Time, if it passed as Cyrus fell, did so without any evident concern for the advancement of plot. He tumbled in the weightless void, arms and legs splaying out wildly in all directions, wondering how long this final, humiliating moment could possibly drag on.

  “My story ends at the bottom of a hole,” he remarked to the hot, dark void around him as he fell. “What utter, fatuous, nonsense. I lost a leg, and found the love of my life, and then lost that too. The leg grew back, and I walked with it to this place to grow love back—only to fall into a hole. A hole! And now my new leg and I will shortly be reduced to a supremely irrelevant smear on some rock that no one will ever see. Whatever jackass is responsible—”

  His monologue—extended though it was, for dramatic effect—came to an abrupt, jolting conclusion.

  ???

  A cacophony of war erupted from every direction in the tunnels, making a mockery of time and distance. The screams and roars of men, Giant-men, goblins, and guns were all around Jonathan, all close at hand. They filled the darkness around him with palpable, immediate horror that pressed against his every sense. Merrily’s hand, gripped tightly in his own even as they both clutched the precious scroll tubes recovered from the library, began to feel unreal. They were a violation of the natural order of the universe. Even Miss Karn’s small lantern ahead of them seemed to offend the pattern. Only hatred and death were real.

  “There is more,” came the soft, lyrical voice of King Simon near at hand, cutting through the wall of suffering even as he trod in something horribly soft and slimy on the floor. “There is more than this, Jonathan. Remember that. There is love and song and serenity in the world. And war, yes. Love’s paradox sometimes demands organized and terrible violence in its service. That we do this for love does not make it less terrible.”

  Jonathan’s eyes, looking down at the short goblin, suddenly caught sight of a familiar long, elegant shape on the ground, gleaming in the light of Miss Karn’s lantern.

  “Merrily,” he said, “isn’t this your dagger? The one that Lady Triggle gave you?”

  He stooped awkwardly to pick it up, juggling the scroll cases. But he managed to get it in one hand, and showed it to her. She stared at the sheathed weapon and blinked.

  “How on earth did it get here?” she asked. “I gave it to… Wigglus.” She blinked for a moment, and her mind seemed to be somewhere far away. “Carry it for me, Jonathan,” she said, returning to the caves and struggling with her own load of scroll tubes. “My hands are full.”

  They picked their way through the foul gore on the ground and carried on down the narrow stair leading from the upper levels into the System B concourse. As they rejoined the main connector, the sounds of fighting and dying grew even louder and more oppressive. Miss Karn held up a warning hand, signaling them to stop, and then peered around a corner, beyond which could be seen a dim light. The ground at her feet was choked with the limp forms and scattered hats of goblins, and the red-clad bodies of the Republican Guard.

  “Come on,” she hissed, gesturing sharply. “I think we can slip through into the finery.”

  Emerging into the broad hall of the connector, they stepped carefully over the corpses, toward a brighter light ahead. They could see the melee now. The huge, silvery forms of three Giant-men hewed mercilessly at smaller figures before them. The ground was littered with the fallen. For every prone twelve-foot tall, steel-clad figure, there were at least twenty smaller ones. Yet even as they drew close, a terrific explosion rocked the ground and threw smoke and fire into the air, and the three Giant-men crumpled, their bodies blown to pieces. There was a sudden lull in the combat nearby, and Miss Karn stepped hesitantly through the smoke-veiled opening before them.

  The finery, which Jonathan recalled from earlier visits as a place of order and industry, was now the scene of devastation and frantic chaos. Bodies lay in uneven clumps at the edges. They included representatives of all the species and factions now contesting the valley. A thin, ragged line of Snugg mercenaries, armed with long guns and hand weapons, held small firing posts, fortified with improvised materials, near the numerous entrances into the chamber. Civilians—both human and goblin—huddled further inward from the edges, some clutching small sacks or cases. Human children were among them. Large stacks of crates, some of them upended and scattered, provided a bit of scant shelter for these unfortunates.

  At the center stood the steel hulk of the Number Two engine, with twelve cars lined up behind it on the steel tracks. Smoke was pouring from the fat, tapered vent at its fore, disappearing up into the vents in the roof of the chamber. Five of the cars behind were of the box type, including the rearmost, and Jonathan could see that within, this last car was stacked to the roof with heavy crates and loose material. The others were partly loaded with people and parcels. Canvas sheets covered more structures strapped to the rooves of the cars, though their shapes could not be seen.

  On the roof of the rear car, strapped down with timber and lengths of heavy line, was a single field gun on a swivel mount, crewed by three excited-looking goblins. The smoke emerging from its muzzle suggested it to be the source of the explosion that had so recently cleared a path for Jonathan, Merrily, King Simon, and Miss Karn. He knew it would take them many minutes to safely reload it. Already, the deep, bellowing voices of Giant-men could be heard nearby.

  “I’ve gotta go, Jonathan,” came the high-pitched voice of the snarf riding at his shoulder. He turned his head sideways, making eye contact with Devi.

  “To Great Roof?” he inquired skeptically. “How will you make it, though the fighting?”

  “There’r lil’ cracks ‘n passages no big’un kin fit through,” she answered with a hint of contempt. “We come ‘n go through ‘em all the time. I’ve gotta git up an’ find Daven. There’s things ‘ee needs ta know, an’ fast.”

  “He thinks you’re dead, you know,” remarked Jonathan, feeling a certain disconnection from the bloody melee at the fringes of the room. “They all think you died when you were captured by the White Knights.”

  “Ain’t no time ta’ jabber on about me mirac’lous recovery,” she snapped, her tiny eyes flashing. “There’s a dragon up thar, an’ Giant-men down ‘ere. Great Roof ain’t safe no more. All my people got ta’ get out o’ here and make fer Refuge.”

  Jonathan gently plucked his tiny companion out of the miniature saddle on his shoulder and placed her on the ground.

  “Good luck, Devi,” he said. “I hope we meet again. I still owe you a pint from our bet at the old church. Come to Hog Hurst to collect any time.”

  “May ye live ta pay up,” she replied with a smirk. Then she disappeared into the carnage that littered the floor.

  Merrily, still near at hand and clutching her share of the scroll tubes, looked at Jonathan curiously as he straightened up. “Devi would drown in a pint of beer,” she observed.

  He shrugged. “The White Knights already tried to drown her once. It didn’t take.”

  She smiled at him—the old Merrily smile, piercing and scattering his rational thought like the light of a thousand suns.

  “You’ll have to tell me the story,” she said.

  A large group of Giant-men appeared at the outlet of the System B concourse. They began hewing again at the defenders, striding forward into the broad finery chamber with little resistance. At the same moment, a flood of red-clad Republican Guard emerged from System C, assaulting the firing posts at the south end of the chamber with long spears and stabbing swords. King Simon, perched on top of the Number 2, gave a single, calm command to the engineers. Moments later, the great engine gave a shriek, beginning to inch forward. The human and goblin workers on the floor immediately flooded toward the remaining train cars.

  “I’d love to tell you the story,” Jonathan remarked sadly, “but I don’t think we’ll have time.”

  The towering steel form of a Giant-man warrior loomed over them suddenly, raising its ten-foot sword for a strike.

  ???

  There was a terrific pain in Cyrus’s right leg, and he swayed back and forth slowly in the deep blackness. He could feel pressure building in his head, and he worked out that he must be positioned upside-down. Something tapped against the back of his head periodically.

  “If this is my death,” he remarked to the hot darkness around him, “then it is of a most peculiar idiom indeed.”

  He groped around him in the darkness with his hands. The sword was long gone, but its scabbard was still strapped to his back, and was caught up in something behind him. The pain in his right leg roared mercilessly, and as he tried to twist around to discover more of his new universe, it flared up into a fresh spasm of agony.

  His hand brushed against something thick and flexible and twisting, and then found a hard dowel that swayed back and forth, tapping his head.

  A rope ladder.

  Cyrus slowly, laboriously put the pieces together. His right leg was caught up between the rungs of a rope ladder, and the scabbard on his back had got caught up in a lower segment. He was hanging, inverted, over some pit of unknown but certainly outrageous depth.

  “Fair enough,” he remarked to the unknown around him. “More futile striving it is, then.”

  He worked his uninjured left leg into the same slot between rungs as the right leg, then twisted his calf outward at the knee to lock himself in place. Holding on tightly to the swaying ladder with one hand, he used the other to unhook the scabbard from where it had caught on a lower rung. Released from its binding but still attached to his shoulders, it flapped downward, banging him on the head. Then, using his hands and abdomen and grunting with exertion, he slowly levered himself into a sitting position on the ladder. He found it was just wide enough for one person.

  “Not today,” he muttered, slowly catching his breath as he swayed back and forth in the sulfuric darkness. “Not yet. I won’t die here.”

  ???

  The Giant-man’s face, as the sword began to descend, was a mask of rage and wild aggression. It was literally a mask, Jonathan saw with a perverse amusement; a steel mask incorporated into the front of its massive helm, with slots for the eyes. The moment of its swing seemed to elongate, stretching out unreasonably. Merrily and Jonathan pulled each other close, waiting for the end.

  There was a terrific bang from behind them, and a new hole opened in the center of the steel mask. The blade suddenly went wide, swooping over Jonathan and Merrily’s heads and crashing uselessly to the floor. The now-limp body of the Giant-man followed after it. Jonathan spun around to see the source of the bang; and there was the small, gray form of a goblin perched on top of the moving engine cab of the Number 2. It held a long gun, comically oversized for its tiny stature, from the broad muzzle of which came a cloud smoke. Jonathan recognized the goblin.

  “The Gizzard?” he said in surprise.

  “These man-sticks are !” the shooter exclaimed with a feral grin.

  “How did you get here?” asked Jonathan. He had to turn his head slightly as The Gizzard drifted by with the rest of the train.

  “On this strange metal beast,” answered the fierce, squat-headed little fellow. His Uellish was tinged by a deranged accent, which perfectly matched his wild clothing and countenance. “I rode it from Hog Hurst with a gaggle of big-man warriors, when I heard that the blood and guts would be here. King Simon can’t be chop-chopped! We need him in the Gray Kingdom. Unless you want to be cut up into little pieces by these big-big-men, you and your mate should come too when we leave. There is little room left.”

  Jonathan and Merrily looked at each other, and then at the rapidly shrinking perimeter around the train. The Snugg mercenaries, overwhelmed all around the edge of the finery, were now running for the remaining cars. The wheeled platforms, packed with civilians, crates, and equipment, were accelerating behind the Number 2 engine, headed for the tunnel leading out into Devi Valley.

  He cupped his hands to help Merrily up onto one of the passing platform cars. Soon she was ahead of him. He handed her his scroll tubes, bobbling them desperately but finally shoving them into her arms. He grabbed at the next car—a box model—but couldn’t hang on.

  “Jonny!” she cried out from ahead. He could hear her voice only faintly over the din and cries of the other people, and of the attackers.

  He ran next to the cars, trying to find a handhold. The arms of the people on the platform cars reached down to try to help him, but he could find no firm grip. The last car—boxy in form, with strange and ominous symbols painted on the side—began to drift past him, even as he ran to keep up.

  Jonathan made a last, desperate leap at the aft railing of the car as it passed, and his hand closed on a steel rail. Legs dragging behind and bumping on the ties, he held on doggedly, defying death for a few moments longer.

  Then small hands closed on his forearms, dragging him upward with surprising strength. His feet left the ground, and his body ascended up to the small platform at the end of the box, where he was deposited prone.

  Gasping for air and looking up, he saw the faces of his rescuers. They were squat, with bulging eyes and gray skin.

  “Thank you,” he managed, between gasps of air.

  One of the goblins smiled and winked at him.

  “We all may die today,” she said, “but not here, and not yet.”

  The train burst out of the tunnel, into the fresh air of the valley. The thick, dark storm clouds roiled overhead, and heavy rain and wind whipped the faces and bodies of the refugees huddled on the train cars. The Number 2 made its way through the mournful, abandoned settlement at the bank of the river, slowly gathering speed as it approached the marvelous steel bridge that crossed the watercourse. Men and women and goblins on the train stared silently at their empty homes, drifting by to the rear. But then other sights drew their gazes away.

  Behind the train, sprinting in pursuit from the mouth of the System B tunnel, came scores of Giant-men. And on the western side of the river, more figures of glittering gray moved toward the bridgehead, cutting off the train from the winding track that led up and over the ridge, toward escape.

  Some on the train raised their eyes to the heavens. In the skies to the east, a fleet of fragile balloons rose up, blowing south with the heavy wind. And from the north, speeding toward the escapers, flew the long, snaking form of the serpent. Its wings cast no shadow in the dim light beneath the clouds, but fire spat from its mouth, and its teeth shone with terrible brilliance in the darkness.

  Those with sharp eyes could see a triangular form, tiny at this great distance, launch itself into the air from the top of the east ridge.

  The train reached the bridge, and the Giant-men closed in on the western bank.

  Sheria

  Her arrow arcs through the clear night air like a lost dream, toward Michael Rider’s unprotected body far ahead in the snow. In that long moment, within the inflection point, Sheria is isolated and alone, with no variants to provide comfort and flexibility. It is a horrible, stripped, naked feeling.

  The arrow misses. She cannot see the branching pathways when she looses it. She has no knowledge of the position and timing that will produce the correct outcome. She relies entirely on guesswork and flat perception, and both fail her.

  Sheria slings the bow on her back, drawing her bronze poignards instead. She stalks after him in the snow, following the fresh footprints. She does not have long to walk; soon the stumbling, shuffling form of his body is plainly visible under the moonlight. She approaches him in the dark, weapons ready.

  He hears her coming and spins around, drawing his own dagger and a thick club.

  “Stay back, Sheria!” he says. Though he does not speak loudly, his voice fills up the awful silence of the snow-covered road and forest beyond. “Stay back! I’m going on!”

  She holds the daggers low, stalking toward him in the snow. He keeps his dagger in front of him in his right hand, with the club held low in his left, ready to strike.

  “I love you,” she says finally, drawing close. Neither Sheria nor Michael lowers their weapons. “I love you, and I ask you to come with me away from this place. You refuse. You carry with you a message that destroys the Bright Path, and you know this, and still you go on.”

  “Can you see the Bright Path now?” he asks, as the two circle each other.

  “No,” she answers. “I can see nothing. We are in an inflection. The pathways have collapsed, and only beyond this point do they resume.”

  “Then how do you know what I’m doing is wrong?” he demands.

  She lunges at him, stabbing blindly forward with a poignard. Even without the benefit of full vision, Sheria is lithe, athletic, and well-trained in the use of her weapons. Michael dodges awkwardly away, clubbing at her back as she passes; but his balance is thrown off, and he falls backward. He rolls away from her as she stabs again, dancing in and out of the snow.

  He staggers to his feet, awkwardly shedding white powder. She circles him again, like a cat with its prey.

  “I know,” she answers. She feels he must know why she does this thing. Her crippled vision offers no clues, but she him to know. It is the only way she can go on living.

  “I ,” she continues, using the distasteful past-tense of Uellish. “Before the inflection began, I

  it. When you carry your message to the Queen of these people, the Bright Path is lost.”

  “And you would kill me for that?” he demands, slowly backing away.

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  She closes in again, dancing away from his clumsy swing of the club. He does not want to hurt her, she sees. It makes his attacks weak and feeble. She slides behind him and plunges the poignards into the sides of his chest, piercing deep into his body where the lungs and heart are. The hot blood leaks out of him, onto her hands, onto her body.

  She lowers him to the ground, looking closely into the fading light of his eyes. Her vision begins to broaden again as the inflection passes. Her black eyes see the branches, nearby, where she did not kill him; where he left the message behind and came away with her. She sees herself and Michael Rider walking off to the west through the snow, the cares and duties of the world forgotten.

  She sees the branch, too, in which she is too weak to kill him, in which he continues on his way, and delivers his message. This path is marked by black, oily residue that makes her shudder.

  Here, in this branch, Sheria lays her head on Michael Rider’s lifeless chest and weeps. The Bright Path stretches out before her, its singular correctness golden and heartless as it marks the perfection of what must be.

  Jonathan Steward

  A hazy orange sun sets over the fields and orchards of the plantation. Great expanses of ripe wheat, waving gently in the wind, remind Jonathan of the tall grasses in a remote valley he visited once, long ago in his youth. The grasses move like waves in the fields, as if some great beast sweeps through them. He smells ripening fruit in the orchards, he hears the lowing of cattle, and he feels the gentle touch of the warm sun on his skin. This place has been his home and shelter for more than twenty years.

  Today he leaves it behind forever.

  “This is a dream,” he says aloud.

  A long train of wagons is parked in the courtyard between the twin buildings of the Hunter Institute. A stream of students and teachers comes and goes through the doors, hurriedly carrying boxes and crates from within the buildings and loading them onto the wagons. The historians wear a variety of weapons; mainly long guns and pistols, but a handful of swords and even bows are on display. The stores of ammunition won’t last forever, and no more will ever be made. A sword or bow will serve for longer before the inevitable end.

  He touches the whitewashed adobe of the library. He thinks back to his youth, reading books in his mother’s library in a distant village, hundreds of leagues away, across the Gulf of Carelon. It is a land that is no more, but it lives in his mind, as does the young woman with brown hair, green eyes, and a smile like the light of a thousand suns.

  “I built this place for you,” he says softly. “And now I must leave it.”

  They come in the dream without warning, but also without dissonance. It is the way of dreams. They are simply there. They are human figures, but no longer human. They wear tattered remains of clothing, or none at all. Clothing is unnecessary for them.

  Each one’s face is a smooth, featureless expanse of silvery metal.

  They are among his people without warning, grabbing, twisting, stabbing, subduing. The historians flee the wagons into the buildings or the gentle orchard, but more of the Faceless are there waiting. When a man or woman is brought down, one of the silver-faced monsters plunges a long, needle-tipped injector into his body. The screaming and thrashing begins then. It does not last long. Soon enough, the ranks of the Faceless will be swollen still further.

  Jonathan walks among them, counting the familiar fallen. Vicod Rayth; Ikongbe Rayth; Miss Kimbwe; so many others. He touches their bodies as he walks past.

  The Faceless ignore Jonathan. He is one of them, after all.

  ???

  Jonathan’s eyes fluttered, and he awoke. He was staring at a brilliant field of stars in the night sky. There was no moon. For a moment, as his mind withdrew reluctantly from that alternate world of dreams, he could still smell the orchards and fields around the Institute.

  , he whispered in the fey-tongue.

  It was real. That time was real. This time was real too. In this time, they had fled the plantation before the Faceless claimed it. But it was all real. As his thoughts and perceptions shifted with the language, he could see the shadows of the other worlds around him, and the Dark Path leading through them. Back; back home, to Merrily.

  He sat up in the darkness and looked around. A few fires burned nearby, illuminating the silent watchers on shift. Vicod slumbered next to him, snoring softly. Knowing that sleep would not return, Jonathan rose to his feet, shrugging off the blankets, and went to find some water.

  Around the camp, an arid plateau stretched for leagues in all directions. The night was utterly still, save for the sounds of sleeping men and women. There were only twenty remaining. The others he had sent into the jungle three weeks ago, along with all that could be saved from the Hunter Institute. Jonathan walked to the edge of the firelight, looking out into the darkness. He found he was facing north.

  “Do you miss it?” came an accented voice near at hand. He turned and looked at the speaker. The man’s black skin and hair, along with dark-stained leathers, rendered him nearly invisible in the night.

  “Hello, Iko,” he whispered. “You’re not on shift now.”

  “I was awake,” replied the young man. “I saw you get up. My father told me to watch you closely, Jonathan Steward, and not to let you go far from me. But you did not answer my question. Do you miss the north? You look back that way often.”

  Jonathan took a deep breath, and turned his eyes back to the horizon.

  “It’s gone,” he said. “The Neighbor Kingdoms are silent. I know my old home is silent with them. Only the Faceless walk its streets, if indeed they do any such pedestrian thing when they aren’t chasing us. I think of my father’s old mill, sometimes, and imagine it stuffed to the rafters with Faceless, all standing still and just watching, the way they do. Do I miss it? I don’t think I do, exactly. I can feel the people as if they were still alive. It’s more than imagination. They are waiting for me, I think. And I am trying to find my way home.”

  “I never went to the north,” offered Iko, “but I miss the Institute. I would have stayed to fight. It was my home, like the north was your home.”

  Jonathan snorted. “Don’t be absurd. You would have died pointlessly, along with everyone who stayed with you. Any confrontation with the Faceless is futile.”

  “And what non-futile purpose is served by this flight?” hissed Iko in a low, passionate mutter. “Where in the deep jungles will the Institute find shelter? When will they stop fleeing and hiding?”

  “Never,” answered Jonathan sadly. “Never in this world. The men and women we sent into the jungle, Iko, carry with them the last history, science, and knowledge that we possessed. It is all that could be saved. They have no purpose but to preserve it as long as it can be preserved—not because we or they will ever overcome or outlast the Faceless, but because what they carry is worth preserving. Wherever the last of them meets her end, she will have carried the last book with her for as long as she could.”

  Iko scowled in dissatisfaction.

  “Then why are we not with them, carrying books?”

  Nearby, there was a faint , and a confused-looking dove appeared out of thin air, where there had been no dove before. Jonathan and Iko both looked at it for a moment, and then turned back to each other.

  “Just a bird this time,” said Iko wryly, keeping his voice low to avoid disturbing the sleepers. “Three days ago on scout duty, I came across a forty-foot-long dog with three heads. Fortunately, it was dead. Father said its heart couldn’t move enough blood for all those brains. The week before that, a house fell out of the sky and nearly crushed Miss Kimbwe.”

  “We are not carrying books into the jungle,” whispered Jonathan, returning to the earlier thread, “because of that bird, and the dog, and the house. Whatever happened in the north, it caused things to break down. The natural order of the world is falling apart. But that presents certain opportunities. Our work at the Institute has not been purely academic, Iko. You know that; you’ve been there all your life. Your father and I have chased the threads of clues, legends, artifacts, half-buried memories hidden in folklore—all as best we could while around us the Holy Empire fought and slowly lost its bitter struggle to the death with the Faceless. You and your father found the latest clue in the palace of Kargen the Gross, and we can only hope there is another waiting for us in Talen Kapvet. This is our last adventure, now.”

  Ikongbe Rayth looked at him seriously in the dim light of the stars. His dark eyes glistened with emotion.

  “What do you hope to find, Jonathan Steward, at the end of your adventure?”

  Jonathan smiled slightly.

  “The universe is a law-book, my boy,” he said, indulging in a bit of gentle condescension to the younger man. “When you let go of an apple, it falls. Law. Though you flap your arms, you cannot fly. Law. And once you no longer perceive the past, it is outside your control. Law! But now the law is weakened. Reality, after the disaster in the north, isn’t what is used to be. And we—you, me, your father, and this score of my finest Applied Historians—we are looking for… a loophole in the law. A place of change. A place where we can shift among the branching pathways and put things right.”

  Somewhere nearby, the dove cooed in confusion.

  “That bird will die, out here on the dry plateau, within two days,” he remarked to Iko. “If you can’t sleep, then go and catch it, and bring it with us. We can improvise a cage, and it won’t need much food and water.”

  Iko raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  “Why?”

  Jonathan smiled again. “Who knows,” he whispered gently. “Perhaps it came to us from the world we’re looking for. Perhaps it can lead us back there.”

  ???

  Jonathan’s small band of historians moved cautiously south over the broad, arid plateau the next morning, and for many days after. They travelled on foot; where they were going, horses or oxen would be a hindrance. But the dove, which Iko had caught after a long chase, was given a little bread and water each morning, and it fluttered vivaciously in its cage.

  The map named this region as Sedocia. At the height of the Holy Empire, it had been a sparsely-populated backwater. Now, with the northern provinces entirely lost and Talen Vicarus fallen, it was dotted with small refugee caravans fleeing south. Not all were successful in the unforgiving desert. From time to time, they encountered bodies—of men, or oxen, or horses. And sometimes there were entire wagons abandoned, apparently for lack of animals to pull or humans to carry.

  Kanje and the Brassen Ribbitte, among his party, both had experience in the high desert. They led the group from spring to spring, oasis to oasis. Ribbitte, a veteran of scores of digs in the ruins of the Empire, was tall, with a lined face and bushy mustaches. He wore a white shirt and beige pants, and the historian’s characteristic broad-brimmed hat. Kanje, by contrast, came originally from the horse tribes of the eastern wastes beyond Broob. He wore flowing white robes and a hood, which served to highlight the deep brown of his skin. They bickered incessantly, but Jonathan found it a welcome touch of humanity amidst the constant tension of their flight.

  “The Ybrion Oasis is occupied,” reported Ribbitte one evening, returning to the group from scouting a stark, rocky ridge ahead. “Looks like a small party, but well-equipped. We’d do best to bypass it.”

  “Leave it behind if you seek to escape your mortal suffering, Monsieur,” answered Kanje, his face skeptical. “I will pray to the One God over your dog-gnawed skeleton when we catch up. The next water is five days’ ride, and our skins are light.”

  Ribbitte snorted. “Your Third Prophet will return from Heaven before I’ll lose my way in a desert. There’s a spring on the west of a ridge a day’s ride south of here. We watered there on our way to the Tarkan Dig twelve years ago.”

  Jonathan held up a wrinkled hand, and the two men fell silent instantly.

  “We’ll stop at Ybrion,” he said. “Kanje is correct; our skins are too light to go on.”

  Nearby, Vicod grumbled and loosened his sword in its sheath. The mountainous wrinkles of his weathered face produced a deeply skeptical scowl. Iko and the others began checking their guns and powder. But there was no more discussion. They went on.

  Looking down the ridge into the Ybrion Valley two hours later, Jonathan saw a handful of small tents pitched around the wild green of the oasis. The figures of men moving about among them flashed the occasional glint of steel in the setting sun. The oasis was in a deep defile cut in the plateau, and a single narrow path led down into the valley.

  “I’ll go first,” he announced, “with Vicod. Two old men won’t seem a threat to them. We’ll see if they’re friendly and come back.”

  Vicod grimaced. “And what will these two old men do if those people down there decide we’re so unthreatening we’d make them a good supper?”

  Jonathan drew open the front of his white linen duster to reveal four pistols, two knives, and Cyrus Stoat’s old hand-crossbow. Beneath them was a chestplate of hard leather, reinforced with metal strips. He grinned at Vicod boyishly, despite his gray hair and wrinkled face.

  “We’re more threatening than most old codgers, you and I,” he replied.

  They walked openly down the narrow path, talking loudly with each other and waving their arms with animation. Nine men were visible at the oasis. Eight appeared to be wearing at least some metal armor and carrying swords. There were two horses, and a single rickety carriage with a hood. Two of the men came to the base of the path and waited there, alerted by Jonathan and Vicod’s display.

  “White Knights,” remarked Vicod distastefully. “Of course, in the middle of the Sedocian Desert, we’d find the nine last White Knights that weren’t wiped out at Talen Vicarus.”

  Jonathan kept quiet as they approached. His memories of the White Knights were forever tainted by the brutality at Hog Hurst, whatever alliances of convenience might have arisen from their common enemy since then. But he forced himself to smile and hold his hands out, palms up, in the customary greeting of peace.

  “No further!” barked one of the two White Knights in the local Imperial dialect. Both had their hands on their swords. Jonathan saw that their faces were unshaven, the flesh thin and the eyes hollow. Their armor was tarnished, and the white surcoats above it dusty and tattered. But they held themselves ready to do violence, just the same.

  “We are simple travelers—” began Jonathan. But he was interrupted by another voice, old and querulous, speaking up from behind the two warriors.

  “Let them through, Marcus,” said the voice. The two knights drew aside immediately, and Jonathan saw behind them the bent figure of an old man, hobbling forward with the aid of a cane.

  “Good evening, friends,” said the newcomer. His snow-white hair was wispy, his plain robes were frayed and dirty, and he had several weeks’ worth of stubbly beard on his face. But his blue eyes were keen and intelligent, and he stared at Jonathan and Vicod appraisingly. He shuffled forward between the knights and stopped in front of Jonathan.

  “Two gentlemen of advanced years, wandering out in the wastes of Sedocia? I think not.” He spoke in cultured, elegant Late High Imperial. “You are ambassadors. Where is the rest of your party?”

  Jonathan gestured slightly back up the path. “They are waiting for us at the top,” he said, speaking carefully in a crudely-accented Imperial. “Eighteen others. We don’t mean any harm; we just want to water at the oasis. My name is Jonathan Steward, and this is Vicod Rayth.”

  “My name is Peter,” said the old man. “And your friends are welcome to come down. But I think they will be disappointed by the journey. There is no water here.”

  Jonathan looked again at the vibrant green of the oasis. The plants were drooping badly, and their leaves were brittle. There was a broad, shallow bowl, covered in the flaking remains of what must once have been pond weed. It was as dry as the rock on the plateau.

  “What happened to it?” asked Vicod, a note of desperation entering his voice. “Plants wouldn’t have grown here if there were no water.”

  Peter shrugged. “One of the new anomalies,” he replied. “Yesterday morning, the spring was here, and the pond full. But when we awoke this morning, it was gone. The pond bed is now as dry as the rock above.”

  , Jonathan said to himself, within his own head. He slipped into the multi-probabilistic grammar of the fey-tongue.

  He considered. Then we waved up the path, signaling Iko to bring the rest of the party down the slope.

  Night was coming on, and it would be cold. Jonathan’s company set up their tents on the other side of the desiccated oasis from the White Knights and their strange leader. The two sides eyed each other warily, but kept to themselves as the sun set. The historians sipped sparingly, and anxiously, from the precious water skins.

  “This is our deaths,” announced Kanje calmly. “We will not survive to the next water. The One God calls us back.”

  “There is a spring near Tarkan!” insisted Ribbitte waspishly. “Pray to the winds and clouds if they answer you, my friend, but we will live another week.” But Jonathan could see fear in his eyes. The chances of finding the Tarkan spring were slim.

  He walked away from the tents, up the narrow path leading out of the crevasse. He looked up at the stars, and down at the meagre campfires around the dead oasis. A sheer drop down to the floor of the defile plunged away on his right, and an equally sheer cliff loomed above him on the left.

  “” he began, closing his eyes and willing his mind into the alien-yet-familiar perception and understanding of the fey-tongue. The adjustment he intended was far greater than anything he had ever accomplished before. He was not sure it could be done.

  “It is indeed a dark path you have walked,” came a voice from the shadows. “It is dark here, and dark above the valley; a dangerous climb in the dark.” The voice spoke in Late High Imperial, scattering Jonathan’s concentration. He opened his eyes. There before him, under the starlight, was the hunched form of the old man Peter.

  Jonathan blinked, readjusting his thoughts.

  “You speak the fey-tongue?” he asked incredulously.

  Peter sat down on a nearby rock, breathing heavily from the climb. In the dim light, he looked even more old and frail than he had during the day.

  “Barely,” he responded with a rueful smile. “I can read a bit of it, and I recognized some of your words. I studied it when I was young, you know, before I entered the priesthood. By my reckoning, you weren’t yet alive when I last spoke a word of the fey-tongue. Tell me, Mr. Steward—why are you alone here under the stars, speaking the dead language of a dead race?”

  Jonathan sat down next to Peter on the rock.

  “Language creates thought,” he said slowly, “and thought is perception. Perception creates the reality we experience. I find that when I speak in the fey-tongue, my relationship with reality changes considerably.” There was no sense in going into the uncomfortable details, and anyway, he didn’t fully understand it himself. He just knew that it worked… up to a point.

  “I expect,” replied Peter, “that it’s rather like prayer.” His bright eyes twinkled under the starlight, and a smile played among the heavy lines that surrounded his mouth.

  Jonathan thought about that.

  “I have never prayed,” he said. “Not in the way that you do. But from what I’ve heard, you’re asking God to do something for you, and then hoping it happens. When I speak in the fey-tongue, I see the world in variations, as it might be. And I can sometimes see the outcome of my actions, or of events around me. I can make choices based on that vision. I don’t think that’s like praying.”

  Peter was silent for a time, and they looked up at the stars together.

  “When I pray,” he said, “I imagine the world as I think God would like it to be, and I ask Him to guide us toward that world. But I might well be wrong. God is without bound or limitation, Mr. Steward; He knows all and accomplishes all. The world cannot be contrary to His design, however much it may discomfort us. Whatever our suffering before the Faceless, or the dragons, or their false god of metal—it is as He wills it. Prayer is not an act of bargaining with God, despite the pretensions of the Second Prophet. It is an act of submission to His design. Please, we ask—please do not let it be Your will that we suffer more. And yet, sometimes it is.”

  More minutes passed by in the darkness, as Jonathan thought about that, and Peter breathed in and out quietly beside him. He could not tell if his companion’s eyes were open or closed.

  “Who are you?” asked Jonathan.

  “I am Peter,” answered the old man. “No more than Peter, now. And my prayers mean no more to God than yours.”

  “Who were you?” pressed Jonathan. “How did you come to be here in the wasteland, with a company of White Knights?”

  Peter turned to him, and Jonathan saw that his eyes were closed. But then they opened, and the stars twinkled within them.

  “Those poor souls in the valley follow me for who I was once,” he answered. “When their brothers were overcome in Talen Vicarus, they fled with me, thinking I would restore their hope. They believed in my prayer. But the White Knights have never understood prayer. I have come to believe that no one in the Ecclesia ever understood it. They are faithful men, Jonathan; they have faith, even now. They will keep the faith as we die of thirst in this valley, waiting for my prayers to save them.”

  Jonathan blinked, thinking back over the last twenty years.

  “Peter…” he said, trailing off.

  Peter smiled wryly and nodded his head.

  “Yes, I know. You expected someone taller and grander. I was the Mouth of God, once upon a time. The last to hold that office, it seems, as the College of Electors was annihilated at Talen Vicarus. And I will die here in the desert, in the company of eight faithful knights.”

  The old man rose to his feet.

  “Enjoy the stars, Mr. Steward. I hope your prayers bring you peace. That is all they are good for, in the end.”

  He tottered off down the Dark Path, back to the valley.

  “The Dark Path,” said Jonathan to himself, resuming his earlier reverie. “” And then he added, feeling rather sheepish: “”

  The web of reality spread out before him. It was a thousand variations of the world as it might be, some closer, some more distant. In some, there was a star shower; in others, dark wings blotted out the night sky. In some there were green plants growing in the oasis; in others, they were long dead. Shades and variations of men and women moved in the valley below him, their paths interlaid on top of each other.

  In a branch—distant, now—there was a trickle of water in the rock.

  , he breathed in the fey speech.

  In two branches, less distant, the water welled up through the rock.

  , he said. Sweat dripped from his brow, called out by the immense effort of the vision. This was no simple nudge toward some far distant possibility in the future. The people in the valley needed water right now.

  The branches around him began to flow with water that might be.

  , he whispered. .

  Nothing happened.

  He sat down wearily on the rock. It was no use. They would all die in the desert. All was silent for many long minutes.

  A single pebble was dislodged by the holster of one of his four pistols, and fell to the ground. Its vibrations carried down into the rock, down below the base of the valley, down to where a shift in the composition of the bedrock held back something beneath. There was a loud crack from the valley floor, followed by the surprised voices of the humans below. Another long silence followed. Then, faintly, Jonathan’s ears heard the sound he had been waiting for: A musical trickle, which grew in intensity to a variegated and joyful hum.

  Jonathan Steward slumped down on the rock, and looked up at the stars. The voices below were raised in exaltation.

  “Hallelujah!” he heard faintly in the distance, spoken in Late High Imperial. “Praise be to God!”

  He walked slowly, unsteadily down the path to the valley. The world swam around him, as the visions of different realities became unhinged and disconnected. He could not see where he was among them. His steps wandered close to the sheer drop on the right.

  he managed to say. And the vision solidifies slightly; enough that those realities in which he plunges off the cliff edge to a messy end draw farther away. He sees the path ahead of him, its singular correctness black and heartless as it marks the perfection of what must be.

  At the valley floor, his historians were busily filling waterskins, and slurping up water from the bubbling spring that was gushing up from the rock, filling the basin and overflowing its edges. At the other side of the restored oasis, the White Knights knelt in a circle around Peter, praying fervently.

  The last Mouth of God looked across the miraculous pool at Jonathan, and slowly winked.