One storm-lashed sunset in the Eldshore’s antique capital, beneath Castle Astrolabe’s crumbling perch and near the Zodiac Coliseum’s bloody stones, Gaunt and Bone scaled Heaven’s Vault, there to make a hellish deposit.

 

        Heaven’s Vault was a golden, six-sided tower lancing like an orphaned sunbeam through Archaeopolis’ sodden skies. Rectangular stained-glass windows glittered at intervals up its six hundred feet, each with a god’s portrait in the center, surrounded by lush scenes of that divinity’s life and death. In the corners of the windows there glowed ruby numbers, as if enumerating divine blood money.

 

        “They are all dead, you know,” Imago Bone said within a gilded cloak, his invictium-tipped gloves scraping past the vast window of the Forge God, a blade of grass in his teeth recalling the world far below. “Or so it’s claimed. All the gods of the West. Those not embedded in the landscape, or too abstract to have form at all. Their blood stained this glass, with the blood of their high priests. And the Things beyond the glass killed them.”

 

        “If this is meant to deter me,” Persimmon Gaunt said, clutching her rope beneath Bone, “I’m deterred. Turn back anytime you like.” Though I wish I’d been swayed at a lower altitude, she thought. Swaying at high altitude is hard on the stomach. Her sturdy body had been toughened by weeks of travel, but the long climb ached within her limbs, and chill winds swirled auburn hair into her eyes. Dangling there, she felt not unlike the rose tattooed upon her face, the one shown ensnared by a spider’s web.

 

        “There’s no choice,” Bone said. “What we need is beyond this glass, that prophecy claims unbreakable.”

 

        The poet answered him,

 

              “Neither liquid nor solid: such then is glass. 

              Stained with godblood and manblood, no one shall pass. 

              Thus trapped between natures, ‘twill never fault. 

              Eternal, the windows of Heaven’s Vault.”

 

        “Right,” Bone said. “That one.” The spare, ferret-like face of the thief frowned down, framed by two old scars, one from blade, one from flame. “I won’t ask again that you allow me to go alone. I merely ask that you respect the Pluribus. They are not seen much beyond this tower. But if tales are true they slew the old world, spawned the present age.”

 

        “I understand.”

 

        “I... do not want to lose you.” The momentary softness fled the thief’s scarred face as soon as it arrived. “Some perils must be mine alone. So you must do exactly as I say.”

 

        “You do not own me, Bone.”

 

        “You are free, Gaunt. I merely want you free and alive.”

 

        They reached the upper right vertex of the great window, beside a number marking Allos the Smith’s assigned ranking among gods (thirteen), and the climbers secured themselves and readied their gear. Stray raindrops spattered the window, which glistened with the ruddy flourishes of sunset. Godblood was, it seemed, composed of all the spectrum’s colors, but with a marked bias toward the red.

 

        Bone removed his gloves. “The gem, if you please.”

 

        Gaunt slid from her index finger the ring they’d stolen from the delvenfolk of Loomsberg. It took the shape of a silver ouroboros serpent, with a crook in its self-devoured tail, and a frosty gem within the crook.

 

        “A ring of Time,” she said, passing it up. “And time, perhaps, to tell me the plan.”

 

        Bone took the ring and tested it, plucking the grass blade from his teeth and flicking it across the gem. Green coiled into brown, blew away as dust, the remnants scattering to the street. None of the hustling wayfarers beside the Vault noted the incident, nor perceived the climbers in gilded cloaks that mimicked the tower’s stones. Indeed, for all their civic pride, the Archaeopolitans preferred to act as though the Vault did not exist.

 

        “We could live a year,” Bone mused, “on the value of this gem. Captain Dawnglass would want it for piracy, the kleptomancers for research, Dolman the Charmed to create false relics. Yet it’s merely the tool for a larger caper.” He sighed. “This is my master heist, Gaunt. I spent decades sketching it, as a sort of hobby, never supposing I’d actually try something so mad.” He gazed if for the final time at the grey sea surging westward; then he smiled. “That is the effect you have on me.”

 

        For you, Bone, she thought, that was a love poem.

 

        But he had turned back to the window of the god-eaters.

 

        He put the ouroboros upon his ring finger, pressed it to the glass.

 

        The gem shimmered and diminished, and simultaneously the world blurred.

 

        Bone shuddered. Hair sprouted upon his face. Grey strands appeared on his head. His clothes frayed. So did the rope.

 

        “Bone....”

 

        “A moment.” Bone shimmered back into solidity, and the gem was gone. Was his voice a trifle weary? “A moment, a year... so little difference to a ring of clotted Time. So little difference to me. Heh. But most of its influence was directed outward, Gaunt, at this window.”

 

        Was the window’s luster gone, its surface drab and colors flat? “What have you done?” Gaunt asked.

 

        “Don’t worry, I’m fine. Just a little temporal backwash. But the window, now... well, a thief appreciates loopholes. Glass is indeed something between liquid and solid, but old glass with impurities has been known to divitrify and become a solid in truth. So I wonder if the prophecy still applies to crystal....”

 

        Bone donned his clawed gloves, scraped, and grinned.

 

        Soon he’d created a gap a few feet across in the corner of the Forge God’s window. He carefully lowered a crystal disc into the darkness of the tower, sliding it to one side.

 

        “Well done,” said Gaunt, peering up into the Vault’s shadows. “But was it necessary to keep me in the dark?”

 

        Bone looked at her. There were lines beside his eyes, as if a few more crows had danced there. “You are not as skilled at evasion as I. You might have been caught and questioned by delvenfolk, or eldguards, or infraseers.”

 

        “You were afraid I’d stop you, weren’t you?”

 

        He coughed. “Perhaps. I could not predict the severity of the temporal backwash. And you have so many years left.”

 

        She reached up and grasped his wrist. “Give me this moment, and this road, and this sky. That is enough. Never give me lies.”

 

        He smirked. “I am glad it’s enough, since you’ve enumerated most of our possessions.” He studied the narrow gap, patted his stomach. “For once I’m glad we’ve had little to spend on food.”

 

        Gaunt shook her head. “Think of it. We are down to our last gold ambrosian, and bear an infernal burden.” She cocked her head toward her pack, which bore the reason for their adventure. “And now we are breaking into one of the world’s most dangerous places.”

 

        “Don’t tell me you aren’t enjoying it.”

 

        She laughed and mimed an unchaste kiss. “After you, master thief.”

 

        The Vault’s windows were for the outside world’s benefit. The beings within had no requirement of light, and although ruddy illumination streamed through the windows, shadows were plentiful. Once within, Gaunt and Bone sought their dubious concealment and took the Vault’s measure.

 

        Their first realization was that Heaven’s Vault was in a sense two towers: a citadel of black stone perhaps fifty feet in diameter, nestled within the shell of the golden-hued exterior. A narrow, sloping passageway separated the two.

 

        Upon the ebon stone of the inner tower there appeared, at regular intervals, narrow doors of still darker metal resembling slabs of congealed night. Spindly glyphs, like a sequence of mad spiders’ webs, etched the walls beside.

 

        “Purest agonium,” Bone said after a sniff of the door-metal. “Formed, it’s said, in the hearts of draconic suicides. I’d best not touch it.”

 

        “The language of the lost isle of Nobeca,” Gaunt said, squinting at the writing beside the door. “I’d best read it.” Clicking her tongue, she said, “A free translation might be ‘clam, ennui, knucklebone.’“

 

        “So,” Bone said, scratching his chin, “beyond lies a talisman that puts mollusks to sleep?”

 

        “No, Bone. My translation makes no sense because the language employed is not Nobecan, but our own tongue of Roil.”

 

        Bone frowned at her, then at the arcane squiggles. “You could have fooled me. But then the light is dim....”

 

        “The Nobecan symbols are here used to represent the sounds of Roil. You see, Nobecan is ideographic, not alphabetic. The glyphs with the meanings ‘clam,’ ‘ennui,’ and ‘knucklebone,’ possessed in the original tongue the sounds ‘slaw,’ ‘terr,’ and ‘dairk.’“

 

        “‘Hm. Slaw-terr-dairk. Slaw-ter-dark. Slaughterdark?” Bone’s eyebrows rose. “The pirate lord? Could this be his deposit box?”

 

        Persimmon Gaunt could almost see the fires lighting behind Bone’s forehead, illuminating storied hoards of Summerlong wine, Karthagarian gold, Wallander silk.

 

        “That creature was the terror of three continents,” Bone murmured, his hand drifting despite his own warning toward the dark panel. “I absorbed all his legends as a boy. He retired as a prince to a desert outpost—what would he lock away here?”

 

♦ ♦ ♦

 

        A thousand miles east in the city of pain, a girl tending a weed-choked garden shivered beneath a desert moon, as if a cold western wind whispered her name....

 

♦ ♦ ♦

 

        Gaunt caught Bone’s hand. “This isn’t our goal.”

 

        Her lover sighed. “Correct. We are not stealing, this day.” He beckoned up the winding passage. “The unoccupied boxes should be this way.”

 

        “A moment.” Gaunt studied the crystal disc they’d dropped in the passageway, its edges marked with red powder, flecked with blues, golds, greens, and yellows. She rubbed the mouth of a pouch along its circumference. “Powdered godblood,” she said, “might just be of value.”

 

        “Audacious,” Bone said. “Well played. You carry the stuff.”

 

        They crept upward the equivalent of two stories, passing dark portals labeled for wizards, heroes, monsters, and lunatics, before they discovered the Vault had a guardian.

 

        A huge golden sphere rolled into view. Bearing down, it made not a rumbling, but a sticky-sounding hiss.

 

        To Gaunt it resembled nothing so much as a globe of frozen honey, just wide enough to dominate the passage. Like drops of blood, bubbles within glinted with the window-light. Yet this was not its most lurid aspect, for within quivered the severed heads of three men, bobbing as though the interior were viscous yet. The rolling heads stared at Gaunt and Bone, their eyes tracking the new victims, their mouths gaping wide as if shrieking silent warning.

 

        “Flee!” Bone yelled.

 

        Gaunt tarried, as much from shock as from a desire to protect her companion. The golden sphere rolled closer.

 

        Cursing, Bone shifted to the nearest black door, jabbing glove-claws deep into the seam between metal and stone.

 

        The door popped. Bone swung it and blocked the way, even as the agonium corroded the claws down to smoking flecks.

 

        The sphere hit the enchanted metal; Bone fell backward into Gaunt. The globe steamed into sweet-smelling vapor, filling the passage with a tantalizing odor as of life’s finest meal, now over.

 

        Before the door swung back Gaunt glimpsed the chamber beyond. There glinted a dented brass lamp, a carved pumpkin brooding atop a saddle, a pale girl immobile within a glass coffin. Then the deposit box and its mysteries were closed off forever.

 

        Three heads flopped now upon the floor like fresh trout, drawing Gaunt’s gaze. They were aging swiftly. Their skins became ash, and the skulls beneath followed suit. Before they were gone, however, Gaunt thought she heard them whisper, Our thanks....

 

        “An ambrosia globe,” Bone said. “A head within goes on living, in misery, nourished by divine honey. I told you to flee.”

 

        “I was startled. And I couldn’t leave you.”

 

        He frowned. “We must hone your self-preservation skills.”

 

        “You’re welcome.”

 

        “Your death would serve no one, Persimmon Gaunt!” Bone shook his head. “You affect a certain world-weariness, but you are a romantic. You must learn proper selfishness.”

 

        “Selfishly I ask, quit the lecture.” Hands on hips, she said, “Of more immediate concern, how many times can you repeat that trick with the door?”

 

        Bone grunted, looked away, removed his smoking gloves. “I had only one set of invictium claws.”

 

        “May I borrow what remains?”

 

        “They’re nearly useless. But be my guest.”

 

        She slipped on the gloves, which still bore remnants of the enchanted metal. “Let’s go.”

 

        Their luck improved. They found their goal just around the bend: the first door lacking an inscription.

 

        Bone withdrew a pair of daggers, slipping the blades between metal and stone. Immediately the weapons corroded. Bone discarded smoldering hilts.

 

        He removed a strand of ironsilk, shaking it once for stiffness, and slipped it into the crack. A line of sizzling ruin lashed out toward Bone’s hands, and he dropped the remnant of the strand.

 

        He raised a jagged shard of magnetite on a string, swung it against the agonium. The shard failed to stick, and the tip smoked and crumbled. Scowling, Bone touched the stone to a ruined dagger-hilt. It clicked, but did not cling. “Gaunt,” he said petulantly, “this vile metal has neutralized my lodestone!”

 

        “Hold. I have a notion....”

 

        Gaunt used the gloves with their invictium shards to trace a Nobecan character beside the door.

 

        Bone winced at the scraping and screeching. “Shall I just call out a challenge to the Pluribus?”

 

        “Hush.”

 

        “That was the gist, yes.”

 

        “This won’t take but a moment. There.”

 

        She had finished inscribing the Nobecan glyph for balance.

 

        In the original tongue it sounded much like Gaunt.

 

        “I am Gaunt,” she told the black door.

 

        With a grinding noise and a waft of cool air, it swung aside.

 

        Bone raised his eyebrows. “I must give you a bigger share of our hauls.”

 

        “We haven’t been stealing anything.”

 

        “Exactly what I’ve been saying. Let’s finish our task and go rob a drunk.”

 

        They peered into the chamber, a dark, hollow space that echoed with their breathing. Gaunt opened her pack and produced an unmarked book with a drab cover.

 

        “Rot in there,” she whispered, and tossed within the tome known only as Mashed Rags Bound in Dead Cow.

 

        That was when the air seemed to come alive.

 

        “THIEVES!” came a maddening cry, as though a thousand voices shrieked all around.

 

        Gaunt shivered, but did not freeze. She spun and unsheathed her own daggers, fine steel from Tancimor.

 

        She became aware of a dark-robed figure behind her. Even as she turned, it lashed out with both hands—or rather, what she had believed were hands. Their touch was light, yet both her wrists sang with pain. She dropped her blades.

 

        Meanwhile Bone had found his own weapon. It was more unorthodox; he flung a waterskin at the hooded shape.

 

        The skin just missed the head, but burst against the wall, spattering their foe.

 

        It buzzed with rage.

 

        For it was a swarm of bees that filled the cloak, and with their central cognitive squadron drenched, the rest spilled in all directions like golden drops of anger.

 

        “I’m fleeing!” Gaunt said, preempting Bone, but even as she scrambled downslope she encountered a second hooded figure droning in accusation, and beyond it a third. She skidded to a halt, and thus Bone collided with her, herded as he was by another pair of shrouded swarms. The lovers fell against each other, and huddled.

 

        Their original accuser(s) flowed back into the abandoned robe, filled it, and billowed up to the ceiling. Gaunt marveled how light the robe must be, or how strong the bees. Then she marveled that she and Bone yet lived.

 

        Down pointed a finger formed of intertwined insects, quivering with legs, wings, and antennae.

 

        “We are the Teller,” buzzed the voice of myriad wings. “We speak for the Pluribus. We have eaten gods. It demeans us to consume thieves. But it’s more efficient than showing you the door.”

 

♦ ♦ ♦

 

        Many times Imago Bone had been surprised by Persimmon Gaunt, but never more so than today.

 

        “We are not thieves, O Pluribus!” cried she.

 

        He opened his mouth to object, reflected a moment, shut it again.

 

        “We fear you,” Gaunt was saying, “who rebelled against the very gods, who never fairly paid you for nectar and ambrosia. We respect you, whose Deicide allowed mortals to dominate the West. We honor you, who originated the art of banking. And we come to you now as would-be customers.”

 

        Bone gave her one look of perfect perplexity, then followed in languid tones, “My colleague speaks the truth.”

 

        “You are Imago Bone,” the Teller said, pointing a crawling “finger” at Bone’s nose. A single bee detached itself for emphasis, orbiting Bone’s head. Larger than a honeybee, it was elongated in a way that resembled wasps, and flashed a metallic shade of gold, with bristles reminiscent of spikes. “We have tiny eyes in many places.”

 

        “You know me?” Bone said, with a quaver of pride.

 

        “We were not stealing,” Gaunt said, “despite my friend’s reputation. We were leaving something behind.”

 

        The Teller withdrew its arm. It and its comrades rippled in consternation.

 

        “You were making a deposit?”

 

        Eyes on the circling bee, Bone said, “There is a deadly enchanted book in our care, the legacy of our first meeting.” He glanced at Gaunt, recalling their escape from kleptomancers, goblin librarians, and the two deaths Joyblood and Severstrand who’d so weirdly circumscribed and extended his life. And he remembered the cost of that escape—employing Mashed Rags Bound in Dead Cow, a book that killed all who absorbed so much as a paragraph. “We do not want it, but its disposal falls to us. While we search for the means, we must ensure it doesn’t fall into evil hands.”

 

        The Teller seemed to scowl. The thief perceived skittering, many-legged eyebrows. “You dread this bane so much? You would destroy it, not sell it? You, a thief?”

 

        He’d asked himself this before. “We like to sleep well at night,” he said, though he added silently that he slept best beside Gaunt, and craved her continued affection. “We deprive others of wealth. Not, as a rule, of life.”

 

        “You would rent a security comb?” The Teller’s tone remained incredulous. “The standard fee is ten ambrosians a month.”

 

        Bone revealed a single gold coin, stamped with the arms of the Empress of the Eldshore, bearing a single drop of dried ambrosia at its punctured center. “We have only one available. Why do you suppose we broke in?” One ambrosian was standard yearly pay for a soldier. It could be traded for numerous lesser coins, and slipped beneath the tongue it had an even chance of reviving a man from a mortal wound. To Gaunt and Bone the coin, a gift from the pirate captain Dawnglass, represented one last long step before destitution. They’d lived on scraps and odd jobs to avoid trading it.

 

        “Bone?” Gaunt whispered. “Self-preservation? Eh?”

 

        The Teller smiled, a grin composed of tiny black feet stained with cream-white pollen. “One? We store crown jewels, dragon-hunters’ hoards, sorcerers’ hearts, mummies and vampires, papyri of the Blind Poet, rings of power, soul-stealing swords, and a cat in an indeterminate state between life and death. The mighty of the West entrust their treasures to us. And you have but one coin?”

 

        Bone licked his lips at this inventory, but he composed himself. “A down payment?”

 

        Gaunt put in, “You know the reputation of Imago Bone. We offer a down payment of one ambrosian, plus the master thief’s services in the acquisition of your choice.”

 

        “We do?” Bone murmured.

 

        “Hush.”

 

        “We must confer.”

 

        The cloaks of the Pluribus dropped to the floor. The divine bees converged upon a nearby window and formed a writhing tapestry of gold-knifed darkness.

 

        “Flee?” Gaunt whispered, with little conviction.

 

        “Our only real option’s a plunge to the street,” Bone replied. “Though we could hide in the open security comb.”

 

        “With the book we’ve struggled to destroy! Oh good!”

 

        “If anything could harm the Pluribus....”

 

        At that moment the swarms dispersed and dressed themselves, with two blocking the path toward the book, and the Teller once again overhead. Gaunt and Bone would never know if the Pluribus had reacted to their words.

 

        The Teller spread wiggling gold-black hands in a magnanimous gesture.

 

        “Congratulations, new customers! We are flexible beings, and offer a special arrangement. There is a service you might do. For this, and your deposit, we will waive the cost of our damaged window and offer forty-nine weeks’ use of a security comb.”

 

        “Ask,” Bone said with widening eyes, “and we’ll steal the spots off the sun.”

 

        “An interesting proposal. But we have no theft in mind. Indeed, you will do as you did here, delivering an item of value.”

 

        “Speak on.”

 

        “We guard many wondrous things. There is one such whose renter has defaulted. We would have you dispose of it. Do you agree?”

 

        “What are the details...?” Gaunt began.

 

        “Of course!” Bone said.

 

        “Very well,” said the Teller. “You shall convey the world’s most perilous weapon to the city of pain.”

 

        The Teller escorted them to the gap in the window of Allos the Smith, Gaunt glaring at Bone the whole while.

 

        To forestall her speech, Bone mused aloud, “Most perilous weapon, eh? The sword Crypttongue, that speaks in its victims’ voices?”

 

        “No,” said the Teller. Gaunt’s scowl intensified.

 

        “The Schismglass of Baelscaer, then, that entraps souls in its reflective blade?”

 

        “No.”

 

        The Teller stopped beside the door Gaunt and Bone had first encountered, the one named for a pirate prince.

 

        “All who possess this weapon have regretted it, even the fiercest of killers, mad Lord Runestock, say, or bloody Sir Fairbeast, or Captain Slaughterdark who abandoned it here.”

 

        At the word Slaughterdark the door swung open, revealing a glowing nimbus of a pinkish hue, festooned with sparkles and rainbows.

 

        “Behold the Sword of Loving Kindness.”

 

♦ ♦ ♦

 

        Far to the east a girl heard words upon the wind: I am coming. The voice was dulcet and dainty, and seemed ready to burst into song.

 

        The girl shivered there, in her desert.

 

♦ ♦ ♦

 

        On the eighteenth day of their journey from Archaeopolis to Maratrace, called the city of pain, Gaunt grew certain something was amiss.

 

        The initial signs had been small. Imago Bone’s normal grumbling irritation at rocks and bumps in the royal road was replaced with a cheery, cloying whistle. The whistle did not cease when the road did, and it echoed maddeningly through the precipitous mountain path. Bone’s usual haphazard way of pitching camp gave way to a tidy pattern of tent, fire, and packs, all arranged according to ancient Palmarian geomantic principles. His habitual lustful manner surrendered to a chaste, schoolboy friendliness. Even this last transformation was not so alarming at first, as it gave Gaunt more time to attack her latest work, The Next-To-Last-Winter:

 

              ‘Tis the loveliest of seasons (she wrote on the seventeenth day)

              A winter bright, my friend.

              Not least among the reasons:

              The next will have no end.

 

        Yet on the eighteenth day, Gaunt, breathing in sharp cold mountain air and trying to scoop up the delicious thrill of that penultimate snow and melt it into words, was interrupted by Bone’s latest musing.

 

        “I am not so good a thief, you know.”

 

        Gaunt’s writing hand froze, pleasant ice-scapes forgotten. She stared at him.

 

        “Most of my escapades,” he continued, chewing a blade of snow-crusted alpine grass, “were lucky escapes.”

 

        Was this some filchform, Gaunt wondered, who had eaten her beloved? Or a sorcerer who’d spirited Bone away and left a fragment of the Brazen Mirror?

 

        “Ah, think of it, Gaunt. I grow old, and never have I tended a garden, raised a child, run for civic office.”

 

        Here he absently patted the weapon from which he never wandered far. It was a rapier with a hilt sculpted like a rose blossom, its whole length an unearthly pink crystal which sparkled and flashed prismatic reflections at the merest hint of sunlight. Delicate and sharp, even its rose petals drew blood.

 

        “Why,” Bone continued, “what must people think? What sort of image do I present? I’ve never dwelled long in one spot, you know, Gaunt, never had a house I could show off to the neighbors.”

 

        “Bone,” Gaunt said, “you are frightening me.”

 

        “I frighten myself,” Bone said agreeably. “To think, I could have spent my life so much better! I might have been a fine physician, student of law—a courtier even! A man of substance!”

 

        “Have you been drinking, Imago Bone?”

 

        “No!” The thief stood, the Sword of Loving Kindness in hand. “Would that I had! A little drink is a social necessity. Instead, I went through long dry spells and sporadic mad binges. Better to raise the occasional stiff drink in the company of peers and patrons. I....” Bone’s brow furrowed. “What... what is wrong with me?”

 

        “Bone,” she said, coming closer, relieved at this change. “Are you yourself?”

 

        “It... it is like dreaming another’s dream. I... what a foolish sentence. A pathetic attempt at poetry. Which reminds me, Gaunt,” Bone continued, all confusion leaving his voice, “I’ve been thinking you should give up verse.”

 

        “What?”

 

        “It is well enough for wise ancients to practice the art, but today’s women should know better. If you must write, perhaps then an etiquette primer for young girls—what are you doing?”

 

        Stooping, Gaunt said, “I am forming a bird out of snow. If I whisper a wish into its ear it will fly away when my back is turned, and bring happiness and prosperity to my friends.”

 

        “Well... a bit whimsical, but all in all a good, kind sentiment. I should think—ow!”

 

        Having packed the snowball hard, Gaunt had hurled it into Bone’s earnest face.

 

        The thief dropped the weapon. Gaunt kicked it downslope, where it lay against a leafless tree, shining as if reflecting an unseen, glorious sunset.

 

        Bone dropped to his knees. “Thank you,” he gasped.

 

        “It was more for me than you.”

 

        “I hope I haven’t lost this eye.” Bone checked. “No. I can see. But more important. I can think—of pride and greed, for example. Of me. Remind me what the Pluribus said about the Sword?”

 

        Gaunt said, “They were rather cryptic. Especially as you’d already agreed to their errand.” She shot him a fresh glare, then added, “I’ve given this a little thought. This may be the whispered final work of the Forge God. A weapon fashioned after most of the gods perished... even his beloved Nettileer Kinbinder.”

 

        “The goddess of love?”

 

        “My bardic teachers suggested I not think of her office as love per se. That is too multifaceted a thing to be embodied in a single entity. Nettileer’s function was kinbinding. She presided over courtship and marriage, childrearing and housekeeping, personal grooming and blood feuds.”

 

        “Blood feuds?”

 

        Gaunt studied the sword as she spoke. “She was not a force for good, necessarily, Bone. Her priestesses did not help the poor and sick, but rather dressed up in fanciful pastel outfits with tiaras. They held lavish balls. They bestowed wishes upon their friends and poison upon their enemies. Kin, cleanliness, status, appearance, chaste affection—that was Nettileer’s realm, and woe to those who angered her. Her husband Allos the Smith suffered much at her hands.”

 

        “Ah,” Bone said. “He must have dallied with another, as gods often did.”

 

        “No. He failed to keep his forge clean, embarrassing her in front of the other divinities.”

 

        “Oh.”

 

        “For this she shoved his face into the coals and cast him away, taking up with the war god Erethor.”

 

        “I see.” Bone straightened his clothing.

 

        “But that wasn’t the end of their story,” Gaunt said, “for one day the Pluribus rebelled and killed almost all the gods. There’s a song, a fragment from the Bladed Isles —

 

              Gold was the godswarm 

              And red the halls of Surmount 

              And black the blade of Erethor 

              As Nettileer he sought. 

 

              And swarm-spattered was his sword 

              When goddess’ hand he got 

              And led her to the ramparts 

              And the chariot of the god. 

 

              But “Would you flee to other worlds?” 

              Said she, “To draw a coward’s breath?” 

              Berserk she goaded Erethor. 

              He charged foaming to his death.       

 

              Then red rose the mane of Nettileer 

              As to stones leapt she of hearth. 

              Red ran her blood, that Allos took, 

              To quench a thing of wrath.

 

        “It is said,” Gaunt said, “that Allos flung this final work into the sea before the Pluribus found him. Taletellers long wondered what it was. I think I have a guess. I think it was this sword, which so perfectly matches the goddess’ nature.”

 

        She stared down the slope. “Think of it, Bone. The final vengeance of the gods is not a thing of thunderbolts or gore, but something forged with the essence of the kinbinder. Something that bludgeons mind and spirit... until one obeys Nettileer’s notions of a clean, shiny life.”

 

        “A cosmic spanking rod,” Bone said. “Why couldn’t we have gotten something that ate souls?”

 

♦ ♦ ♦

 

        Again the girl felt something cold and delicate kiss her neck and whisper Skath. Again she turned and saw nothing but the proud expanse of Maratrace beneath the desert sun.

 

        But the voice on the wind was stronger now, as were her nightly dreams of a dainty pink sword. Almost she clawed herself in the manner of her people, but limited herself to biting her lip.

  

♦ ♦ ♦

 

        Bone and Gaunt resolved to carry the sword in a pack, and handle it only with cloth. Even so, their journey was marked by incidents of a most disturbing wholesomeness.

 

        In the Homunculus Mountains, they found themselves lecturing the Mandrake Marauders on manners and hygiene. Their subsequent dash into the Vale of Webness led to a debate with Poisonfroth Huskmaker, matriarch of the Oldspinners, in which Gaunt accused her of haphazard webmaking, and Bone chided her unfinished meals.

 

        This exchange degenerated into the unfortunate scene of two humans fleeing a be-webbed and burning forest. As the blaze spread onto the Wheelgreen, Gaunt and Bone argued with the Wagonlords, who disputed the notion that the grassfire might inspire their founding agricultural communities with pretty gardens.

 

        When at last the pair reached the reed-marked, quietly churning river that flowed south and east to Maratrace, and the threat of being bound and blood-smeared and left for the ants had faded into anecdote, Gaunt and Bone held a conference.

 

        “Damn this sword,” Bone spat.

 

        “Language,” Gaunt objected. Then she caught herself, and swore.

 

        “You see?” Bone said. “The thing’s influence is growing. We will be lucky to arrive as anything but pedants of good behavior.”

 

        “Look, Bone. Look at the verse I wrote yesterday.”

 

        He looked.

 

              Oh, happy children at their song 

              Frolicking the winter long, 

              For in their joyous hearts they know 

              They lie, who warn of endless snow.

 

        “You think this is a disaster?” Bone asked. “I’ve discarded my gear. My daggers and lockpicks, my camouflage dyes and knockout herbs, my ironsilk lines and sticky resins. Years to assemble, all gone—abandoned on the plains or tossed into the river! Each time, I thought, ‘Farewell, wicked tool.’ Only when it’s too late do I weep.”

 

        Gaunt patted herself and cursed (“Bless it all!”) to discover she too had disarmed herself. She embraced Bone, leaning in closer when she found the initial result too chaste. “Well, fear not. Adventuring is done for now. We must merely deliver this artifact to Maratrace. There is no designated recipient, no specified act or ritual to perform. We may walk through the gates, drop the thing on the street, and leave.”

 

        “You are right. We could even approach by night and hurl it over the wall.”

 

        “And flee at once for Amberhorn on the Midnight Sea, where sin is state-supported, where thieves’ markets come thick as the harbor’s billowing sails.”

 

        “Yes. Yes! You are a healing draught, Persimmon Gaunt.”

 

        Bone kissed her. She responded eagerly, and his breathing grew labored. How long, she wondered, since they had behaved so? Too long indeed—since the fifteenth day out of Archaeopolis.

 

        They clutched at one another, pulled each other to the ground, unfastened, tugged, tore, and lay naked in the tall grass. The scent of mud and sweat was rich. Their hands sought their unchaperoned flesh....

 

        And they paused, regarding one another in vexation.

 

        “I am finding myself mortified,” Gaunt said slowly, “to be so exposed, before the hawks, the field mice, and whatever astronomers might exist on other heavenly discs.”

 

        “I find myself thinking,” Bone murmured, “that this cavorting is rather brutish, and far beneath the dignity of a great poet and a thief whose name is at least known to high society.”

 

        The pair turned their heads and looked upon the Sword of Loving Kindness. It had tumbled from its pack, and now shimmered pleasantly beside them.

 

        They still lay that way when a trading boat arrived, making its way from cold Starkinggrad downriver. The hoots and whistles of the crew sent them diving for their clothes, and they barely mustered the audacity to beg a ride to Maratrace.

 

♦ ♦ ♦

 

        It was no city for sightseers.

 

        First, grotesque dark towers, resembling broken-boned monstrosities covered with pustules, rose on the horizon. These were followed by smaller, angular pyramidal buildings like wide knives, then a conglomeration of adobe houses low by the river. Trails of smoke testified to activity, farmland stretched up and down the river, and watercraft bobbed beside piers; but there was a hush about the place that Gaunt did not like.

 

        As the riverboat creaked cityward, sliding above the sunken rubble of older settlements, its captain said, “All mad they are, indeed,” as if reading her thoughts. “But honest dealers nonetheless. Too honest, in a way.” He was a Palmarian named Flea, with two fingers missing from his right hand, testament to avarice or clumsiness. (Gaunt was oddly proud Bone’s hands were intact even after a long career in Palmary.)

 

        “What do you mean?” Bone said with a flaring of the fingers that implied reward for information (and emphasized, Gaunt knew, that he had all ten.)

 

        Flea cupped his own maimed hand, accepting with a grunt a minor coin. “They’re fanatics, friend. They believe pain’s the great truth of the world, and they labor to provide their own evidence.” Flea pocketed the coin, lifted his hand. “Palmary’s proudest had to shackle me to do this. But Maratrace’s mighty do the same to themselves, or worse. And outsiders who linger become pain-lovers too. I know a few old river-hands who are short a hand or two, these days. Me, I’ll be leaving in one—down to Mirabad. Best you come along. If you can’t afford it, you can work for passage.”

 

        A glance at the morose faces of Flea’s oarsmen, chained by wrist and nose, convinced Gaunt she’d rather walk.

 

        A tsking Flea deposited them at Maratrace’s modest port district. Unusually for a city of tall towers, Maratrace’s harbor did not throb, but rather snored. Activity was faint. Where other docklands would echo with the cries of drunks, lechers, and brawlers, this one clicked with the lackadaisical sounds of dice upon the piers. It seemed the traders clung to the water’s edge.

 

        There was no city wall as such. Wooden harbor-sheds blended with adobe homes and stone pyramids, the city growing by turns more austere toward its center; and despite their intent to abandon the sword immediately, it was unclear to Gaunt and Bone if they were truly inside Maratrace or not. They ventured inward.

 

        They soon found themselves upon hot, hushed, shadow-slashed avenues of white sand, slicing between close-set buildings. To Gaunt, the city seemed the work of two diametrically opposed architects. Most structures, those meant for business or habitation, sat stark, smooth, and angular, reminding her of tombs. This much was strange but hardly daunting. It was the other constructions, the public and military buildings, which cast monstrous shadows. They clawed skyward like the citadels of genius termites. Within the limits of engineering they were asymmetrical and rough-hewn, crafted to suggest diseased and disfigured creatures. The tallest structure, ebon and windowless but in outline oddly reminiscent of Heaven’s Vault, flowed with intricate carvings depicting humans and other sapients undergoing torture. Beneath it, children played.

 

        Gaunt led Bone nearer the children, who represented the largest knot of activity in sight. So far, other citizens had clung to the shadows, slipping indoors as the poet and thief passed by. Gaunt had only been able to discern that the Maratracians were surprisingly pale for desert-dwellers, and that many were maimed as if veterans of some ugly battle.

 

        “We might as well inform someone what we’re doing,” Gaunt said, worried that her scruples were generated by the sword, but unable to act otherwise.

 

        The older children played catch with a wooden octahedron bristling with little spikes. Usually the children avoided the hazards, but occasionally a sharp cry went up.

 

        Heat and distraction had made Gaunt stupid; but when she finally understood the meaning of the latest yelp, she ran toward a fallen boy.

 

        He cradled a bleeding palm. His cohorts gathered around him, silently watching.

 

        Bone slid onto the sand and grabbed the boy’s hand. Perhaps fourteen, the victim was long and lean of face, brown-haired and brown-eyed, and stared as though Bone were a particularly unbelievable desert mirage.

 

        “Let him help,” Gaunt implored in the language of Amberhorn, a far place, but not so distant as the homes of other tongues she knew.

 

        The boy regarded her in silence, but his gaze was intent, perhaps even expectant.

 

        Bone applied a tourniquet from his pack, and strong alcohol from his flask. The boy hissed as the liquor stung, then narrowed his eyes with a peculiar, satisfied look.

 

        Again in Amberhornish, Gaunt said, “Where are your parents? Or your guardians?” She pointed angrily at the spiked ball. “Why do they allow such playthings?”

 

        No one answered. Slowly, Gaunt grew aware of the collection of scars and bandages on the impassively staring children. One boy lacked half an ear, the wreckage neatly trimmed. One girl wore a patch over one eye, the fabric bearing a ghastly symbol. It recalled the familiar skull-and-crossbones of pirates, yet depicted a severed head and arms, all covered in flesh.

 

        “Does no one speak Amberhornish?” Gaunt called out. “Roil? Eldshoren?”

 

        “We understand you,” said the boy with the wounded hand, in careful Amberhornish. “We learn this language in school. We’re supposed to know the tongues of future conquests.”

 

        Bone avoided the obvious question, asked instead, “Then why did you not answer?” The thief finished his ministrations, and the boy flexed his hand with a grim smile.

 

        “Your questions make no sense,” he replied. “We are children. Why should we not play?”

 

        At this point another cry arose. A plump, tanned girl of around twelve barreled toward them, sandals slapping the sand, dirty brown hair flailing about her intense dark eyes. Had Gaunt imagined a sentient sandstorm, there would have been a resemblance. Girl collided with boy with in what seemed both tackle and embrace, weeping. He, in turn, detached himself but swatted her shoulder in amused condescension. “Skath, Skath, Skath. What are we to do with you? It’s just a little blood.”

 

        “Siblings?” Bone murmured to Gaunt.

 

        “Yes,” she said. “The mix of anger and affection is telling.”

 

        The girl Skath looked up at the strangers. Worry twisted her face. She took Gaunt and Bone by the hand and nodded urgently down the white street. “Come!” she declared in Amberhornish. “You must hurry.”

 

        “A welcoming committee at last,” Bone quipped in Roil, as they consented to be led. “But we must dispose of the sword.”

 

        “Perhaps this girl can introduce us to officialdom,” Gaunt said in kind. “The weapon’s emanations make me want to deliver it to proper channels. Also, I am having difficulty refusing an invitation. It’s impolite, after all.” She shrugged helplessly.

 

        “We are wanted thieves in Palmary, Archaeopolis, and Loomsberg,” Bone sighed, “and now we’re compelled to knock at all doors, and wipe our feet. Next we’ll be sending thank-you notes to every noble we’ve robbed.”

 

        They followed Skath. After some hesitation her brother tagged along, taunted by his contemporaries’ laughter.

 

        “A strange city,” Bone observed in Roil. “The size and condition of the buildings imply wealth, and despite their scars the children are well-clothed and fed. Yet all doors stand open, all save those of the great tower, where I saw no opening. Nor do I see city guards, or private muscle....”

 

        “But there are those....” Gaunt jabbed an elbow at a side street, toward one of the smaller grotesque towers. Below, figures in drab grey robes gathered in discussion. They glanced at the foreigners. “They look ominous.”

 

        “They cannot hurt you,” Skath piped up in Amberhornish, proving she understood more than the outlanders realized.

 

        “Because we are outsiders?” Gaunt asked in the same tongue.

 

        “They are not allowed,” Skath said. “No one in Maratrace can hurt anyone else.”

 

        “A lovely sentiment,” said Bone.

 

        “But they want to. They all want to hurt you.” With this she strode into a two-story pyramid.

 

        She led them through the first story, one single large room adorned with bright wall-hangings and colorful sitting pillows, where in one corner lurked a sculpture like an iron sea-urchin with spines of irregular length. The tips had a rusty look. A stairway led to a deeper, cooler level. Another sliced along three walls and led to the roof, and it was up these stairs the girl marched.

 

        They attained a square rooftop rimmed with flower beds, with a rustling white canopy on rickety stilts offering shade. A watering pot creaked in the dry wind; weeds choked the flower beds. A dry, sharp smell accompanied the weeds.

 

        Skath scanned the garden, nodded to herself, and plucked a dandelion. She handed it to Gaunt with slow ceremony.

 

        “I am Skath,” she said. “I keep lots of gardens, here and there. I like the plants people call weeds. Most people think I’m crazy. Have a dandelion.”

 

        “I am... Lepton,” Gaunt said, accepting the white puff. She chose an Amberhornish word meaning thin or light, preferring Skath know the sense of her name rather than the sound. Also, it was just as well her true identity went unspoken. “This is, um, Osteon,” she added, nodding to Bone, and passing the dandelion to him. He bowed. White seeds drifted behind him, from the canopy’s shadow into the blazing sunlight.

 

        “This is Skower,” Skath said with a toss of her shoulder.

 

        Her brother made a scoffing noise.

 

        “Skath,” Gaunt said. “Who rules your city?”

 

        The girl’s smile froze. She looked away to her weeds.

 

        “We are returning something to Maratrace,” Bone added. “May we show you?”

 

        “Um, Osteon....”

 

        “I feel that we must—Lepton.”

 

        Skath nodded uncertainly at Bone’s question, and he set the dandelion atop the roof’s wall, removed the shrouded sword, unwound the cloth. Prismatic flashes and ruby light painted the air.

 

        Skower hissed. Skath merely stared.

 

        “The Sword of Loving Kindness,” Bone said. “Reputed the world’s most dangerous weapon.”

 

        Indeed, Gaunt thought. For she saw Skath reaching toward the sword with an expression torn between terror and awe. Her brother crept beside her like a cat tracking a lame bird.

 

        “Ah, now,” Bone said, edging back. “Touching magic is like petting sharks with a bloody hand....”

 

        Skath paused.

 

        But suddenly Skower grabbed her wrist. As she said, “You are not allowed —,” he shoved her hand toward the blade.

 

        “What are you doing?” Bone pulled back, but his reflexes were sluggish, and his movement served only to cut Skath’s hand upon one of the hilt’s crystal petals.

 

        Skath gasped and closed her eyes.

 

        “At last,” crowed her obviously insane brother, releasing her. “At last you have hurt yourself. And I only assisted you a little: a minor sin.” He babbled on, switching to the language of Maratrace.

 

        “This city is mad!” Gaunt snapped. “Your own sister —!”

 

        “She is a disappointment to us!” he retorted in Amberhornish. “Mother and Father fight over what to do with her. She has never embraced abyssmitude.”

 

        “Embrace this,” Gaunt said, and backhanded him.

 

        He recoiled, clearly not anticipating her strength, or her willingness to cause another pain. “That is—that is against —”

 

        “I’m not from around here.”

 

        Skower stared into Gaunt’s face, a tear crawling down his cheek, and his peculiar intensity collapsed like a tower of sand. He fled down the stairs.

 

        “Good riddance,” she said, but with little satisfaction, for Skath’s eyes were still closed, as though the girl slept on her feet.

 

        “Perhaps if I splash her?” Bone said, looking at the watering can.

 

        Skath’s eyeballs danced behind shut lids, in a way Gaunt’s bardic teachers had discovered signified dreaming. “Wait,” she said.

 

        Skath’s eyes opened, and she shrieked. Bone backed away, and his elbow bumped the dandelion, knocking it over the side in a spray of shining fluff.

 

        “No,” Skath said, spreading her arms as if sheltering the entire weed garden. She uttered frantic sentences in the tongue of Maratrace, and a few words in Amberhornish: “No, you will not! It’s wrong! Wrong!”

 

        She darted downstairs, whence her brother had gone.

 

        The nonplussed wayfarers saw her sprint down the street, dust rising behind her sandals.

 

        “Ah,” Bone asked, “what just happened?” He held the sword away from his body as though it were a boa constrictor.

 

        “You speak as if I was there,” Gaunt said, rubbing her temples and reconstructing the scene in her mind. “All I can say is, two children just had very strange reactions to a magic sword. Stranger than ours, Bone.”

 

        “Did the Pluribus have a hidden agenda in sending it here?”

 

        “Are deserts dry?”

 

        They watched as Skath collided with the collection of drab-robed people they’d noted earlier—those who supposedly could not harm others, but wanted to. The boy Skower was already among them, leading the drab-robes toward the house.

 

        “Let’s consider this from the local point of view,” Bone ventured. “Two foreigners assault a pair of children in their own home.”

 

        The drab-robes pointed pale fingers at the weed garden.

 

        “I think our work here is done,” Gaunt said. “Shall we descend this fine, angled slope?”

 

        “Well said.”

 

        They began climbing over the wall—and stopped.

 

        “Do you feel what I feel?” Gaunt asked.

 

        “Would that be, dear Gaunt, a sense that it would be wholly impolite for us to flee the lawful authorities?”

 

        “Yes,” she sighed. “But even worse, that it’s shameful to tread our dirty feet over these immaculate walls, when honest folk would use the stairs.”

 

        Bone took a deep breath. “Enough. This time the sword presumes to interfere with our long-term plans. To survive, that is. We will overcome it. On a count of three....”

 

        “Keeping in mind the sinister look of those towers....”

 

        “... Indeed... we vault the wall.”

 

        Bone counted three, and both leaned forward.

 

        And both leaned back.

 

        They stood there, feeling foolish, but unable to move.

 

        “Second plan,” Bone said. “We throw the sword, the authorities claim it. Deed done.”

 

        “Excellent,” Gaunt said.

 

        Bone made to fling the weapon, but instead set the rosy rapier tenderly upon the roof.

 

        “Close enough,” Gaunt said. “Let’s flee.”

 

        They still could not descend the wall. They used the stairs. Progress was slow, leisurely, dignified....

 

        “Bone, I Can’t. Move. Faster.”

 

        “Just keep walking.”

 

        The greater their distance from the Sword of Loving Kindness, the faster their pace. As they reached the front door, the compulsion was released, and finally they could run.

 

        It was almost soon enough.

 

        The doors burst in and six drab-robed figures entered. These assumed the stances of trained unarmed combatants, dropping their centers of gravity and spreading their feet, raising calloused hands and sizing up Gaunt and Bone. Gaunt glimpsed scarifications surrounding hard-looking eyes.

 

        “Downstairs,” Bone said, snaring her elbow like an erratic dance partner. They fled to the dim underground, shouts and snarls behind.

 

♦ ♦ ♦

Imago Bone discovered no means of barring the stairs, but a stone passageway revealed side rooms with wooden doors. He ushered Gaunt into what appeared the master bedroom. He regretted they couldn’t use the bed, blanched at the nearby torture equipment, and noted a large air shaft. He and Gaunt dragged gnarled-looking furniture to block the door.

 

        Fists pounded the other side.

 

        Bone whispered, “The air shaft leads to the outer wall.”

 

        “You are sure?”

 

        “Every thief’s an amateur architect. Up you go.”

 

        “And you?”

 

        “I will follow. Go.”

 

        Though Gaunt was quick to challenge him on matters social, geographic, or metaphysical, at least she acquiesced in matters of survival. Sometimes. He gave Gaunt a boost and she scrambled up the shaft.

 

        “Open!” cried one of the drab-robes in passable Roil. “We will not harm you.”

 

        “Spare me,” Bone muttered, preparing to jump.

 

        At that moment the door shattered, and a robed hand emerged.

 

        “Spare me,” Bone prayed to whatever gods yet lived. The drab-robes were far better combatants than he’d feared.

 

        The thief faced a dilemma. He could follow Gaunt into the air shaft, but the drab-robes would see, and would surely have time to slip outside and trap Bone, if not Gaunt as well. Whereas, if Bone stayed and struggled—fought was not really in his professional vocabulary—all the drab-robes might be delayed, allowing Gaunt a better chance. Who knew? He might even win. The drab-robes might simultaneously trip each other.

 

        There was another word that was not really in his professional vocabulary, and he’d never quite used it with Persimmon Gaunt. He did not think of it as he threw pain-implements like daggers, as he tripped foes with bedsheets, as he kicked and bit. He did not think of Gaunt at all, save as the fleeting idea of a woman running free beneath the sun.

 

        He did not even consider the word as they grappled him and smothered him with a pillow and toppled him into a hazy dream wherein he clasped Gaunt’s hand in Palmary’s finest restaurant, peering deep into her eyes.

 

        Is there something you wish to say to me? said dream-Gaunt.

 

        Yes. I hate magic swords.

 

        An aching haze cleared at last, and Bone awoke upon perhaps the most comfortable chair ever placed within a torture chamber. Later, despite painful associations, the memory of that chair would taunt him. It was vast and velvety and perfectly supported his long-abused frame. If the thief ever retired to a cave in the mountains, he must plant such a chair in the center of his loot and doze in sight of the jewels and gold and easily-transportable paintings. The lords of Maratrace knew their furniture.

 

        Alas, they also knew other arts as well.

 

        All around him there were racks and ropes, needles and whips, boxes and spikes, all dedicated to the ostensible purpose of the room, that of damaging the human body by precise increments. Testifying to their use, there came to his nose a reek of mingled blood, sweat, and excretion, clouded by a touch of incense.

 

        Such torments were perhaps to be expected. What startled Bone were the identities of the tormented.

 

        Four of Bone’s drab-robed captors surrounded him—stretched, pierced, constricted, and dripped upon.

 

        Bone sat unrestrained. Those in the devices were, by all appearances, free to leave as well. Even the man within the little confinement box could snake his arm through a hole and release the latch. Instead, the lunatic leered through another hole at Bone. They all bore demented, predatory looks, these drab-robed ones. Here and there Bone caught sight of precise and extensive scars.

 

        A group of more ordinary Maratracians lurked in a nearby gallery, clutching iron bars to peer more intently at the tableau. These citizens were less diligently scarred, with merely the odd missing finger or eyepatch or artistic incision.

 

        “This is some bizarre delirium,” Bone remarked. “I’ve dallied with dreamtellers in Palmary. As that city is fashioned in the shape of a hand, it attracts all manner of soothsayers—except oddly enough the palmists, who claim the layout overwhelms them.”

 

        “So,” said the man in the box, in decent Roil. “What did these dreamtellers say?”

 

        Why not converse? “Dreams (such as this surely is!) toss about the elements of our psyches, as a gourmet tosses a salad. As the arrangement of rent vegetables serves the chef’s purposes, so the parts of a dream may be impossible to reassemble into their original lettuce heads.”

 

        There were gentle snickers. “Are we the croutons then?” asked the man in the box.

 

        “Indeed,” said Bone, warming to his topic as a mouse warms to the notion of holes smaller than cats. “You are much as old, pebbly croutons in the salad of my mind. No doubt with reflection I could find the symbolism in each of you.” He craned his neck. “You with the water dripping onto your forehead, you might be the father who demanded I join him at sea. You upon the rack might represent my desire for greater romantic prowess.”

 

        “This is fascinating,” said she upon the rack.

 

        “Very true!” Bone eased deeper into the chair. “Now, you inside the box might recall that unfortunate time I was apprehended robbing the delvenfolk embassy in Palmary. I was conscripted into their games of hunchball. You play in a delven-height chamber in pitch blackness, you see, and the balls are of stone.”

 

        “And I?” said a woman upon a slab caged by needles, so tightly penned that even breathing occasioned pricking. “What do I represent?”

 

        “Ah,” said Bone, wincing, “that is perhaps most disquieting. There is a companion of mine, who stirs unaccustomed feelings. To approach those feelings more closely inspires fear; to withdraw inspires pain.”

 

        The woman grunted, and to Bone’s horror, she clapped, piercing her hands in the process.

 

        “Well done!” she said. “You obviously comprehend much of this universe’s rue. Yet you hold back at the last. Why assume this is a dream? Is it so implausible that you sit here, in truth, in our mindthresh?”

 

        Bone swallowed. This was indeed a conclusion he wished to avoid. “Were this truly real—and I assure you, many would wish me in such a room—then surely I would suffer, not my hosts.”

 

        There were wry chuckles all around.

 

        “You have never been to Maratrace,” said the man in the box.

 

        “It is you who are in the compromised position,” said the woman upon the rack.

 

        “How can that be?” said Bone. “I lack only a glass of wine and a good book.”

 

        At a nod from the woman among the needles, a noseless citizen entered and proffered a glass of ruby liquid. An earless citizen followed with a translation in Roil of Darkfast’s Memoirs.

 

        “I fear this only supports my argument,” Bone said after an agreeable sip.

 

        “You are mired in illusion,” said the man being dripped upon. “You do not understand the horror that underlies reality.”

 

        “Your comfort holds you back,” said the woman upon the rack. She coughed at one of the departing citizens, who obligingly turned the crank near her head. Bone made a point of opening and examining the book. He glanced at the line Cynics have the most fruitful sense of humor, but they get the least nourishment from it.

 

        “We by contrast,” said the woman of the needles, “have trained ourselves to understand truth. We rise above the human condition, perceiving it fully. Pain gives us wings.”

 

        Bone sighed. “I concede this much: you are mad enough to be real.”

 

        “You draw nearer to understanding,” approved the man in the box.

 

        Bone sized up the situation. “I am a prisoner then, in the torture chamber of Maratrace.”

 

        “Your terms are crude,” said the punctured woman. “In place of prisoner, we would prefer supplicant. Instead of torture chamber, we would say mindthresh. And rather than rulers we encourage you to say Comprehenders. The citizenry follows us because they respect our abyssmitude, our knowledge of life’s pain. I, for example, have no name other than Mistress Needles.”

 

        “And to secure my freedom, I must cultivate abyssmitude?”

 

        Mistress Needles said, “I am impressed.”

 

        “As am I. I appreciate your lesson. Applaud it, even. This wine, which seemed so pleasant, is now revealed as swill.” He drank it down. “Ugh. There. May I go?”

 

        Mistress Needles sighed.

 

        “Yes, I rather thought not,” Bone said.

 

        “We regret confining you,” said the other woman (Mistress Rack, perhaps?) “Though I assure you, we will not significantly damage you without your consent.”

 

        “What is significant damage?”

 

        “Whatever we deem so. Do not be overly concerned. We are civilized folk. However, you and your companion do pose a problem.”

 

        “What problem? We came bearing a gift —”

 

        “Your gift,” said he who might be Master Box, “is a weapon sent by the Pluribus to destroy us.”

 

        “Destroy you? The thing warps minds, and even its rose petals draw blood. But it’s hardly going to wreck your little madhouse.”

 

        “How little you understand,” said the man (Master Drip?) with forehead targeted by waterdrops.

 

        “Our founder, Captain Slaughterdark,” said Mistress Rack, “warned of this blade. It does not inflict wounds. It inflicts sweetness. It forces one to see the world through rose-tinted eyes. It is dreadful.”

 

        Bone smirked. “On that we may agree.”

 

        Mistress Needles said, “Then may we be in harmony, to the degree harmony exists in this cesspool of a universe. The sword’s presence may yet prove a desirable thing. For your freedom, Imago Bone, and that of the companion who brings you fear and pain, depends upon its destruction.”

 

        “Um. How might such a thing be destroyed? We could hardly bear to release it, let alone harm it.”

 

        “Things of magic,” said Mistress Rack, “have their own rules of being and unbeing. We believe it can be unmade, if used to destroy an innocent.”

 

        “That demented girl you encountered,” said Master Drip. “The one who raises weeds and refuses self-injury and smiles at nothing. She is the one.”

 

        “Yet,” Bone said uneasily, “I am given to understand your beliefs forbid doing harm without consent.”

 

        “They forbid us,” said Mistress Needles. “You are not one of us, outlander. Yet.”

 

♦ ♦ ♦

 

        Persimmon Gaunt was uncertain whom she was angriest at, herself or Bone. It was she who should be the prisoner. Did not all romances feature the damsel’s capture? (Though she disliked romances and the term damsel.) More to the point, was she not a morbid poet, able to mine the very prison stones for material?

 

        Bone should be out here. Bone was the thief with far too many years’ experience, the burglar who scaled buildings like step-stools, the schemer who spied cracks in all defenses. But he was not here, and Bone would insist she flee.

 

        Go on (he’d say.) The dire book is safe with the Pluribus for now. Hone your self-preservation skills. Return to poetry, count yourself lucky to be free.

 

        But she wouldn’t abandon him. Did she love him? It almost didn’t matter. She had allowed Bone to fall for her sake. Somehow she would get him back.

 

        She almost felt his presence beside her as she skulked through the day. She returned to the harbor district and its clutter and crowds, obtaining hunks of dry bread and moldy cheese, dressing herself in a tattered robe. She lurked like a troll beneath a dank pier, whence she heard officials (Comprehenders, the market whispers named them) harassing every merchant stall and vessel. Seeking her. The traders, drawn to Maratrace’s useful location from many lands, did not like the place or the Comprehenders; but they promised to report the auburn-haired outlander.

 

        She breathed deeply as her bardic instructors had taught, watching the sun descend and make the sky recall the Sword of Loving Kindness.

 

        The image kept returning, of the girl Skath and her brother Skower, and their reactions to the sword.

 

        Gaunt’s intuition had landed her in trouble as often as out of it, but trouble was already here. She slept, her mission clear. At dawn she sought out Skath.

 

        Gaunt shadowed the girl from her home, and caught her atop the western gate, tending another box of weeds. Although there was no city wall as such, the westward road led through this free-standing maw that snarled with metallic fangs, speared the sky with glass horns, unfurled spiky stone wings; and as the sun rose behind the city, the gate cast spiky shadows piercing the cracked and rocky margin of the desert called the Sandboil. The girl found it easy to crouch among the horns—there were dozens, sprouting like stunted glittering trees—and Gaunt saw the guards below would have great difficulty spotting Skath, let alone catching her.

 

        As Skath knelt beside her stinkblossoms and spikeblooms, her snarlflowers and swamppetals, Gaunt said gently, “I like flowers too.”

 

        Gaunt supposed she might have said something more fugitive-like. Make a sound and you’ll be sorry, say. But, in fact, she was the sorry one.

 

        “Lepton,” Skath hissed, backing up against a curving, serrated glass cone. “Don’t use the sword,” the girl whispered in Amberhornish.

 

        “I won’t.” Gaunt spread her hands. “They took it when they took Osteon. I have no weapons except words.” As the girl relaxed slightly, the poet added, “Though I suspect it’s not ordinary cuts you fear.”

 

        “The sword is evil,” Skath blurted.

 

        “Is that why you set your Comprehenders on us?”

 

        Skath looked at her feet. “It hurt me. It looks like a beautiful flower, but it’s a nasty, angry thing.” She glared at her box of blooming weeds, as if to say those were what flowers should be.

 

        “I’d have to agree,” Gaunt said. She sat, laying hands upon bent knees. She studied the deep blue stinkblossoms for a time, wrinkling her nose. “I like your secret gardens. I spotted several yesterday, hiding from the Comprehenders. I used to keep gardens too, in a way. When I lived in Palmary, I knew a dozen alleys where flowers grew. They were tough little things, like yours. I liked to bring them water. Sometimes I gave them more sun.”

 

        Skath slowly sat, cocking her head skeptically. “How?”

 

        Gaunt smiled. “I scrounged for broken mirrors. Then I positioned the pieces in different spots in the alleys, high and low. It didn’t work that well.”

 

        “I guess it wouldn’t.” Skath frowned. “Why didn’t you just move the flowers?”

 

        “They grew up through cracks and it wouldn’t have been safe to uproot them.”

 

        “Mine will die if I don’t move them sometimes. People will find them and dump them out. My people, anyway—I have some friends by the harbor who let me use their roofs. But Maratracians, they like flowers with lots of thorns. They’ve been breeding for thorns for a long time. They hate weeds.”

 

        “Each flower has its own rules.” After a moment, Gaunt added,

 

              “There are flowers in gardens 

              Tended by wardens 

              Kissed by water-cans 

              Surrounded by cousins. 

 

              They are not my kind 

              They of tended ground 

              Of nurtured bud 

              In a blooming land. 

 

              Mine are of the fissure 

              In a cobbled corner 

              Starved of sun and water 

              In an alley with no owner. 

 

              They are hardly grown 

              When the wind has blown 

              That cuts them down unknown. 

              They are my own.”

 

        Skath regarded her garden a long time. Then: “Why did you bring the sword? It’s a bad thing. I’m sorry I gave you away, I’m sorry they took Osteon. But the sword is evil, Lepton.”

 

        “Even poets and thieves do things they regret. Tell me why the sword is evil.”

 

        “It spoke to me... like it knew me. Had always known me. I heard it from far away, you know, weeks ago. It thinks I’m it’s chosen user, but it hates me too. It wants to change me. It thinks I’m stupid and useless. Just like my family does.”

 

        “What does it want to do, once it’s changed you?”

 

        Skath shuddered. “Kill everyone in Maratrace who believes in the Comprehenders’ way. Teach everyone who repents how to wash more often, dress nice, eat healthy food, build pretty houses. Sing beautiful songs. Pull up all the weeds.”

 

        “Is this what the Pluribus wanted...?” Gaunt began.

 

        “Who is the Pluribus?”

 

        “The one... the ones... who sent us here. I swear to you, my friend and I know very little. We were simply hired to bring the sword. I’d wash my hands of it and leave. But not without my partner.”

 

        “They won’t hurt him.”

 

        “That’s good.”

 

        “They’ll make him hurt himself.”

 

        “Why?” Gaunt asked. “What kind of place is this?”

 

        “My people think being hurt is good. They think it makes you strong.”

 

        “Well, sometimes it can.”

 

        “If you break a flower,” Skath said, playing her hand through the stinkblossoms, “it dies. It doesn’t get stronger.”

 

        “I don’t know what to tell you, Skath. I’m stronger for having endured many things.” She remembered the poor family who’d sent her to live with Swanisle’s bards; and she recalled abandoning those bards to dwell in poverty far from home. “They helped make me who I am. Yet kindness shaped me, too. I don’t hold with those who embrace cruelty.” Gaunt frowned, thinking of greedy kleptomancers and bibliomaniac goblins and homicidal mermaids. “Those who rant about hard necessity, when the greatest hardness is in their eyes. The ones who, even in paradise, would find an excuse to torture.”

 

        Skath wore a look, Gaunt thought, of the oldest soul within the world’s five corners. Then this ancient-eyed being took Gaunt’s hand, and was merely a girl again. Gaunt said nothing but clasped Skath’s hand in turn.

 

        She felt a surprising maternal need to spirit Skath away—to Palmary, to Swanisle, someplace where a girl who loved flowering weeds would have a fighting chance. Yet this girl had a mother, a family, a life of her own, and Gaunt had a lover to save. As she considered all this, Gaunt felt less like an adult comforting a youth than like an older child defending a younger.

 

        If I am ever a mother, she thought, will I lose this ability to be a child’s true friend? Must I always, then, feel superior?But there could be no answer.

 

        Then Gaunt released Skath’s hand and spun, seeing movement out the corner of her eye.

 

        The boy Skower had entered the hiding place. He looked from Gaunt to Skath with wide eyes, and blurted, “The other outlander.... I heard it from the crowd at the Comprehenders’ tower. They’ve got him in the mindthresh. When they’re done teaching him, he’ll come outside—with the sword. He’ll come looking for you, Skath. He’s going to kill you.”

 

♦ ♦ ♦

 

        I’ve been entranced in some way, Imago Bone thought, wanting to feel angry about it. Something in the wine? Perhaps. Magic? He saw nothing obvious, but he no longer trusted his perceptions.

 

        Yet even without magic or drugs, there remained the alcohol. The heat. The long hardship of the road to Maratrace. The confinement of the mindthresh. The constant discussion. And the people who came and jabbed him whenever he dozed. Bone had known thieves who’d confessed to far worse than burglary, signed anything, simply for the right to sleep. And also the self-assured voices of his captors, and the strange rhythm of their self-tortures.

 

        Each time the world blurred and the Maratracians poked him back awake, the chamber seemed hotter, more constricted. Eventually he dreamed with his eyes open, his thoughts guided by the Comprehenders’ remarks.

 

        Bone had waking dreams of his father (the fisherman) and Bone’s two elder brothers (the fishermen) and his mother (the fisherman’s wife) and his sister (the fisherman’s daughter.)

 

        The Bones of Headstone Beach, on the Contrariwise Coast, were all fishermen. It had not been objectionable that Imago be different—it had been incomprehensible.

 

        Yet Imago had no desire to fish. It was not that he hated the sea; indeed, he could study its wavering surface and shadowy depths for hours, much as others would watch a fire. Imago’s dream was to wander that sea as an explorer, not hug the coasts. Imago’s father once or twice grumbled acquiescence to the idea. But that was before Imago’s brothers drowned.

 

        To the boy it seemed a life sentence had fallen upon him, this assumption he must fish to sustain his family. So he asked himself, how would Slaughterdark the Pirate Lord have comported himself, and he answered Slaughterdark would do anything necessary to reach free sea.

 

        With this notion fluttering high, Imago fashioned a mask of old sailcloth and robbed a carriage of the Skullfellows, those merchants who taxed all the trade of Headstone Beach. To his delight he discovered a knack for such work. Triumphantly he presented his father enough money to secure the family for a year.

 

        But Effigy Bone cursed his son for a thief, and kept the money. Imago was not released; he was banished. Though he wandered the Spiral Sea’s three great islands and its gnarled mainland, Imago Bone found no delight in escape. For it is one thing to sally forth, quite another to be exiled.

 

        Other travelers whom Bone met upon the road, alone as they were, seemed possessed of a self-assurance he could never feel. Could it be that these travelers knew the trust and love of unseen, even dead, families? While Bone knew only the contempt of his? He felt like a vessel with a gutted hull, apparently sound and yet inevitably sliding to a fate even Captain Slaughterdark could not evade.

 

        So he turned by slow degrees from the sea. He did not understand it then, but he came to believe he did not deserve his dream. Instead he focused on enhancing the skills that bought him survival on the road. He became, not just opportunistically but occupationally, a thief.

 

        And thanks to Joyblood and Severstrand, two equal but opposed angels of death inflicted by a pair of eager but uncoordinated enemies, his life was strangely prolonged, so that those skills became legend. Yet at heart he was a man who’d abandoned a dream, to punish himself for failing a family long dead.

 

        Bone shuddered as he reached this conclusion, trembled with the need to relate it to his friends, the only people who could comprehend. Only dimly was he aware that he told it hunched up, within a narrow wooden box.

 

♦ ♦ ♦

 

        Gaunt led the children through shadows and dust to her hiding place beneath the pier. There she hissed angry questions to Skower. “Explain yourself, boy. You turn us over to the Comprehenders, and now you want to help?”

 

        “I love my little sister,” the boy said, with a quaver of pride. “I want Skath to be strong, proper, normal.”

 

        “Nothing about Maratrace is normal.”

 

        “It is our way, outlander. But Skath has never fit in. She is too gentle. With herself, with others. When she told me about her dreams of the sword, I thought she was at last growing up. Then I saw the sword in reality. I knew, somehow, Skath had to claim it.”

 

        Skath said, “You forced me to touch it, Skower. That was wrong.”

 

        He contemplated the muddy sand. “Yes.”

 

        “Then you summoned the Comprehenders, and now everything is worse.”

 

        “I got scared,” Skower said, “after Lepton hit me.” He shot Gaunt a glare. “Of the outlanders. Of the sword. Of you with the sword. But I still believe that you’re supposed to use it, that it’s your destiny. The Comprehenders want to destroy it. They think having Osteon slay you with it will do that. Maybe you embarrass me, Skath, but I can’t let him kill you. I can’t oppose the Comprehenders, but Lepton can.”

 

        Brotherly love, Gaunt thought, but what she spoke aloud was, “I can’t let him kill you either,” and she said this as much for Bone’s sake as Skath’s. “And he will not. Skath, tell me again about your friends near the harbor.”

 

♦ ♦ ♦

 

        There were nightmares in the dark, and some happened while Bone was asleep, and some while he was awake.

 

        After a long interval he found himself atop a dark tower rippling with faux spines and sculpted ooze, spearing the air with its spikes and swellings. From this vantage he saw the sun rise obscenely over the city, exposing it like a lamp above a pustulous wound.

 

        He could barely stomach the sight. He felt ill. He studied his own hands, his sandaled feet, noting each blemish and wart, each peculiarity of form. One toe was crooked in a way that offended him. His body seemed a lump of gristle and fat. He loathed the sound of his own rasping breath.

 

        “You perceive,” someone said. “You understand.”

 

        His friends the Comprehenders circled him, wearing robes that hid the nauseating truth of their bodies. They bore an identical robe for him.

 

        He took it eagerly. Its cover compensated slightly for the sun’s oppressive eye.

 

        When he had become as the Comprehenders, Mistress Needles said, “You have come far, supplicant. Since the days when Captain Slaughterdark established this realm, each generation has passed our founder’s abyssmitude to the next. You are not so unlike him, and you have progressed quickly. But there is yet a task required of you, our new Brother Box.”

 

        And now his namesake approached, Master Box. As if passing a torch, Master Box unveiled the rose-red crystal rapier with its hilt sculpted like a blossom, his hands poised carefully beneath the cloth. The sword greeted Brother Box with a cheery pastel crimson glow.

 

        Master Box said, “Behold the abomination. It teaches us to live in a shallow world of insipid pleasantries and callow smiles.”

 

        As one, the other Comprehenders spat. And they spoke, as though intoning a liturgy.

 

        Mistress Rack said, “Our founder plundered this sword, to his everlasting regret. It was to escape its pall that he fled to the desert. There he fed upon locusts and scoured his skin with rocks, until he cleansed his mind of the sword’s ways.”

 

        Master Drip said, “But he accomplished far more. He broke the illusions that veil the horror of the world. Of all men, it was he who first truly Comprehended the loathsome nature of the universe. He abandoned his old life, and taught others to share his abyssmitude. And he foretold that one day our creed would encompass the Earthe, freeing all from illusion. The crusade would begin when Maratrace destroyed the Sword of Loving Kindness.”

 

        Mistress Needles said, “You will do the deed, Brother.”

 

        “But....” He could hardly speak, yet felt he should object.

 

        “You fear losing your new-found perspective,” Master Box said. “We understand, Brother, and there is a risk. But if you cling to knowledge against the siren lure of ignorance, you may banish your illusions for good. We would be proud.”

 

        Mistress Needles said, “We would be even more proud, if you could destroy the sword. Slay the girl Skath, she who tends weeds and smiles so shamelessly.”

 

        “To sacrifice such a one with the sword,” said Mistress Rack, “would negate its claim to kindness. For whatever else the idiot Skath is, she is kind.”

 

        “Do this,” said Master Drip, “and you’ll be free to do as you choose.”

 

        “Even,” Mistress Rack said, “to teach abyssmitude to your beloved Persimmon Gaunt.”

 

        “Give me the sword,” he said.

 

        The touch of the hilt was like a hot gale, and the world seemed to spin around the Comprehenders’ tower.

 

        A similar unbalancing shook his mind.

 

        The sword hungered. He could almost hear it hissing its outrage. It longed to stain the Comprehenders’s drab costumes with crimson, bludgeon their followers into donning bright, cheery garb to please family and friend. It wanted the citizens to tell all their troubles at bladepoint, with the help of tea and trifles. It wanted to topple this grotesque tower and supplant it with something beautiful and airy, flanked by topiary. It wanted to replace torture chambers with padded cells, each with its complementary book of spiritual devotion.

 

        Come!the sword seemed to sing. Let us make the world lovely, by smiting the unsightly!

 

        But Brother Box resisted, for his newfound abyssmitude was strong.

 

        He knew that between the cracks of the sword’s shining new world, loathsome vermin would scuttle. Moths would eat the pretty clothing, mold would claim the sweetcakes, and the beautiful happy people would, at last, rot.

 

        “I am ready,” he said.

 

        As the girl was known to be missing, he stalked the harbor, where a fugitive might readily hide. Mistress Needles accompanied him, with an eye to maintaining his abyssmitude.

 

        She needn’t have bothered. These stinking, muttering bands of greedy, lecherous, sloppy traders were enough to inspire horror in any neophyte. Yes, surely Skath would hide here. Soon he would discover her and be rid of this damnable, mocking blade....

 

        So absorbed was he, he almost missed the fleck of white flaring in an alley to his left. “Come,” he hissed, shifting that way, unconsciously seeking shadows.

 

        Mistress Needles had seen nothing. “Eh? Where do you go, Brother?” Her voice was suspicious. But she followed him into a noxious alley cluttered with refuse, so unlike the bleak dusty paths of inner Maratrace.

 

        He knelt beside a trash-heap and lifted a severed dandelion puff. He crushed it and peered at the rooftops. “Gaunt is near,” he said. “Skath is with her.”

 

        He leapt upon the mound, jumped to catch a window ledge, and scrambled onto an adobe roof.

 

        “Brother, come back!”

 

        “You could never take Persimmon Gaunt on the heights, Sister. I trained her.”

 

        He struck out across the rooftops, ignoring the Comprehender’s protests.

 

        The buildings of the trading district formed a fractured maze. The Maratracians might impose starkness upon their own dwellings, but outsiders were not so rigid. As in so many lands, Maratrace could not afford to expel the foreigners it disdained, so it made do with isolating them.

 

        All this he noted with a barely conscious sweep of observation, along with the awareness that Gaunt had set a trap.

 

        She was not visible of course, nor was the girl. But upon a distant roof he spied the corner of a flower-bed. Despite himself he felt a distant flicker of pride. First, lure me into isolation. Then, force me to cross a long span full of ambush sites. And I must cross, for how can I be certain Skath isn’t beside that flowerbed after all?

 

        His own abyssmitude mocked him for admiring such childish games.

 

        The sword sang its outrage at the indignity of crossing rooftops.

 

        His guts as unbalanced as his mind, he slunk along a roundabout path, from time to time dropping and rolling to see if the ambush was upon him. None came. Perhaps he’d bypassed it.

 

        “Gaunt,” he murmured sadly, “you are brave and gifted. But sorry to say, I’m the master.”

 

        A glint met his eye up ahead, and he stopped, thinking at first to see a dagger, or a crossbow, aimed his way. But no... it was just a common leather money-pouch nestled in a nook between chimneys, just as if some ambitious trader had stashed it while conducting dangerous business. A gem or two glinted through the loosened top. Only someone of keen senses, passing in just this direction, could have noticed. He licked his lips.

 

        “Gaunt,” he called out. “I see what you are doing. But I am beyond such things. They are but stones, and I play for higher stakes.”

 

        He leapt onward toward the flower bed.

 

        A roof collapsed beneath him.

 

        Sloppy, he thought as he fell. He should have noted that stairway gap, concealed though it was by a mandala-carpet covered with sand.

 

        Tumbling down the stairs, Brother Box caught flashes of beauty foreign to Maratrace: brass statues of six-limbed gods, low oil lamps with wicks sticking out like fiery tongues, incense sticks trailing delicate smoky arms. Pain and distraction tore the sword from his grip; it lay upon another carpet of intricate swirling forms, flashing ruby light as if offended by the contemplative surroundings.

 

        Whatever foreign merchants inhabited this home, they’d gone elsewhere. Shaking his head and wiping his eyes, Brother Box saw only Persimmon Gaunt.

 

        Or rather, he saw the elephant-headed statue she slammed into his forehead.

 

        Through the exploding starfield that filled his eyes he heard her say, “Sorry, O unknown deity. Sorry, Imago.” As he reeled, she padded away. He heard a clatter of beads, and when his vision cleared, the sword was gone.

 

        He snarled and crawled through the beaded curtain into the sunlight. He saw Gaunt duck into another mud-brick home, two houses down. Dogs and chickens voiced excitement; humans gasped. The ugliness of existence slapped Bone in the face, but something deeper than his abyssmitude drove him on. He hated to lose. He got to his feet, spat at the onlookers, and ran.

 

        As he passed the next door, the girl Skath emerged and tripped him.

 

        Before he could recover, she darted inside.

 

        He needed both girl and sword. Best he make her unconscious now. He rose and tumbled through the doorway in one motion.

 

        Again an exotic interior confronted him. Red wall hangings coiling with flowing gold calligraphy trembled in a hot breeze. Monochrome scroll paintings of mountainous landscapes hung beside lacquer cases reflecting the dying light from a fireplace; these sheltered jade and ivory carvings of dragons, unicorns, and flying folk.

 

        Something old stirred in Brother Box, a desire to investigate and inventory these unusual trinkets. Something older longed to wander those imaginary mountains beside the dragons. His abyssmitude whipped him on, however, whispering that all human works were so much junk... the calligraphy, the carvings, the paintings....

 

        The intricate ironwork of the hot fireplace poker in Skath’s hands....

 

        She slashed and stabbed, leaping out of nowhere. The scent of hot metal and burnt wood shot past his nose. He scuttled back. He was far, far off his game. Yet though his reflexes were muddled, Skath was no warrior. On her next jab, he swatted the poker away.

 

        Skath kicked him, howling. He shoved her off, following with a gut punch. She toppled with an oomph.

 

        A flash of light warned him of Gaunt’s approach. He spun.

 

        Shaking, Gaunt advanced with the Sword of Loving Kindness. It shone with a lurid pink glow, bringing out the pigments in her rose tattoo. Rainbows sliced the air. Gaunt winced as one of the hilt’s rose-petals pierced her hand. But it seemed to cut her spirit more deeply.

 

        “Bone...,” she murmured. “My poetry.... So foolish and morbid. I should speak of sunshine, of virtue, of weddings and dynasties....”

 

        “The sword,” he answered, “is awake. It is too much for anyone who lacks abyssmitude.” Indeed, his perspective was clearer with the sword lost. He perceived the entropy reflected in the fire’s ashes, the decay that would inevitably claim woman and girl. There was no escape. One could only Comprehend.

 

        “Bone, I am sorry.” Gaunt raised the weapon, and its lurid light intensified. It emitted a sound resembling a shrill birdsong, or frantic harping.

 

        “I am Bone no longer. I am Brother Box.”

 

        He slid beneath her swing. He sensed the sword’s eagerness to sunder his spirit.

 

        “You are not yourself, Gaunt.” He tumbled toward the exit.

 

        “You should talk.”

 

        He sped into the street and ducked into the final house on the row. He must improvise some weapon.

 

        But he found this home not just unoccupied but nearly barren. A life-sized porcelain cat with upraised paw welcomed him to a chamber bearing a little unadorned table with a miniature tree growing from a pot in its center. The very simplicity of the room drew the eye to the complexity of wood and leaf. Brother Box felt he could lose himself in that miniature world.

 

        A trifle, a vanity, a waste of time. Lacking cover, he picked up the little tree, crouched, awaited Gaunt.

 

        She stepped unsteadily into the room, a wary Skath beside her.

 

        “Give up,” he told Gaunt. “You grow progressively less certain. The weapon overwhelms you.”

 

        “Then we’re even. These madfolk have overwhelmed you.”

 

        “Gaunt, you do not see... we were foolish, chasing the beauties of the road. For beauty does not exist.”

 

        “No,” she said, assuming an attack posture, “we were wrong to seek beauty in wandering. We need to settle down, start a family, grow up.”

 

        “Stop it!” wailed the girl Skath, looking from one to the other.

 

        “I will stop it,” said Gaunt, and lunged.

 

        Bone threw his miniature tree. Gaunt whacked it away. Skath screamed and caught it.

 

        Gaunt jabbed again. Bone kicked the table toward her and tumbled, and thus avoided her main blow; yet a petal sliced his shoulder even as he stumbled into the porcelain cat and crushed it beneath his weight.

 

        He barely noticed the physical pain. For he screamed with the awareness of his pointless life. He realized he was severed from the essence of existence—the business of loving, of harvesting, of raising many children, of having the tidiest house on the row. He wept, for these things now seemed glorious, not the hollow grotesqueries the Comprehenders saw.

 

        Then the dark perceptions returned to him, whispering that the cycle of life was but a rotting millwheel, its only product a creaking noise.

 

        Yet in the midst of the screaming and the whispering there opened a clear space deep in his mind.

 

        And Imago Bone, who had some experience maneuvering between warring parties, found in that space a chance to know his own thoughts.

 

        The first thought was this: that neither Comprehenders nor Sword of Loving Kindness respected the life he’d chosen.

 

        “My life,” he murmured.

 

        “Do you yield, Bone,” Gaunt demanded.

 

        “To nothing... except you.” He tried to the squeeze the words out of his mouth, crystallize his new thoughts in language before they collapsed under the force of one impulse or the other.

 

        He rose painfully, turning to Skath. “Girl.”

 

        The young gardener stepped forward, cradling the little tree like a baby.

 

        “The Comprehenders hate you. The sword hates you.”

 

        Skath nodded.

 

        “Do you not see? You must play them against each other! Make your own way.”

 

        “But the swordis good,” Gaunt said, with a hint of uncertainty. “The sword is right.”

 

        “Then why should it hate Skath?” Bone found his strength now, and his voice. “No. This weapon cannot tolerate whimsical little girls. Or morbid poets. Or wandering rogues. None of us three is fit for grand purposes. And so all great powers despise us.”

 

        Gaunt stared at Bone a long while. With trembling hand she stabbed at the earthen floor and released her grip. The sword quivered there, perhaps angered by the indignity. Gaunt released a long breath.

 

        “Skath,” she said. “Bone is right. But I know something else. Your brother is right about something. You must take up the sword.”

 

        Skath looked mystified. “It hates me.”

 

        “Yes,” Bone said, turning to Gaunt, then back to Skath. “And I think it’s that’s because you know your own heart. You needed no philosophy, no etiquette, to become a kind person. Your intuitions surpass its powers. The sword may fear that quality.”

 

        “There is more,” Gaunt said. “Something I realized while wielding the weapon. I could not strike down someone I loved, even with the sword commanding it. I wonder if at its core it still carries, not just the fury of Nettileer Kinbinder, but the passion of Allos the Smith. If so, a gentle heart may be able to command it.”

 

        “I don’t know those names,” Skath said.

 

        “It may not matter,” said Gaunt, and she fished into her pack, and pulled out her pouch containing the powdered blood of Allos. She poured it upon the Sword of Loving Kindness.

 

        The powder hissed, liquified, and flowed into the sword. The pink glow flickered madly and reddened. It seemed tempered now with the hard, steady quality of forge-light. It stood within the earthen floor, looking less dainty, more solid, like some miniature redwood.

 

        “Take up the sword, Skath,” Gaunt said. “It may be your only chance to stand against the Comprehenders, and the Pluribus too.”

 

        “Is that,” Skath asked in wonder, “what I should do?”

 

        “If it is what you want,” Bone said.

 

        There came the sounds of shouting and pursuit. Bone peeked outside. Beyond the crowd he caught a glimpse of drab-robed figures. “Decide soon,” he added.

 

        Eyes shut as if testing whether she dreamt, Skath set down her miniature tree and grasped the sword. She winced in horror, teetered, but mastered herself.

 

        “No. I will notchange. You will do what I want. I willcommand you.”

 

        The sword’s light grew yet more natural, less lurid, like a waning desert sunset. Rainbows and sparkles subsided. Although a child, Skath now seemed somehow taller than either Gaunt or Bone.

 

        “You do not care about people,” Skath told the sword. “But I do.”

 

        The silence that followed was swiftly broken. Mistress Needles rushed in, four maimed citizens close behind.

 

        “Success, Mistress,” Bone began cheerfully, as he tripped her.

 

        Gaunt smashed the porcelain cat’s head over a citizen’s. He went down, but the remaining minions advanced upon their foes, one to a person. Given his and Gaunt’s exhaustion, Bone calculated the odds at a hair less than fifty-fifty, if Skath did not act.

 

        Skath acted.

 

        Glowing crystal slashed her opponent’s arm. The Maratracian regarded Skath with shock and collapsed dead at her feet.

 

        “What have you done?” Mistress Needles hissed, rising from the floor.

 

        Skath pricked Gaunt’s foe in the back. He sobbed and fell still. Bone’s own opponent fled, and the final citizen ran close behind, brushing porcelain fragments from his hair.

 

        Mistress Needles sized up the situation, spreading her hands. “We called you Brother, Imago Bone.”

 

        “You used me.”

 

        “Out of expediency. Are you not using this girl, now?”

 

        “Ask her.”

 

        The Comprehender was silent.

 

        Skath stared at the bodies. “Lepton, are they ... dead?”

 

        “Yes,” Gaunt answered after kneeling beside them.

 

        “I was so angry... the sword doesn’t think their dying matters. The sword really thinks they killed themselves. By living the way they did.”

 

        “What do you think?” Gaunt asked gently.

 

        “I think.... I think I am tired. Lepton, Osteon—come with me?”

 

        Bone and Gaunt trailed Skath, keeping watch on Mistress Needles. The Comprehender shuffled after them, pinching herself.

 

        Meanwhile the crowd had become a throng, Maratracians now mixing with the foreigners. They jostled each other to behold the strange girl with the sword, but they parted for the boy Skower, who charged at his sister, ending with a jump and a shout.

 

        “You command it!”

 

        “Yes,” Skath murmured.

 

        “Now you will be strong. Now you will not embarrass us, or make Mother and Father fight about you. You could become as mighty as a Comprehender. Or a pirate lord. Or a god.”

 

        “It is not that way, Skower. I could not use the sword as you wish, even if I wanted to. I must always be careful of it.”

 

        Skower’s smile collapsed. It was replaced—not by a frown, but by a bulging of the eyes, a set to the brow, that Imago Bone had beheld far too many times, on far too many faces. He tensed for a fight.

 

        “Always you are weak!” Skower screamed. “You don’t deserve this sword. Give it to me. I will show you how to use it! I will show everyone!”

 

        “Skower —”

 

        “Give it to me!”

 

        He lunged at her, and she gave it to him.

 

        But, Bone realized in horror, Skower did not understand it was a gift. The boy grabbed, brother and sister fumbled, and in a dozen places the crystal petals impaled Skower’s hands.

 

        Bone and Gaunt rushed forward, pulling the boy away. Gaunt cradled Skower as Bone wrapped the wounded hands with his Comprehender’s cloak. Skower had been cut more deeply by yesterday’s street game. But Bone understood what it meant to suffer a single scratch from the sword. It was too late.

 

        “I struck at kin,” Skower wailed. “There is nothing worse....”

 

        “Skower, no,” Skath said. “It was an accident —”

 

        “Destroy us, sister,” Skower said. “Destroy us all. We deserve....” The boy’s last breath framed no word, only the sound of surrender. His body went still.

 

        Gaunt touched Skower’s neck, shook her head at Bone. They lay the child down.

 

        Looking up into Skath’s face, Bone thought that Nettileer Kinbinder in her last fury could not have been more terrible. She raised the Sword of Loving Kindness and it blazed like a pyre as she confronted the crowd of people, Maratracian, Comprehender, and foreigner. They recoiled and whispered and clutched at once other, sensing at last a promise of violence that was no game.

 

        Skath lowered the blade to underscore a command, and it dimmed like a shooting star as it fell.

 

        “Bury him.”

 

♦ ♦ ♦

 

        The interment made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in coordination, and although Gaunt and Bone shared a look that said flight was indicated, they both helped, laboring wordlessly beside Mistress Needles and the other Comprehenders.

 

        Soon a low mound of earth rose upon a dusty street of the foreign district.

 

        Skath had not stirred from the site, but when her brother was fully buried she knelt and scooped a hole upon the mound. Biting her lip as though about to plunge into waters deep and cold, she drove the sword into the spot.

 

        Light flared from the weapon, and its petals spread, and its hilt bloomed. A wind rose, creaking the boats on the piers, and the new crystal flower twitched like a supple, live thing, twisting upward toward the sun. Beneath the red blossom, the blade became green. Rose-scent filled the desert air. And all those watching felt their hearts quicken, as the sword’s influence waxed. Yet although never stronger, it was not the uncompromising force it had once been.

 

        Out of the sky descended a swarm of bees. They settled upon the changing sword for just an instant before there came a flicker like bloody lightning. The bees dispersed like dust in a running girl’s wake.

 

        They reformed as a humanoid shape, floating in the air beside Gaunt, Bone, and Skath. It made a sound like the purring of a hundred cats spotting a fat crippled bird, or of a thunderstorm shrunk to the size of a bear.

 

        “This is not the desired outcome,” the Teller buzzed. “The sword called to Slaughterdark’s strongest descendant. In her hands, it should have destroyed Maratrace. Or else the Comprehenders should have destroyed it.”

 

        “As it happens,” Gaunt said, looking at the blood and dirt covering her hands, “the sword is changed. And people still died.”

 

        “Too few.”

 

        Skath had heard enough. “No more killing!” she shouted. “No more hurting! I don’t know who you are, but this is Skower’s Rose now, not some weapon!”

 

        “You had best listen to her,” Bone said.

 

        “The sword bears as much of Allos now,” Gaunt said, “as of Nettileer. And something of Skower and Skath as well. There is more than one kind of love in the world.”

 

        “And as I recall,” Bone said to the Teller, “its creation was a response to your acts of Deicide. It did not like your touch.”

 

        “Indeed not,” the Teller mused. “Intriguing: a crystal rose grows in the soil of pain.”

 

        As the Teller spoke, it turned its constantly writhing face left and right, where the people stood silently, too overwhelmed, perhaps, to fear mere eaters of gods. “It is an unexpected alchemy. Perhaps you have changed the nature of the sword. But if you believe you will thereby redeem this city, think again. This place is a disease. The future we are shaping belongs to commerce and self-indulgence, not to misery and self-abasement. That way lies the return of gods. Beware!”

 

        “This is Skath’s city,” Gaunt said. “And Skower’s Rose. I would not underestimate either.”

 

        “Very well; enough. Bone and Gaunt, you have fulfilled your bargain. You saved us the trouble of finding couriers for the sword, whatever our disappointment that sword or city yet endure. You may continue using your security comb.”

 

        “Thank you,” Bone muttered.

 

        “This will,” the Teller said, “bear interesting nectar, at any rate.”

 

        Gaunt watched it fly like a small lonely stormcloud to the west.

 

♦ ♦ ♦

 

        They made their own departure upon the boat of Flea, who had wonder in his eyes. Under the influence of Skower’s Rose he’d released his conscripts, without quite remembering why, and retained a few as well-paid associates. He was now drinking away his loss.

 

        Already, scores of Maratracians had camped within sight of Skower’s Rose, beginning a new, chaotic city growing within the ordered husk of the old. They planted weed gardens and spoke gently to one another. And yet, as Gaunt noted upon departure, they still displayed their mutilations.

 

        As the scene passed out of sight, they glimpsed a man and a woman embracing a young girl, beside the mound of the Rose. Gaunt looked at her hands, clutching tight the rail.

 

        “I wonder,” she said, watching the river slosh by, breathing in the smells of water and mud as though they were nectar and ambrosia, “if in a hundred years this change will seem an improvement. Will the world come to fear these people? For it’s a dangerous folk who honor both hearth and horror.”

 

        “I was torn between the two,” Bone answered, watching the clouds. “And I want none of either. I only want to settle the matter of the accursed book.”

 

        “Do you still want to rob a drunk?”

 

        Bone glanced toward the captain’s cabin. “Soon.” He took Gaunt’s hand. “For now I only want you, free and alive.”

 

        She touched his face. “You have not spoken quite like this before.”

 

        He smiled. “I have finally given up following in the wake of Slaughterdark. If the Teller spoke true, Skath is his descendant, and I glimpsed within her the kind of spirit he or I might have become, in richer soil. There is more to life than larceny. There is another whose footsteps I would follow.” He touched his clever fingers to her chin. “But I warn you, I am still a thief and a scoundrel and a disappointment to my family, with little to give.”

 

        “Give me this moment and this road and this sky,” she said, and kissed him.

 

        “Never give me roses,” she added.