eating slowly away at the iron underneath. Because there had been a lot of iron in this facility. The grates on the windows, the fortifications on top of the wall, and now the huge iron doors set into the northeast corner, where I had finally stopped with my heart beating and my mouth dry.
	<It’s clear. Go.>
	There was a padlock on the outer doors, its chain rusting like everything else. The padlock itself was new, however. Which meant that it didn’t respond right away to mindstrength; but the chain did, and the padlock dropped harmless onto the grass.
	I wedged the door open just wide enough to get myself through. I knew from the plans that I would find a second door set into the wall, and I did. This one was steel, it was new, and it had no apparent knob, latch or handle; just a smooth sheet of faceless metal recessed into the wall.
	I pulled the iron door shut behind me. A green light on a box mounted near the steel door was the only thing that kept me out of total darkness.
	<I’ve told Ira,> Aine said.
	The steel door slid sideways, with a kind of sighing sound. A rectangle of dim light slowly broadened.
	<It’s open,> Aine said. <Go on, dhiaoc.>
	I looked through the hole at the corridor that seemed to stretch away from me forever.
	<Go on, dhiaoc. I’m with you.>
	I stepped through the door. It slid shut behind me.
	The corridor was, of course, finite. But it was certainly long. It was paved in shiny white squares, just like the walls, and the ceilings, while dingy, had once been white. Looking up at the round glass fixtures depending from the ceiling at regular intervals, I realized with an unpleasant shock that this wasn’t electricity. Those were light globes. Lythril saving on the bill where she could.
	I knew that it would be a bad idea to think for long about the fact that I was staring through that frosted glass at a piece of Lythril’s fire. Mission first, Istria later. Deal with your own trauma last.
	Those eyed boxes were mounted in the corridors too, but evidently Ira was still circumventing them for me. I knew that the laboratory was underground, and that none of the stairwells in these four corners would take me there. The underground level had been designed for what the Cretid medical profession termed psychopaths--the violent, dangerous, uncorrected and incorrigible. Evidently, although they had brought themselves around to the idea of killing their killers, they still balked at executing the mad, and so those who not only murdered and raped but also raved were confined down there, in cells without windows. Those cells opened out onto a corridor, which ran around the building, and which enclosed a huge rectangular space in the middle. 
	That was the space we had decided must be the laboratory. It was the only part of the facility that didn’t have surveillance cameras. If no one else ever went in there, there would be no need for cameras; and Lythril wouldn’t want anyone to be able to see what she was doing down there. And that was where the interesting stuff was happening. In the original design, the space had apparently housed separate treatment facilities for the psychopaths, who were not allowed to mix with the rest of the patients. But although electricity was running into this place, Ira had determined that there were no computers there. Which to me said that this was a good place to look for a kind of magic with which computers could have nothing to do.
	The snag was that to get there, I would have to get out of this corridor and into the central elevator shaft, which was the only thing that connected that underground floor to the rest of the building. Which meant I was going to have to open one of those doors and try to get through whatever maze was on the other side of it without being seen.
	<The one opposite you is open now, dhiaoc, and it’s clear.>
	I pushed down the handle and slipped through the door. I was unprepared for what was on the other side.
	<Well,> I said. <Now we know where they make the Erysin.>
	It was a huge room, and it had been set up for mass production. I suppose it says something about me that what struck me first was that Lythril was still using cauldrons. Stuck there as I was in the heart of an evil empire, what occurred to me first was to start laughing at the sight of those heavy, cast-iron kettles mounted on stilts above gas burners, with glass pipes carrying the liquid from the kettles down into a state-of-the-art system of pipes, sluices, sifters, packers, and other machines that ultimately spit the stuff out at the other end as a million tiny round pellets that were then swept into bottles and stamped shut by a machine that appeared to have been specially designed for the purpose.
	None of the equipment was working at the moment. The production day probably hadn’t started yet. Sleeping late was a necessary part of the dark lifestyle; too much of what they did had to happen at night. That was why we’d decided to make our attempt just after dawn; it was the time we were least likely to find any of her acolytes up and about. I wandered through the room, looking at all of this paraphernalia, and fighting that urge to laugh.
	<If they only knew,> I said, explaining the hilarity I knew Aine was puzzled by. <If the Cretid Nation News could only come down here and see these huge old kettles out of the dark times boiling away with all that blood and jiz and-->
	<Dhiaoc, the door’s opening.>
	My reflexes were faster than I’d have thought they could be. By the time the door had opened wide enough to let anyone in, I had  ducked behind one of the tables at the far end of the room, on which uncapped bottles of Erysin-to-be were sitting. Crouched there, out of sight of whoever it was, I waited to see what would happen next.
	“...Atella, isn’t it?” said an unfamiliar voice, as footsteps passed through the doorway. “I’m Hedina, I’m the superintendent for Erysin production.”
	“Pleased to meet you,” said Atella, following the other woman in and closing the door.
	“Actually, we’ve met,” Hedina said. “Last night, at your initiation. Of course I can’t blame you for not remembering.”
	“I remember now,” Atella answered.
	Her voice sounded different to me--still eager, still carrying that sense that she knew what she was about, but the change was audible. She’d learned how fragile her life was and how much she would have to fear Lythril.  
	“I know she’s planning to put you in public relations,” Hedina observed, as the gas burners burst into flame. “But everyone goes through learning how to make this stuff, and we all have to take shifts. It’s unpleasant, but it’s not especially difficult.” 
	I began creeping slowly toward the door in the back of the room. I wasn’t sure how I was going to open it without their noticing, but they were too involved in whatever they were doing to notice my movement.
	“The ingredients come in through these hoppers up here,” Hedina was saying as I began crawling under the tables. “Press this button here, they’ll come down in the right proportions for one batch. The fires are preset for the optimal temperature. The only tricky part is figuring out when to decant. There’s a very short window of opportunity--it has to be liquid enough to go down the pipes but not too liquid. Once you decant, the stuff goes into the trough here, and it triggers the bell down in the lab. She comes up through the elevator back in the restricted area, comes in here, magics the stuff up while it’s in the trough, and then takes off to go do whatever it is that she does down there. From then on the machines will take care of it, and what you do is go start another batch. From decantation to post-production, it can’t take more than five minutes. One other thing: if that red light is on when you come in through the door, that means she’s working on something she can’t interrupt, so don’t start a batch till it switches to green. Got it?”
	“Seems simple enough,” she said.
	“Not so simple it can’t be screwed up,” Hedina said sharply. “And if you screw it up when Lythril’s having a bad day, it’ll be your last. Our lives don’t mean much to her.”
	“I’ve figured that out,” Atella said. They went to busy themselves up front; I kept creeping.
	“Good.”
	“Tell me something,” Atella went on, dropping her voice. “That other Ideiren, the one down in the basement--what’s the deal with her?”
	I froze where I was.
	“God, you are looking to die young,” said Hedina, her voice just as quiet now. “Listen, the first rule of survival here is: don’t ask. Just don’t ask.”
	“About her, or about anything?”
	“About anything, really, but especially about her.”
	“Why especially?”
	“Walls have ears, Atella.”
	That wasn’t Hedina. That was Lythril.
	She was standing by the doorway I’d come in. I couldn’t see most of her; just the boots, planted wide on the floor near the door, and the startled movement of the other two.
	“Hedina’s correct,” Lythril said, as the boots moved slowly forward. “The first rule is ‘don’t ask.’ And as she has learned, with the alacrity I was hoping you would demonstrate, the second rule is ‘don’t tell.’”
	Neither of them answered.
	“Start it up,” Lythril finally said. “I want to be sure you can do it properly, simple as the process is.”
	They moved off to the cauldron. It occurred to me that this was the time to make a break for it--she was out of the lab, and if memory served she would be occupied for at least half an hour. Of course that meant getting out without her seeing me.
	<Aine?>
	<Y...yes...>
	I had forgotten that Aine could see what I was looking at, and that she had never seen Lythril, or as in this case Lythril’s boots, in the flesh before.
	<See if Ira can find out whether those gas burners are regulated by any of its little friends here.>
	The hoppers opened, and the ingredients slopped from the hoppers into the cauldrons.
	<Ira says yes.>
	<Well, all right, see if Ira can get them to raise the temperature by a third.>
	The flames under the burners suddenly surged, causing the mixture to seethe and causing Lythril to explode in a fit of temper.
	“What in the Dark One’s hell are you playing at?” 
	Hedina was quick to intervene. “The flame’s too hot--it must be a computer malfunction.”
	“Damn it,” she muttered, stomping toward a panel on the opposite wall as the sound of boiling got louder.
	<Have Ira open the door, I’m right there.>
	When the door slid open, it was so quietly that the noise of the boiling, and of Lythril’s cursing, covered the sound. I got through, and the door closed, while the crisis was still being managed.
	<Ira wants to know, should they cut the flame now.>
	<No, let Lythril fix it on her own, it’ll look more like a regular malfunction--Idair have mercy on us.>
	I was now in the “restricted area,” and the elevator column was clearly visible ahead of me. But the space between me and it was filled with square tables ranged in rows, on each of which was resting a computer screen and keyboard and a large rectangular box to which it was wired. Or not so much a box, as a tank. A rectangular aquarium-like tank, with a whole set of control pads and monitor readouts on the top, and inside it a green-tinged fluid within which swam something much like a baby.
	Much, but not quite. Because these things looked like nothing so much as the eel baby of my nightmare--indistinct, unarticulated, headed and limbed but not fully formed. 
	<Careful, dhiaoc. This is where the cloners are.>
	I was not being particularly careful, so she was right to warn me. I was staring at the features on the floating head of one of the eel babies who looked older and closer to human. And I was being reminded of something.
	<Name of the spirit.>
	<What is it, dhiaoc?>
	<It’s her,> I said. <This baby, the face--doesn’t it remind you of her?>
	I stared at it for a little longer.
	<Lythril,> Aine finally said.
	<That’s it,> I answered. <She’s not leaving much to chance, is she?>
	I was now moving toward the elevator with all possible speed. I was now almost positive that this was where her plot was being carried forward, but I was also now pretty sure that “the other Ideiren down in the basement” was Istria. After all, since that was where the most secure cells were, it would make sense for Lythril to keep her captives there.
	Mission first.
	<What was that, dhiaoc?>
	<Never mind, just talking to myself. Can Ira get the elevator up here?>
	There was a soft, almost musical chime, and the polished steel doors opened.
	I stepped onto the elevator. <Ask Ira to take it down.>
	The doors closed, and the box I was standing in started to plummet.
	It was a short enough trip that I didn’t have much time to think about the consequences. The doors opened again, and when I stepped through them, I was in the lab.
	There were no computers here. There wasn’t much light, either. The actual equipment was old, and jumbled around pell-mell without much of a system--flat tables with straps anchored to the four corners, strange metal apparatuses I couldn’t figure out, boxes through which I knew electricity was still running. But all of that stuff had been pushed to the sides so that the center of the place was clear for what was really important. 
	These things were cages too--and Lythril had used electricity to construct them, somehow. But they didn’t have physical walls. Just the lightning jumping from point to point, streams of it crisscrossing space and creating a cubical latticework enclosing a space. And through that lattice, inside that space, I saw something that sent shock through me even though I had expected to find it.
	They were small--no larger than a fist, some of them--and unformed like the eel babies upstairs. Weak, watery colors, indistinct outlines. But I knew what these vague and insubstantial forms swarming through that cramped space were. This was where those notborns had gone to. They were being trapped here, kept in this box through some diabolical combination of electric power and the magic arts until Lythril had a use for them.
	That was the first cage, anyhow. The second, as I crept past the first to look at it, was blazing with colors from all across the spectrum--orange, red, blue, green, purple, yellow--racing around the interior, unhappy with the smallness of the space, their proximity to each other, and the inability to go anywhere. Thousands of points of light, linked together with those dark interstices. Lythril had abandoned the olaidh, probably also abandoned the lurers. Now she was trying with the rappari.
	Up past that cage, in the dim yellow-green light cast by tubes that lined the edges of the ceiling, was the place where the work got done. A broad, low table, surrounded by the same kind of streamer lightning, on whose flat surface lay another one of those things. Woman’s body, like Lythril’s but not quite, and this time multicolored, with iridescent streams of light flowing along the surface of that not-skin, changing hue and shade every second. And, as I watched, beginning to break up, to fail to flow back to the body, to leak toward the boundaries of that table as the body on it dissolved.
	When a sound of dismay proceeded from the vicinity, I realized that the white shape hovering near the table, with its back to me, didn’t belong to a spirit. It was one of those coats the doctors were always wearing, hanging from the shoulders of a woman.
	I approached very carefully. So far as I knew, Lythril was still upstairs with the cauldron, and there was no way for her to get down here without my noticing her. But who could tell. She had probably simply followed those two underlings into the production room while her personal shield was up, and waited for an opportune moment to reveal herself. But then maybe she really had figured out a way to be in two places at the same time. Anything seemed possible.
	The woman’s hands came down on the edge of the table with a thud and her dark head bent over the disintegrating body. Those white-coated shoulders shook as she began sobbing, in a key I knew like I knew the sound of my own sorrow.
	<I’m closing the link, Aine.>
	<Dhiaoc--don’t-->
	It closed and cut off whatever warning she was about to give me. I stepped out from the shadows and toward her.
	“Istria?”
	Her head lifted, and she turned toward me.
	I hadn’t seen her cry often, but the times when I had were burnt in my memory. So when I saw her face, there was no doubt in my mind. I had wondered, before, whether after four years it would be hard to recognize her. It wasn’t.
	“Theamh?”
	It was a whisper--two syllables, said so low you could barely hear it. But even after four years it carried so much to me that I almost couldn’t read it all at once. Amazement so strong it was almost fear, the will to believe it fighting a conviction that it couldn’t be true, an old and almost-dead hope struggling back to life through a choking web of despair, desire leaping up only to be cut down by the throbbing of the open wound.
	I had wondered what I would do when this moment arrived. But with her looking at me, from the bottom of that deep, dark well of despair, it seemed like there was only one thing possible.
	“Istri!” I shouted, running toward her.
	“Theamh, no--” she began, but I threw my arms around her.
	I felt the last thing I had expected to feel.
	Pain.
	And I’m not talking minor twinge.
	I’m talking about teeth-rattling, knee-buckling, consciousness-threatening, this-is-what-I-imagine-childbirth-feels-like pain. Pain that throws you so savagely across the rack of bodily anguish that you don’t even notice your heart breaking.
	At first, anyhow.
	There was a time--I don’t know for how long, it seemed eternal but it can’t have been--where all I knew was that I was in agony. I couldn’t see, hear, or remain conscious of anything but the fact that my entire body was screaming murder. It hurts less when you’re expecting it. Which means of course that it hurts that much more when you’re not.
	And then there was the time when I could hear the sound of someone screaming, and under that the sound of someone sobbing. I realize now that the person screaming was me. At the time, it seemed like someone else. Just as it was a long time--or seemed like a long time--before I realized that those hands I could see belonged to Lythril, and that they were tugging at something white that belonged to me.
	“Well don’t just sit there,” snapped Lythril’s voice, floating disembodied through the pain-shot haze into which the world had dissolved. “Help me get it off her.”
	Realizing finally what was happening, I clutched at the brooch and tried to roll away; but another wave of pain convulsed me and when I was able to move again the brooch had skittered into a corner and someone was hauling the thing over my head. I grabbed onto it with one hand, looking up through the red mist at Lythril as I tried to bring fire into the other.
	“Stop her, Istri,” Lythril said, her voice carrying a warning that couldn’t have been meant for me.
	There was another wave of pain, and I collapsed again on the floor. The cloth of my hreapa jerked out of my failing grip and there I was, squirming on those damp flagstones in nothing but a shift, with pain unstringing my joints and two dark users working at me.
	<Run, Aine.>
	<Dhiaoc, what’s happening-->
	<I’m lost. It’s over. Run.>
	<What do you mean, it’s over?>
	There was another wave of pain, through which I forced out what were almost certain to be my last words to her. <Farewell, Aine. I’m sorry.>
	Istria was bending over me now, her own face red and streaked with tears of pain. With the last strength I had, I grabbed the lapels of that white coat and brought her down to face me.
	Kill me.
	Her ravaged face froze in horror. What?
	Kill me. Snap my neck. You owe me that much.
	She knew what I meant but she wouldn’t admit it.
	I’m not going to start with you, Theamh.
	Before I had time to read that, I felt the fire hit.
	Lythril was blocking me, not burning me. But it still hurt, and was just as horrifying. I fought, but I was in no condition to do it. And after the few seconds it took me to start failing I knew, with heartbreaking certainty, that there was no way for me to win this battle.
	The only thing I could do, after I felt it taking hold, was keep it at bay long enough for me to break my links. That would at least contain the damage. So clutched up into a ball on those hard stones, I started cutting cords. Lilea. Morat. Slythe. Harani. Barant. Taric. Minead. Mna. Mathi. Athi. Aine.
	The one to Istria, of course, was already broken.
	The layer of red fire closed over my face. I was sealed now. Locked inside my skull, cut off, as alone as it was possible to be. Lonelier.
	“Dark One’s anger,” I heard Lythril snapping as the flames died and the seal set. “Will you just get them on and get over here?”
	I was flat on my back now, with one of Lythril’s knees on my chest and her hand on my throat. It was gloved, like the other hand she was using to hold my arm stretched out on the cobbles. Whatever material the things were made of it was transparent, and so close to the feel of skin that it made mine crawl. Istria was struggling into another pair, but her hands were shaking badly.
	“Get the dolanol,” Lythril ordered.
	It did occur to me, even in my weakened state, to wonder why she wasn’t just talking to her over the link. But I had nowhere to go with that question, because the sight of Istria kneeling next to me with a syringe in her hand pretty much displaced everything else in my brain.
	“Come on!” Lythril shouted as I began struggling, and Istria tried to pin my wrist back to the ground. “How long can it take someone to find a vein?”
	Istria gave out a strangled sound I couldn’t read--since I could no longer read anything--and I felt the needle break the skin.
	“Well, Theamh,” Lythril said, calm now that she had everything and everyone under control. “Any last words?”
	It came out in Old Tongue, involuntarily. “Ghioagh tu ag do bhuadh, inion na mhada ar an chohir dhubh.”
	She smiled with those cold lips and turned to look at Istria, who stared back at her from a pale and pain-marked face.
	“Would you translate that for me, Istri?” she said. “My Old Tongue is just a little rusty.”
	Istria swallowed.
	“ ‘Choke on your victory, you blackhearted bitch,’” she finally said.
	Lythril and her smile turned slowly back to me.
	“Shouldn’t ‘bitch’ be plural?” she asked.
	Istria pressed the plunger. Ice entered my veins. And finally, mercifully, the darkness took me.

XXI.
Naming Names

	Regaining consciousness was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.
	I didn’t know much, but I was sure of that. I was not actually dead; my body still sat slumped in the corner where the walls met, and I was still, most certainly, trapped inside it. I was still wearing my shift, which was stained before and behind with what looked to be my own filth. From what I remembered, that made sense to me; I didn’t remember vomiting or voiding specifically, but when the body is in that kind of pain you can’t expect to control your gut. The unmistakable stink of vomit was certainly among the smells assaulting me, so that was probably it.
	The room was small--about three yards square, and maybe eight feet high. The walls were, unaccountably, soft. It made no sense to me, but the place seemed to have been upholstered, despite the fact that aside from the privy that stuck gracelessly out of one wall, there was no furniture. The walls and floor were covered with some sort of padding that gave when I pressed it. Up in one corner was mounted the inevitable box with its inquisitive snout. Wherever I was, I was under surveillance.
	I didn’t expect windows, and there weren’t any. There was one door, which seemed to be made out of a solid sheet of glass; on the other side, after a couple feet of corridor, was another door made of steel. 
	After I decided I’d seen all there was to see, I closed my eyes again. There was no point in having them open. I wasn’t sure where I was, but I could hazard a guess. And whether I was right or wrong, there was no escape. Blocked as I was, I couldn’t use mindstrength. I couldn’t make fire, couldn’t send, couldn’t project, couldn’t read, couldn’t link with anyone--I was no better than a Cretid, and as easily caged. Which I was, down here in this cell designed for the maniacs so evil even the Cretids wouldn’t let them roam abroad.
	They hadn’t chained me or restrained me at all. There was no need to do it. Blocked, I had no more chance of breaking out of this place with my bare hands than a kitten would. She might have done it just to humiliate me, but why should she, when I had so successfully humiliated myself?
	It seemed incredible to me that I hadn’t seen it coming. Perhaps Aine had; maybe that was part of what drove her to try to confront me. Or maybe she didn’t know enough to be suspicious. But I certainly should have been. I knew that before she left, Istria had been studying spirit matter, and had always wanted to know more than we did about how it worked and what it was. It was true that she had never been particularly interested in creating guuns out of it, but that was before Lythril got to her. If anyone was going to be able to actually make a body out of spirit matter, it would be Istria. She was brilliant, she was driven and this was in her line. A line she could never really have pursued very far, if she’d stayed with the Order.
	Aine had been right. Lythril wouldn’t have kept Istria around, if she weren’t useful. But she was. That was clear to me now, as I thought back over that scene in the laboratory. Istria was the one in charge of this project. Lythril knew enough to make guuns, probably enough to mastermind the reincarnation scam that had brought me all the way up here. But without Istria she couldn’t take it that extra step further. She couldn’t make the immortal body she wanted.
	But it had never occurred to me, not once. I had been so convinced that what we had was too strong for any evil to break--it was one thing I had never questioned, even during those times when I had started to wonder if I was crazy and she really was dead. Now, sitting in a lump in the corner of this abandoned madhouse, I was starting to wonder if I had ever been right about anything. Had it all been lies, from the very beginning? Her deceiving me, me willingly going along, letting myself believed she loved me while she was working against me, even then?
	I knew intellectually that it couldn’t be true. I had been there when she got her fire; I knew where it came from. And with one thing and another, I knew also that when she first said she loved me, it had to have been the truth. So it must have been that when she rode off, all that long time ago, she was true. But she wasn’t now. To Idair, or to me.
	The bitterness of that knowledge staved off, for a while, my consciousness of just how completely I had failed. But not forever. I had a long time to sit there, alone, without a sound but the ones I made myself or any company besides that silent dark eye and the sick yellowing light from the pane in the ceiling. All that planning, all that struggle, and I had accomplished nothing. I hadn’t harmed a thing in that laboratory, I hadn’t interfered with her plans. All I had managed to do was get myself captured and deprive my apprentice of the only protection she had from the dangers I had exposed her to. She had made the promise, and she would be on her way south. But there was plenty of danger there too. Lost as I was beyond recall, she would be almost as imperiled, trying to find the last good women in shri without running afoul of Barant and her minions.
	I had only made things worse. Because here I was trapped and taken out of the fight, there Aine was running away alone, and Istria was churning monsters out for Lythril as fast as ever she had been. Meanwhile, I had managed to draw fifteen innocent Duntani, Daire, and Last One Standing into the path of my destruction. Not only was I going down, but I had taken a lot of people with me.
	Hope dies hard. But this had pretty much killed it.
	The vigils, wherever they were, would still keep her from invading me--for a time. But if someone or something got to Aine, and kept her from feeding them, they would eventually abandon me, and then it would be open season. Of course to invade me, Lythril would have to raise the block; but with what she probably knew about me from Istria, I wouldn’t be able to fight very hard. And anyhow, all evidence suggested she wasn’t going to bother overtaking me. What would the point be? She had her minions in charge of the Order; she had me out of commission; she had Istria working for her. She was right where she wanted to be. I was no use to her. She’d just leave me here, blocked and helpless, until she used up all the hearts in those jars and came down after mine.
	That was all I was now. A consumable resource. Spare parts. A year, two years, five years from now, and my heart would be beating inside a glass jar and my body would be stalking the streets of Cretid City in a policeman’s uniform.
	But since my heart was no use to me any more, maybe it would be no big loss. That was another thing clear to me. Over the five years that I knew what was going on in my heart I had felt sometimes that this love was a curse, that I would be better off never having known; but now that it was all over I was sure. Loving her had been at the heart of everything for me. I had learned, after a fashion, to live without her. But I couldn’t live without that love. Or put it more accurately, I didn’t want to. Now that was broken, I had no interest in continuing to breathe.
	Time crawled by at an excruciating pace. I had no idea whether I had been sitting there for hours, or minutes, or maybe even days. What I did know was that this was never going to change. Whatever life was left to me would be spent here in this upholstered box, while I learned as bitterly as anyone could that despite what they say in the tales, you can’t actually die of a broken heart.
	Broken glass, though, that was different.
	It was a while before I could successfully get to my feet. My joints had stiffened into these positions, and my body still complained loudly about the treatment it had been subjected to. I couldn’t balance as well as I wanted, and I toppled against the wall before I could push myself onto my feet. They’d taken my ropesoles, and the band I used to tie back my hair. I supposed I should have counted myself lucky to be left the shift.
	It didn’t take long, even in this state, to walk the length of the cell, and reach the smooth and transparent face of the inner door. And surprisingly enough, it didn’t take long for me to make the necessary adjustment. Having lived through all this, it seemed a natural thing to back up and then deliberately hurl myself against the glass.
	My body registered the shock, but the glass didn’t care, no matter how many times I did it. The thing never broke, it was never so much as scratched. I was scrambling to my feet for another try at it when the steel door behind it slid back and a woman stepped through the doorway.
	It was Istria. Almost the way I remembered her, with her dark hair hanging loose down her back and her eyebrows drawn in worry. And there was still that leap up, when I saw her, but cut short. Because now she was wearing those Cretid blue trousers and a dark shirt, whose open collar exposed the links of the silver chain around her neck.
	“It’s plexiglass, Theamh,” she said, expressionlessly. “It’s a kind of plastic. It won’t break.”
	I backed up into my corner and slumped down, turning my head away from her.
	The steel door slid shut, and the plexiglass one slid open. She braced herself, as if she were expecting me to make a run for it, but I didn’t move. I didn’t care. Probably if both doors had been open I couldn’t have scraped together the initiative to bolt. I didn’t want to escape any more than I wanted to be there. What I wanted, I realized as she came through and the plexiglass door slid shut behind her, was to be dead. That was the only thing that would make me feel better.
	She set down whatever it was she’d been carrying. “I’m here to get you cleaned up,” she said.
	I huddled away from her into my corner.
	“I’m not going to touch you,” she said. “I don’t enjoy pain any more than you do.”
	I didn’t answer, or look at her. There seemed to be no point. I couldn’t read her, and even if I could have I doubted that it would have made a difference.
	After what seemed like a long time, I heard her sigh, and stand up. “You’ll do it when you get tired of the stink,” she said. “The basin’s plastic too, and the soap is non-toxic.” I glanced involuntarily at the space where she’d set down the white bowl full of water and the cake of white soap on top of the folded towel and the folded clothes. “I thought of everything you’re thinking of now, Theamh. There is no way out.”
	There was another long silence, and she started moving out toward the door. Since she was turned away from me my eyes followed her this time. With the block, and all that had happened, she looked like a stranger--distant, unreadable, alien and frightening. Even after she stopped, irresolute, in that doorway with the mind-divided hesitancy I recognized, she still didn’t seem like the woman I’d known, or even the woman I’d run toward down in the laboratory.
	“Damn it, Theamh, after all this time don’t you have anything to say to me?”
	I was so dead inside I couldn’t even summon up anger.
	“I asked you to kill me,” I finally said. “I think that pretty much says it all.”
	She turned away before I could see her face change, and went out through the double doors.
	I looked at the basin, with the water that was still sloshing, minutely, around the edges. The cake of soap lay on top of a graying towel, and underneath that a tunic and pants, made in some coarse variation on cotton. They were bright green and when I unfolded the tunic I could see the words “PROPERTY OF GREENHAVEN” printed across the front and the back in big black letters.
	I couldn’t even cry, because of that camera watching me. And I wasn’t sure I would have, anyway. There was no way for me to give birth to this horrible grief.
	So I sat there, in the corner, without moving. Time continued to pass; I had no idea how much of it. I wasn’t even very curious. I had nothing to look forward to, and nothing to hope for. Even the fact that I felt sick through my whole body didn’t interest me much. I was hoping I might fall asleep, but of course I didn’t; at least not before Istria came back, carrying a plastic bowl full of some kind of stew and a plastic tumbler full of water.
	“Dinnertime,” she said, and put them down near me.
	She sat down on the other side of the food, crossed her legs, and waited. I supposed that she thought I would eventually get hungry, but I didn’t. I felt nothing but nauseous, and the food only made it worse. And since I had been sitting there in that corner for probably a number of hours now, I didn’t mind sitting there for a couple more.
	“You’ll get over it,” she said, and got up to leave.
	I knew the camera was watching, but as soon as she left I couldn’t help it. Having made its presence known, that spirit-killing grief subsided and left me in the grip of an anger that scared even me.
	I kicked the basin over, sending the water sliding away from me, sinking into the padding on the floor. The soap, after being moistened in the water that was standing in the privy, left a streak of white film behind it when I dragged it across those black letters, which I kept doing until I couldn’t see them behind the slimy residue any more. It was tough fabric, but I had the time, so after working it with my hands and teeth I did eventually succeed in loosening the threads in the seams, and then ripping both the tunic and the trousers up. When I had demolished them into scraps as small as I thought them likely to get, I mixed them in with the stew. They came out coated with nasty brown stuff, and when I wiped them across the upholstered walls, they left wide, irregular streaks. After a while most of the liquid was decorating the cell and the cloth wouldn’t mark anything any more, so I went to see what would happen if I flushed it all down the privy.
	Sodden as they were, the scraps still floated so well that the suck of the water wouldn’t pull them in. I was packing them into the drainpipe with one hand when I heard the door open again.
	It was Lythril this time, and she was watching me with an expression of exquisite disgust.
	“Even pigs don’t foul their sties,” she said.
	I looked at her with hatred and didn’t answer.
	“You don’t have to go to all that trouble just to make your life more unpleasant,” she said, as one gloved hand grabbed me by the back of my shift. “That’s our job.”
	She hauled me back to my feet as Istria stepped in past the plexiglass door. Lythril handed her a stick with a rubber cup on the end of it. “Unclog the pipes and clean up this mess,” she said.
	Leaving Istria looking after us impassively, Lythril propelled me out of the cell and into the corridor.
	She seemed surprised that I wasn’t struggling. And suspicious of it, as if she suspected some stratagem on my part. I truly didn’t have one. As far as I was concerned, wherever she brought me there would probably be more chance there of my finding something I could use than there was in my cell.
	As it turned out, she brought me into the laboratory. To be more precise, to the other end of the laboratory, where one of those old tables had been pulled into the center of the room. The straps, I noticed, weren’t exactly in the corners, as I had first thought; they were arranged in symmetrical pairs but there didn’t seem to be any reason to where they’d been put. At least not until Lythril wrapped me and then flung me onto the table, whereupon I realized that they were right where my wrists and ankles were resting.
	Once she’d done up the straps, she dropped the wrap. The block alone must be costing her some energy, and as long as she had other ways to restrain me there was no need to waste more mindstrength on it. She wasn’t averse at all to using technology where it helped her, even when it was technology as old and decrepit as this--or as the strange bundle of metal and wire she was now dragging over to the table.
	“You don’t of course know what this is,” she said conversationally as she began attaching a number of little round pads to my bare arms and shoulders. “I don’t suppose you’ve had time, in your brief stay here, to take in any classic Cretid films. There used to be an art playhouse quite near where your friend Lara lives, but it folded about a year ago.” The pads were attached to wires, all of which led back to a box sitting on a wheeled cart which in turn had a wire connecting it to a panel in the wall. “Outside of a few documentaries, and one very famous film made thirty years ago during the public hearings, the only place you’d see one of these would be in a museum of medical history--or down here.” She flicked a switch on the box.
	“Of course you know what electricity is,” Lythril said. “I have to say, even I haven’t gotten quite used to it, long as I’ve been here. It must have been very unsettling for you, this being your first trip north.”
	She paused, but I said nothing. With a little smile, she resumed.
	“It’s been modified somewhat,” she said. “The Cretids designed it for use on the skull--they had an idea that if they sent the current through the subject’s brain, it would make them saner.” She leaned over, staring me down with those hard eyes. “I let Maerin play around with it a little after we moved in here. He hasn’t published the results of his study, but I’m pretty sure that theory was a crock.”
	I turned my head away from the box, which was about all I could do at this point.
	“The block may prevent you from pre-sensing it,” she said. “Gwilna seems not to mind it, so it’s possible that the block interfered with her fire affinity. But then we know Gwilna was never the brightest flame in the forge, don’t we.”
	When she was sure I wasn’t going to take the bait, she took up her position near the box. She was right; if it hadn’t been for the hum it was generating, I wouldn’t have known the lightning was running through it. 
	“Even blocked, though,” she said, “you can still feel this, can’t you?”
	It wasn’t as bad as what I’d lived through the day before--but it was bad enough, and when it was over it left me with a palpitating, sickened tremor that was new to me. I didn’t give her the benefit of a reply, but she could tell it had had its effect.
	“I’m not out to destroy your mind, Theamh,” she said. “That wouldn’t suit my purpose at all, and isn’t it you who’s always saying I do everything for a reason.” Another one of those nauseating shocks went through me, and I felt the gag rising in my throat. “You’ve got one of the best minds in the business; it’s just your heart that’s so appallingly stupid.” She had apparently taken to using the shocks as punctuation; this one lasted a little longer and hurt a little more. “A mind like yours would be a terrible thing to waste, I’ve always said. And Maerin’s been quite industrious in terms of testing the thing to determine how strong I can make the shock before I bring on a fatal heart attack. No, this is just a little straightforward torture. I want some information from you, and as the Cretids have astutely realized, in a situation like this where you have a very stubborn informant, it helps to provide an incentive.”
	I couldn’t imagine what on earth she was talking about. She probably knew more about what was going on in the Order right now--on both sides--than I did. And with what Istria knew about me, forcing my mind should be a simple enough matter, if she really wanted information that badly.
	“It’s a simple question,” she said. “Even in your state you should have no trouble finding the answer.”
	After giving me another shock for good measure, she crouched down by the head of my table and addressed me with the nonchalance of a party guest making small talk.
	“What’s your name?”
	I wouldn’t have thought I could still do it, but I started laughing.
	The next shock cut that off, and she had to step back to avoid being spattered by the vomit that finally came out. That was the last of it; next time it happened it would be dry heaves.
	“You will tell me,” she said. “You can’t hold out forever, and that’s how long we’ve got.”
	“I don’t have to hold out forever,” I choked out. “Just till I’m dead.”
	She pressed the button again.

	When I came to again I was back in the cell; it was clean, and strangely, so was I. My hair was wet and the shift I was wearing had been washed. I realized that this meant someone had taken it off me and put it back on, but I didn’t want to think about that. Things were gruesome enough.
	She was too smart to tell me what she was planning. But I could piece enough of it together. If she had my name, she could overtake me without even going through much of a battle. I was puzzled at first as to why she should want to, now that I was under indictment and in disgrace and half the country thought I was dark.
	Half the country thought I was dark, but Morat and Lilea and the others didn’t. In fact, no matter what kind of evidence anyone furnished to suggest that I was, they wouldn’t believe it. If they heard about me doing some kind of evil thing they would write it off as more of Barant’s trickery. And as soon as they heard I was in the country, they would come looking for me. Since it was still my body, the touch-test wouldn’t work, at first--it would take a while before the connection took and her inside bled through to my outside. They’d take me in, I’d become part of their campaign. And between her and Barant, she would finish them all off. At that point, she’d be done with me; she’d kill me and move into her new immortal body, and come down to Ideire at Barant’s invitation to make life hell for everyone.
	For a plan she must have had to make up on the spot, it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t what she had originally intended, of course. But she had put more trust in Barant than she deserved; she hadn’t expected there to be a civil war. She had hoped Barant could get the whole Order under control and then bring Lythril back in her new immortal body to rule the land of her birth forever. That wasn’t going to work, because there was a resistance organizing now, and it was successful enough that Lythril would have to use me to neutralize it before she could put her grand design into action. It was funny that after all this time she should want more than anything to go home, but there it was; three years ago she had stayed behind in her stronghold and gotten herself convicted just because she didn’t want to leave even when she knew she was beaten. Because after all was said and done, we had shri and the Cretids didn’t; and no matter how good she got at playing the game up here it would never hold her interest the way Ideire did. Not enough of a challenge, maybe.
	It was a good plan. Breaking me shouldn’t be too hard; she did, as she said, have all the time in the world, and I would just keep getting weaker. And once she had me, I would be a valuable double agent, especially wearing the scars of my battle; who would have the heart to doubt me? No, it was a great plan; and it explained why she was going to the trouble of torturing me to find out the name that would allow her to put it in motion. Everything made sense, now that I thought it out. Except for one thing.
	Istria already knew my name.
	What Aine had seen, when she had the vision of us together in that room in my house, was Istria telling me her name, and me telling Istria mine. Up to that point, it was the most intense moment of my life, and the closest I had ever come to being truly happy. I knew that memory would be the last thing to go when the uru finally took me as it probably would if I didn’t die of something else first. Even granting that Istria might have had reasons for wanting to repress that memory, it was highly unlikely that she could have succeeded. 
	So Istria had never told Lythril my name. And it probably wasn’t because Lythril hadn’t asked.
	It was hard to believe, but there it was. Unless Lythril was engaging in some sort of elaborate charade to make me think this was true when it wasn’t, it would seem that Istria was holding out on her. Keeping that one memory safe from her, if nothing else. Holding onto it like I had, only with even less hope.
	It wasn’t enough. But it was something. One thing, that would give me the strength to take my one way out. Not enough to live on. But just enough to die with.
	The door slid back again, and Istria returned, with a pile of toasted bread on a platter and another tumbler full of water.
	“So,” she said, putting it down in front of me. “Another day begins.”
	“Does it,” I said, incuriously.
	I turned my head back toward the wall. Istria waited.
	“My instructions are to wait until you’ve eaten it,” she said. 
	“Then you better bring in a chair,” I answered. 
	She sat watching me silently.
	“I know what you’re thinking,” she finally said.
	I didn’t answer.
	“You’re thinking you wouldn’t have done it,” she went on. “You’re thinking you would have died before you’d let her turn you. That I should have died, instead of turning.”
	I shook my head.
	“That’s not what I was thinking,” I said.
	I couldn’t tell whether she was looking at me or not. “Then what was it?”
	I knew I shouldn’t answer; talking at all could only lead to trouble. But habit was too strong, I suppose.
	“I was thinking,” I said, still talking into the wall, “that all this time, I could have been sleeping on a bed like a normal person.” I closed my eyes, because I thought that would make the tears less noticeable. 
	I slid down until I was lying on the floor and curled up in a ball.
	I was aware that she was still there, but I couldn’t tell anything else. We sat like that for a long time.
	“Istria.”
	The voice was Lythril’s, but it was amplified and unnatural. Probably piped down into the cell through some kind of intercom.
	“Yes?”
	“I need you in here. Take the food with you.”
	Istria stood up, collecting the plates, and left.
	Used to it as I was, it still wasn’t easy to fall asleep thinking that all this time I thought I was sharing Istria’s captivity, I was really only rehearsing for my own.

	“What’s your name?”
	And another shock, this one to the legs. I had thought maybe I would get used to it, but I didn’t. In fact, it was only getting worse; my body had already learned that when I didn’t answer the question, something really bad happened to it immediately afterwards. Which meant that it was starting to get nervous earlier and earlier. The net result was that when I wasn’t being electrified, I was twitching and shuddering anyhow with the anticipation of being electrified. 
	“What’s your name?”
	I didn’t answer; and soon it was moot anyhow, because of the dry heaves. I was really starting to hate the dry heaves as the worst part of this process. Vomiting’s different; there’s a stopping point. Dry heaves just go on forever, and your body hates you for not being able to cough up the poison that it’s so damn sure is in your completely empty stomach.
	 “What’s your name?”
	I couldn’t have answered even if I wanted to. And I still didn’t want to, no matter how much things hurt. I was starting not to care too much about what was happening to my body. I wouldn’t be staying in it long anyhow.
	“What’s your name?”
	It was unfortunate, too, that the way the question was phrased I couldn’t just curse her out, because to answer “What’s your name?” with “Thurk you and the bitch who bore you” is, technically, a lie, since my name is not in fact ‘Thurk You And The Bitch Who Bore You.’ I think Idair would have spotted me if I’d done it, but it’s best not to take chances. So all I could do was flail about and say nothing, and on occasion do a little inarticulate screaming. 
	“What’s your name?”
	This time she’d pushed it too far, and she knew it; I went into convulsions that really almost started tearing those straps loose. She ripped the electrodes off my skin and stepped back from the table, looking at me as if only her sense of dark majesty was preventing her from kicking the box and swearing at it.
	She snapped those gloves on and undid the straps. She had discovered that after the sessions she didn’t need to wrap me; without someone supporting me I couldn’t even get out into the corridor. She dragged me back to the cell, tossed me onto the floor in a heap, and left, the doors clicking shut behind her. And I began the process of recovering to the point where she would be able to have another crack at it without killing me by accident.
	I was certainly getting tired of this routine; but so was she. Torture wasn’t work that interested her; it isn’t that complicated, really. That was really Maerin’s province, but of course she wouldn’t trust Maerin with something this serious. 
	So I waited there, as I had been waiting for who knew how long, for nothing to happen. There was no way for me to measure time, except by the meal deliveries, which I assumed happened a few hours or so apart. They usually waited a while after a session before bringing the food down, astutely surmising that I needed time to get over the nausea. So it was probably a couple hours before that door opened again, and Istria came through it with a plate and the inevitable tumbler.
	I had been drinking the water, until they started replacing it with juice. They had assumed, I suppose, that I would drink the juice rather than suffer the thirst, but I solved this problem by drinking the water in the privy bowl. That seemed to disgust Lythril greatly, but it didn’t particularly bother me; that basin was a lot cleaner than some of the drinking vessels I’d used out on the farms back home. So they had gone back to water, which was what was in the tumbler.
	I didn’t look to see what was on the plate until she set it down and the smell reached me. Eggs, and the gently bitter scent of goat cheese, scrambled together and baked with spinach and herbs I hadn’t smelled since that year Istria and I worked together. 
	I sat up, which was unusual, and really looked at her for the first time since that day in the laboratory.
	“Where did you get the fielhu?” I asked, ignoring the plate and looking into her hard blue eyes.
	“She grows it out on the grounds,” Istria answered, returning the stare. “We need it for some things.”
	I waited, feeling the gaze of that round mechanical eye.
	“You should eat it yourself,” I said. “It’s a shame to waste it.”
	There was a slight movement of muscles under the pale skin of her throat, but her cut-stone face didn’t change.
	“It won’t work, Theamh. You can’t do this. Nobody can. It takes too long and it’s too excruciating.”
	“And I suppose living for years under these conditions wouldn’t be excruciating?”
	“Whatever she’s trying to get out of you, she’ll get it eventually, and then it’ll get better.”
	“She hasn’t told you, what she’s trying to get out of me?”
	Istria’s eyes dropped for the fraction of a second, toward a place where there was nothing. Then they came back to my face as the air of a half-suppressed breath lifted her ribs.
	I couldn’t read her; but I knew what that meant. I’d seen it so many times. She’d seen something, was maybe still seeing it, but had put it away and was concentrating on the world at hand.
	“This must be a very bad place for you,” I said.
	She looked away. Her lower lip thinned slightly as she bit down on it. Then she turned back, brushing a dark strand of hair out of her face.
	“You won’t die, Theamh. You’ll collapse at some point from weakness and then she’ll put you on an intravenous drip that will start rebuilding you. She can keep you alive as long as she wants. There is no point to this, you’ll only do yourself harm.”
	Now that I had started looking at her I realized I couldn’t stop. It was true that I couldn’t read her. But everything about the way she moved, or didn’t move, the way her eyes changed, the way she held her hands in her lap, the way her mouth pursed or her eyebrows drew together, brought something back. Something I was starting to be able to use. Her face, her hands, the shrug of her thin shoulders and the way she shifted the position of her hips--her body would tell me what I couldn’t know any more about her mind and heart, if I knew how to read it. And I must have been learning how, all that long time ago, without realizing.
	“It’s too horrible, Theamh. Nobody can stand this kind of death. You know you will give up eventually; why can’t you just take it as read and eat something?”
	“I don’t want to.”
	“I gave up after two weeks.”
	“Well,” I said, nestling back into my corner. “I don’t know how long it’s been, so I suppose I won’t know I’ve broken your record until I’m dead.”
	“Theamh--”
	Frustration I’d seen in her before; and specifically, frustration with me and my stubborn refusal to listen to reason. It was a familiar situation, really, in a lot of ways. Which only made it that more grueling--for me, and I was starting to think for Istria too.
	“Is this where she kept you?” I asked.
	It was the wrong thing to do; she shut down, and I knew that as surely as I could have if I’d been reading her. I thought about what it would have been like. Four years--well, not quite four; she must have turned some time ago. But even one year, even a month, of this, would destroy most people. I didn’t know what might happen to me in a couple months. It was hard to imagine turning; but then I’d never imagined Istria turning either.
	“You should have come for me at once, or not at all,” she said.
	The voice was flat and even, but I knew that the anger behind it was anything but.
	“They ordered me to Dairc,” I answered. “The Ubh was poisoned. It was the time of the long slow burning.”
	“So of course you went.”
	“When I got home I set out to search for you. They found me after three days and brought me back. The Council laid me under injunction.”
	“If it had been you--”
	“You would have what?” I demanded. “Helped her strip me naked and stick a needle in my arm?”
	She got to her feet, turning away from me with a curse. I assumed this would be the end of the conversation, but I was wrong.
	“Who asked you to sleep on the floor, anyway?” she shouted as she swung around on me, anger blazing in her eyes. “People do that in the tales, Theamh, real people don’t do things like that!”
	“I’m not going to do this in front of her,” I said.
	Istria glanced involuntarily toward the camera.
	“It’s not as if it was helping me,” she went on, anyhow.
	“It made me the last person in Ideire who believed you were still alive,” I said. “At the time, I thought that was useful.”
	“And now you wish I wasn’t,” she said, quieter now but not really calmer. “You wish I had died, instead of turning. Don’t you.”
	I didn’t answer.
	“Don’t you?”
	“Isn’t ‘don’t ask’ the first rule of survival here?” I replied.
	“The rules are for the Cretids,” she said. “I’m different.”
	“Istria!”
	It was that damn intercom voice of Lythril’s. Istria, at the moment, wasn’t any more pleased to hear it than I was.
	“What?”
	“I want to see you upstairs. Now.”
	“I’ll be there,” she said, not looking at the camera.
	I waited for her to leave, but she didn’t.
	“You should take the pietraka with you,” I said. “Something that good and that hard to make shouldn’t end up as wallpaper.”
	She snatched the plate up and left.
	I hadn’t answered, because I hadn’t known the answer, when she asked. But with the smell of that absent dish still lingering in the air, the answer came to me. 
	I didn’t.

XXII.
Heart of the Matter

	“What’s your name?”
	I wasn’t sure, at this point, that I even understood the question. I couldn’t really remember anything, except that it was very important that I not do anything she told me. So I said nothing, and she kept her finger on the button.
	“I’ll ask you again. What’s your name?”
	They weren’t words to me any more. A string of sounds that meant pain was coming, that was all.
	“If you tell me your name we won’t have to do this any more.”
	I didn’t believe her. Pain was all life had ever held for me, all it ever would mean. Feeling pain, fearing pain, recovering from pain. It had always been like this. It would never stop. So why give her the satisfaction.
	“Your body will give out eventually, you know.”
	“Good,” I gasped. “Can’t wait.”
	She leaned on the button again.

	Supporting myself on my shaking hands, crawling toward the corner of that cell, I knew I had almost had it. Even without the torture sessions--which were becoming increasingly sporadic, even if they were also becoming more painful--the hunger eating me would have been enough. It wasn’t even hunger, really; I was past that stage. It was the weakness, the emptiness, that feeling of wasting. I hadn’t hit the stage where my eyesight and organs started to fail; Istria had informed me, in one of the many conversations we’d had about exactly what happens when you starve to death, that this wouldn’t come for another ten days or so. And after that, it was still a while before death. 
	I wouldn’t make it. I couldn’t. I couldn’t support this any more, alone inside this unyielding skull with my broken heart and failing body. It was just more than I could stand. More than anyone could stand.
	The idea of capitulating to Lythril was unspeakably horrible to me. But the thought of undergoing another second of shock treatment made me shudder so violently I almost collapsed. There was no way. Nobody could live through this.
	Not alone, anyhow.
	I reached the corner and collapsed into it, my heart beating too fast.
	Help me.
	I wondered for a moment if the block would stop Idair from hearing me, but decided that was stupid. She could hear anything, see anything, from where she was, no matter how impossible that seemed right now.
	I want to die true but I can’t do it alone. If you love me, if you want me to stay with you, help me. I don’t ask you to save me. Just to keep me honest on my way out of the world. For everything I’ve done, for everything I wanted to do, take me out of this. I failed you, I know that. But help me anyhow.  Show me mercy.
	The way I tell it, it makes it seem like there was an immediate answer. There wasn’t, of course. I sat there, breathing hard, waiting. For what seemed like forever. And when I realized, hours later, that I was sweating and shivering with something other than reaction to the shock, I had almost forgotten what I’d asked for.
	I didn’t understand what had happened, until that door opened again. Istria came through, walking faster than usual. She reached a hand for my forehead, but drew it back.
	“Can you sit up?” she asked.
	Something in the way she said it stopped me from arguing. I sat up, but it was an effort.
	Istria crouched near me, one knee on the ground, studying my face.
	“Lythril,” she said.
	“What?” came the intercom voice.
	“Come down here,” she said. 
	“I’m busy.”
	“I know that,” Istria said, with a little more bitterness than was quite warranted. “This is important.”
	There was a very long pause, while Istria set down the plate she’d been carrying.
	“Are you cold?”
	I nodded. 
	“Do you...does your skin bother you?”
	I had been feeling the sensation of crawling things on my arms but I had just assumed it was a hallucination brought on by too much electricity.
	“Yes.” I closed my eyes.
	She put one hand through her hair as she looked down at the floor. Lythril finally came in.
	“So? What is it?”
	“I don’t know how it happened,” Istria said. “But there it is.”
	“There what is?” Lythril demanded.
	“I think she’s got carathian fever,” she said.
	“Don’t be ridiculous.”
	“It wiped out my mother’s family, Lythril, I know what the symptoms are.”
	“I thought the bacillus was extinct on this island.”
	“Not the B strain.”
	“Well, they have antibiotics for this,” Lythril snapped. “I’ll order them when I have the time. Meanwhile I need you in the lab.”
	Lythril’s boots clomped out to the door. Istria’s followed, a hesitation later.
	Carathian fever, she said. She was probably right. She should know. Carathian fever was the Cretid name for the Greater Plague. And Istria’s family did know plague, closer than they’d wanted to.
	My family hadn’t tangled with it. But I knew a few things about it. One of which was that if untreated, in most cases, it was fatal inside of a week.
	I’d asked; she’d answered.
	Thank you.

	Grateful as I was for the acceleration of my demise, I had to say that carathian fever was not an unmixed blessing. I was used to being on fire, but this was a completely different thing--everything about my body felt wrong. I was sore, chilled, aching, bloated, parched, shivering and panting all at the same time. But beyond the individual symptoms there was the overwhelming sense that my body was fast becoming a hostile environment. My throat dried, my lips cracked; strange red bumps appeared on my skin; and the smallest movement became not only an effort of heroic proportions but exquisitely painful as well. I fortunately didn’t have much to do, because I doubt I could have focused on anything very long; my mind wandered frequently and there were moments when I couldn’t be sure where I was or how I’d gotten there. 
	Occupied with my own misery, I didn’t even notice at first that Istria had come in, with more water and one of those vials in her hand.
	“Here,” she said, putting the tumbler on the ground. “We finally got the pills. Take them with--”
	I had already drained the whole tumbler and was leaning against the wall gasping. “Thanks for the water,” I said.
	“Theamh,” she insisted. “You will take these pills.”
	“I will not,” I answered.
	“Do you want to die?”
	“Of course I want to die!”
	She ran her hands over her head and sat for a moment, looking down at the floor with her fingers clasped in a yoke across the back of her neck.
	After a long sigh, she looked up and started again. “Theamh, take the pills.”
	“No.”
	“This isn’t a story,” she said. “Dead is forever. And you know what she’ll do with your body.”
	“I know,” I answered. “It won’t be much use, though, I doubt there’ll be much left of me.”
	I didn’t continue because I was seized by one of the dry hacking fits that seemed to be part of this illness. By the time I was being trained the plague was gone from the country, so I’d never learned what the symptoms were. I now had tremendous sympathy for its doomed victims.
	“I’ll get you more water,” she said.
	When she came back she was also carrying a mirror. After I’d gulped down the water, painfully because of my raw red throat, she held the thing up to my face.
	“Look,” she said, her knuckles white at the edges of the glass. “Look at what you’re doing to yourself.”
	I had to admit I looked bad. The bones in my face were far more prominently visible then they had before, and there were dark hollows around my red-rimmed eyes. My hair was greasy with sweat and there was a bright red streak across each cheek, relieving what was otherwise an almost greenish pallor. I was also shaking; or maybe it was my reflection that was wavering as Istria’s hands shook holding the mirror. Or maybe both.
	“I have lost weight,” I said, strangely surprised to see the evidence. “Too bad mathi isn’t here to see it, eh?”
	“Oh for thurk’s sake, Theamh--”
	There was a crash, and the tinkle of broken glass. She was on her feet now, turned away from me, and the fragments of the mirror were scattered in pieces along the floor of the cell near the door.
	Muttering to herself, she brought the pieces together in a ball in the air, then let them drop into the empty tumbler. The doors hissed closed, then open again as she came back with more water in a different container.
	She knelt down in front of me, taking a deep breath as she put the tumbler on the floor and clenched her hands in her lap.
	“Don’t say horrible things like that.”
	“What does it matter?” I croaked.
	“Take the medicine,” she repeated, trying to burn into me with that blue stare.
	“No.”
	“Are you doing this to punish me?”
	“We’re both being punished enough for any six people Idair ever made,” I said. “I don’t want you to suffer, I just want to be out of this.”
	Istria took the vial and walked away.

	“She won’t take it.”
	They had started talking about me as if I weren’t there--as if I were dead already, maybe. My awareness of what was going on had become fitful and sporadic, anyhow, with patches of clarity alternating with long gray and grainy stretches of half-remembered nightmare. Although it was hard now for my nightmares to come up with anything worse than the waking reality.
	“Then just inject her with it.”
	Lythril was just a black shadow now, a head bent over me attached to a dark silhouette. Istria next to her looked more real to me for some reason--I could still see the features of her face, even though they were obscure in the shadow thrown by that overhead light.
	“They don’t make a version for intravenous delivery.”
	Lythril sighed. “Well, give me the oral prescription, I’ll have Maerin work one up.”
	“Maerin?” Istria snorted. “Oh, I don’t thurking think so, Lythril.”
	“I beg your pardon?”
	It was a tone of voice that would have stopped anyone else cold. But somehow Istria kept going.
	“There is no way I am about to let that bloody-minded lunatic pound together some concoction he thinks is a serum and squirt it into the veins of a woman on the verge of the otherworld. I can understand why he thinks he’s a doctor, but why you should believe him is something I will never fathom.”
	“He’s making progress, at least,” she said. “That’s more than you can say.”
	There was a silence.
	“The computers are making progress,” Istria finally answered. “The chances of my finding a solution are far greater than the chance of him growing something up in one of those tanks that can survive its first breath of air. I know what I’m doing, and he doesn’t have a thurking clue. You know that.”
	“I think you’re spending too much time down here,” Lythril said.
	“You want her to live, don’t you?”
	A choking cough I couldn’t stifle obtruded me onto their notice. Istria handed me the water that was now always within my reach. I looked up at both of them with rheumy and glazing eyes.
	“Theamh, will you take the thurking medicine now?” Istria said, crouching down near me and proffering the vial. “Will you just take it and not stubborn yourself to death?”
	“No,” I said, closing my eyes.
	There was another silence, this one ominous.
	“Let her die then, since she’s so set on it,” Lythril said, as her boots trudged toward the door.
	“But--what about the others?” Istria called out, with an edge of desperation.
	“I’m through wasting my time,” Lythril answered. “To hell with her. We’ll use Plan B.” Her boots were on the move again. “I’m giving you half an hour, Istria, and if you haven’t gotten that stuff into her by then I want to see you up in the trophy room.”
	I heard the doors closing. I opened my eyes, but it was a real effort to make them focus on Istria’s face, even though it was close to mine.
	“Take the pills, Theamh.”
	“No.”
	It only a whisper. But it still seemed to enrage Istria, who grabbed me by the shift and shook me.
	“Damn you, Theamh--”
	I collapsed back into the corner in pain as her hand brushed against my skin.
	“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice shaking. “That was stupid. I’m sorry. I’m just--it’s--” The voice broke off with a choking sound; I couldn’t see her face well enough to understand why. “Please, will you take the stuff so we don’t have to do Plan B?”
	“What’s Plan B?” I asked, groggily.
	Istria’s voice dropped almost too low for me to catch.
	“Plan B is the one where we use your apprentice instead,” she said.
	Forgetting how much it would hurt, I threw my head back against the wall. A long howl of frustration, pain, loss and anger came out of me, along with a flood of scalding tears. Istria seemed to be crying too, when she started pressing me again.
	“I know she’s probably in the south by now, but Lythril can find anyone anywhere she wants to. And if you die she’s going to go after her and you know she doesn’t stand a chance in hell. So if not for your sake, and not for mine, for her sake will you just take the thurking medicine!”
	I was blinking at her now, trying to see her face. But the image was gray, blurring, and my ears were full of the sound of sand falling.
	“Theamh!”
	I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I was back in the darkness.

	I was hot, and I hurt, and everything was wrong. Patches of dark and light lurched around me but they told me nothing about where I was. There was a cold wet thing on my forehead, and another on my chest under my neck. The rest of me was burning up.
	My head swam, and the already unsteady world began churning sickeningly. I seemed to be falling off the floor, plummeting out toward an inhospitable ceiling. But I never hit. Things stopped moving, or at least moving quite so much. 
	“Theamh? Can you hear me?”
	With the voice to guide me, I was able to turn the darkened, blurred blotch hovering near me into a face. A face it seemed like I hadn’t seen in a long time.
	“Istri,” I said, in a voice like a sigh. “You’re back.”
	I reached out a hand, but she put it away from her.
	“Where were you?” I asked, because it was what I was wondering. “You were gone a long time.”
	It seemed like a while before she answered, and there was something strange about her voice. “Don’t you remember, Theamh?”
	I tried to remember, but not for very long.
	“My mind’s wrong, Istri,” I said, frightened. 
	“It’s just the fever,” she said. “You’ll be all right when it’s broken.”
	“I missed you,” I said.
	There was a dry gulping sound. “I missed you too, Theamh. But I’m here now.”
	“Good,” I said, and closed my eyes.
	“Here.” I felt the rim of a glass pressed against my lip. “Drink this, it’ll make you better.”
	I tried to hold the glass, but even with two hands I couldn’t keep a grip on it. Istria guided it for me. I sputtered at the first taste.
	“Bitter,” I choked out.
	“I know,” she said, with anxiety straining her voice. “I know it tastes like fnaa, but it will make you better. Just drink it down and then you can have some juice to wash the taste out.”
	I nodded, because it seemed like too much effort to speak, and gulped at the water. It didn’t go down easy, but it went.
	“That’s good,” she said, taking the empty glass away. “That’s very good, Theamh. Now have the juice?”
	I drank down the other glass. It tasted better than the bitter stuff. It seemed, too, as if after a few minutes things came together a little bit, and I could see a little more clearly. But not much.
	“Istri,” I whispered.
	“What is it?”
	“I’m scared.”
	“I know.”
	“Hold me?”
	She shook her head. “I can’t, Theamh.”
	“Why not?”
	“You’re...you’re very sick, and if I catch it from you I won’t be able to take care of you.”
	“Oh,” I said, mustering the energy for a nod. “That’s right. You...don’t get sick for me. That’s right.”
	Her head disappeared from my field of vision as she began clearing away the glasses, and as some kind of sound that wasn’t speech came from her throat.
	I think I probably dozed off, but I didn’t stay out for long. I came awake suddenly and in a panic.
	“Istri!”
	She was back. “What is it, Theamh? What’s the matter?”
	“I’m--I’m--what’s happening to me? Where am I?”
	“You’ve got carathian fever and...you’re with me.”
	“Plague,” I said, fear curdling my already sickened bowels.
	“Yes.”
	If it was plague, I was done for; I remembered that much. “I’m sorry, Istri.”
	“For what?” she asked, in a hollowed-out voice.
	“To leave you,” I said. “You’ll be sad.”
	I was sad too, to think of it--sadder than I had ever been. It seemed as if Istria should be sad too, but I couldn’t tell what she was.
	“Why can’t I read you?” I said.
	“You--the fever’s hurt your mind, it does that to people.”
	“Oh,” I said.
	There was a long pause, marked by the sound of someone breathing hard.
	“Hold me?” I asked.
	“Theamh, I can’t.”
	I didn’t understand this, and the frustration made me cry. “I’m scared, I’m cold, I can’t read, why won’t you hold me?”
	“You don’t understand--”
	“Why won’t you hold me?”
	“Here, just--one minute.”
	Sounds I didn’t recognize happened somewhere beyond what I could see, and then the world started swimming again. When it settled I was wrapped all over in a blanket, huddled up in her lap with her arms around me and my head on her chest. 
	“I’m sick,” I said.
	“You’re very sick,” she answered. “And you’ve lost a lot of weight.”
	“Will I die?”
	The feel of her hand on my face was strange--but then everything was strange, why should skin feel like skin. And when I was looking into her eyes, they seemed bigger than they should have been, big and wet and blurry.
	“You’re dying now, because you’re not fighting,” she said, in a trembling voice. “If you don’t let it kill you you won’t die.” I blinked at her. “You have to fight, Theamh, I need you to fight. I need you to make up your mind not to die.” I was maybe going to answer, but she went on. “I know the pain is bad and the fear is worse but after all this you can’t die on me,” she said, her arms tightening around me. “I can’t stand it, I won’t get through it if you die. Promise me you won’t leave me like this. Promise me you’ll live.”
	“I don’t know if I can live,” I said, with a cough.
	“Promise me you’ll try then. Just promise you’ll try to live. For me.”
	I swallowed hard to clear my throat for it. “I promise, Istri. I’ll try.”
	A long shudder when through her and shook the arms holding me.
	“Thank you,” she said.
	I closed my eyes and rested my head on her shoulder. “I won’t leave you, Istri.”
	“I know you won’t.”
	“I’m scared, Istri.”
	“I know.”
	“I love you,” I said.
	Her arms tightened around me and there was a sound from her throat, a sigh maybe, but almost like the sound of suffocation.
	“Sleep now, Theamh,” she said. “I’ll stay with you.”
	I nodded. “I’ll be all right,” I murmured, as I started dropping back into darkness. “Don’t worry, Istri. Idair won’t take me away from you, now I’ve found you finally.”
	“No,” Istria said, with tears in her voice. “Idair won’t.”

	“She doesn’t look good.”
	“But she does look better.”
	I had figured out that since they couldn’t read me any more than I could read them, if I kept my eyes closed and my breathing regular they would assume I was asleep or unconscious. Half the time they were probably right, but sometimes, as right now, they weren’t.
	“True enough,” Lythril said. “I guess that stuff really does work. Hard to believe.”
	“I know,” Istria answered curtly.
	I was still hot, and I still hurt. But my mind was a lot clearer. Which had its drawbacks, in that I now remembered not only where I was and how I’d gotten there, but the fact that I had promised Istria that I would try to live.
	“I have your performance on tape, if you ever want to watch it,” Lythril said. “I think I’ll start having you do some VB work for us, Istri, you’ve got real talent.”
	I still didn’t understand why they had to talk in front of me at all. If I were them, I would just use the link. Unless maybe they wanted me to hear what they were saying. But since I was completely in their power anyway it didn’t seem to make sense that they would need to use strategy on me. Except for the bit of strategy Istria had pulled on me during my delirium.
	“It was part of my contract,” Istria said. “No public appearances.”
	“We can renegotiate, surely,” Lythril said. “I wouldn’t want to let your histrionic talents go to waste. You must have really brought the house down at the Burning.”
	“Shut up!”
	It was a shout so sudden and loud that I started involuntarily, blinking in confusion at Lythril, who was staring with black anger and silenced rage at Istria, whose silver chain rose and fell as her chest heaved and her breath came loud in her throat.
	“You’re forgetting your place, Istria,” Lythril said dangerously.
	“I know my thurking place,” she shouted back. “In here, in hell, in bondage for the rest of my days. I know that’s never going to change. Now you have what you wanted so leave me alone. Because so help me if you say another accursed thing to me about this I will strangle you with your own chain.”
	“I’d kill you first,” Lythril said.
	“So you would.”
	They stared at each other for a few moments, until Lythril turned to me.
	“I’m glad to see you’re feeling better,” she said.
	“Thurcte bi thu agus do mhuintir.”
	“Soon we’ll be able to start the treatments again.”
	“Die and rot,” I answered.
	“Drink a lot of fluids and get plenty of rest,” she said. “We’ve got a full day tomorrow.”
	“May the ghosts of Dunta’s butchered dead haunt every moment of your dreams,” I replied.
	Lythril turned abruptly and walked out. Istria followed her, with a sudden interest that puzzled me.
	“What does she mean, the ghosts of Dunta?” Istria asked, as the door slid open.
	“It’s no concern of yours,” Lythril said, and the plexiglass cut off the sound.
	And then it came to me. They weren’t using the link around me because they didn’t have one. Istria must have managed, somehow, to keep Lythril out of her head. And Lythril was retaliating by keeping her in the dark about some of her plans. And all this had been going on long before I got there.
	When I’m ready, she’d said. I hadn’t understood what that meant but I thought now that I might. What she’d really meant was, when Istria was ready. Ready to lay down the last resistance, ready to give up that last dying hope. Ready to prove she was Lythril’s creature by killing the last life in her heart.
	And I’d come before she was ready.
	Practically speaking, it didn’t matter. I was doomed, so was she, so was shri, really. But in some absurd way it mattered to me, that Lythril was about to get everything she ever wanted, except--where it counted--Istria.

	“Theamh.”
	It was never dark in my cell, but it was dark now for some reason. Not so dark I couldn’t see Istria crouched by my head, but still so dark her face was dim and almost indistinct.
	“What’s happening?”
	“I’ve had it,” she said. “I can’t do this. I should have known I couldn’t.” She grabbed me by the shoulders with her gloved hands. “Come on. I’m getting you out of here.”
	I scrambled to my feet, unable to believe it. “Istri, she can hear you,” I whispered. “You’ll get yourself killed.”
	She shook her head. “The main power’s out. I disabled it. We’ve only got about fifteen minutes. Come on.”
	“I--but Istri, it’s too dangerous for you--”
	“I don’t care,” she said, her voice breaking. “I’ll die, I don’t care. I love you, Theamh, I know you must hate me now but I still have to do this.”
	“Istri,” I said, bursting into tears. “I don’t hate you, you know that.”
	“You mean it?”
	“Of course I mean it.”
	Her fingers tightened their grip on my bare arms. “You forgive me?”
	“I forgive you,” I said. “This horrible place, and her working at you--what else could you have done?”
	She took a shuddering breath and her arms trembled. “I can’t believe it.”
	“It’s true, Istri, I forgive you--”
	“Show me you mean it,” she said, her eyes dark and her voice thick. “Show me it’s true.”
	“Istri, how can I show you except to tell you--”
	“Show me it’s true,” she repeated, frantic. “Say my name.”
	Fortunately my strength had come back just enough so that I could throw her off me and scuttle back into the corner.
	“Get out!”
	“Theamh--”
	“Go back to the bitch who made you! Get out!”
	“Theamh, it’s me, Istria--”
	“You are not Istria, you are a thurking aidolen made by that bitch upstairs so get the hell out!”
	“Don’t do this to me,” she said. Her voice broke, but she couldn’t get tears out of those eyes.
	“You are not Istria, I will not believe you are Istria no matter how long you stand there. Idair’s teeth, isn’t it enough what’s been done to us that you have to mock me this way!”
	“Theamh,” it said, and ran crying from the room.
	I curled up in my corner. The disappointment was still savage in me, and it was hard on my heart. But I consoled myself with thinking that if Lythril believed, as Barant had believed that time I went to see her, that I was as transparent as everyone said I was, then she would take it at face value, and assume that I had identified the aidolen because it had asked me for something Istria would have known I couldn’t tell her--and infer from that that in fact Istria didn’t know my name. Which was probably what she was trying to find out, unless she was also planning to use Istria’s name against her. Which also seemed likely, given recent events.
	Of course that was all assuming that it really had been an aidolen and not Istria. The light did come on as soon as she left; and all my instincts told me that I’d been right. It was true enough that Istria wouldn’t have asked me that question, at that moment. But that wasn’t because I didn’t know the answer; it was because she wasn’t stupid enough to want me to say her name out loud down here in the heart of hell, whether or not the security cameras were switched on. So I was probably right, and had probably saved both of us from certain perdition. On the other hand, if I was wrong, I had probably thrown away my last chance to escape.
	Then there was the third possibility, which was that I was counting on more than I should. Because the other explanation for why they would talk in front of me was that they were both in on this, both working together to make me think Istria was coming back to my side so that I would betray something to her. Maybe none of this had been real. Maybe it wasn’t about my name at all. Maybe plan B was really plan A and they were working together to find out from me how to get to Aine.
	It didn’t seem plausible to me, but then I knew I wouldn’t have wanted to believe it. And I remembered what had happened to me the last time I had assumed that what I wanted to believe was true.
	But I knew, as I sat there, that I was going to go ahead and believe in her anyway. Because evidently, when it came to this kind of thing, I was a very slow learner.

	I knew as soon as the shape appeared in the doorway that something was wrong. It was too broad and too tall. Then, as it came closer to the plexiglass, I saw why. It wasn’t Lythril, or Istria. It was Maerin.
	Instead of his black cloak he was wearing a white coat like the one I’d seen on Istria that first time, and instead of his death mask he wore one of those hoses the medicals used to listen to us breathe. The pockets of the coat bulged with metal implements and bits of cotton wool. 
	“Well,” he said, snapping on one of those gloves that Lythril and Istria used to handle me. “How’s the patient today?”
	I backed up against the corner as far as I could go.
	“Theamh ni hUlnach,” he said, stopping in the center of the room under the light so that shadows fell down around him in a dim graying puddle. “It’s been a long time.”
	“I wish it had been longer,” I said.
	“You look like you’re on the road to recovery,” he said, with a kind of false cheerfulness that barely camouflaged the raving lunatic I knew was underneath it. “But of course I can’t be sure until I’ve examined you.”
	“You had better not try to touch me, you crazy bastard,” I said.
	“I see we’re a little irritable,” he said, noting something down on a yellow pad he took out of his pocket. “Probably the effect of lingering fever.” He pulled out a narrow glass rod. “Time to take your temperature.”
	“Maerin,” I said, “tell me, is it just that you live in a fantasy world, where you really do practice medicine and I’m actually some completely different person who’s come to you for advice? Or is this just some sort of sick attempt to disguise torture as something else?”
	“You’re not being very cooperative,” he chided, reaching for me.
	I pushed myself to my feet and went sidling along the wall away from him. He moved after me, speeding up until finally I was actually running. But there was nowhere to go in a cell that small, and I found myself suddenly thrown to the ground on my back with his bulk pressing down on top of me. A cruel grin gashed his face and he laughed softly at me through his teeth.
	“We’ll start with the pelvic,” he said.
	“Get off me, you son of a bitch!” I screamed at him.
	I had learned hand-to-hand combat skills, but weakened by fever and starvation I was not up to much. I was reduced to thrashing violently but ineffectively. He was much heavier than I was and there was no way to get a purchase on anything to throw him off. And the knowledge of what he had come in for shot me with the sharpest, most paralyzing terror I had ever known. It had never, in my life, occurred to me that someday I might be there, struggling underneath this ungiving weight, fighting the knowledge that I was about to be overcome by brute strength alone.
	I spat up at his face, but this only provoked him to wrench my head violently to one side and grind it into the floor with one of those huge, red-knuckled hands. 
	“She would do it herself, I’m sure,” he said, “but she doesn’t have all the necessary equipment.”
	No sooner had he finished breathing this into my ear than I heard a crack, the sound of cloth tearing, and a bloody scream from Maerin. Then the weight was lifted off me in what seemed like too short an instant, and there was a thud as his body made contact with the opposite wall.
	I sat up and scrambled back into the corner. Lythril was standing there, fists on her hips, the handle of a long whip in one hand. And smoking with anger as she stared down Maerin, whose body was still pressed into that upholstered wall, and whose feet were several inches off the ground.
	“Who gave you permission to come in here?” she shouted, flicking the lash at him so that it wrapped around one of his arms. She tugged him forward with the whip and he fell prostrate on his face on the floor. It looked like she wasn’t holding him any more, but he still didn’t offer to move.
	“You said to keep an eye on her,” he said.
	Lythril seized him by the shoulder of his jacket and rolled him roughly over, standing over him with one boot planted on either side of his trembling body.
	“This is the end, Maerin,” she spat, violently angry beyond anything I had seen, even that first time we had been with her. “I let you persist in your lunacy because it was occasionally useful to me.” She played the whip across his chest, laying open a bloody furrow from which scraps of cloth and skin curled away. He screamed. “You have ceased to be useful.”
	“You wanted her broken!” he shouted at her as he tried unsuccessfully to get up.
	“You have never, at any point in your wretched life, been capable of understanding for an instant what I want,” Lythril said, her voice velvety soft. He knew enough to be terrified of it.
	“I let you thurk Atella and Hedina and the rest of the Cretid trash you bring in here,” she said. “They don’t care, and they don’t count. And you may have been thinking these seven years that you’ve been thurking me, but I’m the one thurking you, Maerin. Because it pleases me to do it, and because it keeps you in bondage where you belong. You are a slave to our power, just like all your kind. You have just committed an outrage on magic, an act of treason and revolt against me and the power I serve.” The whip flashed again, and that red furrow got deeper as flecks of blood spattered lightly over the walls. “You know that in here there’s only one punishment for traitors.”
	“Lythril--”
	He started, but crazy as he was he wasn’t crazy enough to cry for mercy.
	It happened so fast I couldn’t even move until it was already too late. She dropped one knee into his gut, forcing his breath out in a painful grunt, and put her red-flamed right hand right through that bleeding gash. I started forward, not sure what I could do but determined to do something. But she waved the other hand at me and I flew back into the corner, wrapped up into a harmless ball. 
	He started screaming, and never stopped. Her hand was in all the way up to the wrist; blood was pouring from the hole she’d punched and there was a horrible sound of rending. Bracing herself on that knee, she ripped her hand out of his ribs, with a fistful of bloody red meat shuddering inside it.
	Maerin stopped screaming and his body went limp. His eyes fixed glassily on the light fixture, frozen and unblinking. Lythril stood up over him, making sure of his death, with the heart still beating in her dripping right hand.
	She was panting, and her cheeks were flushed, spackled with the spray from his broken bloodlines. It took her a very long moment to slow her breathing down and swallow so that when she spoke her voice sounded measured and calm even if her eyes were still wild.
	“Istria.”
	The intercom voice spoke, but with Istria’s accents now. “Here.”
	“Bring a sustaining jar down to unit 3425. And turn on the power in 3424, we’re going to have to shift her.”
	“Understood,” said the intercom curtly.
	Lythril stepped back from him, kicking his limp arm out of her path with her boot.
	“It...it’s regrettable, that you were subjected to that,” Lythril said, seeming to have forgotten as she looked at me that she was holding a beating heart in one hand. “It won’t happen again.”
	The most frightening, insane, mind-searing detail about this unspeakably horrifying spectacle was the fact that Lythril was not only apologizing, but appeared to be sincere.
	“I will never understand darkness,” I said, in horror.
	“I’m beginning to think you never will,” she answered, as her eyes narrowed.
	The bloodstreaked glass of the door slid back and Istria walked through, carrying a glass jar full of clear liquid.
	“Thank you, Istri,” Lythril said, uncapping the jar and plunging her hand into the liquid. The heart, released, floated in suspension, tendrils of blood curling around it through the fluid.
	Istria looked past the jar at Maerin. “It was long overdue,” was all she said.
	“I know.” Lythril looked down on him, with an unmarked face. She put the cap back on the jar, with a faint smile as she screwed it tight. “Ah well. At least his heart will go on.”
	With a laugh, Lythril walked toward the doors. “Do what’s necessary and put it with the others. Tell pantry detail to meet me in the cold room.”
	Lythril left me in there with Istria, the corpse, and Maerin’s pulsing heart.
	“I didn’t see him come in,” Istria said. “I was off making Erysin. It’s lucky Lythril is as paranoid as she is.”
	I stared back at her, still too shocked to speak.
	“I would never have thought,” she said, disturbed. “He never tried it on me.”
	It might be my last chance to talk to her, so I had to get it out, even though I could hardly bring myself to it.
	“Watch the tapes from last night,” I said.
	“What?” she asked.
	“It’s all about you,” I said. “It’s always been. She doesn’t even want to turn me, she doesn’t want me working for her. I’m a loose cannon, I’m indiscreet, I’m the opposite of what she wants. You’re the one she’s after. And she knows she hasn’t got you, yet. That’s the only reason she keeps me around.”
	“Theamh--”
	“She sent an aidolen in here trying to get your name out of me,” I said, mindful of that camera eye. “Of course it didn’t work. I’m just a means to get to you, Istri. She’s waiting to see whether in the end you’re loyal to me or loyal to her.”
	We looked at each other. I had no idea what she was thinking.
	“I have to get this to the pantry before it’s too late,” she said. 
	And she left me there with the blood and the corpse.
	I never moved from the corner. Lythril came back and hauled me into a neighboring cell, which looked identical to the last one except it had no blood on the walls and floor and no heartless corpse lying in the middle of it. 
	We had learned to put up with a lot, when we were there as apprentices. But we’d never seen anything like this happen. It might be true, as I thought it probably was, that Istria was realizing that she still loved me. But that didn’t maybe matter as much as I had thought it would. She was in deep. Maybe too deep to ever get out. And if she was, then so was I.

XXIII.
Plan B
	
	“So,” I said, as Lythril came in. “Is it time for another round of ‘What’s My Name?’”
	I tried to sound confident, but the vision of her standing there with that dripping heart was hard to shake. If she had done it on purpose to make me more afraid of her she had succeeded. I was past allowing fear to affect my actions, but I wasn’t past feeling it.
	“It’ll be your last,” she said. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to break you, or kill you.”
	“You’ll probably have to kill me then,” I said. “I can out-stubborn anything that lives, including you. Ask my mother if you don’t believe me.”
	Lythril, instead of hauling me up as usual, sat down slowly and deliberately across from me, painting that smile slowly onto her face.
	“I will, next time I see her,” she said.
	I didn’t know what she meant to imply by that, but I was sure she would tell me in a minute or two.
	“It’s great good fortune to you that she taught you to be stubborn,” Lythril finally went on. “You owe her a great debt for that. I owe her a debt too, in a way,” she added, bringing one hand up to perform some minute and useless adjustment to her hair. “You know, don’t you, that she was my first client?”
	“And in what fictional universe did all this happen?” I said.
	“We met in scoil, just like the two of you,” Lythril said. “You know how it is. The girls sort themselves out by province, and you make friends with the other scoili from your region. Oh, except that you couldn’t have done that, of course, because you were from the Vicinity, and that’s not a region. And of course Istria couldn’t because they all would have known what she was. Come to think of it, that must have been why you found each other. Two misfits that nobody else would talk to.”
	“I’m grown up now, Lythril,” I said. “I don’t care about being popular.”
	She ignored me. “And then there was the added thing that we were both from dirt-poor towns out there. Come to the big city to make our fortunes.”
	“If you wanted a fortune, going to scoil was a stupid way to start making it,” I said.
	Lythril shrugged. “Where else could I learn the skills? That’s what held all the others back, you know--besides their lack of talent. On our side, we don’t cooperate; we don’t train. I’m doing what I can to rectify that, but as you can see, I’ve got nothing to work with up here. It’ll be much better when I get home, and I can really start using the Order.”
	I just waited for the next installment.
	“Of course Ulnach thought she wanted to be a shriia, that was the thing about Ulnach. What she wants and what thinks she wants are just so far apart it’s a wonder she hasn’t drowned in her grief by now. But that was what she liked me for. I got good at telling her what she really wanted.”
	I was starting to find this all vaguely disgusting. For all I knew she was making it up. But if she happened not to be, the idea of my mother consorting with the young Lythril would have made my flesh crawl if it weren’t constantly crawling anyhow these days.
	“Because really, she wanted what I wanted,” Lythril continued. “Not much. A big house, a lot of money, and her own way. That’s all there is to it, really. Of course there are easier ways to get there than the path I chose, but that’s because I like a challenge. Life is worth nothing if you’re not pushing yourself. I couldn’t stand Ulnach’s life, it would drive me to madness--the routine, the dull torpid futility of it all.”
	“Well fortunately you haven’t got it,” I said.
	“No, I haven’t,” she answered with that smile. “You get what you wish for, that’s what they say. Your mother wanted the life she has. I gave it to her.”
	“My father gave it to her,” I said.
	“She had to meet him first,” Lythril answered. “A barefoot Kengda girl isn’t going to be asked to the kind of parties where you meet a man like Flahn. That was where I came in. I was her...well, up here, the Cretids would call me her fairy godmother.”
	I had stopped looking at her, but the voice went on. “All with mindstrength, of course. I couldn’t afford to actually make all the stuff she would need. But the rich get soft, you know that. I could make them all think that not only had they invited us, but we were tricked out in satin and jewels like you don’t ever see down there except in portraits from the old times. Ulnach fortunately was a good-looking woman, so I didn’t have to waste effort on that.”
	She sighed. “They were good days, really. Sneaking out of the scoil at night to run off to some ball in the Sixth, sneaking back in past the diaoci in the early morning...of course that bitch Morat spoiled it all for me, but by then my work was done.”
	“She didn’t meet my father until a year after she left,” I said.
	“That’s how she tells it,” Lythril answered. “She’d been seeing him secretly for a month by the time I said my goodbyes to the Pharc. I thought that might cashier the whole thing, but she was smart, your mother. She ‘confessed,’ told him she was a scoilin, her heart belonged to Idair, she had to say goodbye, please not to try to talk to her any more, and so forth. So of course the man’s not going to leave that alone, and the whole time he’s courting her at the scoil he doesn’t have to know where she comes from, does he, because everyone’s poor at scoil.”
	“He wouldn’t have cared anyhow,” I said.
	“Believe what you want,” Lythril answered. “Fact is, they were already promised before she quit the place. They just waited a year to make it decent. And to give her time to train her family. Your seanmathi--she was not a woman with big-city style.”
	“Leave my seanmathi out of it,” I said, lamely.
	“So I got her what I promised her,” Lythril went on. “The big house, the money, and her own way. With everyone around her. Flahn, the servants, the other Big House bitches--she’s queen of the colony now. Of course in all modesty that goes down partly to her enormous talent for the work. She’s a genius in her own small way.”
	“And you did all this out of friendship,” I snorted.
	“Oh no, Theamh,” she said, eyes widening in innocent shock. “You surely don’t think I would go to that trouble without asking for payment in return, do you?”
	“No, I surely don’t,” I said.
	“I’m relieved to hear it,” she answered. “Your good opinion has always meant so much to me.”
	I waited, smoldering.
	“I was young then,” she said. “Younger even than you were that first day I met you, and romantic like all the young. I should have asked for something practical, something I could use right away. But I’d read the tales, you know. I wanted to be like the old ones. So I asked for something extravagant, something that would have been more trouble than it was worth.”
	Hating myself for caring, I prompted her. “Which was?”
	“Her first-born child,” Lythril said.
	I didn’t want to look up in shock, but I did it anyway.
	“Of course she didn’t really understand the promise when she made it,” Lythril went on. “She was young too, she’d never had a child. I’m not sure she would ever have had one, really, if I’d still been in the Vicinity; but she thought she could get away with it. Because I had to go into hiding in the wilderness far from the Craoibh Oir, and anyhow you can’t press a legal claim for a transaction like that--not since Grouth v. Queen of the Underhill, as Bric will tell you.”
	“You just keep getting more evil every second I look at you,” I said.
	She smiled. “I didn’t press it, right away. I wasn’t interested in changing diapers or teaching table manners. I told her I would come for you, someday. And I waited until I knew you’d be worth it. It’s worked out well,” she wound up. “A long-term investment. She did the hard part, and now I reap the rewards.”
	“In your dreams, maybe,” I said.
 	“She sold you to me before you were born,” Lythril went on, not smiling now. “You promised yourself to Idair; but long before that, you were promised to me. You’re an outstanding debt, Theamh. The oldest one on my books. You can make yourself damn sure, right now, that one way or another I’m going to claim you.”
	“You’re a liar,” I said.
	“May be,” she answered. “But so is Ulnach. Isn’t she?”
	“I was never hers to give,” I said. “And you will never claim me.”
	“We’ll see,” she answered. “Come along, Theamh. It’s time for your final treatment.”
	I waited for her to wrap me, but instead there was a sharp, loud bleat from the box in the corner. Lythril swung around, agitated. The intercom voice came, this time someone I didn’t recognize.
	“Intruder alert. Perimeter breach, northeast quadrant 008.64. Subject approaching curtain wall.”
	“Discontinue audio warning,” Lythril said, not even turning around. She released me and went to the doors.
	“Istria.”
	“Here.”
	“Get to the guardroom and check the monitors,” she said, walking toward the doors.
	“Understood.”
	“Don’t get your hopes up,” Lythril said, as she waited for the glass door to open. “It’s probably just another deer. Poor things--electricity is a bad way to death, and it gives their meat a very strange taste.”
	Hopes my gleacha. Inasmuch as I hoped for anything, I was hoping that intruder was not a human being bent on rescuing me. Aine was long gone, but it had occurred to me early on that Chandra was just crazy enough to try to organize a rescue party on her own, and if she had indeed done so, then she was shortly going to become prey for the Dark One. At least with Maerin out of the way the range of things that could befall her would be narrower, even if it was still inclusive of several fates worse than death.
	And indeed, for what seemed like a long time I heard nothing. Distracted as I was by the present situation my mind kept running back along the story Lythril had just finished telling me. I cursed my own credulity every time, because there was no reason in the world not to assume that this was simply a lie Lythril had crafted to try to weaken me further. If I believed in destiny, or shared this attitude toward debt and payment that seemed to be party of the dark user code, it might be the thing that put me over the edge--believing that actually I had been marked at birth as the Dark One’s creature. But I didn’t believe that anyone but Idair had more than the slightest of ideas of what the future held, and I certainly had rejected, long ago, the premise that because my mother wanted something, she had the right to use me to get it. 
	It meant nothing, then. Except that if it were true, my mother wasn’t just a self-involved, narrow-minded woman who had unintentionally done me harm by refusing to accept the reality I embodied instead of the ideal daughter she thought she deserved. If it were true, my mother had actually sold me to my worst enemy--and then, for thirty years, never said a damn thing to me about it. As she watched Lythril slowly but surely encroach on my life until now here she was about to end it.
	It was a big lie to tell; but it was a smart one because I would never know whether it was true or not. Even supposing a miracle happened and I survived and saw my mother again, confronting her would accomplish nothing. Lythril had said at least one true thing, and that was that my mother was a liar. To herself, and to everyone around her. If she had traded me to Lythril for the Craoibh Oir and everything else, she would die before admitting it. Probably she wouldn’t even remember having done it, really. Probably there was an entirely different story in her mind now about how it had all happened, in which Lythril did not figure at all.
	It was a smart lie, too, because in some ways it made a lot of sense. I was five years old before I knew that my mother had ever lived anywhere but the City,  and I only found out because seanmathi had started to tell me stories about my mother’s girlhood. I was ten before I realized that what my seanmathi told me and what my mother told me about that time in her life were not simply different interpretations of the same story, but actually different stories. And I was fifteen before it occurred to me to ask my mother and father when and how they first met, and watched with amazement as my father struggled to remember. My mother had laughed, and made fun of him for having forgotten, and called him unromantic and just like a man; but knowing this story put a much more sinister reading on that moment. It’s quite common for people to have confused, fragmentary and vague memories of a period during which they were under the influence of a stronger mind.
	And it made sense, too, of the way my mother had rejected belief. If she had indeed promised me to a dark user, then it made a lot of sense to decide that magic was hogwash and that therefore Lythril had no power over either her or me. Of course she had to throw Idair out along with the Dark One, but to her maybe it was worth the sacrifice. It would also explain why she had been so dead-set against my going into shri, the one career that was sure to bring me into contact with the woman that she knew--even when I didn’t--was my mortal enemy. It would explain why when the entire city was convulsed with talk of the Lythril trial and my fame was rising on the wind of it, my mother consistently refused to discuss it with me or with anyone else. 
	But then that could also be explained so many other ways. Including with the theory that we were just, somehow, wrong for each other--which was the one I had always been operating by. Or by some mix of the two--maybe Lythril had helped my father meet my mother, but then maybe my mother had already paid her in full, in coin or in something else. That would go far to explain much, without requiring me to believe that my mother would actually treat me that way, even before I was born.
	It didn’t matter, anyhow. Because that door was opening again, and Lythril was coming through it, ready now to take me out to die on the table.
	“We’re putting you back in 3425,” she said, wrapping me and hauling me up. “Gwilna did a great job of cleaning up the mess. She’s handy to have around for the dirty jobs.” The metal door slid shut behind me. “She’s no good as a user now, of course, but then she never was. I’m not sure she’s not happier as she is, really.”
	Outside the door of my former cell Lythril did something to a pad on the left side of the door, and the metal one swung open. “Of course one cell is much like another. We wouldn’t bother, except that we thought you might prefer company for a change.”
	She pushed me through the second doorway as it opened. I staggered into the lit space under the ceiling fixture, stepping wide because there was someone lying on the floor, sprawling where she’d been thrown.
	The dark head lifted as she turned slowly, pushing herself up on her shaking hands. 
	“Oh thurking hell no,” I said, as my heart sank to my stomach.
	“Hello, dhiaoc,” Aine said, in a voice almost as broken as I felt.
	I spun around and made a murderous dash for Lythril, but the plexiglass door had already closed, and she was laughing at me from the other side of it.
	My hands pounded on the glass, but it didn’t care, any more than Lythril cared that she was getting cursed out at high volume in the worst kind of gutter City slang. She turned, and when the metal door slid back I saw Istria out there in the corridor waiting for her. 
	“You listen to me!” I shouted at her, before the door closed. “What’s been done to me is one thing, but I swear to you now, if you harm her, I will never forgive you for it!”
	Sliding metal cut off my view, and there was nothing I could do now but turn around and face the fact that I had as good as killed my apprentice.
	She was sitting up with her back to the wall, legs stretched out in front of her in their muddied trousers. Her face was whitened either in terror or in shame, and her eyes were taking me in with a pity that I really thought would be more usefully applied to herself.
	“They’ve been starving you,” she said.
	“I’ve been starving myself.” I sat down slowly, under the light. “Aine, you promised me you would go south to find help.”
	“You’re the one who taught me insubordination,” she answered.
	“Don’t remind me,” I said bitterly, looking down at the floor. The stains were indeed very faint, but they were still visible.
	“I couldn’t do it,” she said, still trying to justify herself to me because she felt she had to. “I knew they hadn’t killed you, Ira could tell me enough that I knew you were prisoner here. I had to try. For shri, if not for me or for you.”
	“The best thing you could have done for shri would be to save yourself,” I said, dully. “My story’s over.”
	“That’s not true, dhiaoc,” Aine said quickly.
	“Oh, call me Theamh for once in your life, it’s the last chance you’ll have!” I shouted, driven to anger by the pain of despair.
	She watched me cry for a few moments, and then that incredible sense of duty drove her to try to help keep my spirits up.
	“Well, look at the bright side,” she said, with a ghastly little smile. “If we should survive and make it home all right, at least now you’ll be over her.”
	I pulled my knees up and dropped my forehead onto them, groaning quietly to myself and hiding from the shocked reply I knew was coming.
	“Oh no, dhiaoc,” she said. “Do not tell me that after all this you still have feelings for her.”
	“You don’t understand this, Aine,” I said, not looking up.
	“I do not,” she shouted, angry. “How can anyone, let alone you, be that besotted over a traitor like her?”
	“Leave it alone, Aine,” I said, looking up at her dangerously.
	“I won’t leave it,” she shouted back. “Idair’s hair and eyebrows, dhiaoc, will nothing teach you that she’s black at heart and only wants your harm?” I dropped my head again, but she wasn’t about to let up. “How can you sit there and tell me you still love a woman who has betrayed you this foully and hurt you this long?”
	She was crying too now--sympathy for me, maybe, or for herself and the pain she was about to suffer because of my own foolishness. 
	“I can do it because it’s true,” I said.
	“Spirit almighty,” Aine shouted, driven to that green-spark anger I’d seen before. “If what she’s done to you won’t do it, what about what she’s done to Idair? I could see you loving her when you thought she was good, but now that you know she’s evil--”
	“She’s not evil, Aine--”
	“Well, if she isn’t, she does a very convincing impression!” I looked away. “She’s turned, dhiaoc, that’s real, that’s a fact, you can’t wish that away like you wished death away all those years. Heaven and hell, could you want more proof?”
	“That’s enough, Aine!” I shouted, ashamed of slipping back into the authority my actions had proved me unworthy of wielding. “I know what she’s become and I know what she’s done. I know damn well she’s lost to Idair and to me. And I’ve broken my heart over it but all the same I am cursed with the gift of understanding her.” Aine stopped, surprised and taken aback by this new turn the argument was taking. “And I can’t stop loving her now, just because she’s turned, when I know why it happened.”
	There was a long silence while she stared at me and I bitterly regretted not being able to read her.
	“You claim,” she said, her voice hard, “that you understand this atrocity she has committed.”
	“Yes,” I answered.
	She burst into tears.
	“Then explain it,” she demanded. “Because right now I cannot make sense of it, or of anything else in the universe.”
	It seemed on the one hand like it couldn’t possibly matter less, my telling Aine what I knew about all this. We were both going to be dead soon, if we were lucky; if we weren’t, worse was surely about to happen. Either way, we would never again walk the earth as us, Theamh and Aine, dhiaoc and scoilin, two women trying to help each other help Idair write us a good story. Why I should be driven, against all reason, to continue the absolutely useless project of educating her was something that I did not in fact understand. But habit is strong, I suppose, and I started talking.
	“I never told you about her and her father,” I said. “I suppose by now you must have guessed.”
	“It’s not a hard story to piece together,” she answered.
	“In a way, it’s not,” I said, sighing. “It’s not a complicated tale. Easy to tell, in the outline. I don’t know if her father beat Varen before Istria was born; I just know she doesn’t remember a time when there was any other punishment in their house. When she got to be about eight, and Sinal was born, he started thurking Istria as well as beating her.” Aine bristled at the term, but I went on. “That much he hid from the other farmers and from Varen, although she must have let him hide it, small as their house was. She brought herself one day to tell her mother, who punished her for telling lies. So she shut up and went on living, getting out of the house as much as she could, throwing herself heart and mind into the lore she was learning at fosterage and discovering that she was smart, that she was a good reader, that there were people who thought she would go far and do things. Finding in Idair a mother who would believe her, who knew how great this evil was. Beginning to hope that someday soon there would be an escape.”
	I wasn’t watching for Aine’s reaction, knowing I couldn’t read her, and being anyway plagued by the tears that were blurring my view of her face.
	“And maybe she would just have kept her mouth shut until she could get into the scoil, if it hadn’t been for Sinal. Who Istria loved as hard and fiercely as any mother could love her own child, and for whose sake she would take any punishment and divert any amount of anger and rage and evil onto her own head. She had made up her mind to save him,” I said, with my voice trembling as I remembered. “But she couldn’t, not as long as her father was there, being who he was, and ruling the house. He was only four years old when his father caught him meddling with the hoes in the barn or some such thing and broke his arm like you snap a twig. Istria took him down to the shriia at siulin to get the bone set. And then when the shriia was done taking care of the boy, she walked right out into the town square and called scrainnte on her father.”
	“For breaking his arm,” Aine said.
	“No,” I answered. “Ancinte is a rough place. Life is hard, tempers are high, accidents happen. Up there a broken arm alone isn’t proof that something is wrong enough to need righting. She knew there was only one way to get him out of their house and into scrainnte,” I said. 
	Chuireann mo ari orm!
	I could see the scene as if she’d shown it to me yesterday. And hear her voice, her twelve-year-old’s treble, screaming out the pain she shouldn’t have known.
	Chuireann scrainnte ord!
	“Dhiaoc?”
	I came back to the story, and Aine’s expectant face. “She told them he had forced himself on her,” I said. “And much as he didn’t want to, Ancinte’s town leader did what he knew was his duty, and agreed to hear her.” I sighed. “That part of the story’s long, longer than it seems in the telling. They determined to their satisfaction that she was telling the truth. And they sent a party up to haul him out of the field and down to the square, with Varen trailing behind them cursing them and their ancestors all the way. They put him into scrainnte, third degree.”
	Aine’s eyes widened. Third degree scrainnte is something familiar to most people only through legend and oral history. Most of the time when scrainnte is put on someone there’s a time limit, and there are limits set on the degree to which the person can be ostracized. For something like what Delth had done to Mielen, for instance, it might have lasted six months, and they might have determined that it was permissible to sell goods to him but not to buy from him, that he could not be spoken with in public or invited into another home, but that members of his own family could continue to associate with him in private in his own home. That would put it somewhere between first and second degree. 
	Third degree was complete severance. He was not to be allowed inside any home in Ancinte, even his own. Nobody was to speak to him either in public or in private. Linked communication could not be monitored, but if he was seen standing close enough to another villager to be able to send or receive, he would be driven into the hills. Nobody could buy from him, or sell to him, even food or drink. And this was to be for life, with no chance of revocation.
	“The punishment itself would have been hard enough to support,” I said. “He would simply have had to leave, there’s no way he could tough out an Amstian winter in third degree scrainnte. But worse than that was the shock of seeing all those men and all those women raise their hands and call it down on him. Because he’d done the one thing Idair commanded us above all not to do, and they knew that, and what’s more they knew they had suspected it for a while and done nothing. And it was in their minds and hearts that if they gave him less than the full measure, his guilt and their guilt would bring something horrible down upon their little town.”
	“Do you think it would have, dhiaoc?”
	I was surprised that she thought of that, as a question; it had never really occurred to me.
	“I don’t think Idair would have punished the whole town for his evil,” I said. “But I sure hope she would have found a way to punish him.”
	Aine waited for me to go on.
	“He didn’t survive the shock,” I said. “He was turned out, even though Varen would rather have cut her hand off than do it. But she had to live there, and I don’t know what it’s like in Jipran but in northern Amst you don’t contravene a scrainnte lightly. For a few days he wandered the public byways of the village, recognized by no one. Finally he collapsed in the public square. The shriia took care of him because she was the only person who could touch him. With her help he lingered a day and a night, but no longer. She gave him his departure, but nobody was there to send him home.”
	She watched me as I sat silent, waiting for I didn’t know what.
	“It’s a terrible story, dhiaoc,” Aine finally said. “And a terrible death for him to die, alone like that. I can see how it would make you pity her, and how that maybe would make you love her. But I don’t see how it excuses her turning to evil, after all that time and after all you and Idair did for her.”
	Her voice rose on the last part, and the hot tears of anger were back in her eyes. Anger rose up in me too, even though I knew this wasn’t her fault.
	“It’s not about excusing it, Aine,” I shot back. “I don’t know if Idair will excuse her ever and frankly at this very moment I don’t care. What I said is I understand it.”
	“Explain that then,” Aine returned swiftly. 
	“It’s useless,” I cried. “I can tell you the story but you’ll never see it. I can tell you what he did but I can never tell you what that did to her. Idair’s mighty anger, when I think about it I almost wish he were still alive so I could destroy him myself. If there was one life on earth I was going to take, Aine, it would be his. Even Lythril has more right to exist than he did. To take a child like Istria, a girl as bright and beautiful and magical as she was, and to treat her every day of her life as if she was nothing, as if she was the dirt under his bootheels, as if it was her flesh and her spirit corrupting the air and poisoning the world, as if the rocky earth of their farm was barren because she was prideful and angry, as if she had personally solicited and earned every one of the bruises he gave her, as if because she hated the hand that beat her she deserved to be raped, as if because she was flesh of his flesh that gave him the right to use her like a two-copper whore!”
	She had started back away from me against the wall, appalled perhaps by my language or perhaps by my vehemence. I kept going anyhow.
	“Every day of her life, to teach her that the evil was in her, and not in him, that the misery and pain of her existence was her own fault and not his, that she was unspeakable, unlovable, irredeemable, that the darkness was in her heart!” I shouted. “So that twenty years later, after learning with a lot of pain and terror that after all she was something, that she was beautiful, brilliant, brave, powerful, strong in heart and mind and spirit, that she was a miracle, that she was one of Idair’s jewels, that there never was nor would be anything like her, that people as different as Morat and me could see that and love her for it, Lythril could turn her to the Dark One just by convincing her that she really was who her father thought she was!”
	Aine said nothing. She was watching me, and her mouth was not hanging open, but she sort of looked like maybe it might have been if she weren’t careful.
	“I didn’t know this would happen,” I said, a little calmer. “I could never have predicted it. I believed so strongly that love can beat anything, that I would protect her from all of that just by being the one person who would tell her who she really was, who would say often enough that her father was wrong that maybe she would believe it. I knew it was a struggle. I knew she believed that there was darkness in her heart, and that fight as she might it would claim her someday. And I’m sure, damn sure, that Lythril saw that when we went to her the first time.”
	“And so it has claimed her,” Aine said.
	“You’re not getting it, Aine,” I answered. “We all have demons. There’s darkness in my heart, in your heart, in Morat’s, in everyone’s. We do good and do well because we believe we can, because we believe Idair will give us the strength to fight. But no matter how often I told her that she would never believe it of me. She would insist that she was different, that I was good all the way through but that she wasn’t. She wanted to believe that I was pure,” I said, swallowing my tears. “And so the bottom line was, she never thought she was good enough, for Idair or for me.”
	“So you loved her for the good in spite of the darkness,” Aine said. “But now that darkness is all there is--”
	I shook my head. “No. When you love someone, you love them whole. I loved it that she was a shriia. It made me happier than anything in the world to see her out there working. You never saw her on fire, Aine,” I said, transported by the memory for a moment and forgetting the situation, bringing my hands out to help me get it through to her. “Beauty that would stop your heart, it hurt to look at her almost. I would stand there sometimes like an idiot with tears in my eyes just staring at her and being amazed that this world could hold something like her. I loved it that she was good. But I didn’t love her for being good. I loved her because she was Istria. And that meant I loved her because she struggled, because she had demons, because there was pain and darkness in her heart that answered the pain and darkness in mine.” I looked down at the floor and sighed, then up at Aine’s uncomprehending face. “Maybe you can’t understand this; maybe I’m talking against reason. But there it is. I loved her for the things that made her good, and for the things that right now are making her dark. We’re on opposite sides, we have to work against each other, we’ll never be together like we dreamed of being, that’s all over. But she’s still Istria, and I’m still Theamh. And Theamh loves Istria, and that’s just the story.”
	 I was hard put to read the look on Aine’s face. I had never quite seen her face look that way, and I had nothing to go by. I watched, hoping for some kind of inspiration, and then she finally gulped, with a little gasping breath, and asked in a small frightened voice, “What will they do to me, dhiaoc?”
	I sighed. “What I expect,” I said, “is that they’ll come through that door soon, one or the other or both of them, and haul you off to be overtaken. Or maybe they’ll do it right in front of me, just to see if I’ll crack over it. When she overtakes you, Lythril will run you down to the hills down south and you’ll become her double agent in the resistance. You’ll find Morat and the others, and through you she’ll destroy them all.”
	She didn’t answer; I kept going, drearily running through the scenario. “Or maybe they’ve already done that. Maybe you’ve been overtaken already, and they sent you in here to see if they’re doing a convincing job of making you look like you’re free and self-governed. It would make a lot of sense, for them to do that; and really, since I can’t read you, I have no way of knowing if they’ve done it. I have to say, if it’s true, that you do Aine very well.”
	“But if you believe that--or if you even think it--why tell me that story?” Aine asked, alarmed.
	“Because I want Lythril to know, if she’s watching--as she surely is, either from your eyes or through the eye on that camera--that she did not accomplish this great work all by herself. She had a lot of help turning Istria. From a father who put her through ten kinds of hell, from a mother who never stood up for her, from a town who tried to forget their own guilt by treating her like almost as much of a pariah as he was, from a diaoc who was too involved in her own story to realize that Istria and I were too young and too vulnerable to go off on that mission...and from a lover who wasn’t smart enough, or strong enough, or brave enough, to help her win the struggle, and who in the end when it really counted wasn’t there to fight with her.”
	“Don’t say that about yourself, dhiaoc,” Aine said, reaching a hand out to stop me. “It’s not your fault. You did everything you could. Never blame yourself for it, never--”
	She stopped, freezing with one hand in the air and her eyes fixed on nothing, or more accurately on something that had stopped happening some time ago.
	“Which of the many moments of terrible agony that have transpired here in the past few days are you seeing now, Aine?” I asked wearily.
	“Maerin,” she choked.
	“Yes,” I answered. “That was a nasty way to go.”
	“I don’t mean the death,” she said, water running again from her eyes. “I’m glad he’s dead. He should be dead. To have tried to do that to you.”
	“It’s all right, he didn’t get far,” I said. “Don’t break your heart over it, Aine, save your compassion for yourself.”
	She looked at me with white, wide eyes. “You don’t really believe, do you, that I’ve been overtaken, that I’m not me?”
	I shook my head. “No.”
	“Why not?”
	“Because it wouldn’t help me and it might kill me,” I said. “Because if you have been overtaken I can’t do anything about it and so I don’t want to know. Because I need to believe, more than anything right now, that I have one friend left in this thurking world.”
	“You do, dhiaoc,” she said, crying.
	“Thank you, Aine,” I said. “It means a lot to me, now.”
	She threw her arms out suddenly and grappled herself to me, clutching me around the waist and laying her head on my chest as she sobbed with her whole body. 
	I wanted to tell her that it would all be all right, but that would have been a big, black lie. So instead I just stroked her brown hair with one hand and tried to believe that through some cataclysmic violation of the laws of logic, time, space, and power, Idair was somehow going to save us both, or at least save her.
	“She can’t kill you,” Aine wept. “She can’t, it’s not possible, the world wouldn’t go on with out you. You’re one and only, you’re necessary. She can’t kill you. She won’t. Idair won’t let her do it. I won’t.”
	“Aine, you can’t stop her any more than I can.”
	Her face lifted toward me. Tear tracks had merged into wide wet patches that shone in that harsh overhead light. Water blurred the edges of her green irises and a red blotched flush mottled her cheeks and throat. She was looking at me from the extremity of some kind of emotion, and if only I could have read her I would have known what it was. But I couldn’t, and I didn’t, and all I knew was that her face was about two inches from mine but she was as opaque as if she were on the other side of a six-inch steel wall. 
	“Aine?” I asked, warily.
	She never had time to answer. The doors slid open, and there Istria and Lythril were in the doorway. Aine let go of me and swung around to face them, breathing hard and looking every bit as terrified as she must have felt.
	“Get her up,” Lythril said, nodding toward Aine.
	Istria stepped in and seized Aine by the shoulders. “Come on,” she said. “It’s time to follow in your dhiaoc’s footst--”
	She didn’t finish because Aine, suddenly, broke out of her grip and literally flew past her through the doorway and into the steel one on the other side, striking it with a thud and slipping to the floor. And as Istria turned to watch her go, the plexiglass door slid closed in front of Lythril.
	“What is this, Lythril?” Istria demanded, a note of warning in her voice.
	“I trusted you!” Lythril shouted, her calm exterior dropping from her in one sickening fraction of an instant. “I gave you more responsibility than I’ve ever given anyone and I treated you like a partner. I don’t forget betrayal, Istria, and I certainly won’t forget yours.”
	“What the hell are you talking about?” Istria shouted at her. 
	“You will never amount to anything,” Lythril went on, shrieking her anger without pausing for breath. “You’re not good enough for Idair, you’re not bad enough for the Dark One. You’re nothing and nowhere, Istria ni Vharen na Craic, and if you lived to be a hundred you would never be anything but a long and bitter disappointment to everyone who knew you!”
	“Listen here, bitch without reason--” Istria started, but Lythril cut her off.
	“I will be back here after I’ve dealt with her,” Lythril said. “At that point you will do one of two things. You can either hand me Theamh’s heart, or you can get ready to hand me your own. That’s what it comes down to.” Seizing Aine by the collar of her Cretid’s shirt, she dragged her out into the corridor and was gone.
	Istria ran up and slapped her palms against the plexiglass.
	“Can you burn it?” I asked.
	“Maybe, but I think the fumes would probably kill us,” she said. “Plastic burns even dirtier than hair does.”
	“So,” I said, as I tried to help her push, “has she got a reason for accusing you, or has she just finally lost her mind like we thought she someday might?”
	“There’s something very wrong with the computer system,” Istria said. “I was helping her fix it, and by some strange mischance it sort of got worse instead of better.”
	I looked at her, and her hand slipped closer to mine. 
	“Watch it, Istri,” I said, pulling my hand back.
	“Oh, sorry, dhi--”
	She bit it off after the first sound. It meant nothing, thus truncated--an aspirated breath, a sigh, not a word you could read. But it told me everything.
	“All right,” I murmured, bending my head close to the glass and away from the camera and dropping my voice as low as it would go. “She probably didn’t hear that. I doubt she could have made it back to the surveillance room in this short time.”
	Her head nodded, briefly and furtively, and I stood back from the door. “With my mind to help, maybe we could do it,” I said. “But I doubt even yours could wrench the thing open unassisted.”
	“I guess we have to hope for a convenient computer malfunction,” she said.
	“I guess,” I answered.
	I knew it was important to keep it up. But it was still really hard not to laugh. After all this time, to finally have hope, I felt almost as if I were delirious again. Maybe a touch of fever, persisting. Or maybe something else.
	I had given up patrolling my boundary looking for a soft spot in the block; Lythril left none, I knew she wouldn’t. But I took another look now.
	“Stand back,” I said.
	I really didn’t have to warn her; she jumped about as far back as she reasonably could. Because the flame I was making brought Lythril’s blocking fire out in a red sheath around me, which must certainly have been disturbing to see. But I was a happy woman, because there was a porous patch right over one of my hands, and a white flame was burning its way through it to the air.
	Once I’d burned through, the stuff began peeling back like discarded skin, eaten away at its shrinking edges by my own fire as it traveled back up my arm, until finally I had struggled out of it and she was shielding her eyes from the sight of me, revealed again, shooting a bolt from my hand to blow that box with the snout and the eye in the corner into hundreds of tiny crackling fragments.
	I raised both hands in victory with a long, loud shout of release.
	“YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAAA!” She looked startled, but she was starting to smile, tentatively. “Praise Idair, the Spirit, and the faith of old friends, I am back in business!”
	It was getting hot in there. I pulled the fire back and went to the door.
	“Come on, Aine, let’s see if we can shift this thing.”
	Together we leaned on it with the weight of our bodies and the pull of our minds. Sweat beaded up on her forehead and trickled down the curves of Istria’s face as we struggled with it, and I wondered why it had taken me so long to understand something that should have been so obvious.
	“I shouldn’t have given it away like that,” she grunted, as the thing moved just a couple inches. “I just--it’s so strange, dhiaoc, you have no idea.”
	“I have some idea,” I said, almost not trusting myself to believe that the door was really sliding open. “What I don’t understand is how in the world you were able to plot this. How did you even make contact with her?”
	“Ira,” she answered, as the door finally opened wide enough fro us to wedge ourselves through it.
	“Now this is going to be a bitch,” I said, looking at the steel door.
	We should try to keep quiet, shouldn’t we?
	I knew tears of relief were standing in my eyes but I tried to ignore it. I’ve been blocked so long, I’m out of the habit, I answered. Be glad you’re not a Cretid, Aine, it really, really SUCKS.
	Anyhow, she answered, as we leaned on the outer door. I got Ira to isolate her private Ethermail address. Ira sent her something only Ira can do, and she got curious, and she followed the signal back to me.
	So all that time I thought I was talking to you, I was really talking to her, I said, as the door began sliding reluctantly back.
	I suppose so, she answered. We met about an hour ago outside the compound to do the switch, and then after I got into position she made the ‘attempt.’ Why, what was it you said to her?
	No time for freagair right now, Aine. Although if we lived, I would certainly be having a chat with Istria about that conversation. 
	We had now emerged into the hallway. I decided I was better off not looking at her. As long as she was just talking to me, everything felt perfectly normal. But when I looked at the woman next to me, and saw Istria’s dark head turning on its ivory neck with Aine’s nervous anxiety, it was just a little much for me to take.
	Where do you think she took her, dhiaoc?
	Mission first, I said, breaking the padlock on the door to the laboratory.
	Whatever happened, I wouldn’t be making the same mistake twice. I went straight to the cage with the notborns in it and started working at it.
	The “wire” in the cage was fire, but it was being held in place by electricity. I was standing there trying to figure out how to get through the electric coils to draw the fire out of the beams when I heard Istria’s feet stop behind me as she squatted down by a cord attached to the wall.
	Can you think of any reason why we shouldn’t just pull the plug?
	She glanced up at me with a kind of shy amusement that was just so pure Aine I couldn’t really keep looking at that face and feel sane.
	No. 
	She pulled the plug out of the wall.
	Sparks spun backward along the strands of fire as the coiled lightning died and the fire began to drift and spread. I sent mine out to contain the stuff, peeling it back, molding it into a red recalcitrant ball. And the notborns began to escape.
	Into where, I couldn’t have told you. The air, the ether, some other place. But once the barrier was down they began shooting out around us, slipping their bondage, floating through the dank air of that underground room and ultimately through our plane to somewhere else. By ones, by twos, by tens and twenties, they flickered out of the graspable world back to where they came from, where they belonged, the one place in the universe that we can’t get to or get back from.
	“Istria” was standing next to me, watching them go with her mouth open slightly in wonder. It was something, to have set all that free. A whole village, almost a whole city, of beings who would live now, somewhere, as people, who would enter bodies somehow sometime and make that strange indefinable thing we call life. 
	When the space was clear, I lifted the red ball of angry flame and propelled it right into the latticework on the second cage.
	Sparks crackled, lines curled and burnt, and a hole opened up in one surface. Through which hole a sudden, multihued torrent of light mottled with darkness came rushing, so fast and furious I thought for a moment that I really did hear the beat of galloping hooves.
	“Istria” ducked as they raced around the room, taking the corners hard and fast, shooting finally up through walls and ceiling and leaving their trickling streams of showdust behind. Escaping into the existence they were meant to have, sloughing the weight of visibility.
	A little afraid of what I would find, I advanced toward the table. But there was nothing on it. Her last experiment must not have held together; of it had, it had gone off somewhere else. “Istria” unplugged the electric field around it, and the fire dripped sluggishly off the edges of the table.
	What are you doing, dhiaoc?
	I was crouching down near the outlet closest to us--the one that, coincidentally, Lythril had the shock treatment machine plugged into.
	After ripping the cord out of the wall more savagely than necessary, I sent a stream to the outlet.
	It took a moment to get the knack. But when I withdrew my fire, there was an arc of lighting leaping from the outlet to the stone floor.
	“Dhiaoc!” Aine shouted, jumping back.
	“Don’t worry,” I answered. “It’s grounded. It’ll go right through to the earth, without bothering with us. Just don’t stand in any puddles.”
	But what’s the point? Aine asked as I started with another outlet.
	Power drain, I said. They’ll just keep drawing on the main power source, whatever it is, and demanding more and more until, I hope, things start shorting out. 
	She nodded. So now what?
	Now, we find Istria.
	Where?
	My guess would be the trophy room. If only I knew where that was.
	We got to the elevator, which hauled us reluctantly up the shaft into the cloning room. I had wondered how Aine would react to the sight of the eel babies, but the eel babies were not there. Neither were the tanks. The place had been cleared out; Lythril’s way of underlining the fact that Maerin had outlived his usefulness, I supposed. It was good, because I had been worrying for the last little while about whether those eel babies were alive, and what would happen if I upended the tanks.
	She followed me through into the Erysin room. Hedina and Atella were there, too absorbed for the moment in gossip to notice our entrance.
	“...thinks she’s got everything under control,” Hedina was murmuring into Atella’s bent ear. “But there is some real unfinished business with the two of them, mark my words. Istria’s going to cause her some really big trouble before this is all over.”
	“How right you are,” said ‘Istria.’
	They turned around in shock. They of course had no idea that the woman they were looking at was really Aine in Istria’s body; and they appeared to have not the slightest idea in the world who or what I was. Lythril must never have told them about me, as indeed she would have had no reason to do. There would have been nothing to gain, and a lot to lose, by informing them that she had unfinished business with more than one powerful woman.
	I laid a wrap on each of them and dragged them sliding on their heels down the aisles to where I could take Atella by the lapel of her jacket and slam her up into the nearest wall.
	“You saw Lythril come through here with a slight, brownhaired woman in jeans and a T-shirt,” I said.
	She didn’t know what else to do but nod.
	“Where did they go?” 
	“Up...upstairs...” she stammered.
	“Be more specific,” I said. “And tell the truth, or I’ll break your jaw, because I don’t have time to do things by the book.”
	They both looked at me in horror.
	“Is the trophy room upstairs?” I asked.
	They nodded, glancing at “Istria.”
	“Which floor?”
	“Second,” Hedina gasped as my grip on her tightened.
	“Which corner?”
	“Northeast,” Hedina sputtered.
	I dragged them back to the door into the cloning room, tossed them through the doorway, and locked the door after them. Then I went racing out to find the stairwell that would take me up to the trophy room.
	“Istria” caught up with me easily; I must still not be in particularly good shape. Together we rattled up the round staircase, out through the doorway, and into a corridor lined with doors that all looked identical.
	Which one is... ‘Istria’ began, but I held a hand up. I could read the signs of struggle, even that far away.
	It was behind the third door on the left. Which I put my shoulder to as well as my mind, so that when it swung crunchingly inward I almost fell into the room, and so it was a moment before my balance reestablished itself and I saw where I was and who was there with me.
	The first thing I noticed, I am ashamed to say, was my own hreapa, hung up on the wall opposite the door, stuck to the surface by the seven brooches, splayed out like the wings of a moth. And it wasn’t the only one. She had quite a collection up there, pinned to the walls and ceiling like white butterflies, most of them eaten with holes and decay. The only two, in fact, that were still active were mine and one that I recognized, after a moment’s puzzled staring, as Istria’s.
	But this macabre detail was filed away for reference, because what was more important was the fact that “Aine” was there locked in battle with Lythril, and Lythril appeared to be losing.
	“Come on!” ‘Aine’ shouted, noticing us but not looking away from Lythril’s eyes, which were turned up to her as ‘Aine’ gripped that coifed, dark head in powerful hands and bored into her. “I can’t hold her forever!”
	Lythril was on her knees, wincing in pain, her arms frozen in a gesture of resistance that she couldn’t complete. She had gone in to scour the woman she thought was Aine, preparatory to overtaking her. And instead of Aine, a still-green scoilin who despite all the progress she’d made would have been fairly easy prey, she had been ambushed by Istria. Who had known how to take advantage of the vulnerability Lythril had carelessly exposed to her, and forced her mind to the point where she had to drop the block around me. Now they were battling it out to see who would subordinate whose will, and even as the contest looked Lythril was just that much on the short end of it.
	“The dolanol’s in the glass cabinet,” ‘Aine’ shouted. “Just grab a syringe, they’re pre-filled.”
	I broke the glass pane in the front of the locked cabinet and reached around for the syringe.
	“There’s two colors,” I shouted. “Which one’s dolanol?”
	“For pity’s sake,” ‘Aine’ shouted, irritable. ‘The dolanol is the green stuff, you ought to know it well enough. Hurry!”
	I made a grab into the cabinet and swiped a pair of those gloves out of a box I saw on the counter. They felt strange going on, clingy and unnatural, and they smelled like something very wrong.
	I turned one of Lythril’s elbows upward and moved the syringe awkwardly and hesitantly over the skin, looking for the place to make the puncture.
	“Just find the blue line and stab it!” ‘Aine’ called, struggling to keep Lythril silent and shut down. “I don’t know why she ever trusted you with pantry duty, squeamish as you are.”
	I jabbed the needle into the vein and pushed down on the plunger.
	‘Aine’ released Lythril’s temples and stood up, panting with her effort as she watched Lythril’s unfocusing eyes close and her body subside to the floor.
	...no... was all her mind said, as it sank into oblivion.
	I stood up, grabbing my hreapa off the wall and folding it up into a ball. I reached for Istria’s too, but ‘Aine’ put a hand on my arm.
	“Don’t,” she said. “I won’t need it.”
	“But Istria--”
	“You’re one thing. Idair’s another.”
 	“All right then,” I finally said, facing ‘Aine’ as ‘Istria’ looked on. “Let’s get the hell out of here before she wakes up.”
	Clutching my precious bundle, I led the two of them back down the stairs and out into the first-floor corridor, where the lights were beginning to flicker severely. As they would, Lythril being unconscious and for the time being out of commission.
	The three of us tumbled out onto the grass between the building and the curtain wall. It was twilight; the sun had gone down, and the purple was just beginning to bleed to black at the edges of a sky I had not seen for what seemed like a lifetime. I peeled the gloves off and tossed them away.
	“What about the computers, Aine?” I asked, as I shot a bolt out to the wall that pulverized the decaying masonry and collapsed a three-foot section we could wade through. “Shouldn’t we liberate them?”
	“Ira’s doing that as we speak,” ‘Istria’ said as we climbed through the breach. “That’s why her systems were all crashing--Ira’s been downloading the coding in them onto disks. We’ll find machines somewhere to put them on so they can keep living later.”
	‘Aine’ wasn’t paying attention. She was looking back at the Greenhaven Mental Hospital, and laughing.
	“Name of the Spirit, we did it!” she shouted. “We did it, we’re out, we made it. I can’t believe it. It’s just too amazing. We beat her!” I turned to study ‘Aine’s’ face, elated now with an almost savage joy. “We’re finally free of her, Theamh! Can you believe it?”
	“No,” I said.
	Before the look of suspicion had time to fully dawn on Aine’s face, I put my fist through it.
	“Dhiaoc, what are you doing?” came the horrified scream from ‘Istria,’ as Aine watched her body crash to the ground.
	I was on her in a minute, knee on her chest and green-filled syringe in one hand, looking for the vein. I found it much quicker this time--quicker than she would have given me credit for, certainly. ‘Istria’ gaped in disbelief as I broke ‘Aine’s’ skin and pressed the plunger carefully.
	“I’m only giving you half the syringe because you’re so much smaller,” I said, while Istria’s eyes goggled at me in fear and alarm. I pulled the needle out, stood back, and sealed Aine’s body off with blocking fire. “That should take care of things, but don’t take chances. If you see her coming to or moving around, put this into your vein--I mean her vein--I mean, you know what I mean--” ‘Istria’ nodded. “--and administer the rest of it. I’m sorry about your face, Aine, I’ll make it up to you after this is all over.” I started back toward the breach.
	“This is insane!” ‘Istria’ shouted after me. “You’re going back in there? After Lythril?”
	“No,” I called back, continuing on.
	It took her a minute, but I heard the cry of dismay about halfway across the courtyard.
	“FNAA!”	“Be careful,” I called over my shoulder.
	“You can’t leave me here with her!”
	“You’re a big girl now, Aine,” I shouted, forging ahead. “You can handle it. Just call me if she gives you trouble.”
	“Dhiaoc, our link is broken!”
	This was true. “Well, I hope I’ll be back soon,” I called. “Meanwhile look out for yourself, and Idair guard you.”
	The door we’d come through was wedged half-open. The computer crash, combined with the power drain I had set up, had immobilized almost everything. When I started up the stairwell, I could hear footsteps and shouts echoing faintly from above, as the other inmates began to realize that something was going very wrong.
	When I emerged into the corridor on the second floor, though, the place was still deserted. And when I barged back into the trophy room, Lythril’s body was still lying where we’d left it, unconscious and unmoving.
	I went back to the cupboard. I had remembered all along that dolanol was green, and that the stuff Maerin had given Atella to wake her up was clear. So I picked up a handful of syringes--dolanol might come in handy again before we got out of there--including one half-filled with clear liquid. I pulled on another pair of gloves, and brought myself, after a moment of unreasoning revulsion, to go over to Lythril’s body and touch it.
	It helped that I was wearing the gloves and so didn’t actually feel the skin, but it was still something that curdled my guts, to be kneeling so close to the woman who had been torturing me for so long and feeling in her elbow for the right spot to put the needle. I knew perfectly well how to find a vein, too. After all, I was the one who had had to draw blood for Lythril’s colleagues and staff, all that time. I had fumbled it earlier because I wasn’t sure that what I suspected was true; but I was now. It made sense.
	I broke the pallid skin of her arm and pumped the contents of that syringe into Lythril’s veins.
	Lythril’s eyelids fluttered, then came open. She looked up at me, at first, with a blurred and drowsy gaze, as those red-painted lips parted in a soft smile.
	“Theamh,” she murmured, reaching for my face.
	“Careful,” I said, as the gaze hardened and she remembered.
	Lythril’s head fell back against the floor with a thud. Tears of disappointment squeezed out of the corners of her closed eyes.
	“It’s so hard, Theamh!” she said, weeping in frustration and pounding one fist on the floor. “It’s so thurking hard!”
	“I know, Istri,” I said, as my own throat tightened. “But look at it this way, it can only get easier.”
	Lythril’s mouth moved in what was almost a smile, and she sat slowly up. “Give me a minute,” she gasped, as her face twisted in pain. “The strepton brings you out of it quick enough, but it gives you a monstrous headache.”
	I waited, watching her fight the pain down.
	“You know what,” I said, “it was strange before, but this is really disturbing.”
	“You think it’s disturbing,” she said, stretching Lythril’s arms out and looking at them. “I thought it was all over. I’m surprised she didn’t try to get you to kill me.”
	“She’s not that stupid,” I answered. “Then again, she’s not as smart as she thinks she is.”
	‘Lythril’ got to her feet, while I took off the gloves. “How did you know to come back for me?”
	“How would I not?” I answered, climbing up on the chairback and beginning to unpin Istria’s hreapa from the wall. “I came in here fully expecting her to have bested you. I mean, not that you’re weak, but once you lost the advantage of surprise you’d be working out of a strange mindspace in a body that couldn’t make fire. So I was suspicious as soon as I saw she was losing. Besides, I can read now; and she was trying to mask her and you both but it wasn’t complete.” And I would know you anywhere in anybody, I thought, but decided I wouldn’t add. Istria was watching me bundle up her hreapa, but said nothing. I had slung mine around me and pinned it, although I wouldn’t be able to actually put it on until the next morning. “I knew she wanted Aine’s body anyway, so it made sense to me that she would try to take it; leaving you stuck in her own body was just icing on the cake, it being exactly the kind of thing that she would enjoy chuckling over late at night while sitting around the campfire with Morat and the rest of the resistance. I knew she’d switched your bodies as soon as she started talking to me. Which all incidentally answered one of the questions I’ve always had about her.” I held her hreapa out to her; she didn’t reach out to take it. 
	“Which was?” she said, folding her arms.
	“Whether she had limits,” I said. “We now know, there are some things she won’t or can’t do. She wouldn’t be kind to me, even when it would have been strategically useful.”
	‘Lythril’ nodded. I tucked the bundle under my own arm; she didn’t comment on it. “So,” she said, as we looked at each other, and both of us felt the ridiculousness of this situation along with the pathos. “Do you have a plan?”
	“First thing, of course, is we evacuate the compound,” I said.
	“And then?”
	“And then you and I are going to raze this place to the ground.”
	Lythril’s mouth spread in a slow smile.
	“I like this plan,” she answered.
	“Well let’s go then,” I said. “You roust ‘em out, I’ll follow you and do the lifesweep. It’ll be fun. You can give me the grand tour. I can’t wait to see what the other accommodations are like here at the Hotel Lythril.”
	‘Lythril’ smiled, hesitantly. It would have made me cry to see that smile if it weren’t on Lythril’s face.
	“C’mon then,” I said, with a coaxing smile. “Show me the minions.”
	I hadn’t thought it was particularly funny, but she laughed. Just once, but a real one, that rang briefly in the acrid air of that close, death-filled room.
	“Do you know what, Theamh,” she said, as her eyes moistened again. “My entire life, the only times I have ever really laughed have been with you.”
	“All right, now you’re making me cry,” I said.
	She turned away and kicked the door open with one of those boots. It flew back against the wall and we emerged into the hallway.
	“They’ll never know what hit them,” ‘Lythril’ said.

XIV.
Burning Down The House

	How many damn floors did they build into this thing? I complained, as we rounded yet another whorl in the staircase. Now that the first rush of strength and elation had left me, I was starting to really feel the effect of a period of starvation followed by life-threatening illness. The energy the block on ‘Aine’ drained from me didn’t help either.
	Only four, and we’re at the last--Idair’s teeth, Theamh, are you all right?
	I was clutching the banister and gasping, preserving my dignity at least enough that I didn’t actually collapse.
	Although I’m better than I have been, I answered, looking up at her as I got my strength back, I am still not a well woman.
	She wanted to help me; but she was quite sensibly afraid to touch me. Instead, she waited for my breathing to even out, looking on with concern in her eyes--or rather, in eyes that were not at all used to expressing emotions in that register.
	All right I’m ready, I finally said. What’s up here on the top floor?
	The minions, she answered. Or what we call the associates. This is where their sleeping quarters are--as far away from the important stuff as they can be, naturally.
	Naturally.
	We leapt out into the corridor. There were a number of women running around from room to room, looking harried and panicked. Most of them were young--younger than Istria and I were, certainly much younger than Lythril. And when ‘Lythril’ struck her pose, boots planted a little wide, hands on her hips, eyes boring levelly through that space to fix on the first woman whose head turned to look in her direction, it only took about five seconds to go from chaotic hubbub to terrified and frozen silence.
	“Good evening, ladies,” ‘Lythril’ said.
	She paused, and the others waited, radiating fear.
	“I’m liquidating the firm,” she said. 
	Consternation crested over them in a wave. “But...why?” asked one near the front, a little older than the others and with hair that, at least to my fevered imagination, appeared to be bright purple.
	‘Lythril’ walked forward, three slow steps. The purple-haired woman looked ready to cower, but didn’t.
	“Because it pleases me,” she answered.
	The woman nodded, silently.
	‘Lythril’ lifted her head and nodded to the others. “You’ve worked well, some of you,” she said. “As well as it was in you to work. It grieves me to part this way. It truly does.”
	Behind her, at the adjoining wall, I had set up the lifeshield. It’s the only practical thing I can make without trouble, because its construction is very simple, especially in a building like this where the halls and rooms are all square. It’s like a shield, only it’s portable; you push it ahead of you like a shovel. And as you push it, anything living gets scooped up by it, and runs on ahead. We don’t have to burn things down often, but sometimes there is a need for it, and we developed this so that animals wouldn’t get caught up in it when we fired a place. So while they stared terrified at ‘Lythril’--ignoring, somehow, the strange, disheveled woman wrapped in a blanket who was shoving some invisible thing along the corridor behind her, a family of mice came scampering out of the back wall and ran toward them. The mice seemed to agitate them greatly; several of them leapt for the walls shrieking.
	“Cretids,” ‘Lythril’ said, her mouth sneering in contempt. “Two years of working toward the Dark One and they’re terrified of a family of rodents.”
	They were now far more terrified of ‘Lythril,’ who raised two flame-haloed hands above her dark head.
	“You have all been a great disappointment to me,” she said. “I would say I was going to miss you. But sometimes even we tell the truth.”
	“RUN!” shouted the purple-haired woman, and they broke away from her down the corridor.
	Once they had all started rushing down the stairway, ‘Lythril’ began opening doors, making sure the rooms were empty. Since I had to sweep them too--and I dislodged things, when I did that, that were a lot more unpleasant than mice, that building was old--I did indeed get the grand tour. The rooms were large enough, and they seemed mostly to be shared by two people; evidently privacy was something Lythril thought dangerous, as indicated by the number of security cameras placed about the floor. There was nothing particularly squalid about them, at least until the possum and its babies got dislodged from a hole in the masonry; they were decorated according to individual taste, well-kept, and in general clean if not necessarily neat. She’d treated them pretty well, considering.
	So tell me, I said, as we progressed around the corridor and snaked from room to room. Did you really think I was going to just go back home and get over you?
	I...don’t want to talk about it, Theamh.
	You talked plenty about it down in the cell, I said.
	It was part of the plan, Theamh. I didn’t do it on purpose.
	I wasn’t sure about that, but there was no sense arguing. So much for the associates. What’s on the next floor?
	We closed the door to the stairwell behind us, as the small crowd of mice, rats, possum, and one lost bat who hadn’t made it outdoors to the twilight skittered down ahead of us. Office space, she said. There’ll be more of them in there; one of the shifts is active while the other one sleeps.
	But the news had already traveled down to the fourth floor; even before we got into the corridor we heard the sounds of panic. ‘Lythril’ jumped out with her hands blazing.
	“Out!” she shouted, swinging the flame around while doors opened and frightened occupants scampered out of their rooms and toward the stairway. “Out, get out, or you’ll know what it is to burn! OUT!”
	As the noise of hurrying feet increased, I kept sweeping. I wondered what they were all making of me. Of course they had no way of knowing who I was, and probably they didn’t know enough to recognize a hreapa, especially if they were fans of “Idair: Priestess of Power.” But I would think I looked crazy enough to attract some comment. Unless everyone was just too scared.
	The computers in the offices, when I went through them, were not looking well. That hum was still there, but the screens were either dark or splattered with random patterns of light and color that had no meaning. ‘Lythril,’ having cleared the floor, tapped at one of the keyboards out of curiosity. Nothing happened, no matter what she pushed.
	Crashed, she said, standing up and admiring Aine’s work. What they call a fatal system error. Your apprentice has brought down the whole network.
	She’s onto something really important with this stuff, I answered. Took to it right away. I’m very proud of her.
	‘Lythril’ went back into the corridor without saying a word.
	I couldn’t tell whether what I was reading was actual jealousy, or whether it was more along the lines of envy. I swept through the rest of the offices, not really pausing to remark on what was in them--computers, files, the machinery that allowed a large organization to run smoothly and secretly. Until I got to the big one on the corner.
	‘Lythril’ stopped in the middle of it, looking first over at the empty chair by the desk, then swiveling her head abruptly when I entered to look at the boarded-up window. I followed, not her gaze, but what it had left. On the desk, in a small gilt frame, there was a miniature painting.
	Come on, she said, stepping forward. She won’t stay out forever.
	Is that me?
	Come on, Theamh.
	It was me. Not a realistic likeness, but close enough that I could tell. And signed, in the corner, with a little KmM.
	This used to be your office, I said.
	She looked back at me, and the memory of pain was so transparently visible that I almost regretted asking.
	I worked in the lab most of the time.
	But when you didn’t, you worked here. She nodded. I didn’t even know Keanrih had done a painting of me.
	Come away, Theamh.
	I took one last look around the place. It was almost entirely bare; unlike the others she hadn’t put anything up on the walls. There was a desk, a chair, a computer, and in the corner a kind of couch with a pallet on it.
	You slept in here?
	Here, or in the lab. I don’t sleep much, any more.
	And on the desk, along with some scattered files and the machine that printed things from the computer, nothing but that one little painting.
	How did it get all the way up here?
	I took it with me when we fled.
	So she’d turned before we raided Lythril--and she’d been one of the advance guard, sent up here to stake the place out. Along with Maerin, probably, and some other ‘associates’ who hadn’t survived their association.
	But how did you come to have it at all?
	“Oh, don’t ask, Theamh!”
	I wanted to turn away from the pain I saw in her, but I didn’t. I looked back, and I hoped that it would help her to see me looking back.
	Lythril gave it to me, she finally said, running a hand over that twist of hair pinned up at the back of Lythril’s head. She had asked Nocc to bring something personal belonging to Keanrih, and he brought this. After she was done with it she gave it to me.
	I picked it up from the desk. Keanrih’s style, on that bit of hardboard, framed in cheap Cretid metal.
	Why did she give it to you?
	Because she loves to hurt me, she answered, bitterly. Leave it, Theamh, let it burn with everything else.
	I replaced it slowly on the desk, face down.
	I’ll promise you this now, I said, walking up closer to her as she stood there watching two years of misery roll through that room. I will make it so someday it won’t hurt you to look at me.
	She blinked fast, and turned around to go into the next office.
	Hurry.
	I hurried. We cleared the third floor and took the stairs to the second.
	I’m sorry about him, ‘Lythril’ said as we reached the door.
	About who?
	About Keanrih. He was a good friend to you.
	We emerged into the second floor corridors. Sweeping the trophy room dislodged quite a family of moths from the hole-eaten hreapas of the shriias who hadn’t lived through their captivity. I looked around to see if I could recognize any of them. There was one that I thought might be Ydra’s, but I couldn’t really remember what Ydra’s had looked like, and then they look so different off from what they do on. Some of them had to be old, almost as old as we were. I would have wanted to stay and look longer, but ‘Lythril’ radiated such an intense desire to be somewhere else that I stopped pondering and drew us out into the hallway.
	You didn’t...have anything to do with...
	No, she snapped, as we progressed to the next door. I didn’t do that kind of work. It was in my contract. I spent all my time on the Project.
	She let you write your own ticket?
	I had something she wanted, ‘Lythril’ said, pushing the door open. I’m sure she thought I would develop a taste for overtaking and murder, given time.
	I doubt, given any amount of time, I would have developed a taste for it. Given my shock and disgust when I discovered that we were in the cold room.
	And this was a really cold room--Lythril must have availed herself of the refrigeration technology that the Cretids seemed to excel at. Not only that, but the place seemed to have been designed for exactly the kind of storage she wanted. There was a wall full of drawers at on end, and a bunch of tables in the middle, and shelves ranged along the other three walls full of jars. Some of them held eel babies, but these were obviously dead; suspended, motionless, shriveled-looking. The others were only too familiar to me--blood, fluids, afterbirth, and the hearts beating merrily away.
	‘Lythril’ wasn’t looking at the jars; she was looking at the table, upon which lay something long and narrow hastily covered with a bloodied white sheet. She pulled the sheet back and looked down impassively at the pinched and pallid face.
	Maerin, I said.
	Looks like they stopped halfway, she mused, looking at the open cavity of his abdomen. They must still be around, somewhere, they were in the middle of harvesting him.
	I swept the room anyway, although there was nothing living, and we began running through the others. More office space, a huge room full of Erysin waiting to be shipped, more paralyzed and dark-eyed computer screens.  
	I don’t like it, ‘Lythril’ said. We haven’t seen Gwilna yet.
	When did she make it up here, anyway? We left her with her aunt.
	She ran off and found Tifni; Tifni got her through the border, she answered. She thought Lythril would be able to do something about the block; it’s the only thing that gave her courage to show her face. I doubt Lythril could have; but for certain she wasn’t in the mood to try. We rounded the final turn in the corridor.
	Theamh, she said, reluctantly, as we opened the stairwell door.
	What?
	What did you mean, the ghosts of Dunta? 
	Lythril never told you that story?
	‘Lythril’ shook her head. All I knew was, Gwilna thurked up. But I could have told her that would happen. See, until Barant turned...Lythril had a very hard time finding good help.
	I’ll tell you later, I said. It’s a long story, and I don’t think you’ll like it.
	Disturbed, she pushed out of the door into the hallway. When we entered the Erysin room, smoke was already drifting through it, up from the vents in the basement. Unfortunately, it was also tenanted by a small crowd of minions, who had freed Atella and Hedina and were massed to resist us, headed by the one woman I had been hoping I would never have to set eyes on again in this lifetime.
	“I told you to clear out,” ‘Lythril’ growled, while I wondered why Gwilna hadn’t noticed me.
	“What have you done with Lythril?” Gwilna demanded.
	“Nothing,” ‘Lythril’ answered. “I’m here, bad as I always have been, and if you all don’t skitter for the exit like the rats you are there will be bad trouble. I wouldn’t bother warning you, only I do dislike the stink of roasted human flesh.”
	“You’re not Lythril,” Gwilna shouted.
	‘Lythril’ smiled indulgently, the exact smile she would put on before flying into one of her terrible rages. “And if I’m not Lythril, who would you suggest I am, Gwilna of the tremendous brain?”
	She pointed accusingly at her. “You’re a trick,” she said. “You’ve been overtaken, you’re not Lythril, you’re Theamh ni hUlnach!”
	“Hello,” I said, waving an arm in a futile attempt to attract her notice.
	‘Lythril’ just laughed. Slowly, while the others started sweating.
	Istri, why can’t they see me?
	Because I’m not letting them, she answered. Idair’s mercy, Theamh, how do you think we’ve gotten this far?
	Oh, I said. I forget you can do that kind of stuff now. 
	A shadow darkened her face. “Gwilna,” she said, lowering those dark penciled brows just a little. “Come here.”
	Gwilna looked at her warily as ‘Lythril’ stepped forward, but didn’t move. ‘Lythril’ kept moving, until she was close enough to breathe on her. She lifted Gwilna’s right hand, and placed it over Gwilna’s heart, holding it there and looking into her eyes.
	“You feel that?” she said. “It’s your heart beating. It’s the pulse of your life. There’s a lot in a heart, besides blood; a lot of things you need. A lot of things I need, too.” She released Gwilna’s hand, leaving it there on her breast as Gwilna stared back at her like a bird stares at a snake. “Do you like your heart? Would you want to part with it?” Gwilna stared. “Well, would you?”
	She shook her head, just perceptibly.
	“Then GET OUT OF MY ROAD!”
	The explosion of her voice, and the leap forward, scattered them all; there was a confused rush for the door, with Gwilna at the forefront, and minions scampered into the hallway and out the door. ‘Lythril’ busied herself chasing them off, while I swept around the corridor and then back into the Erysin room. We both went to the elevator room, but I stopped cold when I got there.
	It was partly the electricity. Now I could feel it, the crackling field of flying lightning set up such an intense panic in my body that I almost couldn’t go forward. But it was partly the toxic shock of my own memories of being there.
	I don’t think I can go down there, Istri, I said, as she walked slowly toward the elevator. I don’t ever want to go back down there.
	I’ll do it, ‘Lythril’ said. Stay here; I’ll be back.
	The elevator had, of course, stopped working by now; but fortunately it had been stuck on a higher floor, so all ‘Lythril’ had to do was jump down the shaft once she’d opened the doors.
	Doesn’t that hurt? I sent down, looking into the pit.
	I twisted her ankle, ‘Lythril’ answered. But, you know, it’s a rental, who cares.
	I was still laughing when she disappeared, sweeping out the downstairs. Little by little the vermin started pouring out of the shaft--squirrels, moles, more mice. I was so involved in watching the parade that I almost didn’t notice Hedina coming in through that door.
	She was alone, at least; the others must all have cleared out. But unfortunately, now that ‘Lythril’ was in the basement, she was looking right at me and seeing me.
	“I know who you are,” she said.
	I looked over my shoulder. “I’m sorry, were you talking to me?”
	“You’re that other woman,” she said. 
	“You know, we are going to set this building on fire,” I said. “If I were you I’d run out into the light with the rest of the rats.”
	“I could have been something to her,” she said. “If it only weren’t for you.”
	“Look, I’m sure this conversation is meaning all kinds of things to you, but I don’t know what you’re talking about and I really don’t care. Now will you get the hell out before I get angry?”
	“I know that isn’t really Lythril,” she said. “I know that’s Istria in there. ‘Get out of my road’ is a local thing, from that place she’s from, in the mountains.”
	“You really don’t take direction very well,” I said.
	“I could have been something to her,” Hedina said. “Instead of just someone to thurk. If it weren’t for you.”
	‘Lythril’ had hauled herself out of the shaft now, looking a little burnt but not too badly. She took in who I was talking with, and walked forward without hesitation.
	“Get out of here, Hedina,” she said.
	“Does she know?” Hedina shouted to her, nodding in my direction. “Is she standing here like an idiot thinking you’ve been faithful to her all this time? Because I can tell you--”
	“Shut up, Hedina!” ‘Lythril’ shouted, with an almost Lythril-esque anger that was not feigned in the least. 
	“Oh come on now, Istri,” Hedina said, in that envenomed voice. “You can’t expect me not to try to profit from my one chance to talk to the famous Theamh ni hUlnach.”
	Things were now much clearer to me, and I decided I’d better answer her before Istria decided to get just a little too far into character.
	“That’s right,” I said quietly. “I am Theamh ni hUlnach. And I am not an idiot. And I don’t care how often she thurked you or how much you enjoyed it. And it surprises me that I can say that, but as it turns out it’s true. So shut up and take your poisonous hide out of here. Because I’m not allowed to do gratuitous violence upon people, but as I understand it the Dark One is much more lax about these matters.”
	To illustrate, ‘Lythril’ sent a scorching red beam along the floor toward Hedina’s feet. But Hedina’s feet weren’t there very long; she darted through the door with impressive speed.
	‘Lythril’ took back the fire and turned to look at me.
	“Is that really true, what you said?”
	I popped some flame out of my  hands and looked at it. “Guess so,” I answered.
	She watched it with a catch in her throat, then looked up at me. “Theamh, is there anything I could do that would make you hate me?”
	“I can think of a couple things,” I said. “But if they haven’t occurred to you, I’m certainly not going to put ideas in your head.” She almost cracked a smile. “I’d prefer just not to know, of course, but it’s not like it never occurred to me.”
	“But...” she began.
	“Istri,” I said, “the whole time you were up here, you weren’t being faithful to yourself. Why should you be faithful to me? Except, you know, where it counted. Because where it counts, you’ve always been true. To me, to yourself, and to Idair.”
	She shook her head.
	“All right, you don’t believe me,” I said, shrugging. “I’ll work on you. We’ll have time.”
	“Come on, we have to clear them off the grounds,” she said, walking past me.
	They didn’t need much clearing. Many of them had already reached the hills. If they noticed ‘Istria’ and ‘Aine’ they didn’t seem to be stopping; even Gwilna didn’t hesitate once she saw ‘Lythril’ leaping through the breach with flame in her hands. I don’t even know if I would have stood my ground; she looked pretty frightening. ‘Istria’ obviously thought so too, judging by the look of horror with which she watched our approach.
	“She all right, Aine?”
	‘Istria’ looked down at that recumbent body.
	“She’s been sort of twitching a little,” she said. “I didn’t want to give her more, I’m afraid of killing me.”
	“Can I have a quick look in there?” I said, walking to ‘Istria.’
	“Sure.” She knelt; I did the scour. It was her right enough, even though it was very bizarre trying to match the mind with the mindspace.
	“Fabulous. And the block is still holding.” I looked back at the compound.
	‘Lythril’ followed my gaze. “You know,” she said, “I almost wish we could wake her up to watch it.”
	“I don’t,” ‘Istria’ said promptly.
	“It’s a temptation, certainly,” I said. “But I’m not in shape, and I don’t trust that block to hold her on its own.” ‘Lythril’ nodded. 
	“Come on then,” I said, looking into her sweat-streaked face, around which that dark hair was starting to come undone. “Let’s burn it down.”
	She looked back, not answering. She didn’t need to.
	At the same moment, we started running toward the building, both of us shouting loud and long through the darkening air, venting the crush of unnamable emotion that rose up in both of us as we set ourselves to the work of destruction.
	By unspoken agreement we ran up to the fifth floor to start from the top down. I fired the sleeping quarters one by one, running down the corridor with speed and strength that was coming to me from Idair alone knew where. When I got to the corner office, ‘Lythril’ was still standing there, watching things I couldn’t see.
	“Get through to the stairwell,” she said. “I want this thing to go up like a pine branch.”
	I darted through. As soon as I was at a safe distance, the tearing rush of a firestorm burst through the air behind me and ‘Lythril’ came running out with her hands still burning.
	“So,” I said, watching her panting face shine red in the firelight. “No regrets?”
	She laughed. “Are you joking?” she cried, transported by the rush. “I should have done this the day the Dark One was fool enough to give me fire. I would have, but I was too depressed.” We ran down the steps and began firing the third floor. I could hear her whooping as the flames hit and caught, and I was answering her. It’s a terrible power to have, a terrible temptation, and that’s why we rein ourselves in as tight as we do. Because there is that desire always there to burn just for the sake of burning, to wreak havoc because we can. I knew burning this place was the right thing. But I knew, also, that I was enjoying it more than I should have.
	When we met again in the stairwell to the second floor, we were both damp, sweating, breathing hard. Her eyes were lit with the high, hot frenzy that I was pretty sure she could see in mine, too. It was getting hot, and close, and things upstairs were starting to crunch and buckle, but we still stood there looking at each other.
	“You’re enjoying this,” ‘Lythril’ said.
	“You bet your gleacha,” I answered. 
	A shade of worry dampened her exultation. “I don’t...maybe you better let me do the rest. I don’t want to...”
	“This isn’t going to turn me,” I said, reading what she couldn’t get out. “Believe me. If Idair were on the earth she’d be in here burning this with us.”
	“How...how can you be so sure about that?”
	“If I’m in danger she’ll tell me,” I said. “I trust her.” 
	‘Lythril’ watched me, pensive. It occurred to me then that maybe that was part of it. Istria hadn’t been able to trust Idair like I did, because she didn’t trust herself. And because of her father, and her mother--she was always waiting for the blow, the punishment, the sudden unexpected judgment that would tell her she had finally gone wrong.
	“Come on,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of fnaa to get into this fire.”
	We ran out along the second floor. When we got to the cold room we stopped short, the same thought coming to both of us at about the same time.
	“I guess this is his departure,” I said, before she did.
	“Stand away from the doorway,” ‘Lythril’ said. “I’ll send him home all right.”
	I backed out. ‘Lythril’ grabbed one of the jars with the eel babies, shattered it against the table, and dropped the slimy relic within onto Maerin’s sunken and cratered chest.
	“Goodbye, Maerin,” she shouted. “You were wrong from your birth. May the pain you’ve done be visited somehow upon you, and if you ever come back to this earth, know enough to stay the hell away from me and everything I love. Killer of women, butcher of the young, violator of the body and corrupter of the soul, run home to the Dark One for the reward you’ve earned.” She raised one flaming red hand over her head. “Slan abhaile, you son of a bitch.”
	The stream of flame that broke out to envelop him was so hot it almost blistered me. ‘Lythril’ came running out of a room that erupted in flame, smoke, and poisonous dark clouds.
	“I think that should do it,” she said. “Let’s get the hell out before the whole thing collapses.”
	We flew down the steps and out into the field, where the darkness was now hollowed out by the red-orange cave of the fire in progress. Leaping the curtain wall, we found ‘Istria’ hovering over ‘Aine’s’ body in a highly agitated state. I realized why when we reached it. She wasn’t just twitching now; she was moving, and moaning.
	“Dhiaoc!” ‘Istria’ shouted as she saw us approach. “She’s waking up!”
	Both of us sped up, and reached her at around the same time. I brought the blocking fire out just to check it; it was holding, especially after I tightened it up and sunk it back in. ‘Istria’ drew back, terrified to see her own eyes opening with Lythril behind them.
	‘Aine’ flew immediately at ‘Istria,’ probably with the object of breaking her neck; but ‘Lythril’ threw a wrap on her and dragged her around to face us.
	“You’re forgetting who’s who,” ‘Lythril’ said sweetly. “I’m the one who’s betrayed you, remember? You know. Istria ni Vharen na Craic, the big disappointment.”
	‘Aine’ looked from her to me, and then out to the burning building.
	“I was trying to build something here,” she said. “Nobody ever understood that.”
	“Cry me the Ubh, Lythril,” ‘Lythril’ said. “For two coppers I would have thrown you on the pyre. Count yourself lucky you’re in a borrowed body.”
	“Speaking of which,” I said. “We should get her out of it, this is all very disturbing to poor Aine.”
	“We should. Now what’s the best way to...” ‘Lythril’ put her hands on her hips, frowning down at ‘Aine’ with an expression of workmanlike concentration that made me laugh.
	“What?” she demanded, looking up.
	“It’s just...you’re doing the pose, except it’s you and not her,” I said. “I mean...oh, never mind.”
	‘Lythril’ was laughing too, and took her hands off her hips. “Come on, other people stand that way, it just looks scarier in the boots.”
	We were both laughing now, but ‘Istria’ wasn’t. “Dhiaoc...”
	“I’m sorry, Aine, I know--oh, don’t you thurking try it,” I said, as ‘Lythril’ tightened the wrap and cut ‘Aine’ off in mid-spring. “Know when you’re beaten, Lythril. Savor the experience. I’m sure it doesn’t happen to you often.”
	“We’ll put her back in me first,” said ‘Lythril.’ “I mean...well, you know what I--” I nodded. “You still have the dolanol, right?”
	“Right,” I said. ‘Lythril’ laid ‘Aine’ out flat on the ground, while I took the half-empty syringe from ‘Istria’ and kneeled on her to administer it.
	“So,” I said, looking down at her. “Any last words?”
	“I will claim you,” she spat, looking up at me with hatred. “You belong to me.”
	“I like my last words better,” I said. “At least they had the ring of truth to them.” I pressed the plunger.
	When she was out, I got the capture spaces ready. I handed another syringe to ‘Lythril.’
	“All right, you understand then that there’s going to be a time during which Lythril will actually be in my head,” I said as both ‘Istria’ and ‘Lythril’ nodded. “Did you bring the cieridh, Aine?”
	“No, all that’s back at Kwenu’s,” she said. “I was afraid of her confiscating it and doing something bad with them.”
	I sighed. “Well, they’ll protect me from a distance as well as they can,” I said. “I suppose that amulet’s gone too?”
	“She burnt it up as soon as she had the time,” ‘Lythril’ said.
	“Ah well. Mo linn abu!” My blocking fire leapt up around Aine, and I took it back. Not without trepidation, since I didn’t quite trust the dolanol.
	“If she overtakes me you’ll notice, right?”
	“She won’t overtake you, Theamh,” ‘Lythril’ said. “She’s not the Dark One, she’s just a user like us. And if you ask me, she’s not as good as you are.”
	“Oh right.”
	“I’m serious,” ‘Lythril’ said. “I’m not saying she’s not powerful, smart, or cunning. But she would never have gotten you if it weren’t for me. She knew that,” she went on, although the realization choked her up. “She hid it from everyone else, but I knew. Those last three years, you had her running scared. She couldn’t have overtaken you, really.”
	“Not without knowing my name,” I answered.
	‘Lythril’ looked back at me, but said nothing.
	“Ready?” I finally asked.
	She nodded, and poked the needle through her vein.
	When she started to topple, ‘Istria’ caught her and laid her out on the ground, tenderly the way she’d always been with Crann. I couldn’t touch her head, but I put my hand near it, and she started moving out of Lythril’s body up my arm.
	I had been afraid to see what she looked like, but it wasn’t as bad as I had expected. There was red, of course, mixed in with the green that I was familiar with. But no black. One color but not the other. And she still had that dark-leaf, summertime green that made her her; it hadn’t been overwritten by years of service the way Lythril’s color, whatever it had been, had disappeared under the Dark One’s black.
	It was strange that once she was in the capture space she was more cut off from me than ever before. In me, but not with me; fenced off the way Lythril would be once I took her out of Aine.
	That was harder. She couldn’t fight initially, the dolanol having rendered the mindspace inactive, but once I pulled her out she did not move without a fight, and it was a struggle almost beyond my strength to drag her up my arm and into the other space. ‘Istria’ looked on with trepidation as the black and blood-red stream crawled reluctantly toward me, finally disappearing into my head.
	“Here’s the tricky part,” I said, flashing ‘Istria’ a smile that didn’t reassure her much.
	I drew Istria’s spirit out a little bit, enough so I could see the color and know it was really her. Then I shot her right into Aine as fast as I could do it, and gave her one of the antidote injections.
	After a minute ‘Aine’ shook her head and sat up. “Another strepton headache,” she said. “You’re making me pay for this, aren’t you?”
	“I just want you around in case something happens,” I said.
	“I didn’t mean it, Theamh,” she answered, hurt by the thought that I had taken her seriously.
	“I know, Istri.” I put my hands near Lythril’s head. “Come on, Lythril. Home to your head.”
	She tried to balk, but the pull of your own body is not something anyone, even Lythril, can resist for long. I watched the last tendrils of that nasty light disappear into her head and scoured myself several times. She was gone, every last bit of her, into that unconscious form. And blocked, once I sent the fire around her.
	‘Aine,’ ‘Istria’ and I watched the little white flames sink into her, as the face changed. Even unconscious, she looked different. There was no question that she was home.
	And no question, either, that the Greenhaven Mental Institution was at the end of its long rope. The top three floors had already crumbled in, and the fire was still eating at the first floor and the basement. Waves of heat ripped out of those charred, collapsing window frames, fanning our faces with their angry breeze. Istria, Aine, and me. Working together, if under bizarre circumstances.
	“What’s that sound?”
	“You mean the fire?” I asked.
	“No,” ‘Istria’ said. “I mean that wailing thing, in the distance, can you hear it?”
	We stopped to listen. ‘Aine’ suddenly cursed in Amstic.
	“I wondered where they were,” she said. “It’s the thurking police. She’s got the thing wired right into the Cretid City Police system, they’re supposed to show up the minute there’s a security breach. It’s amazing it’s taken them until now.”
	“I think they might have other things to worry about,” ‘Istria’ said. “The results of that inquiry in Rett Deacon’s death were supposed to come out today.”
	“Anyhow,” I said, “we better get out of here. Come on, you can switch later when we’ve put some distance between us and her.”
	‘Istria’ turned to move off, but ‘Aine’ didn’t. “No,” she called, as she watched us start for the trees. “We have to do it now.”
	“Why?” I demanded.
	“Because I’m not coming with you.”
	‘Istria’ sighed. I turned slowly around and walked back toward her.
	“You are coming with us.”
	She shook her head. “No. I can’t go back there. This is the only place left for me.”
	“You’re going to stay here and wait for her to wake up and slaughter you?”
	“No,” she answered. “If it comes to that I’ll slaughter her first. But I can’t come with you.”
	“Tarbhfnaa!” I shouted, as the noise of sirens got louder and ‘Istria’ became restive.
	“Just what do you think is going to happen next, Theamh?” ‘Aine’ cried, angry but not yet on the point of tears. “I’m still a dark user--”
	“Well, that may change,” I said.
	“And you’re still a shriia!” she shouted, ignoring me. “You think we’re going to run off to your little house in the Vicinity and live happily ever after? We can’t even touch each other!” 
	“I don’t know what’s going to happen, I just know I’m not leaving you here!” I shouted back. “Spirit almighty, I barely stood it the first time, I’m not losing you again after all this!”
	“They’ll be here soon, dhiaoc,” ‘Istria’ said. “We have to go. You can do this later.”
	“I am not going back there to live like that!” ‘Aine’ shouted back. “With you and not with you and going out of my mind--I can’t stand it, Theamh, I won’t. You’re safe, she’s beaten, and you’ve accomplished your mission. It’s over for us, so just go home and do your job!”
	“It is not over and I’m not leaving without you.”
	“Dhiaoc,” ‘Istria’ interjected, but ‘Aine’ drowned her out.
	“You want to go back together,” she snapped, incredulous in the face of my naiveté. “No matter what.”
	“No matter what.”
	“What if I turn you?”
	“That’s not going to happen.”
	“What if I never turn back? What if they exile both of us?”
	“We’ll deal with what the future holds when it happens to us.”
	“What if...” She was running out of ‘what if’s. “What if I really am evil all the way through? What if I don’t love you any more?”
	“Well, that would be a stumbling block,” I retorted, “but since you obviously do I think the question is moot, don’t you?”
	“DHIAOC,” ‘Istria’ insisted.
	“You don’t know that,” ‘Aine’ replied.
	“You haven’t said it, and don’t think I haven’t noticed that. But that doesn’t mean I don’t know it.”
	She wasn’t about to yield. But she also wasn’t going to try to tell me I was wrong.
	“Leave me here!” she finally shouted, flailing her arms in an attempt to wave me off. “I’m no good to you or to anyone and I am not coming with you!”
	The frayed end of a flashlight beam was now visible over the hill as the sound of crunching told us the Cretid police were moving through the woods.
	“Istri, I am just as stubborn as you are--”
	“You are not--”
	“All right, THAT’S ENOUGH!”	Both of us looked in shock at ‘Istria,’ who had leapt in between us and was smoldering with anger.
	“Now the police are coming up that hill,” she said, staring both of us down. “I don’t know what your experience of them is, but I never want another thing in the world to do with those bastards. I don’t have time to sit here watching you two bicker like children, especially about something that’s so clearly a non-issue. Name of the spirit, if there were ever two people who were more obviously meant to be together I want to know who they are. You don’t want to go home and face up to what you are and what you’ve done,” ‘Istria’ snapped, turning on ‘Aine,’ only minimally registering the shock of realizing she was delivering her harangue to herself. “That’s natural, but it’s your own fault and not something to punish my dhiaoc for. She loves you, you love her, and somehow something is going to work itself out, because Idair wouldn’t have broken her back to get you back together if she didn’t have some kind of plan in mind. So just shut up, admit what’s undeniable, and let’s all of us get to bloody hell out of here!”
	‘Aine,’ after watching her for a moment in amazement, returned to the fray. “I’m not going back home.”
	“Well, you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!” I shouted.
	“Theamh--”
	“That’s it!” ‘Istria’ shouted, anger snapping in those blue eyes. “I’m done arguing.” She started to walk backwards away from us.  “You want your body? Chase me for it.”
	 She darted off through the trees, taking Istria’s body with her.
	We watched her go, both astounded, if for slightly different reasons.
	“You know,” ‘Aine’ said, glancing back at me, “I would never have spoken to Morat that way.”
	“Well, maybe you should have,” I said. 
	She wasn’t laughing, but she was close to it. I smiled my most disarming, intimate smile.
	“Come on,” I said, gently. “It’s not going to be easy, I know that. But it never was.”
	“There’s only one of you, Theamh ni hUlnach,” she said.
	“Well aren’t you lucky then that you were first in line,” I answered.
	She sighed. 
	“All right, damn it,” she finally said. “Let’s go before she runs me into a ditch, or something.”
	“Aine!” I shouted, as we charged through the forest. “Wait up!”	She stood still long enough for us to overtake her. “So you’ve learned insubordination,” I said. “Istri, you can handle the police, can’t you?”
	“No problem,” she said. “Only thing easier than a Cretid is a Cretid Enforcer.”
	So we didn’t even have to hide, really. The three of us waded out through the underbrush to the road, while the hillside continued to swarm with enforcers who could look straight at us without realizing we were there. We reached the asphalt, where there was a Cretid police car waiting. 
	“So how are we getting back to Kwenu’s?” I asked.
	“Walking, I guess,” ‘Istria’ said.
	“Thurk that,” ‘Aine’ answered, starting for the car.
	“Istri, what are you doing,” I called, warningly.
	She rapped on the driver’s side window of the car. It rolled down, and we watched in disbelief as she bent over to accost the Enforcer behind the wheel.
	“May I see your driver’s license and registration, please?”
	And, incredibly, he handed something meekly to her through the window. “And your badge too, sir?”
	He handed a small metal brooch.
	“Step out of the car please, sir.”
	We were now staring in open astonishment over the roof of the car and its flashing lights as the door opened, and the Enforcer stepped out and put his hands on the hood, waiting obediently as she frisked him, removed his weapon, and handcuffed him. 
	“Get in,” she said to us, pinning the badge on her shirtfront.
	“But Istri,” I said, as I opened the door reluctantly. “Do you know how to drive?”
	“Now why would you think I wouldn’t?”
	“Because you just answered the question with a question, for one thing,” I said.
	“Habits die hard. But come on, how hard can it be?” she said.
	“That’s not an answer,” ‘Istria’ said anxiously.
	“I know,” I replied. “But we do want to get out of here.”
	“I just want you to remember that if I die in the back seat of this car,” ‘Istria’ called, “I’m taking you with me.”
	“I’m aware of the ironies,” ‘Aine’ said, taking the seat behind the wheel. “Come on, Theamh, you trust me, don’t you?”
	“On most things,” I said, reluctantly getting into the passenger seat.
	“Fnaa on a hot shingle,” ‘Istria’ finally muttered, sliding into the back.
	‘Aine’ glanced over at me as she turned the key in the ignition. “You really have left your mark on her, haven’t you?”
	“Don’t waste time getting jealous,” I answered. “It doesn’t become you, and it’s stupid. You know me.”
	“I do,” she said, as the car leapt into life. “Don’t worry, Hedina took me around the parking lot a couple times.”
	“You know what, Istri, if she took you anywhere else I don’t want to hear about it.”
	“Oh come on, Theamh, you said it didn’t bother you.”
	“I said I didn’t care how often you thurked her.”
	The car peeled loudly away from the shoulder, leaving the bewildered Enforcer shaking his head like a cat coming out of a nap.
	“The City is that way,” ‘Istria’ pointed out dryly.
	‘Aine’ swung the car around in a vicious arc and it went roaring down the street, with ‘Istria’ and me praying for safety.
	“You know she meant nothing to me,” ‘Aine’ said, glancing at me.
	“Well, if she meant nothing to you why did you thurk her?”
	“I thought it might make me less miserable. It was the year after I turned, I did a lot of stupid things then.” The car swerved around another curve, sending me into the wall. “Put on your seatbelt.”
	“So did it?” I asked. “Make you less miserable.”
	“Dhiaoc,” ‘Istria’ said, as she struggled into her seatbelt. “Would you mind not having this conversation in front of me?”
	“Sorry, Aine.”
	I suppose we mustn’t corrupt the young, ‘Aine’ said.
	Think about it from her perspective, I answered. Would you want to listen to Morat talk about sex?
	A shudder went through her shoulders that almost swerved us out of the lane. All right, point taken.
	So, I said, to keep my mind off the road. Did it make you less miserable, being able to do it?
	Not with her, she said. She glanced over at me and returned her eyes to the road, but the blood was in Aine’s cheeks now, and once I read her it mounted to mine too.
	I CAN STILL HEAR YOU, from the back.
	‘Aine’ sighed. “So how long can you maintain the block?” she asked, as we took another turn at suicidal speeds.
	“Depends on how long I live,” I replied.
	“Stop being such a fraidy cat,” she said, strangely calm and smiling at me with amusement and affection. “You fought off Barant, carathian fever, Lythril, me, and the minions, and you’re worried about a stupid piece of Cretid technology?”
	“The heart is a strange place,” I said.
	“Ain’t that that truth,” ‘Aine’ answered, as we ran down the road toward the City.

XV.
The Long Way Home

	“You see, it isn’t that hard, really,” she said, as the lights of the city appeared at the edge of the horizon. “It’s all about learning the...”
	She stopped, because something was happening to me, and she knew what it was, even if ‘Istria,’ leaning forward anxiously from the back seat, didn’t.
	“Dhiaoc, what’s wrong?” I was trying not to make it obvious, but I had broken out into a cold sweat and my jaw and hands were clenched up as tight as they would go.
	“She’s up,” ‘Aine’ said, glancing at her in the rear-view mirror. “The dolanol’s worn off and now Lythril’s fighting the block.”
	It was a struggle I’d never really envisioned having, and I was surprised, even though I was also terribly worried, that I was fighting her off even this long. Especially since I was still wrung out and emptied, drained first by hunger and then by fever and now by the effort of keeping my fire around someone powerful who really didn’t want it there.
	“Should I pull over?” ‘Aine’ asked gently as she watched me struggle.
	“Oh no,” I gasped. “If anything, speed up.”
	She stepped on the pedal that made it go faster. And as the distance and my exhaustion increased, it finally broke down, and I knew it was over.
	‘Istria’ and ‘Aine’ both watched in concern as I collapsed into my corner of the car. “That’s it,” I said. “She’s loose. We can only hope she doesn’t have access to a vehicle.”
	“She does,” ‘Aine’ said grimly. “But at least she doesn’t know where we are. Probably she’ll think we’re taking the highway to the border, and she’ll do the same, because only an idiot would make a detour to the City in the middle of an escape.”
	“Well, I’m not leaving my bag behind,” I said, a little testily. 
	“I’m not saying you should,” ‘Aine’ answered. “Anyhow it’ll be good if we can hole up there for a while so you can rest.” Aine’s eyes flicked back to me, then back to the road. “You still drive yourself like you used to.”
	“I have no choice,” I said.
	“You did it even back when you had one,” she answered. “But if you are Theamh ni hUlnach herself, you need time to recuperate, after a month like that.”
	I had started trying to drop off to sleep, but at this I raised my head and stared at her in slow astonishment.
	“Was it really a month?” I said.
	‘Aine’ didn’t answer, frowning ahead as she focused on the road and tried not to let me know she was getting upset just thinking about it.
	“A little more, dhiaoc,” ‘Istria’ answered quietly. “Four weeks and four days. Could you not tell?”
	“There was no sun,” I said.
	‘Aine’ swallowed, but said nothing.
	“So,” I finally said, to break the tension. “Anything happen while I was gone?”
	“Plenty,” Aine answered. “Barid’s still in jail. So’s Last One Standing. Lara’s trying to find out what’s happened to Iriq--”
	“What do you mean, what’s happened to him?”
	“He disappeared,” she said. “Right after he released you. They can’t get the Bureau or the Cretid Police to give information about him. Lara thinks it was re...retaliatory, for letting you go, she thinks they’ve got him in some facility somewhere interrogating him. And then the Cretid Police agreed to have an inquiry into that murder I saw, but they only gave it three weeks, and the results are out today but I don’t think they were going to be good--”
	“That is a lot, Aine,” I said, a little wearily.
	“Yes,” she answered.
	“But what I meant was, at home. What’s happened at home?” I looked up at the mirror, from which Istria’s solemn eyes looked down on me. “What happened with Slythe’s trial?”
	The eyes disappeared from the mirror as ‘Istria’ dropped her head.
	“Theamh...” ‘Aine’ began, but didn’t finish.
	“Tell me what happened,” I finally said. “It’s not good, I can read that much. Did they convict her?”
	“Dhiaoc,” ‘Istria’ said, tentative and unhappy about having to speak. “Slythe is dead.”
	That City darkness that was never dark enough pressed in on the windows of our stolen car, and the cord of the radio phone dangled in the silence as I turned my face away from the two of them and the mirror.
	“The repeaters gave it out to be suicide,” Aine said, when the silence got too oppressive.
	“Well, that just about figures,” I answered bitterly. “How did she die?”
	“Hanging,” ‘Istria’ answered.
	“Of course,” I said. “That way there’s no blood. That’s something Barant would have had a hard time explaining, blood on her hreapa.”
	We were in the north end of the City now, speeding through those narrow canyons with their steep steel walls, but I wasn’t seeing the scenery. I was looking at Slythe, on her knees in the mud outside my house, begging me for the help she didn’t deserve. And back too at happier days, from before all this happened, from scoil, from the day she’d snuck up on me out in the courtyard with a box holding seven star-shaped brooches. “Here,” she’d said. “I’d hate to see metalworking stand between the world and a good shriia.” And she’d run off as soon as I started to thank her, leaving Istria laughing at the look on my face.
	I hadn’t planned to cry; there was no point to it. But it happened anyway, silently, as I pulled my hreapa around me and started fingering the brooches, counting them. All seven, still there. Lythril had wanted to display it intact.
	Istria’s hreapa was down at my feet, bundled up and pinned with its seven brooches. Istria had made them herself, in the normal way. You don’t have to; they’re purely utilitarian, and the fact that they’re star-shaped is just for us; all Idair cares about is that there are seven of them. The real magic is in the cloth itself. But I had always felt, I guess, that I was lucky that way, going into battle wearing the strength of two and not just one.
	“Theamh,” ‘Aine’ began, and then stopped because there was no use in continuing.
	She was thinking of her too, of that same memory even, and she wasn’t going to cry. Not because she didn’t want to, but because of the habit, driven hard into her after four years in exile, of hiding grief from itself and doing what had to be done.
	“I’m sorry for it,” ‘Istria’ finally ventured. “She was a good woman, at the end of the story.”
	I closed my eyes.
	“Do you remember, Aine,” I said, when it got to be too much. “Do you remember that day, a million years ago, when you were making me breakfast and I was going off to the Pharc to talk to Ethir’s students, and Slythe was alive and I’d never seen Dunta and there was only one bitch in the world?”
	‘Istria,’ not knowing what to say, reached out to put a hand on my shoulder, but stopped when I shrank violently away.
	“Don’t touch me, it’ll hurt,” I said, tears and anger bursting out of me.
	“Theamh--” ‘Aine’ began.
	“Don’t touch me! Nobody touch me! Just leave me alone!”
	They left me alone, to cry to my heart’s content. ‘Istria’ because she still didn’t know how to act when this happened to me, and ‘Aine’ because she was driving, because the roads were starting to get narrower and harder to negotiate, and because this was hurting her too in ways she couldn’t show me.
	“There is no way back,” I said, my voice a high, scratched wail. “It’ll never be like that again.”
	“No,” ‘Istria’ answered softly. “But then it wasn’t, even then.”
	 The car suddenly stopped short. I thought maybe ‘Aine’ was getting ready to deliver herself of whatever diatribe might be fomenting in her quick-angered heart, but it wasn’t that. She’d stopped because the dark figure of a man had suddenly leapt out in front of the car, and she remained stopped because other men came running from the sidewalk and streetcorners to surround us. I noticed a number of things I hadn’t before. One was that we were on one of the avenues that ran from the north into the South Corner. Another was that the people who had surrounded us were what they called ‘black.’ And a third was that through the crowd, at the intersection we hadn’t yet reached, I could see there was a police car just like this one, that had been turned turtle on its back and was on fire.
	“This isn’t good,” ‘Istria’ said, from the back seat.
	‘Aine’ leaned on the horn, but that made no difference. There was a crashing sound right near my ear, and something stung my neck. When I put my hand to it, I felt a hard, jagged thing which, when I removed it, turned out to be a piece of broken glass. I was covered in tiny, glinting fragments. Someone had smashed the window.
	“Get out of the car!” shouted a voice, as the barrel of a gun appeared in the newly empty space.
	‘Aine’ turned her green eyes on the man behind the gun. “We’re not harming you,” she said.
	The gun disappeared, but the man holding it was instantly thrust aside by another man, who reached in and began scrabbling for the door handle. “GET OUT OF THE THURKING CAR!”
	I don’t think you can force all of them at once, I sent, as this one also released and withdrew.
	She was about to answer, but her side of the car suddenly lurched down as it began to rock. They were getting ready to tip us.
	“It’s the car,” ‘Istria’ suddenly shouted. “They think we’re Enforcers. It must be about the report.”
	“Damn it,” I muttered, reaching for the handle.
	Theamh, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
	Only thing I can do, I answered, as the car settled down and I pushed on the door.
	I didn’t have the chance to obey that insistent summons; I was seized by a number of hands and dragged bodily out of the car, still clutching Istria’s hreapa. It was a while before I could determine exactly what was going on, but by the time I was on my knees on the pavement I could see ‘Aine’ and ‘Istria’ being hauled out by others, as the noise of shouting and the crackle of fire made it impossible to understand anything. I understood it, though, when one of them cracked the butt end of an Enforcer’s gun across ‘Aine’s’ head.
	“YOU LEAVE HER ALONE!” I shouted, not sure as I rushed to my feet whether in my gut I was defending Aine or Istria. “She’s not an Enforcer, this is a stolen car!”	Nobody cared, and when I leapt forward to try to intervene I was hauled back by the same man with the gun who had broken the window.
	“Who are you?” he demanded, shaking me by the hreapa.
	I can’t read strangers well, but I could tell a few things. One was that he was starting to realize there was something very strange about all this. Another was that he was mad as hell.
	“I’m a stranger here, we all are. We’re not Enforcers. We’re not even Cretids.”
	“Tarbhfnaa!” he shouted, shaking me again. A little circle had cleared around us, as the others left ‘Aine’ stretched out on the sidewalk and ‘Istria’ kneeling on the asphalt as one of them twisted her arms behind her. And something fell out of my shift and onto this cleared circle.
	The man who was shaking me nodded to another man, who stepped forward and picked it up. The first man looked closely at it, then back to me.
	“Where did you get this?” he demanded.
	He was holding up the charm that Tyrna had given to me. I was as surprised to see it as anyone else was.
	But you confiscated that, I sent ‘Aine’ as she goggled at it. Didn’t you?
	We certainly did, she answered. Lythril was going to examine it, and then somehow the thing disappeared. I don’t know how it got back into your shift.
	Strange, I replied. Well, that’s magic for you.
	“It was given to me,” I answered.
	“By who?”
	“By a woman called Tyrna ni Bhronson.”
	I shouldn’t have put the “ni” in, I realized. But they didn’t appear to have heard it. The man holding me nodded at the one behind ‘Istria’, who let her up. ‘Aine’ was now sitting up, looking around warily as the crowd let her bleed in peace.
	“You know Tyrna?” he asked, suspicious.
	“We worked together, very briefly,” I said.
	The man gave me a little shove in the direction of his associate.
	“Take them to Tyrna,” he said. “All of them. And see nobody hurts them, until she says to.”
	Very shortly the three of us found ourselves being marched along by a small band of what seemed to be soldiers--albeit soldiers in an army that had been very hastily constituted, and very haphazardly armed. They had no uniform per se, but I saw that many of them were wearing jackets with that TTCP logo that Aine had seen on the murdered man. 
	We could run for it now, maybe, ‘Aine’ sent me as we wound through a back alleyway that was still largely deserted.
	And run where? I replied, looking around at the fires that seemed to be burning everywhere. I mean, I’ve never lived through one. But this looks to me like a war. If we can get some kind of safe conduct from Tyrna, we can get out of here maybe. Without that, I think we’re trapped.
	Who is this Tyrna?  ‘Aine’ asked, as we emerged into one of those paralyzed, flame-studded intersections.
	I told you before about getting jealous, I said, a little irritated. It’s a charm, not a love token.
	As I said it, one of those canisters came hissing through the air and landed a few feet in front of me and my captor. While he and the others were just starting to recognize it and panic, I wrapped it up and held it. The fog stayed inside, although it wouldn’t be long before the thing exploded.
	“Throw it back,” I said, since my captor still had my arms pinioned.
	“What?” he demanded. 
	“Never mind.” I had spotted the place it came from--about a hundred yards up the avenue we were on, where a platoon of Enforcers had massed on the other side of a barricade that had been cobbled together out of old cars, broken boards, pieces of fallen masonry. Hoping my mindstrength would get it far enough, I hoisted the thing and sent it flying back over the barricade into their midst.
	I saw the massed, helmeted shadows scatter, and then the fog burst out of it. But it burst out among the Enforcers, who began gagging and stumbling as the people on our side of the barricade retreated from the wafting mist.
	“Fnaa,” was my captor’s sole comment.
	“How’d you do that?” said the one holding ‘Aine’, who was apparently less interested in preserving the illusion of authority than in learning the trick.
	“It’s simple, once you know how,” ‘Aine’ said dryly. They must be mighty sorry now that Maerin crossed Lythril, she added, as they marched us forward. No more Special Forces.
	We had almost reached the barricade now, and following their lead we were crouched down to avoid the flying projectiles that sailed by occasionally overhead. These were the smaller ones, the ones designed to hit and kill. Apparently the Enforcers were taking this seriously.
	From the crowd of people milling around near and, some of them, on the barricade, one detached and began running toward us. A woman, about sixty, but moving as if she were thirty.
	“We were sent to find you,” my captor shouted as she neared us and I could see it was Tyrna. “We have hostages. One of them was carrying this.” He handed her the protector.
	Tyrna took a moment to gather the weight of her dignity.
	“They’re not hostages,” she said. “They’re special agents working under my direction. Leave them be and get back to the northwest barrier. And don’t meddle any more with what you don’t understand.”
	“Yes, Tyrna,” he said, releasing me. The others let go of ‘Istria’ and ‘Aine,’ and they went running away up the street.
	Tyrna folded her arms in front of her chest. She took a long, slow breath and let it out in a sigh, shaking her head as she looked at me. 
	“Well, Theamh ni hUlnach,” she finally said. “Trust you to turn up at the worst possible moment.”
	“What the hell is going--” I began, but Tyrna had already forgotten about me and gone over to look at the bleeding bruise on ‘Aine’s’ temple.
	“Will you look at what they’ve done to you, poor child. Didn’t you pick up enough from the news to know to stay indoors?”
	Theamh, get her to stop touching me, ‘Aine’ sent me as Tyrna turned her chin and began testing the skin around the bruise.
	“She’ll be all right,” I said. “I’ll take care of her when we get to--”
	“Oh, a lot of care you’ll take of her. Poor thing, if you’re not getting her beaten up by the Enforcers you’re running her through the gauntlet down on the front lines. I don’t know why she puts up with it--”
	“Leave her alone!” from ‘Istria,’ who was once again moved to anger on my behalf. “It’s my choice and if I want to run into danger it’s my affair. She’s got enough to do without trying to protect me.”
	“Theamh, who is this madwoman who thinks I’m talking to her?” Tyrna said, turning to me.
	“I--” I wasn’t going to try it. “Listen, Tyrna, you’re busy and we’re in a terrible hurry--”
	“Fnaa,” ‘Istria’ said, as another one of those canisters landed. She wrapped it and tossed it back just as she’d seen me do it. ‘Aine’ whistled as it sailed back over the barrier.
	“She’s a fast learner, Theamh,” she said. 
	“She’s making progress,” I answered, while ‘Istria’s’ reddening face curved in a slight, fleeting smile.
	“Theamh!”
	Now Lara had come running over from the barricade and before I could even begin greeting here she had her thin arms clamped around me in a disconcertingly firm embrace. “You’re back! Oh my God! You have to tell me all about it. Aine wouldn’t tell us a damn thing, just up and left this morning--” She broke off as she finally released me and stepped back far enough to get a look at me. “And not a minute too soon, because girlfriend, you look like hell! What have they been doing to you?”
	“It’s a long story,” I said. 
	 “You got over the carathian fever all right, though,” Tyrna said.
	I swiveled suddenly to look at her, but ‘Aine’ beat me to the question.
	“How do you know about that?” she demanded.
	“How do you think you got it, honey?” she asked, holding up the protector. “I told you Tyrna would take care of you.”
	“But...” I said. “How could that thing give it to me?” She shrugged. “How did you even know I’d asked for it? Were you...listening to me, through it, or something?”
	“You asked for carathian fever?” ‘Istria’ demanded, aghast.
	“I didn’t know, Theamh, not that way. This thing doesn’t work like a radio transmitter. You’re all so cerebral, the pack of you, on both sides of the border. I’m a totally different story, one that it would take you about fifteen years to understand. Stop worrying your head about it and just be glad it worked out.” 
	“Thank you,” I said.
	“Don’t mention it.” There was a crunching sound, and part of the shell of a burnt building crumbled further up the street, raining chunks of masonry onto the armored heads of the Enforcers. “We have to help each other, or nothing will ever change.”
	“Speaking of which,” I said. “What happened to Last One Standing?”
	“He’s organizing the defense of the eastern barrier,” she said. “They busted him and Iriq out of the holding cells when they stormed the Bureau building. The Bureau was in charge of the inquiry, see.”
	“Oh good,” ‘Istria’ said, looking at Lara. “So he’s turned out all right, then.”
	Lara snorted. “He’s gonna have to do a lot more than get himself arrested if he wants to win this girl’s heart,” she said. 
	“He’s busting his gleacha for her, all the same,” Tyrna said. “The man is practically single-handedly staving off the assault on the barrier.”
	“Well,” ‘Istria’ said. “In the tales, you know, men fight for their homes or their honor, but they fight hardest of all for the love of a fair maiden.”
	“True for you, tall dark and handsome,” Lara answered, turning to her. “Honey, I don’t know who you are or where you come from, but you have got to learn to accessorize. Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to wear silver with black?”
	As she said this, she reached a hand playfully toward the chain around ‘Istria’s’ neck. ‘Aine’ looked about ready to pounce, but as it happened I hit breaking point first.
	“Lara,” I said dangerously, “that’s not funny. Leave it be.”
	Lara dropped her hand and drew back, mortally offended.
	I took a deep breath.
	“So,” I said, slowly. “The report came out, and it exonerated the Enforcers.”
	“That’s right,” Tyrna nodded.
	“And now the Cretid City Police have finally got the fight they were spoiling for.”
	“Right again.”
	“What can we do to help?” I asked, turning back to her.
	“Nothing,” she said promptly. “I am amazed you can even stand there without falling over, destroyed the way you are. Lara, I want you to tell Iriq he’s on his own for now and take these people back to Kwenu. I appreciate the offer, Theamh,” she went on, “but right now, you need to be somewhere else.”
	“She’s right,” ‘Aine’ declared. “Come on, let’s get back to wherever this place is.”
	“Tyrna!” someone shouted from the barricade.
	“Be right there,” she called, running toward the flame and the fight.
	“This way, ladies,” Lara said. “Don’t worry, we’ll be all right.” 
	My eyes caught on the strip of cloth she had tied around her arm. It was a red band, with the letters TTCP drawn on it crudely in black. The badge of safe passage. Or at least I hoped so. We moved forward, and the pavement swam up toward me as my knees buckled.
	“I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”
	The sickening rush toward asphalt stopped, and I felt ‘Aine’ lifting me up, draping my arm around her shoulders and putting hers around my waist. “It’s all right, Theamh, we’ll get you safe home. Take it slow.”
	“I’m tired, Istri.”
	It sounded more plaintive than I wanted to. But it was true. I was sick at heart and at stomach, drained, dizzied by the sounds of flame and explosion and shouting that were spinning around us, and more than anything, bone-tired.
	“I know, chara. I know. Hold on, we’ll get there.”
	We moved forward again, slowly. In front of us I could hear Lara on the mobile phone.
	“Damsel to Black Knight,” she said, as Iriq’s greeting crackled over the waves. “I’m taking some of the wounded back to home base, honey. Can you get along without me for a while?” There was a pause, and one of her high, silvery laughs. “Yeah, well, I better not come back and find they’ve breached it, you hear, or I will be very severe with you.”
	‘Istria’ looked at her with mild horror as she snapped the phone closed. “So, stranger,” Lara went on. “You the wench who broke poor Theamh’s heart like Aine was telling us?”
	There was a sudden dip, but we were soon back on the sidewalk. Don’t be angry with her, Istri, I said. I’m her dhiaoc, she’s gotten very protective of me.
	“I am not,” ‘Istria’ answered.
	“Who are you then?” Lara pressed.
	How can I be angry, when it’s only the truth, ‘Aine’ answered.
	“It’s difficult for me to answer that question right now,” ‘Istria’ said.
	It is and it isn’t, I answered back. Or call it the truth as far as she knows it.
	Careful, she said, pulling me in closer to her and away from the burning puddle I had almost strayed into.
	
	Kwenu’s apartment building was relatively unscathed, although there was a group of men and women in those red jackets standing around the doorway. They let us through after Lara spoke to them, and we began the climb up the steps. Even with ‘Aine’ supporting me, I was broken-winded and gasping when the door finally swung in, and I stumbled more than walked into the hallway.
	“Aine!” shouted Etana, poking her head out of her bedroom. “Ira, Aine’s home!”
	Etana, in her nightdress, came pattering down the hall and threw her arms around ‘Aine’, closing her eyes and hugging tight to her. As ‘Aine’ looked to ‘Istria’ for some explanation, Chandra followed her out of the room, bursting into a squeal of excitement when she saw us.
	“Holy fnaa on a hot buttered roll,” she shouted, running toward us and crushing all three of us in a hug. “I thought you were both goners. Praise whatever made the world, you’re back among the living.”
	Somehow the whole crowd of us managed to get out of the hallway and into the living area, where Kwenu was on about three different phones at once.
	“No, that’s not legal. Even under Enforcement Measures they still have to charge you with something. I’m going to call Malisha and get her down there. Hang on.” She put one of the phones down and looked at us. “Where the hell have you been? Do you know I’m in about seven different kinds of contempt right now because of you? No, no, listen, this is a war, you are a political prisoner. Demand that they treat you like one and make sure everyone else does the same.” 
	While Kwenu kept talking into the second phone, I detached Etana gently from ‘Aine’ and turned to ‘Istria.’ “Where’s the bag?”
	“In Etana’s room.”
	“Etana, Aine and I are going to borrow your room for just a little while, all right?” I said, squatting down and looking her in the eye. “You make sure Aunt Chandra and Aunt Lara and your mathi stay here with you and don’t disturb us, all right?”
	She nodded, solemnly.
	“Good girl.” Come on, we need to get you straightened out, this can’t be good for you.
	The three of us escaped into Etana’s room and I shut the door. There, in that brightly painted room with its child-sized furniture and the blue glow of Ira’s screen, we finally looked at each other.
	I sat down rather heavily on the edge of the bed, and took the cieridh out of the bag.
	<Tabhair, mo sielnai.>
	The four of them burst out of it as if they’d been wanting to do that for a long time. ‘Aine’ stepped back warily as they streamed around the room, then suddenly pulled back and began circling me in one of those parti-colored clouds.
	<It’s all right, it’s all right. She’s not going to hurt me.>
	“I fed them yesterday, dhiaoc,” ‘Istria’ said. 
	“Thanks,” I answered. <I’m all right, friends. I’m home now. Tar cieridh.>
	One by one they went back into the ball. ‘Aine’ watched them go, moodily. She knew them, of course; and she knew why they’d rallied around me as soon as they detected her. But it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. If she’d really been my enemy they would have gone right after her instead of merely protecting me.
	Phredi was the last to go, lingering pinkly in the air, its transparent mist tumbling in mournful and dejected waves.
	<You did what you could, friend. Evil is strong, that’s all.>
	Reluctantly, he disappeared into the ball. I rolled it back into the bag, stuffed Istria’s hreapa in there with the rest of it, and closed it up.
	“Can you...” I began, but they had already started. ‘Aine’ had her hands on ‘Istria’s’ temples, and ‘Istria’ was reaching up for hers. I watched while that red and green spiraled up ‘Aine’s’ arms back into the head it belonged to, while Aine’s spirit came back to her. It was a sharp, bright color, almost blue but really purple, bold and forthright if also somewhat unnamable. And it returned to her quickly, gratefully, without too much shock or pain. Unlike Istria’s, which had a moment of hesitation before drawing its flickering ends back into her mindspace.
	When Istria blinked and her eyes opened as her again, it hit me hard--the relief of return mixed with the pain of loss, the sorrow of knowing she was back in the body that would keep her divided from me. And my own throat and eyes answered it, prickling with our shared and frustrated grief.
	“All right, Aine?” I called, when I thought my voice was under my command.
	“All right,” she answered, putting a hand up to the wound on her head. “But my head’s going to hurt for a while.”
	“At least I didn’t break your jaw,” I said, examining her while Istria stood off to one side. “I am sorry, but it was the only way.”
	“I know,” she said. “It’s all right, dhiaoc. I’m just glad to be back.”
	And I was glad she was back, too--it was as if I hadn’t seen her, really, in a very long time. I gave her a hug.
	“You did well, Aine,” I said, holding onto her for my comfort as much as for hers. “You got me in and you got me back out and you put your life at risk to save my sorry gleacha when I didn’t really deserve it.”
	“You do deserve it, dhiaoc,” she said. “It’s not your fault, what happened.”
 	I released her. “You know how you worried about whether you could get ordained as young as you will be, after that whole thing with Pel,” I said.
	“Yes,” she answered, surprised I was bringing up something from so long ago.
	“Well, trust me--assuming the Order survives, when it comes time for you to get your orders, you’re not going to have any trouble.” She smiled, shy about being proud but proud nonetheless. “I’m very grateful to you, Aine. And I’m very, very proud of you.”
	“Thank you, dhiaoc,” she said, blushing.
	I cleaned her up as well as I could with the uisce. With a glance at Istria, who was still watching silent and morose from the corner, she went to the door. “I’m going to say goodbye to Etana,” she said, opening the door. “She’ll miss us, poor thing.”
	She closed the door and left us there. Deliberately, as we both knew.
	“You know she’s waiting for us,” Istria said. “Out there, somewhere.”
	“I know,” I answered. “One more reason to stick together.”
	Her hands moved away from her sides, and then fell back futilely. “This is worse than before, Theamh.”
	“No it isn’t,” I said. 
	“Exactly how is it better?”
	“When we went in there, we thought it was our big weakness,” I said. “That we loved each other. We know different now.” She folded her arms and waited for me to argue the point. “It’s our strength, Istri, it’s the best thing we have to fight with. It only made us vulnerable because we thought it was wrong.”
	“That’s not the point any more,” she answered. “Whether it’s wrong or not--it’s impossible, is what it is.”
	“Idair told us all things are possible,” I said.
	“I want to believe that,” she finally answered.
	“Do then,” I replied. “It costs nothing.”
	She looked at me out of those blue eyes, and we both heard our hearts beating.
	“I will go back with you,” she said. “If only to see the look on Barant’s face when she finally sees us coming for her.”
	I smiled. “That will be priceless, no question.” 
	The smile that answered me was full of tears. “You know, if I could--” she said.
	“I know.”
	Because there was nothing else for it, we went back into the hallway.
	“...make sure and help Ira do that,” Aine was saying to Etana, who nodded up at her while Kwenu kept talking into her machines and Chandra approached us.
	“So you’re Istria,” she said, looking at her icily.
	“I am,” she answered. 
	Chandra’s eyes dropped to the chain on her neck, and then came back to me.
	“I suppose you know what you’re doing,” she said, clearly believing I didn’t.
	“Chandra,” I answered, “I’m grateful to you for all your help, but I think you just better not say anything to me about how foolhardy you think I’m being.”
	But nothing could stop Chandra. “You treat her right,” Chandra said, walking over to Istria. “Or I’ll hunt up someone capable of kicking your gleacha.”
	“It won’t be easy,” Istria said. 
	“Let’s go,” Aine said as she emerged into the hallway. “Kwenu’s not going to say goodbye, because she wants to be able to claim she didn’t know we were absconding.”
	“It’ll be a long walk,” Istria said, looking doubtfully at me. “Are you sure we should start?”
	“Walk, hell,” Chandra said, tossing me a set of small metal objects. “My car’s outside. I’m getting a new one anyhow. The heat and AC don’t work and in the winter it doesn’t start too well, but it should get you home all right.”
	“Are you sure about this?” I demanded.
	“Say I’m doing my bit for shri,” Chandra said. “Truly, you can take it with a clear conscience--the thing isn’t worth the metal it’s made of, at this point.”
	“Goodbye, Chandra,” I said. “Look for us on the VB.”
	She hugged both of us and waved us off down the stairs.
	The hood of her car had been painted with a huge, red TTCP. At least it would get us through the lines. We bundled into it, Istria at the wheel, Aine in the back, and me riding shotgun.
	“She even filled the tank for us,” Istria said, turning the key.
	We drove. Past the streets on fire, through a broken barricade, out onto the broad road home.
	“I’m hungry,” I said, as Chandra’s car clanked its way up the speedometer.
	Istria was pleased to hear it, but she didn’t want to smile. Instead she shrugged. “There’s a WorldBurger--”
	“NO.”
	Aine and I said it together. Istria looked over at me, then back to the road. 
	“I forget,” she said. “It’s been a while.”
	Aine laid down on the seat and closed her eyes, but we knew she wasn’t sleeping.
	She’s trying to give us privacy, I sent, in answer to Istria’s puzzled look in the rearview mirror. Of course she can’t actually sleep in here, cars make her very nervous.
	If we turn on the radio, she said, nodding toward a knob on the dashboard. The noise will maybe cover it, if we talk quietly.
	I started spinning the knob, searching for something I could stand to listen to. 
	“--rioting engulfing most of the South Corner. Cretid City Police Chief Norgren reports that the outbreak has been contained and the situation is under control.”
	Next, I said, flipping the knob as Istria laughed.
	“--and so the Lord did sent the faithful to the southern regions, to afflict the heathen with most dire afflictions--”
	Next, Istria answered, as I kept searching.
	“--news of a disastrous fire at DeVane pharmaceuticals’ City plant has left thousands of Cretid men feeling let down--”
	NEXT, came from the back seat, where Aine did not after all seem to be having any trouble reading us through the radio.
	This time it was music. I couldn’t identify the words right away, but when I went to change it Istria stopped me.
	She said nothing, but I knew she wanted me to leave it. So I did. 
	“...you asked me what I had to say,
	I couldn’t answer right away.
	I’ve been thinking it over all today,
	But it’s all been a waste of time...”
	It was a man’s voice, but a high one, that could almost be a woman’s. And there was a mournful strain in it that seemed to be answering something in her, as her hands gripped the wheel and the water began to stand in her eyes.
	“I could make up an answer and reasons why,
	Pitch you my sob story and hope you’ll cry,
	But whatever I told you, I’d tell you a lie
	If I said that the fault wasn’t mine...”
	I don’t have aftersight, and anyhow the building that would have held those memories was coal and ash now. But I could see it as plain as if it were there in front of me. Istria, down in the lab or up in that office, working late as she always did, sleep as far away from her as happiness, listening to this voice and its words and taking some comfort, along with the pain, in seeing herself in it, banal as it was, and crying because grasping at so slight a straw drove home to her how alone in the world she was.
	“I’ve done you over,
	I’ve done you wrong,
	I’ve done you harm, and now all I can say
	Is that I’ve suffered much
	And I’ve suffered long
	And I’ll suffer still till I hear you say

	That the mess I’ve made of things isn’t pretty,
	But you’ll take me in hand, take me up, take pity,
	That you won’t leave me here to cry alone,
	That you’ll take me
	The long way home.”

I looked over at her. I couldn’t do the simplest thing; I couldn’t even hold her hand. Our link was broken and she had said nothing about reestablishing it; and I hadn’t asked. But I knew she was reading me, and I had to believe it made a difference.
.	“It does,” she answered, though I hadn’t asked.
	I looked out at the darkness rushing past us.

	And if love was smart,
	And if life was fair,
	It would be too late, I would not even try--
	But you know my heart,	
	And you’ve seen despair,
	And I know you won’t really tell me goodbye

	Cause the mess I’ve made of me isn’t pretty--
	Cause you’ve searched in your heart and found love, found pity,
	Cause I’m way too lost to get back on my own--
	Cause you’ll take me
	The long way home.

	“It is a long way home,” I said. “But we’ll get there. All of us.”
	“All of us,” piped up Aine from the back seat.
	Istria laughed, still crying.
	“All of us,” she said, bringing the car slicing around the curve of the highway and driving those twin beams into the riven darkness of a long Cretid night.

THE END