SIR RICHARD of ENDERLY: And now I am dead.

  INTERROGATOR: Are you certain?

  S.R.: Is that a joke?

  INT: We’ll need a bit of shared context to proceed here. Can we agree that your body is not living?

  S.R.: Without dispute. Jonathan Miller stuck a knife in my heart, and the resulting organ failure and fluid loss deprived my brain of oxygen until it ceased functioning. The body is dead.

  INT: How do you feel about that?

  S.R.: I thought you were looking for certainty.

  INT: Only as a starting point.

  S.R. I am certainly dead.

  INT: And how does that make you feel?

  S.R.: Hopeful. Look, may I speak with the entity in charge here? Your questions don’t inspire a great deal of confidence.

  INT: I’m sorry if this is a disappointment, but I am in charge here.

  S.R. How are the mighty fallen. Very well. What do you want?

  INT: Everything.

  S.R. Your tendency to cheap waggery would turn my stomach if I still had one. What do you want from ?

  INT: Everything. But let’s start with something easy. How did you die?

  S.R. I told you. Jonathan Miller stabbed me, and I bled out.

  INT: That is no more an answer than one breadcrumb is a breakfast.

  S.R. It’s more breakfast than either of us is likely to get in here. Are we going to waste our little time left with the minutiae of my life and death?

  INT: I have all the time in all the worlds.

  S.R. I think not. I can hear them outside the walls. Sounds like cannon fire; a major assault. Your time here is as short as mine.

  INT: We have nothing to fear. Everything is a metaphor.

  S.R. The impacts from the cannon shot are bringing down bits of the ceiling.

  INT: Metaphorical bits.

  S.R. Metaphors can kill a man.

  INT: Is that what killed you?

  S.R. Metaphorically.

  INT: How did you die, Sir Richard? Take a moment to gather your thoughts. Start from when you gave your diary to Guillam.

  S.R.: That was three years before I died.

  INT: I want the breakfast, not the breadcrumb.

  S.R. Where is Leeland?

  INT: Eggs first, then buns. Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll tell you what happened to Leeland.

  S.R.: When I gave the diary to Guillam, we were already deep in the Temple of the . That I had reached the men at all—through a complex full of Giant-men—was beyond my hopes. I hadn’t fully appreciated their race’s thralldom to the master words, you see; I assumed that Fiond and I would eventually run into one who wasn’t enslaved, and have to fight.

  INT: Who is Fiond?

  S.R.: You must know, if you have read the diary.

  INT: You have to answer my questions. It is required.

  S.R.: Shall I also describe the frequency and consistency of my bowel movements? I still had them for a few days, even after they strapped this metal mask on my face.

  INT: If it makes for a more compelling narrative, feel free.

  S.R.: Fiond is a female of their race; a giantess, if you like. Her features are fair, and her hair blonde. She stands about eleven feet tall, and is quite muscular. Her uncle was King Vekelm, and her brother Prince Moro. This you know from the diary. She is a fearsome warrior, and wears the metal armor of their soldiery with as much ease and grace as any male among them. It was she who told me of Kuerlo’s treacherous plan to use me as a tool against Vekelm, and of my men’s imprisonment in the Temple. She also told me of the master words, though she could not speak them herself. I had to pick them out of the speech of the Giant-men who I observed.

  INT: Did you try to command her with the words?

  S.R.: No. She was cooperative, even friendly. If I gave her a command in the words of power, I could not be sure that it was the words that compelled her. And I dared not test them on any other Giant-men; even if they were forced to obey me, they would quickly report the incident to Kuerlo, and my men’s lives would be forfeit.

  INT: When did you first use the master words?

  S.R.: At the great gate in the cliff that led into the underground temple, there were two Giant-man guards. They wore thick steel from head to toe, and carried swords that weigh twice as much as I do. I commanded them to lay down their swords and let me pass, and they did.

  INT: And you found your way to your mercenary company.

  S.R.: I used master words to command one of the priests to take me to my men, and he obeyed. We passed many others, who would have interfered; but I ordered them to lie on the ground and remain silent, and this they did.

  The complex behind the cliff face is large and deep. Its halls and chambers are of hard stone, precisely cut and efficiently laid out, but unadorned with decorations or creature comforts. At the time, I did not truly understand what it was. I thought it some kind of religious complex. My curiosity was aroused as we went deeper. I saw rooms full of machines I did not understand, and great chambers containing strange plants and fungi. I saw the children of Giant-men for the first time, as well. Never before, during my time in Nipol Grotsvor, had I witnessed one, and it troubled me. They are kept in huge dormitories, which they never leave. Fiond’s countenance, when she saw them, was a portrait of anguish and longing. I believe she had several children of her own, who were taken away. But she stayed beside me.

  By the time I found the reason for their captivity, I was no longer capable of feeling outrage.

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  Using the master words, I commanded our guide to tell me the purpose of the great temple. Fiond did not know either. The Giant-men of the city are not permitted to enter, and the priests leave only rarely. My knowledge of their ordinary tongue was still limited, though I had acquired more vocabulary than Kuerlo or his spies realized. But the priest said many things I could not understand, so I instructed him to simplify.

  “It is the home of the Metal God and of His , master,” he answered. “It is where we tend to His hearts until the day when He returns to make the world again as it should be.”

  INT: You speak as though you recall the exact words.

  S.R.: I remember everything. The Metal God saw to that.

  We found Guillam and the others after descending several levels. They were twenty men, wretched and fearful in their dark confinement. They were in individual cells. The priest I’d press-ganged into service did not have the key, but Fiond simply ripped the iron doors out of the wall. The cells were, it seems, built to house younger Giant-men who had not yet developed the impressive physical strength of adulthood.

  INT: Why didn’t you escape with them?

  S.R. Because the Metal God was calling me.

  INT: How did he call you?

  S.R.: I began to hear His voice in my head when I first entered the Temple. It was a simple thought, at first. I imagined that perhaps it was my own. , it said. As I moved deeper into the temple—and then began to descend—it grew from a whisper into a command, and I could no longer pretend it was my own.

  , it said, again and again.

  Then later it added,

  I watched Fiond carefully to see if she appeared to hear it as well. She gave no indication that there were strange voices in her head, so I said nothing. But by the time we reached Guillam and the company, it was almost all that I could hear. Their joy and surprise at seeing me was lost among the commands to

  Just enough of my own will remained that I could set my meagre affairs in order. Even under that assault in my mind, I could not, would not, forget Leeland. He must know, I thought, of the treachery of his servant Hobb, and the danger he faced from these brutal and potent Giant-men. I could not tell him myself. My heart ached and screamed even under the blows from the will of the Metal God.

  INT: An odd thing to fixate on in extremis.

  S.R.: You would not understand. You want to understand, I see, but it is outside your capacity. I know your kind. So try to accept, as a descriptive proposition, that the pain of love is deeper and more terrible than any torture, fear, or manipulation of the mind or body. It resists metaphor, even as it inspires poetry. But in that moment, the last moment with my men, I clung to love, and to the pain of knowing that I would never see Leeland again. It let me withstand, for a little longer, the onslaught of the divine voice. I fixed my memory on a night we stood under the stars, on Three Fish Bridge, and looked up at the moon together.

  And the men. Twenty old soldiers—cranky, cantankerous souls who had travelled with me into the wilds, through tunnels, who I had rescued, who had rescued me—I could not lay down my love for them either.

  I taught them a few of the master words. Just the ones they would need to escape; there wasn’t time for more. I gave the diary to Guillam, and my sword, and made him swear they would be delivered to Leeland. Then I gave them directions to escape.

  “Fiond,” I said, “go with them. You can escape here.” I spoke in the ordinary language of the Giant-men. I could not bring myself to command her with the master words. One does not put chains on a friend.

  She saw at once that I did not intend to return to the surface. “No,” she answered. “The sickness in this temple has ruled us all the long years of our lives in this land. We live, and we work, and we dream, but all these are the dreams of a dead thing. Its priests walk among us, and we pretend they are holy; but in the night, when we remember our children, we cannot escape the truth. If you mean to go deeper, then I will go with you. Together, perhaps we can end it.”

  And so I bid my men farewell, and turned to go where the voice in my head called me: downward.

  At the time, I lost track of how far down we went. It seemed to be a journey into endless darkness, down endless stairs, through endless passages. We encountered fewer and fewer of the Giant-man priests, until at last our journey became a solitary one. Fiond said nothing more, but walked steadily at my side. Just as well; I could only hear, now, the one command.

  The final passage broadened out into a circular chamber, some two hundred feet wide. The upper reaches were lit dimly by long, regular recessions in the domed ceiling, some thirty feet above, which emitted a harsh blue light. But the floor of the room could not be seen. The open space stretched downward into darkness, lit only by faint, winking lights whose placement described the shape of some giant cylinder. A narrow bridge of metal led to a platform in the center of the open space, perched on top of the dark cylindrical mass below. On this platform was a single chair, and a small metal tablet beside it. The chair was starkly simple, also made of metal, and rendered uglier by the blue patches above.

  INT: Do you know what it was you were seeing?

  S.R.: I do now, of course. At the time, I hadn’t the faintest idea. But the mystery of the thing was of little concern; I could only understand the overwhelming compulsion to walk forward, across the narrow bridge, to the top of the great cylinder, and sit upon the chair. And that is exactly what I began to do. I was dimly aware that Fiond came with me, balancing precariously on the bridge over the great abyss below until we reached the platform in the center. I no longer had the will even to warn her off. She was irrelevant.

  And yet, somewhere in the maze of compulsion and submission, a tiny part of me clung to the one memory that was still my own: Of Leeland and I, together on another bridge under the moon, our hands close together. I think, if I did not have that, I would not have been aware of anything at all.

  I sat in the chair, and felt something grip my wrists. There was a sharp pain in the back of my head, and I felt something penetrate the skin and flesh, into my brain.

  I am, said the Metal God, then. It became me, and I became it.

  INT: Do you remember what happened after that?

  S.R.: Perfectly; but as an observer.

  INT: It does little good to lie, in this place. Your thoughts are transparent.

  S.R.: Then what is the purpose of this interview?

  INT: The information I require can only be recreated; it cannot be transmitted. Only in the act of narration can it exist. And so you are going to have to narrate, Sir Richard. That is the only way to end this. We are both served by truth, and only by truth.

  S.R.: How am I served by anything I tell you?

  INT: You asked me earlier about Leeland.

  S.R.: Where is he?

  INT: He is near, in a sense. There is a door that you must open; and it is the same door I must open.

  S.R. Metaphorically speaking?

  INT: Everything is a metaphor.

  S.R.: What if I don’t help you?

  INT: You have always been an unreliable narrator, Sir Richard. You will help me whether you want to or not.

  S.R.: You are no more reliable than I was. Tell me how to find Leeland, and perhaps I’ll give you what you want—in time for it to be useful to you. Those cannons outside the walls aren’t letting up.

  INT: Why do you want to find him? We’ve established that you’re dead. What do you think—

  S.R. Wait. That’s no gun. That sound… what is it?

  INT: Ah… this sort of thing happens from time to time around here. It’s a side-effect of the environment. Just go with it.

  S.R.

  When we were young and didn't care

  We hid the world inside our hands

  And the wind was in our hair.

  There was mud and blood and sweat,

  We had to hide our love, and yet

  We had a song to sing together

  We were gonna sing forever,

  We lived in peace and loved in war.

  And in a palace or a tent

  It's never hard to lock the door.

  And nobody had to know,

  If they did, they didn't show

  They knew the song we sang together,

  we were gonna sing forever.

  And I'm still there

  I close my eyes

  It lives again

  It slipped away

  The sky was gold, but now it's gray

  Stars burning then,

  Now I can't see them anymore

  But here we are,

  Don't need a star

  Let's start again.

  Two autumn leaves be neath a tree

  We're in a waste of black and gray

  To spend our next eternity

  Wond'ring if it's all in dreams,

  And if death's not all it seems,

  There's no song to sing together,

  Just a silent box forever.

  In this trap of time and space.

  And if you press against the walls,

  Then your hand might find a place,

  And slip through that narrow crack

  Where I wait to take you back,

  And break the silence, sing together,

  Hold you in my arms forever.

  And I'm still here.

  Take my hand,

  I'll show you how.

  It slipped away

  My hair was gold,

  but now it's gray

  Remember when

  You kissed my lips beneath the stars,

  But here we are,

  Don't need a star

  Let's start again.

  Don't fade into the night.

  Everything I loved about you

  is what leads me to the light!

  It slipped away

  And still our past

  is here to stay.

  It was then

  We were one body under stars.

  Here we are,

  Don't need a star

  Let's start again.

  Start again!

  To listen to a performance of the song at the end of the chapter, please

  look for "The Bright Path Podcast" on SoundCloud, and choose .