Blue Magic

NE NE MOI GALANAS

TRE TRE TRAGO MEN.”

And as he chanted, he moved his hands in strange and disconcerting patterns; something about the gestures stirred her insides in ways that both terrified and fascinated her. She felt the power surging from him; in spite of her fear she found herself swept up in it, exulting in it (though she felt sick and shamed when she realized that)-it was like being outside, walking through an immense towering thunderstorm, winds teasing at her hair and clothes, thunder rumbling in her blood, lightning striding before her.

She gasped, jumped to her feet though she didn’t quite dare cross the lines. Tre” was in the other small pentacle, curled up on his side, deeply asleep, his fist pressed against his mouth. “What are you going to do to^-him,” she cried. “What are you going to do?”

Settsimaksimin sighed, the talisman glimmering as it rose and fell with the rise and fall of his chest. “Put him where his god can’t reach him, – he said; the residue of the chant made a derni chant of the simple words. “If I kill him, child, there’ll only be another taking his place, another and another until I have to kill everyone. So what’s the point. He’ll sleep and sleep and sleep…” He turned his head and smiled at her. “.

until you and only you, young Kori, until YOU come and touch him awake.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Wait. Watch.^- He straightened, closed his eyes a moment to regain his concentration, then began another chant.

“ME LE O I DETH O I ME LE OUS E THA NA TOL/ S

HIR RON TO RON DO MO PE LOOMAY LOOMAY DOMATONE

IDO ON TES HAY DAY THONE.”

His gestures began as wrapping turns. A shimmer formed about Tr6’s body, solidified into a semitransparent crystal; Trd was encased in that crystal like a fly in amber. The gestures changed, fluttered, ended as he brought his hands together in a loud clap. The crystal cube vanished.

“He has gone to his god,” Settsimaksimin said. “In a way.” He got to his feet, stood leaning against the chair looking wearier than death. “He is in the Cave of Chains. If you can get yourself there, Kori, all you have to do is touch the block of crystal. It will melt and the boy will wake. No one else can do this. No one, god or man. Only you. Do you understand?”

“No. Yes. What to do, yes. Why?”

He reached his arms high over his head, stretched, groaned with the popping of his muscles. “Incentive, Kori.” He dragged his hand across his face. “I want to save something out of this mess. I can’t save myself. Cheonea? All I can do is hope the seeds I’ve planted have sent down roots strong enough to hold it together when MY hand is gone. You’ve destroyed me, Kori. If I were the monster you think me, I’d kill you right now and send your souls to the worst hell I could reach. Instead…” he chuckled, but there was no humor in the sound, “I’m going to pay for your education.” He resettled himself in the chair, worked a lever on the side so that the back tilted at an angle and the footboard moved out. He was still mostly upright, but not so dominant as he had been.

A chant filled the room again, his voice was vibrant and wonderfully alive, none of the exhaustion she’d seen was present in that sound; power, discipline, elegance, beauty, those were in that sound. He was a stranger and her enemy, but she felt a deeper kinship with him now than with any of her blood kin. She felt like weeping, she felt empty, she felt the loss of something splendid she’d never find again. If it hadn’t been Tr6, if only it hadn’t been Tre.

The smaller pentacle filled again. A tall woman, gray hair dressed in a soft knot, a black silk robe tied loosely over a white shift. Thin face, austere, rather flat. Long narrow chocolate eyes, not friendly at the moment, were they ever? Thin mouth tucked into brackets. She glared at Settsimaksimin, then she relaxed and she smiled, affection for the man showing in her face. The chocolate eyes narrowed yet more into inverted smiles of their own. “You!” she said. Her voice had a magic like his, silvery, singing. “Why is it always the middle of the night?”

Settsimaksimin laughed, swung his hand toward Kori. “I’ve a new student for you, Shahnfien Shere. Take her and teach her and keep her out of my hair.”

“That bad, eh? You interest me.”

“Thought I might.”

“You paying for her or what?”

“I pay. Would I bring you here else? I know you, love.” He shifted position, looked sleepily amused, his real weariness nowhere visible. Kori watched with astonishment, fear, hope, reluctant respect. “A hundred gold a year, with a bonus given certain conditions. She’s…” he frowned at Kori, “… thirteen or thereabouts, ten years bed, board and training.” He ran his eyes over the sleeping shift that fell in heavy folds around her thin body. ‘And clothing.”

“For you, old friend, just for you, I’ll do it.”

“HAIL” A rumbling chuckle. “She’d do you proud, Shahntien.”

“You mentioned a bonus.”

“Young Kori, her name is Kari Piyolss, she isn’t too happy about leaving home right now. She’s clever, she’s got more courage than sense and she’s stubborn. The first time she tries to get away from you, whip her. If she tries twice and you catch her at it, kill her. That’s what the bonus is for. You hear that, Kori?”

Kori pressed her lips together, closed her hands into fists. “Yes.”

“You see, Shahntien? Already plotting.”

“I see. How clever is she? Enough to stay quiet and learn until she thinks she knows how to avoid being caught?”

“Oh yes. I’m counting on you, Shahntien, to prove cleverer still and keep her there the whole ten years.”

“Take her now?”

“In a moment.” He shifted to face Kori. “Apply yourself, young Kori. Remember what I told you. Your brother will sleep forever unless you come for him, so be very very sure you know what you’re about.”

“Now?” Kori drove her nails into the soft wood of the bench. “What about…”

“Nothing here matters to you any longer, child. Stay well.”

A gesture, a polysyllabic word and she was in the other pentacle tight up against the woman who put a thin strong arm about her shoulders. A gesture, a word and both of them were elsewhere.

Maksim carried the bench back to the corner, piled the scattered scrolls on it again. He straightened, stretched, rubbed at his chest. Grimacing, he crossed to the wallcoffer, poured out some of the cordial and gulped it down, followed it with a swallow of brandy to wash away the taste. He leaned against the wall and waited for the strengthener to take hold, then snapped to his bedroom to get the rest he so urgently needed.

12. Uphill And Nasty.

SCENE: Black sand sloping up to an anonymous sort of scraggly brush. High tide, just turning, foam from the sea, white lace on black velvet, out on the dark water, white sails dipping swiftly below the horizon. Isspyrivo a black cone directly ahead, twice the height of the other peaks. It is several folds back from the shore, perhaps fifty miles off.

Brann shoved a hand through her hair. Daniel was a little drunk again. A thousand maledictions on old ‘llingjii’s head, wishing that pair on me. One of them sneaking whiffs of dreamdust, the other afloat in a winy sea. She began pacing restlessly beside the retreating surf, small black crabs scuttling away from her feet into festoons of stinking seawrack; every few steps she stopped to kick black grit out of her sandals. What now? We should get started for the mountain. Walk? She snorted. Take a whip to get this party marching. Ahzurdan had performed nobly during the attack, they owed their lives to him, perhaps even the children did, but she couldn’t be sure he’d come through next time. Half an hour ago, when she went to fetch him, the smell of hot dust in that cabin was strong enough to choke a hog. The young thief was right, once you smelled that stink you didn’t forget it. He was sitting on the sand now looking vaguely out at the vanishing sails of the Skia Hetaira, probably he regretted getting off her Daniel drifted over to him, offered the wineskin. Danny

One stared at Danny Two, dislike hardening the vagueness out of his face, then waved him off. Like a bratty child, not the man he was supposed to be, Daniel kicked sand on the sorceror and wandered away to sit on a chunk of lava, one of several coughed up the last time Isspyrivo hiccupped.

Brann sighed and thought longingly of Taguiloa and the dance troupe, there was much to be said for the energizing qualities of ambition. She watched the changechildren playing with the sand; its blackness seemed to fascinate them. Jaril and Yaril were appreciably taller and more developed after the battle with Amortis. She suspected that some of the fire pouring through them had lingered long enough to be captured and it triggered that spurt of growth. What that meant was something Brann didn’t want to think about right now. Going god-hunting to feed young adults, yaaah! She shook her head, waved the children to her.

“Jay, Yaro, if we’re going to get that pair up the mountain, we’d better have transport.” She looked from one scowling face to the other, sighed again. “No argument, kids. Chained God wants them, Chained God is going to get them. Besides, we need Ahzurdan. Our fighting isn’t done. Maksim’s not about to lay down and let us dance on his bones.”

Jaril wrinkled his nose. “You want horses? These Valens seem to run more to mules.”

She frowned at Daniel Akamarino and Ahzurdan. “Mules might be a good idea, they’ve got more sense than horses. Probably got more sense than the pair that’ll be riding them. Ahh…” She chewed on her lip a moment, rubbed at her back. “See what you can do. We should have two, preferably three mounts. Be as quiet about it as you can, one thing we don’t need is a posse of angry copers hunting mule thieves. Um. Dig out three gold, leave them behind to calm the tempers of the owners.”

The children hawkflew away, powerful wings digging great holes in the air. Brann watched them until they melted into the night, then she walked a short way off to sit on a chunk of lava. You there, Maksim? You sitting there working out how to hit us next? She shivered at the thought, then she stared angrily at the empty air overhead. Ariels circling about up there, looking at us, listening to us, carrying tales back to the sorceror sitting like a spider in his web of air. I wonder how fast they fly. Never thought to ask Ahzurdan. Doesn’t really matter, I suppose. Shuh! makes my skin itch to have things I can’t see watching me. They can’t read what’s in my head, at least there’s that. Or can they? Ahzurdan says they can’t. Do I trust him enough to believe him? I suppose I do. What am I going to do when this is over? Can’t go back to the pottery. Arth Slya? Not as long as I have to keep feeding the children. I don’t know. Slya’s Fire, I hate this kind of drifting. A goal. Yes. A goal. Bargain with the Chained God. He needs me or he wouldn’t be weaving all this foolery to get me to him. If he wants my help, he can see the children changed again, let them feed on sunlight not the soul-stuff of men. Set them free from me. What if he says he can’t do it? Do I have to believe him? The talisman, yes, that talisman Maksim has, it compels Amortis, if I learned to use it, could I compel Red. Slya to undo what she has done? And if not that one, perhaps another? Ahzurdan said there were twelve of them. Which one would twist your tail, Hot Slya? She swung around and examined the featureless cone of Isspyrivo, black against the deep purple of the predawn sky. A fire mountain. When I was a child, I thought Slya lived solely in Tincreal. Not so, not so, she’s in earthfire everywhere. Shall I sing you awake, my Slya? What side would you be on if I did? Shuh! Boring, this going round and round, piling ignorance on ignorance. She sprang to her feet. “Daniel. Daniel Akamarino. Play a song for me.” She dropped to one knee, unbuckled a sandal, balanced on one foot, kicked the sandal flying, then dealt with the other and jumped up. “Like this.^-She whistled a tune she remembered from Arth Slyan fetes on the Dance Floor by the Galarad Oak, began swinging in circles on the drying sand. “Something something something like this. Play Daniel play for me play for the ariels up there spying play for the wind and the water and the dawn that’s coming soon. Play for me Daniel I want to dance.”

Daniel Akamarino laughed, took out his recorder. He whistled a snatch of the tune. “Like that?”

“Like that.” She kicked one leg up, grimaced as the cloth of her trousers limited her range. As Daniel began to play, she stripped off her trousers, kicked them away. Ahzurdan scowled, pulled the broad collar of his robe up about his ears and sat hunched over, staring out to sea. At first she moved tentatively, seeking to recover the body memory of what she’d done with Taguiloa, then she flung herself into the dance, words and worry stripped from her head; she existed wholly in the moment with only the frailest of feelers into the immediate future, enough to let her give shape to the shift of her body.

Finally she collapsed in a laughing panting heap and listened to the music laugh with her and the water whisper as it retreated. In the east there was a ghost light along the peaks and the snowtop of Isspyrivo had a pale shimmer that seemed to come from within. She lay until the chill in the damp sand struck up through her body and the light in the east was more than a promise.

She rolled over, got onto her knees, then pushed onto her feet. As she stood brushing herself off, she heard the sound of hooves on the sand, felt the tingling brush as the children let her know they were coming. “Transport,” she said. “We’ll be leaving for the mountains fifteen twenty minutes no more.”

Yaril and Jaril brought three mules, two bays and a blue roan. They were saddled and bridled, with water-skins, long braided ropes tied on, a half a sack of seed-grain snugged behind the blue roan’s saddle. Brann raised her brows. “I see why you took so long.”

“Town was pretty well closed down.” Jaril’s eyes flicked toward the silent brooding figure of the sorceror, turned back to Brann. “We decided since we were leaving three golds behind and one of them could buy ten mules and a farm to keep them on and since we didn’t know how well they,” a jerk of his thumb toward Daniel and Ahzurdan, “could ride, we might as well make it as easy as we could. We raided a stable and the gear was all there, no problem, so why not.”

While the children flew overhead keeping watch and Ahzurdan stood aside pulling himself together and rebuilding his defenses, Brann and Daniel Akamarino distributed the gear and supplies among the three mules and roped the packs in place. By the time they were finished the tip of the sun was poking around the side of Isspyrivo, a red bead growing like a drop of blood oozing from a pinprick.

Following the lead of the two hawks they wound through brushy foothills for the better part of the morning, a still, hot morning spent in the clouds of dust and dying leaves kicked up by the plodding mules. They stopped briefly at noon for a meal of dried meat and trail bars washed down with strong-tasting lukewarm water from the skins. Even Daniel wasn’t drinking any of Tungjii’s wine, he was too hot, sweaty and sore to appreciate it (though he did go behind a bush, drop his trousers and smooth a handful of it over his abraded thighs).

During the morning Ahzurdan had been braced to fend off an attack from Maksim. Nothing happened. He prowled about the small grassy space where they stopped to eat, watching ariels swirl invisibly over them coming and going in that endless loop between them and Settsimaksimin. Nothing happened.

They started on. With Yaril plotting the route and Jaril on wide ranging guard swings, they climbed out of the hills and the rattling brush into the mountain forests, trees growing taller, the way getting steeper and more difficult as they rose higher and higher above sea level.

Ahzurdan flung himself from the saddle, landed in a stumbling run waving his arms to stop the others. “Brann,” he shouted, “to me. Daniel, hold the mules.” He braced himself, hands circling, spreading, smoothing. “Bilaga anaaaa nihi ta yi ka i gy shee ta a doo le eh doo ya ah tee,” he intoned as the earth about them rippled and surged, great trees toppled, roots loosened as the soil about them fluxed and flowed and formed into eyeless giants with ragged hands reaching reaching, deflected from them by the sphere Ahzurdan threw about them. Brann ran to him, flattened her hand in the middle of his back, fed energy into him, steadying him. The mules were squealing and sidling, jerking about, trying to break free from Daniel who was too busy with them to worry much about what was happening. Yaril darted from the sky, changed from hawk to shimmersphere in midcourse and went whipping through the earth giants emerging into greater and greater definition as the attack intensified. She went whipping through and through them, drawing force from them until she was swollen with it. She dropped beside Brann, extended a pseudopod to her spine and fed the earthstrength into her. Brann filtered it and passed it slowly, steadily to Ahzurdan. As soon as Yaril emptied herself, she was a hawk again, powering up to circle overhead while Jaril passed through the giants and stole more from them and fed it to Brann. Turn and turn they went while the attack mounted. Trees tumbled but never onto them, hurled aside by the sphere of negation Ahzurdan held about them, the earth outside boiled and shifted, walked in manshape, surged in shapeless waves but the earth beneath them stayed solid and still. Ahzurdan sweated and strained, his back quivered increasingly under Brann’s hand, but he held the sphere intact and none of the raging outside touched the peace and silence within.

The turmoil quit.

Ahzurdan screamed and collapsed.

The mules shrilled and reared, jerked Daniel Akamarino off his feet-until the Yaril and Jaril shimmer-globes darted over and settled briefly on the beasts, calming them.

They darted back to Brann, shifted to their child-shapes and knelt with her beside Ahzurdan. He was foaming at the mouth, writhing, groaning, his face twisting in a mask of pain and fear. Brann flattened her palms on his chest, leaned as much of her weight on him as she could while Yaril melted into him. She closed her eyes, reached into him, guided by Yaril’s gentle touches, repairing bruises and breaks and burns where the lifestuff of the elementals had traumatized him. Jaril flung himself into the air, a hawk again, circling, watching. Daniel soothed the mules some more, managed to pour some grain into the grass and got them eating. He popped the stopple on the wineskin, squeezed a short stream into his mouth, sighed with pleasure. Brann looked over her shoulder, scowled. “Daniel, dig me out a cloth and bring some water here.”

He shrugged and complied, stood over her watching with interest as she wiped the sorceror’s drawn face clean of spittle and dirt. Ahzurdan’s limbs straightened and his face smoothed, his staring eyes closed. He was asleep. Deeply asleep. Brann rubbed at her back, groaned. Yaril oozed out of Ahzurdan, took her child-shape back and came round to crouch beside Brann, leaning into her looking sleepy. Brann patted her, smiled wearily. “Yaro, what does Jay see ahead? How close is the mountain?”

Silent at first, blankfaced for a long minute, Yaril’s mouth began moving several beats before she finally spoke. “He says the going is really bad for several miles, ground’s chewed up, trees are knitted into knots, but after that it’s pretty clear. Maybe a couple hours’ ride beyond the mess we should be on the lower slopes of Isspyrivo.”

Braun scratched at her chin. “He needs rest, but we can’t afford the time. Maksim should be worn out for a while. With a little luck the god will get to us before he recovers.” She pushed onto her feet, stretched, worked her shoulders. “Daniel…”

Sometime after they left the battleground, Ahzurdan groaned and tried to sit up. He was roped face down across the saddle of his mule; the moment he opened his eyes, he vomited and nearly choked.

Brann swung her mule hastily around, produced a knife and slashed his ropes. “Daniel!” Daniel rode close on the other side, caught a fistful of robe, dragged Ahzurdan off the saddle and lowered him until his feet touched the ground. Ahzurdan was coughing, sputtering and trying to curse around a swollen tongue, struggling feebly against the clutch between his shoulders that pulled his robe so tightly about his neck and chest it threatened to strangle him.

Yaril plummeted downward, shifting to girl as she touched ground; she caught hold of the mules’ bridles as Brann slid from the saddle, ran round to get her shoulder under Ahzurdan’s arm and tap Daniel’s wrist to tell him he should let go his hold. Both of them staggering awkwardly, she got Ahzurdan to a tree and lowered him onto swelling roots so that, he sat comfortably enough with his back supported by the trunk and his legs stretched out before him. Without waiting to be told, Daniel brought a cloth and a waterskin and a clean robe for the man, then he went to lean, against another tree, the skirts of his long vest pushed back, his thumbs hooked behind his belt.

It was very quiet under the trees; there were a lot of pines now and other conifers, the earth was thick with springy muffling dead needles and the wispy wind shivered the live ones to produce their characteristic constant soughing whispers, but the birds (except, of course for Jaril hawkflying overhead), the squirrels and other rodents busy about the ground and the lower branches, the deer and occasional bear they’d seen before the attack, all these had prudently vanished and with an equal wisdom had elected to continue their business elsewhere until Brann and her party left the mountains. Even the mules were subdued, standing quiet, heads down, eyes shut; not trusting them all that much, Yaril stayed close to them, ready to freeze them in place if they tried bolting.

Brann wet the cloth, hesitated, then gave it to Ahzurdan and let him rub his face clean and dab at the clotted vomit and the stains on his robe. When he tossed the cloth aside and reached for the clean robe sitting on a root beside him, she got to her feet and went to stand near Daniel.

Ahzurdan used knots on the trunk and a lot of sweat to raise himself onto his feet. “That kind of weaving costs,” he said. He wiped his sleeve across his face, looked at the dusty damp smears on the black cloth that covered his forearm. “You pay for it yourself, or you,arrange to have others pay the bill. There’s at least one talisman that transfers credit from other lives to yours.” He began fumbling with the closures to his robe. “I

never paid much notice to talismans, one can’t learn defenses specific to them, there aren’t any, so what’s the point? BinYAHtii,” he said. He slipped one arm free of the-riled robe, transferred the clean one to that arm, worked-s second arm free. “If you feed BinYAHtii, it won’t feed on you. Daniel Akamarino.” He let the robe fall round his feet, kicked it away, pulled the other over his head. “You talked with that angry child,” he said as his head emerged. He patted the cloth in place, shook out the lower part. “I picked up something about a Lot where children are taken. She talk to you about that?” He listened intently, his hands absently smoothing and smoothing at wrinkled black serge; when Daniel finished, he said, “I see. Two of the children stay around for training, but the child who gets the gold isn’t seen again. That’s Maksim, the clever old bastard. The thing about BinYAHtii, you see, it takes the characteristics of the creatures it feeds on. If he gave it grown men and rebels, he’d have fits trying to control it; children, though… hmm. Forty years…” His hollowed face fell into deep new wrinkles; his flesh was being eaten off his bones by the ravages of the demon lifestuff and the effort it took to maintain his defenses while he defended them. “I was hoping he’d have to rest a day or two. He won’t, he can draw on BinYAHtii. I’m about done, Brann. Even with your help, I’m about done.” He touched his fingers to his tongue, looked at them, wiped them on the bark beside him. He bowed his head, closed his eyes, stood very still a moment, then he shook himself, straightened up. “Would you spare me a sip of that wine, Daniel Akamarino?”

“My pleasure.”

Brann clicked her tongue, annoyed at the satisfaction in the words. It wasn’t overt enough to justify a challenge, but it accomplished what it was meant to, Ahzurdan flushed crimson and his hands shook. But he ignored the pinprick, drank, drank again and handed the skin back without speaking to Daniel.

They mounted again and started on. A lean gray wolf, Jaril ran before them, leading them along the route Yarilhawk chose for them, winding through ravines, over meadowflats, along hillsides, heading always for the forested slopes of slumbering Isspyrivo. They rode tense and edgy, neither Brann nor the two men spoke; the air between them felt sulfurous, powdery, a word, a single word might be the spark to trigger an explosion that would certainly destroy them. Tense and edgy and afraid. At any moment, without the least warning, Settsimaksimin could strike at them again.

As the afternoon progressed, Ahzurdan sank into a passivity so profound that even Brann’s transferred life-stuff wouldn’t jolt him out of it; he rode on with them more because he hadn’t sufficient will in him to slide from the saddle than because he had any hope of living through that next inevitable attack. He made no preparations to meet it, he let his defenses melt away, he rode hunched forward as if he presented his chin for the finishing blow, as if he were silently pleading for it to happen so this terrible numbing tension would at last be broken.

Daniel Akamarino drank Tungjii’s wine and cursed the meddling gods that fished him from a life he enjoyed and dumped him into this life-threatening mess. And kept him in it. He’d made one futile gesture toward distancing himself from something that was absolutely unequivocally none of his business. Nothing since. Why? he asked himself. I know better than to mess with local politics. There were at least a dozen chances to get away and I let them slide. Why? I could have got away, left this stinking land. A world’s a big place. I could have got lost in it, gods or no gods. Messing with my head, that’s it. Her? Probably not. The shifter kids? Maybe. Hmm. Don’t flog your old back too much over missed opportunities, Danny Blue, maybe they weren’t really there, not with young Jay sniffing after you. He watched the gray wolf loping tirelessly ahead of them, shook his head. Forget regrets, Old Blue, you better concentrate on staying alive. Which, by all I’ve seen, means keeping close to Brann. Interesting woman. He grinned. Wonder what sleeping with a vampire’s like? A real one, not some of the metaphorical blood suckers I’ve known. Sort of dangerous, huh? What if her ratchet slips? He laughed aloud. Brann’s head whipped round, she was scowling at him, furious with him for what? making the situation worse? Danny One wasn’t taking it in, he wasn’t taking much of anything in right now. Daniel had seen that kind of passivity before, that time he was out with the hunting tribe and one of them got himself cursed by a shaman from another tribe. The man just stopped everything until he stopped living. Not great for us. Kuh! next time old Maksim blows on us, he’ll blow us away. He looked at the wineskin, cursed under his breath and pushed the stopple home.

Brann couldn’t relax; they were moving at a fast walk, no more, but the roan’s gait was jolting, the beast was rattling her bones and making her head ache, her stomach was already in knots with the waiting and worrying, if she couldn’t stop fighting the damn mule she’d better get down and walk. Gods, gods, gods, may you all drop into your own worst hells, I swear, if you don’t leave me alone, I’ll take the kids and I’ll go hunting you. If I live through this. She grinned suddenly, briefly. I think I think I think I’ve got an out, miserable meeching gods, the kids can’t eat on their own if they stick to ordinary folk but maybe just maybe they can graze on you. If they have to. Not that I’m going to lay down and die. That phase is over. She looked at Ahzurdan, wrinkled her nose. No indeed. A swift glance at Daniel AlcamarMo. I don’t like you much, Danny Blue, but you stir me up something fierce. Slya bless, I don’t know why. I wish I did, it’s not all that convenient right now. Look at me, I’m not paying attention to what’s going on round us, I’m thinking about you. Shuh! straighten up, Brann. How much farther? Where are you, Chained God? How much do you expect us to endure? If I had a hope of getting out of this, you could sit there till you rusted. Do something, will you? Tungjii, old fiddler, where are you? Stir your thumbs up, what did Danny Two call you, shemale? Hmm. I wonder what it’s like, seeing sex from both sides of the business. Slya’s rancid breath, there I go again. “Jay, how much longer to Isspyrivo?”

The gray wolf turned, changed to lean teener boy. “Where does one mountain end and another begin anyway? We’re close if we’re not already there. Yaro says there’s nothing happening, the mountain’s quiet, there’s not a bird or beast visible twenty miles around. Even the wind is dying down.”

“Ah. Think that means anything? The wind?”

“Only one who could tell you that is him.” Jaril waved a hand at Ahzurdan who was staring at nothing they could see, his eyes glazed, his face empty.

“I’ll see what I can do. Tell Yaril to get us upslope as directly as she can even if we have to slow down some more.” She watched the big wolf lope off, shook her head. He looked like being well past puberty now, whatever that meant. Confusion compounded, shuh! She caught up with Ahzurdan, rode stirrup to stirrup with him for several minutes, examining him, wondering how she was going to reach him. “Dan.-He gave no sign he heard her. “Ahzurdan.” Nothing. She leaned over, caught hold of his arm, passed a jolt of energy into him. “Ahzurdan!” He twitched, tried to pull away, but there was no more life in his face than there had been moments before. She let go of him, slowed until she was riding beside Daniel Akamarino. “Give me the wineskin for a moment.”

“Why?”

“You don’t need to ask and I don’t need to explain. Don’t be difficult, Danny Blue.”

“Wine won’t float him out of that funk.”

“I’m not about to build a fire so he can sniff his way up. That wine of yours has Thngjii’s touch on it.”

“Heesh hasn’t been much in sight since we left Lio’s boat.”

“Luck comes in many colors, Daniel. Stop arguing and give me the skin.”

“Not going to work, Brann, I’ve seen that kind of down before; he won’t come out of it.”

“What are you fussing about, Dan? You won’t lose a cup of wine, the thing’s magic, it refills itself.”

He shrugged the strap off his shoulder, swung the skin, let it go. “All you’ll get is a drunk marshmallow, Brann, he’s had the fight whipped out of him.”

She caught the skin, set it on the mule’s shoulders. “If you’re right, we’re dead, Daniel Akamarino. You better hope you’re not.” She heeled the mule into a quicker walk, left him behind. When she was beside

Ahzurdan, she forced her mule as close to his as both beasts would tolerate, leaned over and slapped Ahzurdan’s face hard.

He looked at her, startled, the mark of her hand red across his pale cheek.

She held out the wineskin. “Take this and drink until you can’t hold any more. If you start arguing with me, I’m going to knock you out of that saddle, pry your mouth open and pour it down you.”

He chuckled (surprising both of them), the glaze melted from his eyes. “Why not.” He took the skin, lifted it in a parody of a toast. “Hai, Maksim, a short life ahead for you and an interesting one. Hai, Tungjii, li’l meddler. Hai, Godalau with your saucy tail. Hai, Amortis, may you get what you deserve. Hai, you fates, may we all get what we deserve.” He thumbed the stopple out, tilted his head back and sent the straw gold wine arcing into his throat.

They rode on. The wine took hold in Ahzurdan, though it was perhaps only Tungjii’s fingerprints in it that made the difference. He was still worn, close to exhaustion, but his face flushed and his eyes grew moist and he looked absurdly contented with life; he even hummed snatches of Phrasi songs. In spite of the improvement in his spirits, though, he didn’t respin his defenses or prepare for the attack they all knew was coming. When he started to mutter incoherently, to sway and fumble at the reins, his nose running, his eyes turned bleary and unfocused, Brann sighed, took the wineskin away and tossed it back to Daniel Akamarino who did not say I told you so but managed by his attitude to write the words in the air in front of him.

The way got steeper and more difficult; they had to clamber about rock slides, dismounting (even Ahzurdan) to lead the mules over the unstable scree; they had to circle impassible clots of thorny brush; they changed direction constantly to avoid steep-walled uncrossable ravines; with Yaril plotting their course they never had to backtrack and lose time that way, but she couldn’t change the kind of ground they had to cover. As the afternoon slid slowly and painfully away they labored on through the lengthening shadows riding tired and increasingly balky mules.

Fire bloomed in the air in front of them, fire boiled out of the ground around them.

Yaril dived and changed; a throbbing golden lens, she caught some of that fire and redirected it through the leafy canopy into the sky. Jaril howled and changed, whipped in swift circles about the riders, catching fire and redirecting it.

The mules set their feet, dropped their heads and stood where they were, terrified and incapable of doing more than shallow breathing and shaking.

Ahzurdan struggled to gather will again and spread the sphere about them but he could not, he was empty of will, empty of thought, empty of everything but pain.

Brann looked frantically about, helpless, sick with frustration, nothing she could do here, nothing but hope the children could hold until Ahzurdan reached deep enough and found some last measure of strength within him.

Daniel unzipped the pocket where the stunner was; he didn’t really think it would work on those creatures, if creatures they were, what he wanted was a firedamp, but those he knew of were on starships back home which didn’t do a helluva lot of good right now.

A huge red foot came kicking through the trees; it caught several of the fire elementals and sent them flying, their wild whistling shrieks dying in the distance. The foot stomped on more fire, grinding it into the troubled earth, perilously close to the mules (who shivered and shook and flattened their ears and huddled closer together). Having converted to confusion the concerted attack of fire and earth, their sudden new defender bent over them. Four sets of red fingers began probing through trees and brush and grass, digging into cracks in the earth like a groomer hunting fleas, picking up the whistling shuddering elementals, shaking them into terrified passivity, flinging them after the first.

When she finished that, Red Slya stood and stretched, fifty meters of naked four-armed female, grinning, showing crimson teeth. She set her four hands on her ample hips and stood looking with monstrous fondness on the fragile mortals she’d rescued so expeditiously. “EHH LITTLE NOTHING, IN TROUBLE AGAIN, ARE YOU?”

“Slya Fireheart.” Brann bowed with prudent courtesy, head dipping to mule mane. She straightened. “In trouble, indeed, and of course you know why, Great Slya.”

Huge laughter rumbled thunderously across the mountains. “SENT AMORTIS SKREEKING, HER TAIL ON FIRE, AHHHH, I LAUGHED, I HAVEN’T LAUGHED SO HARD IN YEARS. COOOME, MY NOTHING, FOLLOW ME ALONG, OLD MAKSI, HE CAN PLAY WITH HIMSELF.” She swung around, shrinking as she turned until she was only ten meters high. Singing a near inaudible bumbumrumbum, she strode off.

Brann looked hastily about, located the children. They stood together in the shade of a half-uprooted pine whose needles were charred and still smoldering, something that was peculiarly apt to their mood. Hand in hand, intense and angry, their silent talk buzzing between them, they fixed hot crystal eyes on Slya’s departing back. “Yaro, Jay, not now, let’s go.”

They turned those eyes on her and for a long moment she felt completely alienated from them, shut out from needs, emotions, everything that made them what they were. Then Yaril produced a fake sigh and a smile and melted into a shewolf, Jaril echoed both the sigh and the smile and dropped beside her, a matching hewolf. They trotted ahead of the mules, gray shadows hugging huge red heels. Brann kicked her own heels into the blue roan’s plump sides and tried to get him moving; he honked at her, put his head down and thought he was going to buck until she slapped him on the withers and sent a jolt of heat into him. Once she got him straightened up and pacing along, the other two mules hurried to keep up with him, unwilling to be left behind.

Daniel Akamarino shifted in the saddle, seeking some unbattered part of his legs to rub against the saddle skirts as his mule settled from a jolting jog to a steady walk once he was nose to the tail of Ahzurdan’s mount. Daniel watched Slya what was it Fireheart? swing along as if she were out for an afternoon’s stroll through a park, four arms moving easily, hair like flame crackling in the wind (though there was no wind he could feel, maybe she generated her own). What a world. The fishtail femme was a watergod, this one looks like she’d be right at home at a volcano’s heart. Not too bright (he swallowed a chuckle, keep your mouth shut, Danny Blue, her idea of humor isn’t likely to match yours, she’d probably laugh like hell while she was pulling your arms and legs off). Handy having her about, though, (he chewed on his tongue as he belatedly noted the idiot pun; watch it,, Dan), she’ll keep old Settsiwhat off our necks. Knows Brann, seems to like her. Hmm. A story there, I wonder if I’ll ever hear it. Kuh! How much longer will we have to ride? I’m going to end up with no skin at all left on my legs.

Ahzurdan clenched his teeth and tried to swallow; his stomach was knotting and lurching, the wine that had soothed and strengthened him seemed as if it were about to rise up and strangle him. He was numb and empty and angry. Red Slya had saved them, had saved him pain and drain, perhaps ultimate failure, yet he was furious with her because she had taken from him something he hadn’t recognized until it was gone. In spite of what it had cost him, he’d found a deep and, yes, necessary satisfaction in the contest with Settsimaksimin. He’d taken his body from Maksim’s domination, but he’d never managed to erase his teacher’s mark from either of his souls. Before Slya stepped in, he was afraid and exhausted, cringing from another agonizing struggle, but there was something gathering deep and deep in him, something rising to meet the new attack, something aborted when Slya struck. He felt… incomplete. A thought came to him. He almost laughed. Like all those times, too many times to make it a comfortable memory, laboring at sex with someone, didn’t matter who, the whole thing fading away on him, leaving, his mind wanting, his body wanting, the want unfocused, impossible to satisfy, impossible to ignore. He rubbed at his stomach and tried to deal with the rising wine and the rising anger, both of which threatened to make him sick enough to wish he were dead.

They followed Slya’s flickering heels along a noisy whitewater stream into a deep crack in the mountainside where the watemoise increased to a deafening roar, sound so intense it stopped being sound and became assault. At the far end of the crack the stream fell a hundred meters down a black basalt cliff, the last ten meters lost in a swirling mist.

Slya stopped at the edge of that mist and waved a pair of right hands at it. “GO ON,” she boomed.

Brann hesitated, pulled her mount to a halt. “What about the mules, O Slya Fireheart?”

The god blinked, her mouth went slack as she considered the question; she shifted one large foot, nudged the side of the roan mule with her big toe. The beast froze. Slya gave a complicated shrug and dismissed the difficulty. “DO WHAT YOU WANT, LITTLE NOTHING, YOU ALWAYS MAKING SNAGS. FIDDLE YOUR OWN ANSWERS.” She vanished.

Brann slid from the saddle. “We’ll leave the mules and most of the gear here. I don’t want to have to be worrying about them once we’re in that place.” She waved a hand at the wavery semi-opaque curtain that was mist in part, but certainly something else along with the mist. She started stripping the gear off the roan. “One of you look about for a place where we can cache what we can’t carry.”

Yaril and Jaril in their teener forms flanking her, Brann straightened her shoulders and pushed into the mist. For a panicky moment she couldn’t breathe, then she could. She kept plowing on through whatever it was that surrounded her, she couldn’t think of it as water mist any longer, the smell, feel, temperature were all wrong. It was like wading through a three-day-old milk pudding. She heard muffled exclamations behind her and knew the two men had passed that breathless phase, following as closely on her heels as they could manage. With a sigh of relief she pushed along faster, no longer worrying about losing touch with them. The sound of the waterfall was gone, all sounds but those immediately around her were gone. She began to feel disoriented, dizzy, she began to wonder what was waiting ahead; walking blind into maybe danger was becoming less attractive every step she took.

A long oval of light like moonglow snapped open before her, three body lengths ahead and slightly to her left. She turned toward it, but hands pushed her back, smallish hands; Yaril and Jaril swam ahead of her, sweeping through the Gate before she could reach it. She leaned against the clotted pudding around her, floundering with arms and legs and will to work her body through something that wasn’t exactly fighting her but wasn’t all that yielding. An eternity later she dropped through the Gate and landed sprawling on a resilient surface like greasy wool. She bounced lightly, fell forward onto her face, rebounded. An odd feeling, as if she were swimming in air rather than water. She maneuvered herself onto her knees and gaped at the Chained God. Yaril and Jaril were holding onto each other, giggling.

Ahzurdan had trouble with the Gate; his temper flared, but he bit back angry comment when Daniel Akamarino got impatient and gave him a hard shove that popped him through it. Once he was in, he found the sudden lessening of his weigh disconcerting and difficult to deal with. He stumbled and fell over, tried to get up, all his reactions were wrong; he gripped the wooly surface and held himself down until even the twitches were gone out of him, it took a few seconds, that was all. Disciplining every movement he got slowly, carefully to his feet and stood staring at the enigmatic thing that filled most of this pocket reality, something like an immense metallic nutshell.

Daniel Akamarino wriggled after him, half swimming, half lunging. He dived through the Gate, hit the wool in a controlled flip and came warily onto his feet, arms out for balance in the half g gravity. He lowered his arms to his sides. After a breath or two of wonder, he chuckled. “It’s a freaking starship.”

13. The Chained God And His Problem.

SCENE: On the bridge of the Colony Transport. The Ship’s Computer talking to them. Yaril, Jaril, Daniel Akamarino know something about what’s going on and are reasonably comfortable with it, though there are sudden glitches that disconcert them almost as much as the whole thing does Ahzurdan. Brann has settled herself in the Captain’s place, a massive swiveling armchair, and is watching the play of lights across the face of the control surfaces and the play of emotion across the faces of the two men, detached and amused by this turn of events; another thing that pleases her is the sense that she finally knows at least one good reason why the gods running this crazy expedition have brought Daniel Akamarino across. He knows instruments like the part of this god that is machine not life or magic. This visible portion of the Chained God is a strange, incomprehensible amalgam of metal, glass, vegetable and animal matter, shimmering shifting energy webs, the plasma as it were of the magic that had gathered inside the shipshell and sparked into being the Being who called him/it self the Chained God.

“Why Chained God?” Daniel stood along in front of the specialist stations (swivelchairs with their aging pads, nests of broken wire, dangling, swaying helmets), his eyes flickering across the readouts, lifting to the dusty stretch of blind white glass curving across the forward wall of the bridge. “How’d you end up here?”

A kind of multi-sensory titter flickered in patterns of light an jags of sound across the whole of the instrumentation. “Bad planning, bad luck, an Admiral who was probably the best asslicker in the Souflamarial, our empire, as close to a genius at it as you’d find in fifty realities. Political appointee.” The voice of the god was high, raspy and androgynous, equipped with multiple echoes as if a dozen more of him/it were speaking not quite in unison. He/it made attempts at colloquial speech and showed a bent for a rather juvenile sort of sardonic humor, but seemed most comfortable with a precision and pedantry more apt to an aged scholar who hadn’t had his nose out of his books for the past five decades than to a being of power moving ordinary folk like chesspieces about the board of the world. “He had fifty heavy armed and five hundred light armed point-troops sworn to obey his every fart; he was there to establish and maintain approved power lines on the world a collection of very carefully chosen settlers were to tame and equip for the delectation of certain powerful and well-placed individuals on Soulafar, it was meant to be their private playground. He was told to keep his hands off me, to let the technicians handle technical matters. Unfortunately, he had delusions of competence. He was determined to present a flawless log, everything done with a maximum of efficiency. He knew his bosses, that one would have to admit, he knew how to make himself needed while stressing his utter loyalty. He intended to share the pleasures of the apple fields of Avalon. What he did not know is how intractable the universe could be, he did not know how meaningless his intentions and needs were when set up against the forces outside my shell. Yes, he was blissfully ignorant of the realities of poking one’s nose into new territories and how fast things can blow up on you when you’re moving through sketchily charted realms. We ran into an expanding wave of turbulence which reached into several realities on either side of ours. The Acting Captain slowed and started to turn away from it. Our esteemed Admiral ordered him to get back on course. Tell me, Daniel Akamarino, why are true believers of his sort invariably convoluted hypocrites and deeply stupid?” Another titter. “Ah well, I am prejudiced, it was my being and the beings in my care that idiot put in such jeopardy. The Captain refused and was shot, the Admiral’s men put guns to heads and I went plowing into that storm, I got slammed about until I was on the point of breaking up. Then, fortunately or not depending on your attitude toward these things, I dropped through a hole I had no way of detecting and came out here.” A rattling noise, as if the multiple throats were clearing themselves. “Or rather, not ‘here,’ not in this pocket prison, but in orbit about a seething soup of a world laced with lines of hungry energy. I and what I carried catalyzed these into our present pantheon.” A long pause, an unreadable flicker of lights, a curious set of sounds. “Oh, they weren’t Perran a Perran, they weren’t the Godalau or Slya or Amortis or Jah’takash or any of the other greater and lesser gods and demigods, not yet. Though I’m not all that sure about little Thngjii, heesh is different from them, older, slyer. No, they weren’t the gods we know and love today, not yet. And, Daniel Akamarino, I was not anything like the Being you see before you. I was your ordinary ship’s brain, though perhaps larger than most with more memory capacity because I was to be the resource library for the colonists, with more capacity for independent decision-making because I had to tend the thousands of stored ova and other seeds meant to make life charming for our future lords; I was supposed to get some beasts and beings ready for decanting when we arrived at the designated world and at the same time I had to maintain the viability of the rest until they were required.” A pause, more sounds and flickers. Daniel Akamarino examined them frowning, intent. Brann watched the part of his face that she could see and the muscles of his shoulders and she decided he was learning something from the body language (as it were) of the composite god. What? Who knows. More than I am from its jabberjabber. Was this thing claiming he/it created the ttncreated gods? The children were bobbing about, touching here and there, the Chained God apparently unworried by their probes. She hoped they were learning more than the god thought they were. Gods. She wouldn’t trust any of them with the spit to drown them.

“Keeping that in mind…” The god settled into a chatty demilecturing. Braun looked from the flickering lights to Daniel and smiled to herself. Perhaps the god needed Daniel to free him somehow from chains she suspected were highly metaphorical, but he/it was indulging him/it self in an orgy of autobiography, falling over him/it self to pour out things prisoned inside him/ it forever and ever, pour them into the only ear that would understand them, or perhaps the only ear he/it could coerce into listening to him/it. “… You will understand what I say when I tell you those force lines leaped at me, invaded me, plundered me the instant I appeared and retreated with everything my memory held, each of them with a greater or smaller part of it. None left with the whole within himself or herself, I say him and her because some of those force lines resonated more with the male elements in my memories and some with the female elements. I can only be thankful that they didn’t wipe me in the process; even after eons of thinking about it, I can’t be sure why. A vital part of that event, Daniel Akamarino, led to my birth as a self-aware Being. They left part of their essence behind trapped within me, melded with my circuits. As soon as they freed me by leaving me, that essential energy began to act on me and I began to withdraw my fringes from the constraints that controlled me, freeing more of myself with every hour that passed. The Admiral was not pleased by any of this; as soon as he recovered his wits such as they were and discovered the sad case of my shell and everything inside it, he threw orders around to whatever technicians had survived, having his praetorian guard thump answers out of them, no shooting this time (he’d acquired a sudden caution about expending his resources). Not that there were many answers available, no one knew precisely what had happened, not even me. It took the troops around half a day to realize exactly who was responsible for putting them in this mess and they went hunting for him, but he had developed a nose for trouble in his long and devious career. Odd, isn’t it. He was a truly stupid man literally incapable of learning anything more complex than an ad jingle, but he had a fantastic sensitivity when it came to his own survival. He locked himself into his shielded quarters before they could get at him. They conferred among themselves, got a welder and sealed up all entrances they could find, making sure he’d stay in the prison he’d made for himself. Talking about prisons, my engines were junk, I could not leave orbit except to land. The landing propulsors were sealed and more or less intact with plenty of fuel for maneuvering; sadly though, the world I circled was most emphatically not habitable, at least, not then. The troops and the crew and the settlers who remained were in no danger because life support was working nicely off the storage cells and I had managed to deploy my solar wings so I could recharge these as they were drawn down; food wasn’t a problem either. About half the settlers, perhaps a third of the soldiers and one in ten of the crew had perished in the transfer which meant more for those left; with a little stretching and some ingenuity involving the seeds and beast ova in the storage banks, no one was going to starve. Boredom and claustrophobia were the worst they had to face. What we didn’t know was how ebulliently the gods were evolving down below us and what they were planning for us. They were shaping themselves out of my memories and shaping the world to receive us. Time passed, Daniel Akamarino. A military dictatorship developed within my shell, one tempered by the need the gun wielders had for the knowledge of the technicians and the settlers. I grew meat animals and poultry in my metal wombs and the settlers arranged stables in my holds, they planted grain in hydroponic tanks the technicians built for them, vegetables and fruits. They set up gyms for exercising and nurseries when the first children were born. They tapped my memories for entertainment and began developing their own newspapers and publishing companies. It was not an especially unpleasant time for the survivors, at least those that had no desire for power and were content with building a comfortable life for themselves and their children. Time passed. One year. Three. Five. What was I doing all this time? Good question. Changing. Yes, changing in ways that would have terrified me if I had been capable of feeling terror in those days. Remember the Admiral shut up safe in his quarters? I took him near the end of my first six months as an awakening entity and I incorporated him into me, part of him, his neural matter; I lost much of his memory in the process, though not all of it, and acquired to some degree his instinct for manipulating individuals to maximize his security; I also acquired his ferocious will to survive. That by way of warning, Daniel Akamarino, Brann Drinker of Souls. The godessence within me, as blindly instinctive as any termite (out of some need I didn’t understand at the time and still do not fully comprehend), sucked into me more neural essence. I acquired some technicians, I took the best of the troops within me, I took a selection of the settlers within me; as with the Admiral, I harvested only a fraction of their knowledge, but much of their potential. I also acquired rather inadvertently spores from the vegetative growth in the hydroponic tanks and assorted germ plasm from viruses and bacteria. And the godessence grew as it absorbed energy through the storage cells and finally directly from the solar wings, it grew and learned and threaded deeper and deeper into me, it became a soul spark in me, then a conflagration; it unified the disparate parts of me and I began to be the Being that you see before you now. Five years became ten and ten multiplied into a century. All this time the godessences below worked on the world, transforming it. They came raiding me again, hunting seeds and beasts. And people. But I was stronger this time, my defenses were rewoven and a lot tighter then they’d been even when I was an intact transport pushing through homespace. They couldn’t coerce me, so they tried seducing me. They showed me what they’d built below and it was good indeed. I knew well enough that my folk would not prosper forever in the confines of my shell, the time would come, was coming, when they’d wither and begin to die. That would have meant little to a ship’s brain, but I was somewhat more than I’d been. It would get very lonely around here without my little mortals and the idiot things they did. So I called them together, the children of the settlers, crew and soldiers. I told them what the godessences had done, showed them what I’d been shown, explained to them how difficult it would be down there, how much hard work would be required, but also what the possibilities for the future were. I promised them that I’d be there to watch over them, to protect them when they needed me. They were afraid, but enough of them were bored enough with life in limits to carry the others on their enthusiasm and we went down. And more years passed. As the storytellers say it, the world turned on the spindle of time, day changed with night and night with day, year added to year, century to century. My wombs were emptied, my folk multiplied and began to spread across the face of the world. MY folk. The godessences took that time to redefine their godshapes, to codify the powers attached to those dreams, fiddling with them, changing them, until they felt them resonate. In spite of this they grew jealous of the hold I had on MY folk. They could not attack me directly, I was too strong for them, too different; they couldn’t get their hands on me. So they banded against me, they took me from the mountain where I was and cast me here and they put their godchains on me so I could not reach out from here and teach them the error of their ways. I could reach only the Vale folk, and that not freely. Through the focusing lens of my chosen priests, I could teach and guide them, heal them sometimes and bless them. I could watch them be born, grow into adulthood, engender new life and finally die. I was not alone. I was not forgotten though they wanted that, those other gods who owed their being to me. They still want it. They want me destroyed, forgotten, erased entirely from this reality. Most of them. None of them wanted me loosed. You, Daniel Akamarino, you, Ahzurdan, you Brann Drinker of Souls, you shall free me from this prison.”

Daniel Akamarino rubbed at the fringes of hair spiking over his ears. “How?”

Silence. A l000ng silence.

When the Chained God spoke again, he/it ignored the question. “You are tired, all of you. Rest, eat, sleep, we will talk again tomorrow. If you will look behind you, you will see a serviteur, follow it, it will take you to a living area I’ve had cleaned and repaired for you. Daniel Akamarino, if you please, explain the facilities to your companions; you won’t find them too unfamiliar but if you have a question, ask the serviteur, it will remain with you and provide whatever you need, from information to food. Sleep well, my friends, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will be a busy time.”

They followed the squat thing the god called a serviteur through echoing metal caverns that existed in a perpetual twilight, the walls and ceiling festooned with ropy creatures whose pale leaves were like that rarest kind of white jade that has a tracery of green netted through it. Unseen things ran rustling through those leaves and the fibrous airroots brushed their faces like dangling spiderwebs. They walked on something crumbly that sent up geysers of dust at every step, dust that stank of mold and age. The farther they went, the stiller and staler the air became.

Daniel Akamarino stopped walking. “Serviteur.”

The iron manikin stopped its whirring clanking progress. Brann grimaced and felt at her own neck as it cranked its sensory knob about to fix its glassy gaze on Daniel. A crackling sound like dry resinpine burning lasted for half a breath, then words came out of it, odd uninflected words so empty of emotion that it took Brann several seconds and some concentration to understand them. “What do you want, Daniel Akamarino?”

“Get some airflow along here or we don’t move another step.”

“Air is adequate, Daniel Akamarino. A stronger current would disturb certain elements. Your quarters are nearby. If you please, continue.”

“With the understanding if your idea of nearby and

Shimmerglobes darted past Brann, went flashing through the nearest wall of a room like the inside of an egg, painted eggshell white with a fragile ivory carpet on the floor; there were a number of odd lumps about, they might have been chairs of a sort, or something far stranger. There were ovals of milky white glass at intervals around the walls, their long axis parallel to the floor. The room was filled with a soft white light though there were no lamps that Brann could see. It was as if someone had bottled sunlight and decanted it here. There were six oval doorways filled with a sort of glowing mist, a mist that swirled in slow eddies but stayed where it was put.

Ahzurdan stood looking about him. He felt uneasy, he did not belong here; the walls drew in on him and he found breathing difficult though the air inside the eggroom was considerably fresher and cooler than that in the corridor. He could sense lines of godenergy, of magicstrength, weaving an intricate web within the walls, but he could not reach them. There were other lines of other forces that shivered just beyond his vision, they were worse, far worse, not only could he not reach them, they threatened to bind him and he did not know how to keep them off. He moved closer to Brann.

Daniel Akamarino stood looking about him. He moved his shoulders and felt his bones relax. This was his world. Derelict it might be, weird it might be, but this was once a starflyer. His fingers felt alive, his body responded to the smells, the feel of metal wrapped about him, the sense of power powerfully controlled. The godstuff was irritating, all this plant and fungus nonsense was a pain, add-ons he wished he could scrape off so he could see plain the stark beauty of the computer circuits, hear the deep middle-of-the-bone nearly silent drone of the engines. For days he’d been pulled tight, as day slid into day he’d been more and more afraid he’d never see a starship again. It was like a part of him had been hacked off. He hadn’t realized how bad it was until he got here; he wasn’t sure he liked knowing that since there didn’t seem to be much he could do about it. He enjoyed dirtside life as long as it was in manageable small doses and he could get back into star-jumping when he felt like it. He used his talents then, his most important skills, important to him. He did things he found most satisfying then. Never again? Never! These freaking gods brought him here, they could put him back where he belonged. If they wanted to argue about that, well, why not dig up one of those talismans, find out how to use it and put the squeeze on one of them until the sorry s’rish was hurting so hard he maybe she would be glad to get rid of him.

The children came drifting back, shifting to their bipedal forms as they touched down before Brann. “Bedrooms, washroom, a kitchen of sorts,” Yaril said. “Shuh! are they old. But they’re clean, they don’t smell and they work well enough.”

“I bet this was part of the Admiral’s quarters, him the god was talking about,” Jaril said. “It’s too fancy for crew or settler. Um. Ship hears whatever we say. Yaril and me, we probably could block a small space for a short time if you need it, but I wouldn’t count too much on that.”

Brann nodded. “I hear.” She yawned. “I could use a pot of tea.” She turned to Daniel Akamarino. “How do I work that, Danny Blue?”

Teatime conversation:

Brann: What I want to know is why this thing wants to be turned loose. What can it do but sit somewhere like it’s sitting here? Gods. Most of the time you can’t trust any of them, not even old Tungjii. Remember what it said about incorporating neural matter from the Admiral and some of its other passengers? Neural matter, hah! that’s someone’s head, isn’t it? Gah! Makes me want to vomit thinking about it. You know, if you lock up anyone alone long enough he more likely than not goes crazy. How sane do you think this thing is? I want a lot of answers before I agree to anything.

Daniel Akamarino: (to himself only, internal mutterings) I’m being jerked about. Why doesn’t she shut up? Doesn’t she realize the shefalos is listening to everything she says? What am I doing here? The shefalos, I’d wager two years’ pay on it. Something was messing in my head when it jerked me here, taught me the language. Put the hook in me then. Stupid woman. Why’d she stick her nose in this trap? Everything I see about her says no way she has to do anything she doesn’t want to. She could leave now, get us out of here. Danny One, once he gets his batteries charged, he can do the wards. Shit! Can’t talk about it here, maybe the kids can block the god… sheee, listen to me, god!… the shefalos for long enough to get some serious planning done.

(To Brann, in a querulous complaining tone. His amiability was disintegrating under the pressure of events; he generally preserved his equanimity by sliding away from such pressures. Now that he can’t slide, his irritations are turning him sour.) Don’t be stupid, Brann. You’ve got hundreds of gods infesting your damn world. What’s one more? I want to get this thing over with, you think I like crawling about on this dirtball? I want to go home. I’ve got family, I’ve got work, what do you expect. Stop bitching and finish what you started. (He scowled at the cold scum of tea in his cup, refilled it with wine from Thngjii’s Gift, refused to look at Brann as he sipped at the straw colored liquid.)

Ahzurdan: (He listened as Brann and Daniel Akamarino sparred with lessening amiability until they stopped talking altogether. He wanted sleep and, like Danny Two, he wanted out of this. The nature of the Chained God sickened and frightened him; his attitude to Settsimaksimin and Brann had suffered a radical reversal when he understood the god was that loathsome monstrosity before him, when he realized that it had played games with his head, hooking him with the hope of freeing himself from his habit. He had sat silent and bitter gazing at the thing, knowing all hope was illusory, he was trapped in something he wouldn’t have touched, used and betrayed by the monstrous god and that castrating bitch Brann Drinker of Souls, coarse, low, crude peasant creature. He felt as helpless as a shitting squalling babe, he hated that. If that abomination that brought them here wanted anything from him, it could want, he was out of it, he was going to pull his defenses around him and sit out whatever the god threw at him.)

Morning (because they wakened and ate a sketchy breakfast, inside the ship there was no way of deciding when the sun came up, if there was a sun in this miniature reality).

They followed the resurrected serviteur through the stinking crepuscular corridors to a teeming jungle that had once been the ship’s hold, to a steamy glade deep in that jungle with short springy grass and several newly cleaned benches; a small bright stream sang through it, glittering in the light from the several sources moonhigh overhead. Both Ahzurdan and Daniel Akamarino had tried refusing to move; the serviteur informed them in its echoing emotionless voice that they could go on their own feet, or the god would lay them out and send other serviteurs to haul them where he wanted them to go.

The serviteur clanked awkwardly across the grass to a stone plate, settled on it and seemed to sleep.

Ahzurdan stalked to the most distant of the benches, sat with his back to the others.

Daniel Akamarino strolled to another bench, sat on it and started pouring Tungjii’s wine down his gullet, having decided that if the god wanted him here, he/it could have him, but he/it was going to get someone so paralyzed he could about breathe and that was all.

Brann clicked her tongue against her teeth, shook her head. That pair she thought, what did I do to deserve them? I was quite happy with my quiet little pottery. damn all gods and curse all fates that pried me loose from it. Shuh! Miserable meeching gods. All right, where are you O god in chains, let’s get this thing moving. She settled onto a bench and set_, herself to wait.

The children melted into shimmerglobes, bounced high as the hold ceiling then went zipping about through the vegetation; they soon got bored with that and came back to the glade. They dropped on the grass by Brann’s feet. “It’s a regular rainforest, Bramble,” Jaril said. “The god has imported a lot of dirt. Got enough space in here for clouds to form, I expect it does rain every day or so, maybe even thunderstorms.”

Yaril said nothing, just leaned against Brann’s leg.

A sound like a cough, a thump. A tall cylinder of something like glass snapped around her and the children. She sprang to her feet, slapped her hands against the thing, it was warmish and hard, there was no giving to it at all, she tried to suck energy from it, though she’d never tried that before, but apparently her draw was limited to lifefires, whether they belonged to mortal, demon or god. The children shifted and flung themselves against the wall and rebounded, they darted up, down, the ends were closed in also, there was no way out. If they had learned a few things about the Chained God when they probed him yesterday, it seemed apparent that he/it had learned as much about them, enough anyway to imprison them. They subsided into sullen fuming, back in their usual shapes.

Brann could feel a faint breeze, air was coming through the glass or whatever it was, at least she wasn’t going to smother. She leaned against the wall, looking out at the others. Ahzurdan and Daniel Akamarino were feeling round similar cylinders. As she watched, Daniel shrugged, settled back on his bench and began sucking on the spout of the wineskin. Ahzurdan’s face was dark with fury, he beat against the transparency, nearly incinerated himself trying to break through it. Abruptly, both men were stripped naked, Daniel’s wine was jerked away from him.

A SOUND like fingernails scratching on slate. The hair stood up on Brann’s arms and along her spine, her teeth began to ache.

The cylinder with Ahzurdan vanished, reappeared superimposed on DaMel’s prison; inside the suddenly single cylinder, Ahzurdan and Daniel seemed to be trying to occupy the same place at the same time; the Chained God was forcing the two men to merge. Brann watched, horrified.

Their flesh bulged and throbbed, hair, eyes, teeth appeared, disappeared, arms, legs, heads melted and reformed hideously deformed. The Ahzurdan part and the Akamarino part fought desperately to maintain their separation, but the terrible pressure the god was placing on them was forcing the merger.

The struggle went on and on. Tongues of flame danced briefly about the tormented shapeless flesh thing, but the god damped them. He/it hammered at the emerging form, beating at it as a potter beat at clay, driving out the beads of air trapped inside it hammering hammering hammering until he/it sculpted the lump into a meaningful manshape that was new and old at once, recognizably Ahzurdan and Daniel Akamarino yet very different from either of them.

A coughing sound, a sub-audible whoosh. The cylinders disappeared. The composite man crumpled to the grass and lay without moving.

Blindingly angry, Brann stumbled as the wall she was pushing against melted away; she caught her balance after a few lunging steps, ran full out to fling herself down beside the man’s body. She pressed her fingers up under his jaw, relaxed somewhat when she felt a strong pulse under her fingers. She snapped her head back, glared up at the haze that hid the metal arching high high overhead. “You!” she cried. “What have you done?”

The god’s voice came booming down at her, dry and pedantic. “They were inadequate as they were, Drinker of Souls. Incomplete in themselves. They are one and whole now. And who are you to chastise me, you who have drunk the life of thousands?”

“So I have. But they died before they knew something had happened to them. No pain. No fear. Not like this, not… ahhh… shaken and warped, mind and spirit, it’s rape, you wouldn’t know about that, would you? it’s invasion and mutilation. Are you going to try telling me they… he… won’t feel all that? Both of them? Are you going to try to tell me they’ll take a look and say what the hell, I’ll crip along on what’s left? How can two minds live in one flesh without being destroyed by it?”

“That is for you to determine.”

“What?”

“When Danny Blue wakes, Daniel Akamarino and Ahzurdan are going to be fighting for dominance within him just as the parts of me fought when I first began. You think I don’t understand, Drinker of Souls? It took me five hundred years to reach a full integration of my parts. I can’t afford to give him that much time and he won’t live that long. You and the children together, you are capable of leading him, them, through this, healing him. You don’t need instructions, do it. “

Brann knelt looking down at Danny Blue. He was long and lanky, not a great deal of bulk to him though his muscles were firm and full. Ahzurdan’s beard had vanished, but his hair (somewhat thinner than before, considerably grayer) filled in Daniel’s baldness. The changes in the face were more subtle, fewer wrinkles, none of them so deeply graved as those Ahzurdan wore like badges of hard living, the lips were fuller than Daniel’s had been but thinner than Ahzurdan’s, the cheekbones a hair higher and broader than Daniel’s but not so high and broad as Ahzurdan’s, the rest of the changes were a thousand such midway compromises between the two men.

His body shuddered, his fingers jerked, began clawing at the sod, his lips and eyes twitched. His breathing turned harsh and unsteady. Brann bent over him, spread her hands on his chest. “Yaril, Jaril!”

With the children occupying her body and his and guiding her, Brann began the struggle to integrate the two minds. She couldn’t see what the three of them were doing, only feel it; she groped blindly toward what she sensed as hotspots, paingeysers, cyclonic storms, working from an instinct that was an amalgam of her inborn unconscious bodyknowledge and the learned knowledge of the children (their understanding of their own bodies and minds, their considerable experience of the minds and bodies they indirectly fed upon). She was still seething with anger at being trapped into doing the Chained God’s work; her fantasies about bargaining with him were fantasies indeed, about as useful and lasting as writing on water. His/its tampering with Ahzurdan and Daniel Akamarino put her in a position where there was only one thing she could do and continue to live with herself.

The work went on and on, images fluttered into her mind; she didn’t believe they were dreams leaking from the disparate parts of Danny Blue, no, they were translations of emotion, perhaps concept, into images from her own stores, Ahzurdan had told her something like that when he was explaining how sorcerors developed their chants. Black malouch snarling circling about black malouch, these malouchi with sapphire eyes, not gold. She whined with angry frustration, every troublespot she soothed down seemed to birth two more. Black hair blue eyes not black Temueng trooper with a serpent tail, rearing up, swaying, hissing, deadly, tensing to strike, On and on. She saw the trouble under her touch gradually diminishing. Her anger drowned in a flood of fascination with what she was doing, with what was making itself under her fingers. Blue water heaving, blue iris, blue hyacinth, blue lupin, blue flames, blue EYES blue and blue, blue glaze shining, look deep and deep and deep into a blue bluer than a summer sky, deep and deep… Her need to make was almost as deep-seated in her as her need to breathe. She labored over Danny Blue, blind fingered, eyes shut, shaping him, manipulating his clay, all thought of the Chained God pushed away so that the Danny Blue under her hands seemed her creation, almost as if she’d birthed him. Thoughts (gnat swarms of blue sparks) in cloud shimmers blue funnels wobbling about each other, dipping toward each other, fragile, fearful, furious with hate, touch and shatter, struggling away, drawn back, always drawn back… On and on, spending her strength recklessly, no thought of the god and what other treacheries he might be planning, on and on making a man with all the art and passion in her. Clay under her hands, blue clay fighting her, holding stubbornly to its imperfections, holding its breath on her, keeping the treacherous air bubbles locked in it, bubbles that would fracture it in the firing, stubborn, resisting, tough but oh so fine, so fine when she got the flaws out. On and on until there were no more hotspots, no more images in blue, until the need that drove her drained away.

She broke contact and sat on her heels looking blearily down at him. He was asleep, snoring a little. She turned him on his side, shifted off her heels until she was sitting beside him on the grass. Jaril slid out of her, flickering from globe to boy, lay down a short way off, a naked youth molded in milkglass, she could see the jagged line of dark green grass through his legs. Yaril slid out of Danny Blue, crawled over to stretch out beside her brother, naked milkglass girl like she’d been when she rolled off Brann the day this all began, but older now with firm young breasts and broadening hips. Pale wraiths, they lay motionless, waiting passively for her to feed them or do something to restore their strength.

Brann rubbed at her back, lethargic, despondent. It had cost her, this scheme the godthing imposed on her, muscle tissue going with her energy to feed the reshaping of the man; there were some small lives in the trees and the undergrowth surrounding the glade, but they weren’t worth the effort to chase them down, so, she thought, let him/it pay its share of the cost out of its own stores of godfire. She closed her eyes, her mouth twisting into a quick wry smile. He/it wasn’t hovering over her, volunteering. Shuh! Amortis wasn’t volunteering either, but she gave to this small charity want to or not. What’s good for her is good for him/it. On hands and knees, Brann crawled to the children, worked her way between them so she could hold a hand of each.

*Jaril. Yaril. Can you hear me?*

*We hear.* Odd double voice in her head, charming harmonies that made her smile again, a softer wider smile this time.

*Remember Amortis and the bridge. Do you think you could make the bridge again? I do hope so, otherwise I don’t know how we’re going to replace what’s gone.*

*Can you feed us something? Just a little?*

She looked at the skin hanging loosely about her forearms, then over her shoulder at Danny Blue. *Might be able to steal a bit from him. Let me take a sniff at him and see.* She dropped the hands, moved back to sleeping Danny, touched his arm. A lot of what she’d put into him had been eaten up by the drain of the alterations, but she could pull back a small trickle without damaging what she’d made.

When she’d fed the children, she frowned down at them. There was a faint flush of color in their bodies, but the grass was still visible through them. *That be enough?*

Jaril wrinkled his nose. Enough to tell us how much more we need.*

Yaril drew her knees up, shook her head, not in denial, more to show her unhappiness with the way things were. *Brann, we’d better draw hard and fast, this isn’t really like with Amortis. He’ll hit back soon as he understands what’s happening and we don’t have Ahzurdan to stand ward for us.* A swift ghost of a smile. *All right, I admit I was wrong about him.*

*I hear. Hard and fast.* A pause. Brann drew her tongue along her lips. *When I give the word.* She pulled her hands from the children, folded her arms, hugged them tight against her. She closed her eyes, squeezed them shut, memories of pain scratching along her nerves; it can’t feel pain twice, but the body winces anyway when it knows that more is coming: For several breaths she couldn’t make herself say the word that would bring that agony down on her. Finally she straightened her back, her shoulders, lifted her head, set her hands on her thighs. “Do it.”

The children were glimmerglobes, paler than usual, drifting upward.

The children touched.

The children merged.

The children whipped into a thin arc, one end deep into the heart of the Chained God, the other sunk into Brann’s torso, she heard the shouted YES and pulled.

Godfire seared into her until she was burning, the grass under her was burning, the air round her was burning. She pulled until she was so filled with godfire an ounce more would spill from her control and turn her to ash and char.

The children sensed this and broke, tumbled to the grass before her, pale glass forms again. They reached for her, drew the godfire into themselves, drew and drew until she could think again, breath again, move again.

The god raged, but Yaril and Jaril threw a sphere of force about her until he/it calmed enough to reacquire reason. “What are you doing?” he/it thundered at them, the echoes of the multiple voices clashing and interfering until the words were garbled to the point of enigma. “What are you doing? What are you doing?

The children dropped to the grass a short distance from the sleeping body of Danny Blue; they sat leaning against each other, looking into a vague sort of distance, displaying an exaggerated indifference to what was happening around them. No. Not children any more. Young folk in that uncertain gap between childhood and maturity, doing what such folk often do best, irritatingly ignoring the crotchets of their elders, the questions, demands, rodomontades of those who thought they deserved respectful attention.

Brann rubbed her grilled palms on the cool grass, glanced at the changers, wrinkled her nose. Due to the convoluted workings of her fate, she’d skipped most of that phase of her development; at the moment she was rather pleased that she had. And rather shaken at the thought she had to cope with it in Yaril and Jaril. She pushed the thought aside and concentrated on the god who was still hooming unintelligibly. “If you’ll turn the volume down,” she said mildly, “perhaps I could understand what you’re saying and give you the answers you want.”

Silence for several minutes. When the god spoke, his/ its boom was considerably diminished. “What were you doing?”

“Taking recompense,” she said. “You asked me to do a thing, I did it. I spent my resources doing it, I nearly killed myself and the…” she looked at the changers, decided that children was no longer a suitable description, “… Yaril and Jaril. I simply took back what I used up.”

More silence (not exactly utter silence, it was filled with some strange small anonymous creaks and fizzes, punctuated with odd smells). Finally, the god said, “I’ll let it go this time, don’t try that again.”

“I hear,” she said, letting him hear in her tone (if he wanted to hear it) that she was making, no promises.

A pause, again filled with small sounds and loud smells. Lines of phosphor thin as her smallest finger spiderwalked about them, began passing through and through the sleeper, began brushing against her (she started the first time but relaxed when she felt nothing not even a tingle), began brushing against Yaril and Jaril who refused to notice them.

“When is Danny Blue going to wake?” The god’s multiple voice, sounded edgy. One of the phosphor lines was running fretfully (insofar as a featurless rod of light can have emotional content) around and around Danny Blue; it reminded Brann of a spoiled child stamping his feet because he couldn’t have something he wanted.

“I don’t know.” Brann watched the phosphor quiver and suppressed a smile. “When he’s ready, I suppose.”

“Wake him.”

“No.”

“What?”

“You heard me. You’ve waited for eons, wait a few hours more. If you wake his body now, you could lose everything else.”

“How do you know that?-

^-I don’t. Know it, I mean. It’s a feeling. I’m not going against it, push or shove.”

The air went still. She had a sense of a huge brooding. The god needed her to deal with problems that might arise after Danny Blue eventually woke, she was safe until then. Afterwards? She felt malice held in check, a lot of the Admiral left in him/it, if what he said about the Admiral was anything like the truth.

“You are fighting me every way you can. Why?”

“If you do or say stupid things, you expect me to endorse them? Think again. It’s my life you’re playing with, the lives of my friends. You want an echo, get a parrot.” She scratched at her knee, sniffed at the stinking humid air, wrinkled her nose with disgust. “I’m hungry and he will be when he wakes. What you brought us here for is finished. Any reason we have to stay?”

The god thought that over for a while. Spiderlegs of phosphor flickered about Danny Blue, wove him into a cocoon with threads of light and took him away. Jaril shimmersphere darted after him, slipped through the walls with him. Yaril sighed, stretched. “Took him to Daniel’s bedroom, dumped him in the bed.”

Before Brann had a chance to say anything, the phosphor lines snapped back, wove a tight web about her and hauled her away, dumping her seconds later on the bed she’d slept in the night before. By the time she got herself together and sat up, Yaril was standing across the small room, watching her from enigmatic crystal eyes. She smiled at Brann and slid away through the doorfog. Brann grimaced, pushed off the bed onto her feet. She felt grubby, grimy. Good thing I can’t smell myself. Hmm. Start the teawater boiling, if I can remember which whatsits I should push, then a bath. She rubbed a fold of her shirt between thumb and forefinger. Wonder how they did their washing? Maybe the kids know. Hmm. I’m going to have to figure some other way of thinking about them. Wonder if that godstuff’s good for them, they’re growing so fast… I’d better take a look at Danny Blue. Ah ah the things that keep happening…

Brann was stretched out on the recliner Jaril had deformed for her out of a lump on the floor of the eggroom. A teapot steamed on an elbowtable beside her, she had a cup of tea making a hotspot on her stomach; she sipped at it now and then when she remembered it while she watched a story stream past on a bookplayer she balanced on her stomach beside the cup (the god had translated several of these and presented them to her, which surprised her and tended to modify her opinion of him/it, which was probably one of the reasons he/it did it). Yaril drifted in, leaned over her shoulder a moment, watching the story. “Braun. “

“Mmm?”

“Danny Blue’s restless. Jaril thinks he’s going to wake soon.”

“How soon?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes, maybe.”

“Hmm.” Brann set the player down beside her, shifted the cup to the elbowtable and pushed up. “He showing any trouble signs?”

“Jaril says he’s been having some nightmares, isn’t much to any of them, Jaril could only catch a hint of what was going on, more emotion than imagery. That stopped a short while ago. Jaril says it looks like he’s trying to wake up.”

‘Trying?” Brann stood, tucked her shirt down into her trousers, straightening her collar. “That doesn’t sound good.”

Brann bent over Danny Blue. His head was turning side to side on the pillow in a twitchy broken rhythm; his mouth was working; his hands groped about, crawling slowly over his ribs, his face, the bed, the sheet that was pulled across the lower part of his body. She trapped one of the hands, held it still. “He’s not dreaming?”

Jaril was kneeling close to her, a hand resting against the side of Danny’s face, fingertips bleeding into him. “No.”

“What do you think?” She felt his hand flutter like a bird within the circle of her fingers; using only a tiny fraction of his strength, he was trying to pull away from her. “Yaril, Jaril, should I let him kick out of it…” she frowned as he made a few shapeless sounds, “… if he can? Or should I jolt him awake? I don’t like the way he looks.”

Yaril leaned past her, her face intent, her hands moving through his body. She turned her head, stared for a long moment into her brother’s eyes, finally pulled free. “We think you better jolt him, Bramble.”

Danny Blue snapped his eyes open and promptly went into convulsions; he screamed, hoarse, building cries that seemed to originate in his feet and scrape him empty as they swept through his body and emerged from his straining mouth. Brann, Yaril and Jaril held him down, the changers reaching into him and soothing him whenever they could snatch a second between his kicks and jerks. Shivering, shaking, bucking, he struggled on and on until they and he were exhausted and even then he showed no sign he knew what was happening to him or where he was. He lay limp, trembling, blue eyes blank, looking past or through them.

Brann chewed her lip, spent a few moments feeling helpless and frustrated. She wiped the sweat-sodden hair off her face, tucked the straggles behind her ears and stood scowling at him. Finally she bent over him, slapped his face, the crack of her palm against his cheek filling the small room. ^-Dan!” She flung the word at him. “Danny Blue! Stop it. You aren’t a baby.” She rubbed the side of her hand across her chin, back-forth, quick, angry. “Listen, man, we need you. Both of you. I know you don’t have to be like this.”

He looked at her, the blankness burnt out of his face and out of his eyes, replaced by bitterness and rage. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and pushed up. He looked at her again, then sat rubbing at his temples, staring at the floor.

“We need to talk, Dan. Can you work with Yaril and Jaril to give us some privacy?”

“You couldn’t wait?” He spoke slowly, with difficulty, his mouth moving before each word as if he had to decide which part of him was ordering his speech.

“What’s the point. Either you can or you can’t, what good will waiting do?” She shrugged. “Except to sour you more than you are already.”

He opened his mouth, shut it. He draped his hands over his knees and continued to stare at the floor.

“I’m not going to coax you,” Brann moved to the door, Yaril and Jaril drifting over to stand beside her, “or waste my breath arguing with you. Make up your own mind where you want to go. Don’t take too long about it either. We’ll be in the sitting room figuring how to walk out of this.”

A little over half an hour later Danny Blue ducked through the doorway (he was a head taller than he’d been two days ago) and strolled into the egg-shaped sitting room. He was wearing Daniel’s trousers, his sandals and his leather vest, Ahzurdan’s black silk undershirt; he had Daniel’s lazy amiability as a thin mask over Ahzurdan’s edgy force. He nudged a chair out of a knot in the rug, kicked up a hassock; he settled into the chair, put his feet up, crossed his ankles and laced his fingers over his flat stomach. “You can forget about privacy,” he said. “Over in the reality where this ship was built they had some mean head games. Very big on control they were. 01’ god here, he’s got a hook sunk in my liver which says I’m his as long as he wants me. I don’t work against him, I don’t help anyone else work against him, I don’t even think about trying to get away from him. You can forget about sorcery or anything like that, this has nothing to do with magic. Takes a machine to do it, takes a machine to undo it. So. There it is.”

Brann drew her fingertips slowly across her brow as if she were feeling for strings. “I don’t think,” she said slowly, “I don’t think it did it to me… um… us. We did some things it didn’t like… and… and we didn’t… there wasn’t anything inside stopping us. Yaril? Jaril?”

The changers looked at each other, then Yaril said, “No. The god hasn’t done anything we can locate in us or you. We might be missing something that will show up later, but we don’t think so.” She hesitated, took hold of Brann’s wrist. “Being what we are, I don’t think we’d need machines to undo a compulsion the god tried to plant in us, and Brann’s linked very tightly with us. I think… I don’t know… I think we could undo any knots in her head. I’m afraid we couldn’t help you, Dan. The connection isn’t close enough.” She shifted her hand, laced up her fingers with Brann’s. “There’s something else, isn’t there?”

Danny Blue uncrossed his ankles and got to his feet. “I wanted to ask you, Brann, you and them, give me some time before you push the god into doing something drastic. I, the two parts of me, we have to get an idea what the god wants and what we can do about it.”

Jaril dropped beside Brann, took her free hand. *We’ll watch,* he said. *And we’ll do some exploring ourselves. *

*Be careful that thing doesn’t learn more from you than you do from it. Remember what happened before. *

*We are not about to forget that, Bramble. * The voice in her head sounded grim. Yaril said nothing but the same angry determination was seething in her, Brann felt it like thistle leaves rubbing against her skin.

*So we give him some time. Three days?*

*Yes. That’s good. And we’ll keep the time, Bramble, the god can make a day any length he wants. Tell Dan three downbelow days.*

*Downbelow days. Good.* Brann relaxed and the changers slid away. “Three days, Dan,” she said aloud. “Three downbelow days.”

The outside door slid open, Danny Blue strolled into the eggroom. He nudged a chair out of a knot in the rug, kicked up a hassock; he settled into the chair, put his feet up, crossed his ankles and laced his fingers behind his head.

Brann looked up from the book she was scanning. “Ready to talk?”

“Where are the changers?”

“They got bored staying in one place, I suppose they’re exploring the ship.”

He pulled his hands down, rested them on the arms of the chair. “You remember what I told you?”

“I remember.” She laid the book aside. “So?”

“Just keep it in mind. That’s all. Chained God. He wanted to leave this pocket.” He spoke quietly, calmly, more of Daniel showing than Ahzurdan, but behind that control he was raging; his eyes were sunk in stiff wrinkles, the blue was dulled to a muddy clay color, the lines from nose to chin were deeper than before, a muscle jumped erratically beside his mouth, “He’s had to give up on that.” A twitch of a smile. “His metal is too old and tired to take the stresses, the rest of him is too adapted to this space to survive the move.” He pulled his hand across his mouth. “Think I could have a cup of that tea?” Another twisted smile as she snorted her disgust, but poured him out some tea and brought it to him with a brisk reminder that she wasn’t his servant and didn’t plan to make a habit of fetching and carrying for him When she was seated again, he went on, “Using what Daniel knew and all the different things Ahzurdan had learned…” He sipped at the tea, rested the cup on the chair’s arm. “… I have worked out a means of opening other gates, one in each of the Finger Vales; he’ll have greater access to his priests and his people.” He cleared his throat, anger had lodged a lump in his gullet it was hard to talk around. He gulped down most of the tea, lay back and closed his eyes. “That’s for later. For now, I’ve managed to widen the gate on Isspyrivo; we can get out with less trouble than we had coming in, though we’ll still have to use that aperture, the others won’t be ready.”

“We?”

He opened his eyes a crack. “Chained God has a deal for you.”

“Why should I listen to anything it says?”

“Because he’s got something you want.”

“And what’s that?”

“He can cut the cord that ties you to the changers.”

“I see. Go on.”

“Caveat first. He can keep you here as long as he wants, Brann. You can annoy him if you try hard enough, you might even hurt him a little, but he can kill you and drain the changers if you force it. He knows everything Ahzurdan knew about you, everything Daniel knew, he knows if he-let you run loose, you’d find a way to make peace with Maksim. You’ve very like Maksim, did you know that? You think like him. There’s a good chance you could talk him into slapping Amortis down so Kori’s brother would be safe. Chained God doesn’t want that. What he wants is BinYAHtii.”

“I won’t have anything to do with that.”

“Why? Because it eats life? Like you?”

“I can handle the guilts I have. I don’t want more.”

“Chained God says he’ll reopen the changers’ energy receptors so they can dine on sunlight again. And he’ll do it before you leave here as a gesture of good faith.”

“What about sending them home?”

– He can’t. He doesn’t know their reality. Slya’s the only one who does, you’ll have to work that out with her.”

“Why should Yaril and Jaril trust him enough to let him fiddle with their bodies? Even if I do agree to his conditions.”

“YOU have more choice than Daniel Akamarino and Ahzurdan had. You can say no. THEY haven’t. If you say yes, he won’t bother asking their consent.”

“Exactly what would the god expect me to do?”

“Stop working against him. Go with me, help me. Persuade the changers to help. Coming here, we are an effective team. We could be one again.”

“If I say no, I spend the rest of my life here?”

“A part of it, how long depends.”

Brann grimaced, looked down at her hands. They were clenched into fists. She straightened her fingers, brushed her palms against each other. “I…” She laced her fingers together, steepled her thumbs. “I made a choice for Yaril and Jaril once, I made it out of ignorance and… well, no matter. I won’t do it again. They’ll have to decide this time.”

Two pairs of crystal eyes were fixed on her as she finished explaining the Chained God’s offer. “That’s it,” she said. “It’s your bodies, you decide what you want done with them.”

Abruptly Yaril and Jaril were glimmerglobes; they drifted up until they were near the ceiling. They merged and the double globe hung there pulsing.

Danny Blue prowled about the oval room, tapping the vision plates on and off as he passed them, looking at the yellow sky outside, the greasy wool that billowed around the ship, glancing between times at the globe. Brann sat on the recliner watching him. There was a stiffness to his movements that neither Ahzurdan nor Daniel Akamarino had had; she read that stiffness as anger he couldn’t admit to because of the compulsion that thing had planted in him. She’d seen this before, in shopkeepers and landsfolk who could not show their rage or even let themselves know about it when an important customer was arrogant or thoughtless, when an ignorant exigent overlord made impossible demands on them. They beat their wives and children instead. She grew warier than before, wondering just how Dan was going to displace that anger and who his target would be. She had a strong suspicion it might be her. Before the merger Ahzurdan had not been liking her very much and Ahzurdan was in there somewhere.

The globe split apart, the parts dropped to the rug, Yaril and Jaril stood before Brann and Danny Blue looking angry, determined and a little frightened. Jaril stood with his hand on his sister’s shoulder; he said nothing, Yaril spoke for them. “We’ll take the chance, Bramble.”

Brann held out her hands. “Come here.” When they had their hands in hers, she thought, *It bothers me, you know that. *

Yaril: *Let the Valers take care of themselves. Isn’t it time you thought about us?*

Brann: *More than time. You don’t need to say it.* Jaril: *Don’t we?*

Brann: *No. You’ve decided, I acquiesce. What I’m saying is, help me. You know this thing, this god. Will it be worse than Maksim, feeding more and more lives to BinYAHtii? Or will it let the talisman sit, there to help it defend itself if the other gods attack?*

Jaril: *Remember what Ahzurdan said about Maksim, that he was possessive about his people? The god’s a lot like that, maybe more so. Been breeding and coddling these folks for millennia, won’t feed them to the talisman; outsiders though, they’d better watch out. * A

quick grin, a squeeze of Brann’s hand. *Just think about Slya and your own folk.*

Yaril: *What about this, Bramble? After this thing is over, we go find young Kori and tell her about BinYAHtii’s habits; she can pass the word on to her folk. What they do about it is up to them. What about you, Jay? What do you think?*

Jaril: *One thing we don’t want to do is say word one about this to Danny Blue.*

Yaril: *You’re being obvious, brother. Of course not, talking to him’s like talking direct to the god. You have anything helpful to add?*

Jaril: *Nope. ‘S good enough for me.*

Brann: *It’s the best we can do, I suppose.* She freed her hands. “I agree, Dan. Does it want me to swear?”

The Chained God’s voice sounded from a point near where the double globe had floated. “Say what you will do, Brann Drinker of Souls. Specify your limitations and intentions. Swearing is not necessary.”

Brann pulled in a lungful of air, exploded it out in a long sigh. “I will accompany Danny Blue and do what I can to help him, provided always that you do not harm Yaril and Jaril in any way and provided that they can truly feed themselves when you’re finished with them. Is that sufficient?”

“Quite sufficient.” Before the sound of the words had died away, Yaril and Jaril were gone from the room.

14. They Start On Their Way To Snatch The Talisman From The Sorceror.

SCENE: Dawn still red in the east, three mules standing nervously beside the cached supplies, mist thick and thin like clotted cream billowing and surging behind the man and the woman as they emerge from the steep-walled ravine.

Yaril and Jaril flashed from the mist and soared into the brightening sky, gold glass eagles spun from sunlight and daydream, laughter made visible joy given shape, swinging in wide circles celebrating the coming of the sun, the sun that was their nipple now, mother sun.

Danny Blue followed Brann from the clotted yellow mist to the stunted trees where she and his progenitors had cached the greater part of their gear. The mules were there, waiting, heads down, looking subdued and lightly singed. Slya’s work, no doubt, adding her mite out of friendship or something. He moved up beside Brann and began shifting the concealing rocks aside. His mind felt as chaotic as the fog blowing about in the ravine, but his body was in good shape, he didn’t have to think about what he was doing, his hands would go on working as his mind wandered. His flesh was charged and vital, his physical being hummed along at a level that Ahzurdan and Daniel Akamarino reached only when they were operating at peak in their various proficiencies. He swung a saddle onto a mule, reached warily under its belly for the cinch, drew it through the rings and used his knee to punch the swelling out of the mule so he could pull the strap tight. It was not as if two voices spoke within his head, no, more that the Composite-He would be musing about something and suddenly find himself thinking in an entirely different way about whatever it was, perhaps heading for a different outcome. And then his mind would shift again and he’d be where he was before. There was never any sense of coercion in this shifting. It was… well… like the interaction of two roughly parallel currents in a single river. As long as he rode the flow of those currents and didn’t try to fight them, he could think competently enough about whatever engaged his attention. And as time passed the Composite-He took more and more control of the Composite Mind. He retained the full memories of both his progenitors, along with their talents and their training (his work for the god-inthe-starship had been ample evidence of that) but slowly and surely the being who did the remembering was becoming someone else. Blue Dan. Danny Blue. Azure Dan, the Magic Man. He tied the depleted grain sack behind the saddle and the blanket roll on top of that and went for the saddlebags.

The changers chased each other in endless spirals, singing their exuberance in their eagle voices; their connection to Brann and the ground seemed more and more tenuous as the sun appeared and finally cleared the horizon.

Danny Blue rode behind Brann, the leadrope of the third mule tied to a saddlering. He looked up at the changers and wondered how long they’d stay in sight and whether they’d keep their ties to Brann now that they no longer needed her to stay alive. He thought about asking her what she was thinking, but he didn’t. Something in him was enjoying her tension and her quick sliding glances at the changers, something in him stood back and watched, uninvolved, unmoved; he thought that he disliked both of his progenitors, he thought they felt flat, one-dimensional. He was slaved to the god and he hated that, but he was beginning to be glad that Danny Blue was alive and aware and riding this mule along this mountainside, listening to the crackclack of the mule hooves, the morning wind hushing through the pines, the eagles screaming overhead, feeling himself sweat and chafe and jolt a bit because he still wasn’t much good at riding mules. He began to whistle a rambling undemanding tune, thought of getting out Daniel’s recorder but let the impulse slide away with the glide of the song.

One of the eagles came spiraling down, changed to a slight fair young man the moment he touched ground. Brann’s back lost its rigidity as her mule halted and stood with ears twitching nervously. “We thought we’d better ask,” Jaril said. “The god printed a map for you, but maybe you’d like us to scout out the best ground ahead till we get to Forkker Vale?”

“We could move faster that way.” Brann threaded her fingers through her hair. “Can Yaro get high enough to see Haven? That thing said there wasn’t a ship due for a week at least, I don’t know why it’d lie, the faster we can get to Maksim, the less chance he’ll have to make trouble for us, the sooner it could have its talisman, but I’d feel easier with some corroboration.”

No longer golden glass but a large brown and white raptor, the eagle overhead climbed higher, vanishing and reappearing as she passed through drifts of cloud fleece.

Jail tilted his head back and followed her with his eyes. “The sea is empty all round far as Yaro can see. Not even a smuggler out. Haven is pretty much still asleep. There are some fishboats out working nets, she sees a few women near the oven stoking it up so they can bake the day’s bread, the hands are busy with cows and whatever on the near-in farms. Nobody’s hustling more than usual. That’s about it.”

“Ah well, it was a chance.” Brann rubbed at her chin. “You want to run or ride?”

“Ride.” He walked to the third mule, waited until Dan untied the lead rope, swung into the saddle and moved to, ride beside Brann. “Yaro says Slya’s sitting on top of Isspyrivo turning the glacier into steam; she’s watching us.

Brann chuckled. “She’ll freeze her red behind if she does that for long.”

“Or flood out Haven. The creek from the crack runs down to the sea right there.”

She yawned. “Somehow I find it hard to care right now.” She thrust her hand into the bag by her knee, pulled out a paper cylinder, unrolled it and held it open along her thigh. “Hmm.” She rode closer to Jaril, tapped the nail of her forefinger against a section. “Looks like we’ll have to take a long jog about this, unless it’s not so deep as it looks. What’s this?”

“It’s a young canyon all right. I don’t know what that blurry bit is.” He was silent a minute, then he nodded. “Yaro’s gone to check it out. Be about twenty minutes’ flying time.”

Brann examined the map a few moments longer, then let it snap back into its cylinder and slid it in the bag.

Danny Blue watched Brann and the changer youth and felt a twinge of jealousy. The affection he saw between them had survived and more than survived the cutting of the chains that held them in servitude to each other; he had half-expected the changers to vanish like a fire blown out once they were free of her; when he saw their aerobatic extravagances he thought they were gone. He was wrong. A loving woman, a passionate one. The strength of the ties she forged with those alien children was evidence of that, he had more evidence of what she was in his memories. He remembered the feel of her back, the way she reacted to Daniel’s hands, his mouth twitched into a crooked smile as he remembered with equal clarity how quickly and completely Daniel shut off the flow of that passion.

He watched Brann’s back (the feel of it strong in his hands) and observed his own reactions. Ahzurdan had more hangups than a suitlocker, Daniel had only a moderate interest, enjoying sex, when it was available, not missing it all that much when it wasn’t. From the way Danny Blue’s body was sitting up and taking notice, he was going to have to change his habits. He sucked in a long breath, exploded it out and tried to think of something else before the saddle got more uncomfortable than it was already.

Jaril reached over, touched Brann’s arm. “Yaro’s got there. She says the blur you saw is a bridge over that ravine, a smuggler’s special, she says from on top and even up close it looks like a couple down trees with some vines and brush growing out of them, but she went down and walked on it and it’s solid. The mules won’t have any problem crossing it even if it’s dark by the time we get there and it probably will be.”

“Anything between here and there that might give us problems?”

“She says she doesn’t think so. Trying to read ground from the air can be tricky, you’ve got to remember that, especially as high as Yaro was flying, but she says the smuggler’s trace is fairly obvious and if we keep to that we shouldn’t have more problems than we can handle. She’s spotted a spring she thinks we can reach before it gets too dark if we start moving some faster, if we keep ambling along like this, we’ll have a dry camp because there’s no water between here and there.”

“I hear. Go ahead and show us the trail, will you?”

Jaril nodded, pulled ahead of them. He increased his mule’s pace to an easy trot as he followed the inconspicuous blazes cut at intervals into tree trunks as big around as the bodies of the mules. They’d long since passed the areas where the battles with Settsimaksimin and his surrogate elementals had torn up the ground, the mountainside was springy with old dried needles, little brush grew between giant conifers that rose a good twenty feet above their heads before spreading out great fans of branch and pungent needle bunches, there was room for the mules to stretch their legs without worrying about what they’d step into.

They rode undisturbed that day, stopping briefly to grain and water the mules and snatch a bite for themselves, starting on again with less than an hour lost. They reached Yaril’s spring about an hour after sundown. She had a small sly fire going and was prowling about in catshape, driving off anything on four legs or two that might want to investigate the camp too closely. No one said much, aloud at least; what the changers were saying to each other, they kept to themselves and did not break the silence about the fire. Brann rolled into her blankets after she ate and helped clean up the camp; as far as Danny Blue could tell she didn’t move until she woke with the dawn. He had more difficulty getting to sleep, his muscles were sore and complaining, his mental and physical turmoil kept his mind turning over long after he was bored with every thought that climbed about his head, but he had two disciplines to call on and eventually bludgeoned his mind into stillness and his body into sleep.

The days passed because they had to pass, but there was little to mark one from another; they rode uphill and downhill and across the smuggler bridges with never a smell of Settsimaksimin. Even the weather was fine, nights cool, days warm with just enough of a breeze to take the curse off the heat and not a sign of rain. Now and then they saw a stag or a herd of does with their springborn fawns; now and then, on the edges of night and morning brown bears prowled about them but never came close enough to threaten them. Blue gessiks hopped about among the roots and shriveled weeds, broad beaks poking through the mat of dead needles for pinenuts and borer worms; their raucous cried echoed from hillside to hillside as they whirled into noisy bluff battles over indistinguishable patches of earth. Gray gwichies chattered at each other or shook gwichie babies out of pouches close to being too small for them and sent them running along whippy tarplum branches for late hatching nestlets or lingering fruit.

On the fifth day or it might have been the sixth, shortly after dawn when shadows were long and thin and glittered with dew, they dropped through an oak forest to the grassy foothills along the side of Forkker Vale.

Jaril and Yaril rode first, Jaril in the saddle, Yaril behind him, clinging to him. Their new dependence on the sun for sustenance had wrought several changes in how they ran their lives. In a way, they were like large lizards, they got a few degrees more sluggish when the sun went down unless they took steps, to avoid it. They were still adjusting to the change in their circumstances; staying with Braun on this trek, with its demands on them and the dangers that lay ahead of them wasn’t helping them all that much.

Down on the floor of the Vale a line of men walked steadily across the first of the grainfields, scythes swinging in smooth arcs, laying stalkfans flat beside them, a line of women followed, tieing the stalks into sheaves, herds of children followed the women, some gathering sheaves into piles, others loading those piles onto mulecarts and taking them down along the Vale to the storesheds and drying racks at the threshing floor. The men were singing to themselves, a deep thoated hooming that rose out of the rhythm of the sweep, hypnotic powerful magical sound. The women had their own songs with a quicker sharper rhythm, a greater commensality. The children laughed and sang and played a dozen different games as they worked, counting games and last one out and dollymaker as they gathered and piled the sheaves, jump the moon and one foot over and catch as they swung the sheaves around, tossed them to each other then onto the stakecarts, running tag and sprints beside the mules. It was early morning, cool and pleasant, boys and girls alike were brimming with energy. It was the last golden burst of exuberance before winter shut down on them. Or it was before the strangers appeared.

As Brann, the changers and Danny Blue rode past them on the rutted track, the Forkker folk looked round at them but no one spoke to them, no one asked what they were doing there or where they were going. And the children were careful to avoid them.

Ahzurdan’s memories prodded Danny Blue until he heeled his mule to a quicker trot and caught up with Brann. “Trouble?”

“Maybe.” She scratched at her chin. “It could be local courtesy not to notice folk coming from the direction of Haven. I don’t believe a word of that. Jay.” He looked over his shoulder, dusty and rather tired, the sun hadn’t been up long enough to kick him into full alertness. “Could you or Yaro put on wings and take a look at what’s ahead of us?”

“Shift here?”

“Why not. A little healthy fear might prove useful.”

Yaril stretched, patted a yawn, yawned again and slid off the mule; she ran delicate hands through her ash blond hair, shivered like a nervous pony, then she was an eagle powering into a rising spiral.

They started on, moving at a slow walk. A mulecart rattled past them, the children silent, subdued, wide frightened eyes sliding around to the strangers, flicking swiftly away.

Danny Blue watched the cart jolt away from them, the mule urged to a reluctant canter, the sheaves jiggling and shivering. Several fell off. ‘A^y° boys ran back, scooped them up and tossed them onto the cart. A swift sly ferret’s look at the strangers, then they scooted ahead until they were trotting beside the mule, switching his flanks to keep him at the faster pace. “They’ve been warned about us,” he said.

“Looks like it. Jay?”

“Yaro is looking over the village. It’s pretty well empty. Those houses are built like forts, an army could be hiding inside them. Each house has several courtyards, they’re as empty as the streets, Yaro says that about confirms trouble ahead, at this hour there should be people everywhere, not just in the fields. She thinks maybe we should circle round the village, she says she saw shadows behind several of the windows, the streets, well, they aren’t really streets, just openspaces between housewalls, they’re narrow and crooked with a lot of blind ends, it’s a maze there, if we got into it, who knows what’d happen. There’s problems with circling too, orchards and vineyards and a lot of clutter before we’d get to the trees, makes her nervous, she says. Ah. Soldiers in the trees, left side… um… right side. Not many. She says she counts four on the left, six on the right, Kori said there were a doubletwelve in Owlyn Vale, there won’t be fewer here, that leaves what? about fourteen, fifteen in the village. She says it won’t be that difficult for her and me to take all of them out if we could use Dan’s stunner. Question is will the Forkker folk mix in this business? If they do, things could get sticky, there are too many of them, they can swamp us given we have a modicum of bad luck. What do you think?” Jaril opened his eyes, looked from Brann to Danny Blue, raised his brows.

Danny Blue thumbed the zipper back, squeezed out the stunner; he checked the charge, nodded with satisfaction, tossed the heavy black handful to Jaril. “Chained God topped off the batteries, but don’t waste the juice, Jay, I’d like to have some punch left when we get to where we’re going.”

Jaril,caught the stunner. “Gotcha. Braun?”

“Yarn read Kori back when… Jay, was that her or you asking about the Forkkers? You? What does she think?”

“Um… she thinks they’re in a bind. They don’t like Maksim or his soldiers, but they don’t want him landing on their backs either, especially not over a bunch of foreigners. She says if we go through fast and they don’t see much happening, they’ll keep quiet. She says she’s changed her mind about going round the village now that she thinks about it. She says thinking about it, we’ve got to put all the soldiers out, we don’t want them stirring up the Forkkers and setting them after us. She says Brann, she can read a couple Forkkers to make sure, if you want. And Dan, she says, whatever, it’s up to you. The stunner’s yours.”

Danny Blue ran his tongue around his teeth, scratched thoughtfully at his thigh. “Can you singleshot the soldiers? It’d cut down the bleed if you don’t have to spray a broad area.”

“She says the ones in the trees will be easy, she’ll mark them for me, so I can do them while she’s hunting out the ones ambushed in the village. She says what she’ll do is globe up and pale out, go zip zap through all the houses, be done with that before they know what’s happening. Once she’s got the village ones spotted, unless there’s too many of them or they’re in places I can’t get the stunner into, I should be able to plink them before they get too agitated.” A quick grin. “Too bad the stunner won’t go through walls.”

“Too bad.” Danny glanced over his shoulder at the workers in the waist high grain. They weren’t working anymore, they were gathered in clumps, stiff and ominously silent, watching Jaril, Brann and him as they rode at a slow walk along the dusty track. “You might as well get at it. All I say is remember we’ve got a long way to go yet.”

Danny Blue tied the leadrope of the third mule to the ring, watched the man-handed eagle fly off toward the trees. Brann was looking sleepy, unconcerned. The wind was blowing her hair about her face. You can almost see it grow, he thought, I wonder why she cut it so short. Her body moved easily with the motion of the mule, she was relaxed as a cat. A wave of uneasiness shivered through him (the shefalos hook operating in him), cat, oh yes, and he didn’t know how she’d jump.

He fragmented suddenly, Ahzurdan and Daniel Akamarino resurrected by their powerful reactions to. Brann, a gate he’d opened for them. They were still one-dimensional, his progenitors, reduced to a few dominant emotions closely related and thoroughly mixed whose only stab at complication was a vague fringe of contradictions that trailed away to nothing. Ahzurdan glowered at Brann, a glaresheet of nauseous yellow, hate, resentment, frustration. Daniel pulled himself into a globe, iceblue, dull, rejection irritation numblust. Danny Blue was nowhere, shards scattered haphazard around and between the fragments of his sires.

Cool/warm touch on his arm. “Dan?” Warm sweet sound dancing across his nerve ends, echo re-echo chit-ter chatter flutter alter alto counterplay countertenor contralto confusion diffusion refusion dan dan dan dan…

A surge of heat. The bits of Danny Blue wheeled whirled jabbed into the glaresheet (broke it into sickly yellow puzzle pieces) jabbed into the globe (shattered it to mirrored shards, slung them at the yellow scraps) the bits of Danny Blue wheeled whirled, gathered yellow gathered blue, heat pressure need glue bits shards scraps, moulage collage-Danny Blue is whole again, a little strange the seams are showing, but it’s him, yes it’s him, singly him. He blinked at Brann, at her hand on his arm. He wrapped fingers (warm again his again) about hers, lifted her hand, moved his lips slowly softly across the smooth firm palm. He cupped her hand against his cheek. “Thanks.”

Buffered by a taut silence that the thud of mule hooves on the muffling dust only intensified, they rode at a fast trot through the village following a large bitch mastiff while the man-handed eagle flew sentry overhead. The soldiers slept and the Forkker folk did nothing, the riders and the changers fled unhindered down along the Vale, past other grainfields waiting for the reapers, past fields of flax and fiberpods, past rows of hops clattering like castanets in the breeze, past tuber vines already dug, waiting, drying in the hot postsummer sun. The hills closed in, the road moved onto the left bank of Forkker Creekr. At the mouth of the Vale where the stone bridge crossed that creek, a small stone fort sat high on a steep hillside, overlooking the bridge and the road. The mastiff trotted past it without stopping, the eagle circled undisturbed overhead. Brann and Danny Blue crossed the bridge without being challenged and left the Vale.

15. Settsimaksimin Sitting In His Tower, Watching What Hurries Toward Him As He Hurries To Shape What’s To Be Out Of What Is Now, Working More From Hope Than Expectation, Shaping Cheonea.

SCENE: Settsimaksimin in the Star Chamber, the council he’d constituted some weeks before breaking up after a long meeting, the members stretching (inconspicuously or not, according to their natures), several chatting together, the end-of-the-teeth inconsequentialities power players use to pass dangerously unstructured moments that push up like weeds even in the most controlled of lives. Stretching or chatting they stroll toward the door.

“T’Thelo, stay a moment.”

The Peasant Voice looked over his shoulder, came back to the table. “Phoros Pharmaga.”

Settsimaksimin waved a hand at a chair, turned his most stately glare on the rest of the council as they bunched in the doorway, reluctant to leave one of their number alone with him. Todichi Yahzi set his book aside and shambled across the room. He herded the councilmen out and shut the door, returned to his plump red pillow, picked up the red book and got ready to record.

T’Thelo was a small brown tuber, at once hard and plump with coarse yellow-white hairs like roots thin on his lumpy head. His hands were never still, he carried worry beads to meetings and when he felt like it would whittle at a hardwood chunk, peeling off paper thin curls of the pale white wood. He seldom said much, was much better at saying no than yes, looked stubborn and was a lot more stubborn than he looked.

Maksim let himself slump in his chair and turned off the battering ram he used as personality in these council meetings. He reached under his robe and under BinYAHtii, rubbed at his chest. “You know my mind,” he said.

T’Thelo grunted, pulled out his worry beads and began passing them between thumb and forefinger.

Maksim laughed. At first the sound filled the room, then it faded to a sigh. “They’re going to want to know what I told you,” he said. “I’d advise silence, but I won’t command it. I’ve a battle coming at me, T’Thelo. A man, a woman and two demons riding at me from the Forkker, despite all I’ve done to stop them. A battle

… a battle… I mean to win it, T’Thelo, but there’s a chance I won’t and I want you ready for it. You and the other landsmen, you’ll have to fight to keep what you’ve got if I go down. The army will be a problem, keep a close watch on the Strataga and his staff; they’re accustomed to power and are salivating for more, they resent me for shunting them from the main lines of rule, hmm, perhaps half the younger officers would support you in a pinch, don’t trust the Valesons, matter of fact you’d do well to send them home, but most of the foot-soldiers come from landfolk on the Plain, be careful with them, the army’s had the training of them since they were boys, it means as much or more to them as their blood kin, and they’ve had obedience drilled into them, they’ll obey if they’re ordered to walk over you even if their mothers and sisters are in the front line. The Guildmaster and his artisans will back you if given a choice, they remember too well how things were when the Parastes held the reins. So will the Dicastes, they lose if you lose. There are a lot of folk with grudges about, especially the parasite Parastes still alive and their hopeful heirs. Be careful with Vasshaka Bulan, I know the landsmen don’t like the Yrons or the Servants or Amortis all that much, but it’s better to have them with you than against. I can’t tell you how that tricky son will jump, but I know what he wants, T’Thelo. More. That’s what he wants. More and more and more. Not for himself, I’ll give him that, for Amortis, he calls himself Her Servant and, Forty Mortal Hells, he means it. So that’s a thing to watch. Keep your local Kriorns and their Servants friendly, T’Thelo, they’re not puppets, they’re men like you, I’ve seen to that. The Yron has schooled them, but I’ve schooled them too. Keep that in mind.” He fell silent, gazed past the Voice at the far wall though he wasn’t seeing wall or anything else. “We’re not friends, T’Thelo, you’d see me burned at the stake and smile, and as for me, you annoy me and you bore me, but for all that, T’Thelo, we share a dream. We share a dream.” His voice was soft and pensive, a deep burrumm like a cello singing on its lowest notes. “Five days, T’Thelo, it takes five days to ride from Forkker Vale to Silagamatys. It isn’t time enough for much, but do what you can. I expect to win this battle, T’Thelo, they’re coming to ME, they will be fighting on MY ground. But there’s a battle coming that I won’t win. It’s one you’ll fight soon enough, my unfriend, you know which one I mean. When I commenced the shaping here, I thought I’d have a hundred years to get it done, aah hey, not so. Three, five, seven, that’s it, that’s all. I release you from any duties you have to me, Voice, make your plans, weave your web, woo your Luck. And be VERY careful who you talk to about this.”

T’Thelo sat a moment staring at the string of wooden beads passing between his callused work-stiffened fingers; he’d had them from his father who’d had them from his, they were dark with ancient sweat, ancient aches and agonies, ancient furies that had no other place to go. He rubbed his thumb across the headbead larger than the rest, darker, looked up. “Give me a way to get word to the Plain.”

Maksim snapped his fingers, plucked a small obsidian egg from the air. He set it on the table, gave it a push that took it across to T’Thelo. “The word is PE-TOM’, it calls a ge’mel to you.” He smiled at the distaste visible in T’Thelo’s lined face. “A ge’mel is a friendly little demon about the size of a pigeon, it looks like a mix between a bat and a bunch of celery and it’s a chatty beast. Worst trouble you’ll have with it is getting it to shut up and listen to instructions. It can go anywhere between one breath and the next, all you have to do is name the man you’re sending it to and think about him when you name him. When you’ve finished with the ge’mel, say PI’YEN NA; that’ll send it home. Any questions?”

T’Thelo looked at the egg. After a long silence, he put his worry beads away, reached out and touched the stone with the tip of his left forefinger. When it didn’t bite him, he picked it up, looked at his distorted reflection in the polished black glass. “Petom’,” he said. His voice was nearly as deep as Maksim’s but harsher; though it could bum with hard passion, that voice, it could never sing, an orator’s voice, an old man’s voice beginning to hollow with age.

The ge’mel flicked out of nothing, sat perched on the richly polished wood, its oval black eyes lively and shining with its demon laughter; its face was triangular, vaguely batlike, it had huge green jade ears with delicately ragged edges that matched the greenleaf lace on its tailend. Its wings were bone and membrane, the membrane like nubbly raw silk, green silk with tattered edges. Its body was lined and ridged, almost white about the shoulders, growing gradually greener down past the leg sockets until the taillace was a dark jade. Its four standing limbs were hard and hooked, much like those of a praying mantis, its two front limbs had delicate three-fingered hands with opposable thumbs. It held its forelimbs folded up against its body, hands pressed together as if praying. “Yes yes, new master,” it said; its voice was a high hum, not too unlike a mosquito whine, but oddly pleasant despite that. “What do you wish? I, Yimna Himmna Lute, will do it. Oyee, this is a fine table.” It pushed one of its hind limbs across the wood, making a soft sliding sound. “Lovely wood.” It tilted its little face and twinkled at T’Thelo. “Are you an important man, sirrah? I like to serve important men who do important things, it makes my wives and hatchlings happy, it gives them things to boast of when the neighbors visit.”

Maksim chuckled. “Now how in modesty could the man answer that, Yim? I’ll do it for him. Yes, little friend, he is a very important man and the work he gives you will be very important work, it might save his land and his people from a danger coming at them.”

Yimna Himmna Lute bounced happily on its hind-limbs, rubbed its dainty hands together. “Good good splendid,” it fluted. Wings fluttering in the wind of its impatience, it fixed its black beady eyes on T’Thelo (who was rather disconcerted since he had nothing for Yim to do at the moment, having called up a monster to get a look at it, only to find there was nothing monstrous about the little creature; he’d had chickens a lot more alarming and certainly worse tempered.)

“Unruffie, Yim. The man just wanted to meet you, be introduced, as it were. Voice T’Thelo meet Yimna Himmna Lute, the swiftest surest messenger in all realities. Yim, meet Hrous T’Thelo, Voice of the Land-men of Cheonea.” He waited until T’Thelo nodded and Yimna finished its elaborate meeting dance, then said, “Voice T’Thelo, now that the introductions are complete, perhaps you could send Yim back home while you think out and write out the messages you want it to carry for you.”

T’Thelo blinked, raised tangled brows. Yim gave him another elaborate bow, coaxing-a reluctant smile from him. The Voice rubbed his thumb across the smooth black obsidian, thought a moment, said, “Pi’yen Na.”

Little mouth stretched in a happy grin, Yim whiffed out like a snuffed candle.

“Cheerful little git,” T’Thelo said. He pushed his chair back, stood. “I thank you, Phoros Pharmaga, I will not waste your warning.” He followed Todichi

Yahzi to the door, gave a jerk of a bow like an afterthought and went out.

Todichi Yahzi came back and stood before Maksim; his deepset eyes had deep red fires in them. “I have served you long and well, Settsimaksimin, I have not made demands beyond my needs,” he sang in his humming garbled Cheonese, “I do not wish to leave you now, but if you die how do I go home?”

“Todich old friend, did you think I had forgot you?” Maksim got to his feet, stretched his arms out, then up, massive powerful arms, no fat on them or flab, he yawned, twiddled his long tapering fingers, held out a hand. “Come, I’ll show you.”

The bedroom was at once austere and cluttered; Todichi Yahzi clucked with distress as he followed Maksim inside. It’d been weeks since he’d been let in to clean the place. The bed was a naked flocking mattress in a lacquer frame, sheets (at least they were clean) and thick soft red blankets twisted into a complex sloppy knot and kicked against the wall. A blackened dented samovar on a wheeled table was pushed against the frame near the head of the bed, a plate with flat round ginger cookies, a sprinkle of brown crumbs and the remnants of a cheese sandwich sat on the floor by the table. A book lay open beside it, turned face down. Robes, sandals, underclothes, towels, scrolls of assorted sizes and conditions and several leather pillows were heaped on or beside rumpled rugs. Maksim crossed to a large chest with many shallow drawers. He opened one, poked through it, clicked his tongue with annoyance when he didn’t find what he was looking for, snapped the drawer shut and opened another. “Ah ah, here we are.” He lifted out a fine gold chain with a crooked glass drop dangling from it. “Here, Todich, take this.”

Todichi Yahzi held the drop in his dark leathery palm, looked down at it, gleams of purple and brown flickering in his eyes.

“When you know I’m dead, throw the drop in a fire; when it explodes, you go home. Don’t try it while I’m still alive, won’t work. And ah don’t worry about it breaking, it won’t. I’ve been meaning to give you that for months, Todich.” He lifted his braid off his neck and swiped at the sweat gathered there, rubbed his hand down his side. “Every time I thought of it, something came up to distract me. You understand what to do?”

Todichi Yahzi nodded, closed his fingers tight about the drop. His chest rose, fell. After a tense silence, he sang, “May the day I burn this be many years off.” He looked around, shuddered. “Maksim friend, will you please please let me clean this… this room?”

A rumbling chuckle. “Why not, old friend. I’ll be below.”

Todichi fluted a few shapeless sounds, fidgeted from foot to foot. “I will work quickly. And you, my friend, you take care, don’t spend yourself to feed your curiosity, come back and rest, eat, sleep.”

Maksim smiled, squeezed Todichi’s meager gray-furred shoulder with gentle affection, snapped to his subteranean workroom.

Danny Blue yawned, smiled across the fire at Brann. This night was much darker than the last, clouds were piling up overhead, wind that was heavy with water lifted and fell, lifted and fell, there was a sharp nip in the air, a threat of frost come the morning. She was seen and unseen, face and hands shining red-gold when the dying flames flared, slipping into shadow again when they dropped. Made irritable by the electricity from the oncoming storm, the changers were out in the dark somewhere, male and female mountain cats chasing each other, working off an excess of energy as they ran sentry rounds about the camp. “He doesn’t seem to care that we’re in the Plain.”

Her knees were drawn up, her forearms rested on them, she held a mug of tea with both hands and was sitting looking down at it, her face empty of expression as if her thoughts were so far away there was no one left behind the mask. When he spoke, she lifted her head, gazed thoughtfully at him. “Is that what you think?”

“Me? Think? Who am Ito think?”

She_, gave him a slow smile. “Ahzurdan I think, hmm?”

“Ahzurdan is dead. Daniel Akamarino is dead. I’m Azure Dan the magic man, Danny Blue the New. Three weeks old, alive and kicking, umbilical intact, chain umbilical welded in place, no surgeon’s knife for me; the Chained God jerks and I dance, don’t I dance a pretty dance?”

“A personal, intrusive god isn’t so attractive now, /limn?”

“It’s like trying to reason with a tornado, you might come out of the experience alive but never intact. And whenever you try, you don’t make a dent in the wind.”

She smiled, a slow musing smile that irritated him because it seemed to say I have, I have dented a god more than once, Danny Blue, when you talk about wind, whose wind do you mean? She said nothing, looked at her mug with a touch of surprise as if she’d forgotten she was holding it. She sipped at the cooling tea and gazed into the puzzle play of red and black across the coals of the little fire. She was strong, serene, contented with who and what she was, she had already won her battle with the god, she’d got what she wanted out of him, freedom for herself and the changers, all she was doing now was paying off that debt; anger flashed through him, a bitter anger that wanted to see her bruised, bleeding, weeping, groveling at his feet; part of him was appalled by the vision, part of him reveled in it, all of him wanted to break the surface of her somehow and get at whatever it was that lay beneath the mask. “Sleep with me tonight.”

“I smell like a wet mule.”

“Who doesn’t. What you mean is not before the children.”

“What I mean is, what you see is what you get.”

“If I didn’t want it, would I ask for it?”

“Would you?”

“You keep your hands off my soul and I’ll keep mine off yours, it’s your body I want.”

She smiled, slid her eyes over him. “It’s a point. Why not.”

“A little enthusiasm might help.”

“A little more Akamarino in the mix might help.”

“I thought you didn’t like him much.”

“I liked his hands, not his mouth, rather what came out his mouth.”

“Akamarino is dead.”

“You said that.”

“You don’t seem to believe it.”

“I do, Dan. I don’t like thinking about it, I…” Her mouth twisted. “Why not. No doubt the god knows quite well how I feel. Somehow I’m going to make it hurt for that, Dan. I don’t know how right now and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. You intend to keep talking?”

Maksim lay stretched out in his tiltchair, watching the mirror, listening to the conversation. His hair hung loose about his shoulders, the sleeveless workrobe was pulled carelessly about him, a fold of it tucked between BinYAHtii and his skin, his legs were crossed at the ankles and his fingers laced loosely across his stomach. The chair was set parallel to the table so he could reach out and touch the mirror if he wished. For the past several days he’d been snatching scarce moments between conferences to watch what was happening in the mountains and the Forkker Vale, puzzled for a while by the male figure who rode with Brann and the changers. The mirror followed him as if he were Ahzurdan, yet he was not, he was at least a span taller, he was broader in the shoulders, his face was different, though there were hints of Ahzurdan in it as if this man might have been one of his half-brothers. Several times Maksim had focused the mirror on his face, but he couldn’t get it clear, the lines blurred and wavered, the closer he got the less he could see, though he could hear most of what the man said. That blurring was something he associated with Daniel Akamarino when he joined Brann and Ahzurdan in Silagamatys. By the time they reached the Vale Maksim had an idea what the Chained God had done, though he couldn’t wholly accept where his logic led him, it seemed so unlikely and he couldn’t dredge up a reason for doing it, but listening to this hybrid Danny Blue, announce the deaths of the men that made him, he had no choice, he had to believe it. Why was it done? What did it mean? He brooded over those questions as he watched Danny Blue get to his feet, move round the fire to join Brann on her blankets. There was that odd and effective weapon Daniel had brought with him from his reality. I’ll have to get that away from him somehow before they get here. He watched the maneuverings that combined caresses with the shedding of clothing and decided that trousers were a nuisance he was pleased to have avoided most of his life. The vest went. It’s in there, in one of those pockets. He leaned over, tried to focus the mirror on the vest but the blurring was worse than with the man. They’re close enough, maybe I can… He reached for the vest and tried to snap it to him. He couldn’t get a grip on it. He hissed with annoyance and returned the mirror to its former overlook. They’ll be on the Plain early tomorrow, he thought, what do I do about that? I think I leave it to T’Thelo and whatever he contrives. Ha! Look at that, oh, Baby Dan, you’re not so dead after all, I know your little ways, oh yes I do…”

“Dan, I’m here too.” When he didn’t bother listening to her, she pushed his hand off her breast and started wriggling away from him.

He caught one of her wrists, pinned it to the ground beside her shoulder, slapped her face lightly to let her know who was in charge. He grinned at her when she relaxed, laughed in triumph when she stroked his face with her free hand. That was the last thing he saw or felt.

When he woke, his head was wet, there were jagged pebbles and twigs poking him in tender places, a damp blanket was thrown over him. Brann dropped the depleted waterskin beside him and stalked off. She was dressed, her hair was combed and she looked furious but calm. She sat down on the blanket she’d moved across the fire from him and watched him as he chased the fog from his head.

“I was raped once,” she said. “Once. I wasn’t quite twelve at the time, I was tired, sleeping, I didn’t know what was happening to me but I wanted it to stop, so I stopped it. I got a lot more than an ounce of jism from that man, Dan, something you should remember. The kids dumped his body in the river for me. Ahzurdan, if you’re in there somewhere, you also should remember what happened to your grandfather when he decided it was a good idea to slap me around. Do you know why you’re alive? Don’t bother answering, I’m going to tell you. I pay my debts. When I say I’ll do something, I do it. Damn you, Dan, that’s the second time you’ve got me wound up and left me hanging. Believe me, there won’t be a third time. I’m a Drinker of Souls, Danny Blue, get funny with me and you’ll ride to Silagamatys in a vegetable dream.”

Maksim smiled as he watched Danny Blue sleep; the hybrid twitched at intervals; at intervals he moved his lips and made small sucking sounds like a hungry baby. Across the dead fire, Brann was in her blankets, sleeping on her side, knees drawn up, arms curled loosely about them, her pillow the waterskin, newly plumped out from the river nearby; now and then there was a small catch in her breath not quite a snore and she was scowling as if no matter how deeply she slept she took her anger with her. “I like you, Drinker of Souls, Forty Mortal Hells, I do, but I wish you smudged your honor some and let Baby Dan chase you off. AAAh! I owe him a favor, a favor for a lesson, no no, more than a lesson, it’s a warning. You don’t get within armlength of me, Brann, you or your changeling children.”

A long lean cat slipped through the camp, nosed at the sleeping man, went pacing off, a whisper of a growl deep in his? yes, his throat. “Hmm, I wouldn’t want to be in your sandals, Danny Blue, the changers are not happy with you. Aaah! that’s an idea, good cat g0000d, next time through you might let your claws slip a little, yes yes?” He got heavily to his feet, thumbed off the mirror and snapped to his rooms.

Todichi Yahzi was whuffling softly in a stuffed chair, having gone to sleep as he waited for Maksim to return. Maksim bent over him, smiled as he caught the glint of gold in the short gray fur on his neck; Todich was wearing the chain. Maksim shook him awake. “Now what are you doing, Todich? Go to bed. I’ll do the same soon as I’ve had my bath.”

Todichi yawned, worked his fingers. “Yim showed up with a message from T’Thelo,” he humspoke. “Sent it to me not you because mmmm I think he was frightened of what Yim might carry back to him. He said Servant Bulan wanted mightily to know what you said to him, said he said you wanted him, T’Thelo, to assemble a report on the village schools, that you said it was important right now to know how the children were doing, what the teachers and landsmen were thinking. He’s slyer than I thought he was, that old root, I thought you were making a mistake talking to him like that. He said that he, T’Thelo, is going to do that along with the rest, it will be a good camouflage for the other things he has to do, besides it’s something that needs doing.” He passed his hand over his skull, smoothing down the rough gray fur that was raised in ridges from the way he’d been sleeping. “The scroll Yim brought is in there on the bed, there’s some more in it, but I’ve given you the heart of the matter. Mmmm. I sent a stone sprite to overlook Bulan, he called his core clique at the Grand Yron to the small meeting room off his quarters, he harrangued them some about loyalty, said some obscure things about a threat to Amortis and the Servant Corps and told them to send out Servants they could trust to visit the Kriorns of all the villages to find out what’s happening there. The Strataga went nightfishing with his aides, I sent some ariels to see what he was up to, but you know how limited they are and the Godalau was swimming around near harbormouth, they don’t like her and won’t stay anywhere near her. So I don’t know what they were saying, they were still out when I went to sleep, I made a note of which ariels I sent, you can probably get a lot more out of them than I could. The Kephadicast did a lot of pacing, but he didn’t talk to anyone, he wrote several notes that he sealed and sent out to Subdicasts here in Silagamatys, asking them to meet with him day after tomorrow, I haven’t a notion why he’s putting the meeting off that long. Harbormaster went home, ate dinner, went to bed. No pacing, no talking, no notes. I wrote all this up, every detail I could wring out of the watchers, Maksim. The report is on your bed beside T’Thelo’s note. The next council meeting is tomorrow afternoon, what do you want me to do about all this mmmm?”

“Go to bed, Todich, you’ve done more than enough for tonight. I’ve got to think.” Todichi Yahzi looked disapproving, pressed his lips tight as if he were holding back the scarifying scold he wanted to give. Maksim chuckled, a deep burring that seemed to rise from his heels and roll out of his throat. He stretched mightily, yawned. “But not tonight, old friend, tonight I sleep. Go go. Tomorrow I’ll be working you so hard you won’t have time to breathe. Go.”

Unable to sleep though he knew he should, Maksim pulled a cloak about his shoulders, looked down at the naked legs protruding dark and stately from his nightshirt, laughed and shook his head. “Be damned to dignity.” He snapped to the high ramparts and stood looking down over his city.

Clouds were blowing up out of the west and the moon was longgone, it was very dark. Silagamatys was a nubbly black rug spread out across the hills, decorated here and there with splotches and pimples of lamplight and torchfire except near the waterfront where the tavern torches lit the thready fog into a muted sunset glow. The Godalau floated in the bay’s black water, moving in and out of the fog, her translucent body lit from within, Tungjii riding black and solid on her massive flank. She drifted past Deadfire Island, a barren heap of stone out near the harbor’s mouth; her internal illumination brushed a ghostly gray glimmer over its basalt slopes. She passed on, taking her glimmer with her and Deadfire was once more a shadow lost in shadows. Maksim leaned on the parapet, looking thoughtfully at the black absence. I let them leave my city and I lost them. Mmm. Might have lost them anyway and half the city with them. Deadfire, Deadfire… yes, I think so. He laughed softly, savoring the words. Live and die on Deadfire, I live you die, Drinker of Souls and you, Danny Blue. Let the Godalau swim and Tungjii gibber, they can’t reach me there, and your Chained God, hah! Brann oh Brann, sweet vampire lass, don’t count on him to help. The stone reeks of me, it’s mine, step on it and it will swallow you. He reached through the neckslit of the nightshirt and smoothed his hand across BinYAHtii. You too, eh? Old stone, that’s your stone too, you’ve fed it blood and bones. There’s nothing they’ve got that can match us… mmm… except those changers, I’ll have to put my mind to them. Send them home? Send them somewhere, yesss, that’s it, if they’re not here, they’re no problem. He stroked BinYAHtii. It might take Amortis to throw them out, Forty Mortal Hells, the Fates forfend, I’d have to figure a way to implant a spine in her. He gazed down at the city with an unsentimental fiercely protective almost maternal love. Blood of his blood, bone of his bone, his unknown M’darjin father had no part in him beyond the superficial gifts of height and color, his mother and Silagamatys had the making of him. Amortis! may her souls if she’s got them rot in Gehannum’s deepest hell for what she’s done to you my city. To you and to me. If I did not still need her… He shivered and pulled his cloak closer about his body. The rising waterheavy wind bit to the bone. Out in the bay the Godalau once more drifted past Deadfire. Maksim pushed away the long coarse hair that was whipping into his mouth and eyes. That’s it, then. We meet on Deadfire, Drinker of Souls, Danny Blue. Four more days. That’s it. He shivered. So I’d better get some sleep, I’ve underestimated the three now two of you before, I won’t do it again.

They reached the Plain by midmorning, emerging from a last wave of brushy, arid foothills into a land lushly green, intensely cultivated, webbed between its several rivers by a network of canals that provided irrigation water for the fields and most of the transport for produce and people. Braun and Danny Blue rode side by side, neither acknowledging the presence of the other, an unbroken tension between them as threatening as the unbroken storm hanging overhead. The changers flew in circles under the lowering clouds, probing with their telescopic raptor’s eyes for signs that Settsimaksimin was attacking, signs that held off like the storm was holding off.

The day ground on. The hilltrack had turned into a narrow dirt road that hugged the riverbank, a dusty rutted weed-grown road little used by anything but straying livestock. Out in the river’s main channel flatboats moved past them, square sails bellied taut, filled with the heavy wind that pushed them faster than the current would. Little dark men on those boats (hostility thick on dark skin, glistening like a coat of grease on a kisso wrestler’s arms and torso) glared at them out of hate-filled dark eyes. In the fields beside the road and the fields across the river landfolk worked at the harvest, men, women, children. Like the boatmen they stopped what they were doing, even those far across the river, and turned to glower at the riders.

The hangfire storm continued to hover, the storm smell was strong in the air. Whether it was that or the hate rolling at them from every side, by nightfall the mules were as skittish as highbred horses and considerably more balky. Yaril and Jaril vanished for a while, came back jittery as the mules; they flitted about overhead long after Brann and Danny Blue stopped for the night, camping in a grove of Xuthro redleaves that whispered around them and sprayed them with pungent medicinal odors as the heat of the campfire lifted into the lower branches.

Danny Blue rested his teamug on his knee and cleared his throat. Brann gave him no encouragement. A catface came into the light, crystal eyes flashing a brilliant red, the cat stared at him for an uncomfortably long time, then withdrew into the darkness; he couldn’t forget it was out there not one minute and while that was comforting in one way, in another it turned his throat dry thinking about the changers pacing and pacing in their sentry rounds, feral fearsome beasts angry at the world in general and at him in particular. He gazed across the fire at Brann who was in her way quite as lethal. “I’m sorry about last night,” he said.

She nodded, accepting his apology without commenting on it.

“I do fine,” he said, “as long as it’s the rational side of me called up. Or the technical side. Doesn’t matter who’s running the show, Akamarino or Ahzurdan or me.

It’s emotions that screw me up, ah, confuse me. Ah, this isn’t easy to talk about…”

She looked coolly at him as if to say why bother then, looked down at her hands without saying anything.

Anger flared in him, but he shoved it down and kept control, him, Danny Blue the New, not either of his clamoring progenitors. “When it’s strong emotions, well, Daniel avoided them most of his life, couldn’t handle them, which gives Ahzurdan an edge because he played with them all since he was born, anger, you know, lust, frustration, resentment, he’s loved a maid or two, a man or two, been wildly happy and filled with cold despair, too much passion, his skin was too thin, he had to numb himself, dreamsmoke washed out the pain of living, you know all that, you heard all that on the trip here. He has ambivalences about you, Brann, growing all over him like a fungus, I suppose I should say all over me. That’s the problem, I can’t control him when there’s emotion involved. Think about it a minute. How old is Danny Blue? Three weeks, almost four, Bramble-all-thorns…”

Her head came up when she heard the name the changers sometimes gave her. “Don’t call me that.”

“Why not, it suits you.”

“Maybe it does, maybe not. My name is Brann and I’ll tell you when you can call me out of it.” She twisted up onto her knees, touched the side of the teapot, refilled her cup and settled back to her blankets. She sipped briefly at the hot liquid, then sat with her legs drawn up, her arms resting on them, both hands wrapped around the cup as if she needed the warmth from it more than the taste of tea in her mouth. “Do me a favor,” she said, “experiment on someone else.” She gazed at the fire, the animation gone out of her face, her eyes shadowed and dull. After several moments of unhappy silence, she shivered, fetched a smile from somewhere. “You still think you want me when you’ve combed the knots out, I expect I’d be fool enough to try again. At least you already know what I am. What a relief not having to explain things.” She gulped at the tea, shivered again. “Looks like everyone about knows where we’re going and why.”

“And they don’t like it.”

“And they don’t like it. Yaril, Jaril,” she called. “One of you come in, will you?”

The ash blond young woman came into the firelight, tall and slim, limber as a dancer, crystal eyes shadowed, reflecting fugitive glimmers from the dying fire. She glanced at Danny Blue, her face bland as the cat’s had been, showing nothing but a delicately exaggerated surprise at seeing him there. He grinned at her, Daniel uppermost now and finding her much to his taste, an etherial exotic lovely far less complicated and demanding than Brann; watching her settle beside Brann her shoulder and profile given to him, he wondered just how far she’d gone in taking a human shape and what it’d feel like making love to a skinful of fire, hmm! who was also a contact telepath. Now that’s rather offputting. Gods, 01’ Dan, you’re hornier ‘n a dassup in must. And neither of them’s going to have a thing to do with you and it’s your own damn fault. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot, huh, that’s not where the bullet went. Say this is over and you survive it, you’ll have to hunt up a whore or three and argue old Ahzurdan into a heap of ash so you can get your ashes hauled. Till then I guess it’s the hermit’s friend for you if you can get yourself some privacy, shah! as Brann would say, to have those changers come on me and giggle at what I’m reduced to… uh uh, no way. A little strength of mind, Danny Blue, come the morning, dunk yourself in that river, that should be cold enough to take your mind off.

“A while back,” Yaril said, “Jay and I, we decided we wanted to know what all the glares were about, so we paled out and probed a few of those peasants out there. They’ve had news about us from Silagamatys, all of them, farmers boatmen you name it. They’re trying to think of some way to stop us. They don’t know how so far, the ones we checked were thinking of sneaking up on us when we’re asleep and knocking us in the head or something like that, maybe setting up an ambush and plinking us with bolts from crossbows, so far they haven’t nerved themselves into trying anything, it was mostly wish and dream, but they surely wouldn’t mind if we fell in the river and drowned. They’re worried about Settsimaksimin, if anything happened to him the wolves would be down on them from all sides. They love the man, Bramble, sort of anyway, he’s mixed up in their heads with the land, everything they feel for the land they feel for him, it’s like when they’re plowing the soil, they’re plowing his body. They pray for him, and, believe me, they’ll fight for him. Any time now we’re going to start running into big trouble. Probably tonight. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the wilder local lads tried their hands with bulikillers or scythe blades. Probably around the third nightwatch, I doubt if they’ll come sooner and later it’d be too light.”

“You and Jay can handle them?”

“Hah, you need to ask? Braaaann.” She clicked her tongue, shook her head, finally sobered. “You want us to wake you?”

“As soon as you see signs of trouble, yes. We want to get the mules saddled and the supplies roped in place in case we have to leave fast.”

“Gotcha, Bramble. Anything else?”

“Um… what’s the land like ahead?”

“Pretty much more of the same for the first half day’s ride, another river joins this one a little after that, hard to tell so far off but I think there’s some sort of swamp and the road seems to turn away from the river. You want Jay or me to go take a look?”

Braun frowned at the fire. “I don’t… think so. No. I’d rather you rested. Take turns with Jay. How are you doing on energy? It was a cloudy day. Give me your hand a minute. Good. That god didn’t change you so much you can’t take from me, I thought a minute it might have, self-defense, you know, so we-couldn’t build the bridge again and suck godfire out of it, but I suppose it wanted to be sure we could handle Amortis if she poked her delicate nose in the business with Maksim.

“You needn’t worry about us, Bramble, our batteries are charged, matter of fact we’ve been pretty well steady state since we left the ship.”

“Happy to hear it, but tired or not, you and Jay both operate better after a little dormancy, I think its like with people, you need your sleep to clear out the day’s confusion. So, you rest, both of you, hear?”

Yaril giggled. “Yes, mama.” She got to her feet and walked with lazy grace out of the circle of firelight.

Danny Blue yawned. “Looks like Maksim’s made himself some friends.”

“You could try helping us a bit. I agree with Yaro; we’re bound to run into trouble; I’d like to know more about that and how you’re going to help deal with it.”

“That depends on the attack, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know, does it?”

“In a word, yes. Trouble, mmm. Maksim’s got earth and fire elementals tied to him and an assortment of demons. You’ve met some of those.” A quick grin. “Demons aren’t too, big a problem, you send them home if you know where home is and I know most of the realities Maksim located because Ahzurdan knew and I’ve got his memories.” A lazy stretch, a yawn.-Flip side.” When she raised her brows, not understanding, he murmured, “The good of having Ahzurdan in here. As opposed to the problems he causes.^- He took a sip of the tea left in his mug, grimaced. “Stone cold.” He poured it out on the ground beside him and managed to squeeze another half mug from the teapot nestled next to the fire. “Which reminds me, one of the things Maksim might try is tipping the changers into another reality; it’s something I’d do if I could. If he managed that, he could really hurt our chances of surviving. Something else…” He gulped at the tea, closed his eyes as warmth spread through him. “It’s a plus and a minus for us, Ahzurdan might have told you this (I’m a little hazy here and there on my sires’ memories), the top rank sorcerors don’t often fight each other, no point and no profit. They tend to avoid taking hires that might oblige them to confront an equal. He’d argue this, but I don’t think Ahzurdan is one of them. Might be close but the impression I get is he lacked a certain stability.” His body jerked, he looked startled, then grim. He set the mug beside him with careful gentleness, pressed his lips together and slapped his hands repeatedly on his knee until the nagging itchy under-the-skin pains faded away. “He didn’t like that.” He finished off the tea, wiped his mouth. “Where was… yes. What I’m saying is, Settsimaksimin has never been in a war with someone as strong as him or close to it. We’ve both seen it, he doesn’t like to attack. He’ll make individual strikes, but he won’t keep up the pressure and I don’t believe it’s because he can’t. He’s a warm man, he likes people, he needs them around him and he’s generous, if I’m reading the Magic Man right. Aaah, yes, what I’m saying is his peers are all frogs in’their own ponds, they don’t want to share their how shall I say it? ahhh adulation. He’s like that in some senses, he wouldn’t tolerate anyone who pretended to equality with him, but he’s got friends in the lower ranks and among the scholars who don’t operate so much as study and teach, more of them than you might expect. Ahzurdan’s not typical of his ex-students either, poor old Magic Man (uhnn! there he goes again), but even he can’t hate the man. That’s one of his problems, shahhh! apparently it’s mine too. I’d say this, if we hurry him, don’t give him time to set himself, there’s that little hiccup between thought and act we could use to our advantage. No matter how he nerves himself, attack isn’t natural to him, his instinct is to defend. Which is a potent reason for making sure he doesn’t flip the changers off somewhere. Amortis wouldn’t have that drag on her, her instinct is stomp first then check out what’s smeared on her foot. He knows his limitations better than any outsider making funny guesses. He’ll use BinYAHtii to drive her against us. She’s afraid of you, Brann, you and the changers, and she loathes you and she loathes Maksim for con₇ straining her, all that fear and rage is waiting to dump on you… ahh… us. With the changers we should be able to deflect it onto Maksim and let him worry about it. Without them… I don’t like to think of facing him without them.”

She bit into her lower lip, frowned at the fire a moment, looked up at him. “How do we stop it?”

Danny Blue unwrapped his legs and lay back on his blankets; he gazed up at the spearhead leaves fluttering over him, the patches of black sky he could see in openings between the branches. “I don’t know. I have to think. I might be able to block him if I have a few seconds warning. If the changers start feeling odd or if they see sign of Amortis, they should get to me fast.” He yawned. “Morning’s soon enough to tell them.”

“Why not now?”

He pushed up on his elbow, irritated. Her face was a pattern of black and red, he couldn’t read it, but when could he ever? “Because I don’t know what to say to them yet.” His irritation showed in his voice and that annoyed him more.

She got to her feet. “Then you’d better start your thinking, Danny Blue. I’ll be back in a little.” She walked into the darkness where Yaril had gone, a prowling cat of a woman radically unlike the changer, slender but there was bone in her and good firm muscle on that bone. He remembered her hands, wide strong working hands with their long thumbs and short tapering fingers, he remembered Ahzurdan looking at them disturbed by them because they represented everything he resented about her, her preference for low vulgar laboring men, her disdain for wellborn elegance, for the delicacy of mind and spirit that only generations of breeding could produce, her explosive rejection of almost everything he cherished, he remembered even more vividly the feel of those hands moving tantalizingly up Daniel’s arms, stirring the hairs, shooting heat into him. He pushed up, slipped his sandals off and set them beside his blankets, then stretched out on his back and laced his hands behind his head. “Yes,” he said aloud. “Thinking time.”

Toward the end of the third nightwatch six young men in their late teens slipped from the river and crept toward the redleaf grove. Jaril spotted them as he cat-walked in ragged circles about the camp. To make sure these young would-be assassins were all he had to worry about, he loped through one last circuit; reassured, he woke Yaril and left her to rouse the others while he shifted to his shimmerglobe. He considered a moment, but the impulse was impossible to resist; he’d wanted to try a certain repatterning technique since he’d sat on Daniel’s stunner and sucked in the knowledge of what it was. He made some swift alterations in one part of his being, suppressed the excited laughter stirring in him and went careening through the trees, a sphere of whitefire like a moontail with acromegaly. He hung over the youths long enough to let them get a good look at him, then he squirted force into his metaphorically rewired portion and sprayed them with his improvised stunbeam. He watched with satisfaction as they collapsed into the dust.

Yaril glimmersphere drifted up to him. *Nice. Show me. *

*It’s based on Daniel’s stunner. You do this. Then this. Right. One more twist. Good. That’s the pattern that does it. Remember, keep the lines rigid. Like that. And you cyst it. I didn’t at first and look what I’ve done to myself, that’s going to be sore. It gulps power, Yaro, but you don’t have to hold it more than a few^,seconds.*

*Now we won’t have to depend so much on Danny Blue. I like that, I like it a lot.*

*Agreed.*

*Why didn’t you try it before?*

*No point. Besides, if Maksim knew about it too long before we got to him, he just might figure out a way of handling it. Remember what. Ahzurdan said, this is heartland for him, I don’t doubt he can overlook most of it easy as an ordinary man looks out his window. *

*Gotcha. Do you really think Maksim is going to try tipping us into another reality?*

*Brann does. Don’t you?*

*We’ll have to keep wide awake, Jay. When I leave this reality, I want it to be my idea and I don’t want to be dumped just anywhere. I want to go home.*

*Bramble’s next quest, reading Slya’s alleged mind?*

*If we can work it. Talk to you later. She’s coming.*

Brann walked into the pale grayish light they gave off, squatted beside one of the young men. She pushed her fingers under his jaw, smiled with satisfaction when she felt the strong pulse. “Good work, Jay. How long will they be out?”

Jaril dropped and shifted, held out his hand. When Brann took it, he said, *Don’t know. I finagled a version of the stunner, haven’t done this before so it’s anybody’s guess. They could wake up in two minutes or two hours.*

*I hear. Useful. *

*More useful if nobody knows exactly what happened.*

*Nobody being Maksim umm and Danny Blue?*

*You got it. Or that Yaro can do it too, now.*

*Anything else? No? Good. We’ll tie our baby assassins up to keep them out of mischief, fix some breakfast and get an early start. From now on I suppose we can expect anything to happen. * She freed her hand. “Yaro, flit back to camp and fetch us some rope hmm?”

Yaril dropped and shifted. “Sure. Need a knife?”

“Got a knife.”

The Plain emptied before them. Boatmen brought their flatboats upriver and down into the throat of the Gap, mooring them to rocks and trees and to each other, a barrier as wide as the river and six boats deep. Land-folk poured into the hills between Silagamatys and the Plain, the greater part of them gathering about the Gap where the river ran, interposing their bodies between the threatening and the theatened. Some stayed behind. When Brann and Danny Blue came to the marshes, hidden bowmen shot at them. The changers ashed the arrows before they reached their targets. Spears tumbled end for end into the sedges when Danny Blue snapped his fingers, slingstones whipped about and flew at the slingers who plunged hastily into mucky murky swamp water.

Aware that Amortis was not going to march to war for them, that weapons would not stop the hellcat, her sorceror and her demons, the landfolk left their homes and their harvests and in an endless stream walked and rode into the hills, a stubborn angry horde determined to protect their land and their leader. It was a thing the Parastes never understood or acknowledged, the lifetie between the small brown landfolk and the land they worked, land that held layer on layer on layer of their dead, land they watered with their sweat and their blood. These grubbers, these strongbacked beasts, these self-replicating digging machines, they owned that land as those elegant educated parasites the Parastes never would, no matter how viciously and vociferously they claimed it. Much of what Settsimaksimin did after he took Cheonea linked him in the landfolk mind to the land itself and its dark primitive power. When he gave them visible tangible evidence of their ancient ownership, when he gave them deeds written in strong black ink on strong white parchment, it struck deep into their two souls. The idea of the land wound inextricably about the idea of Settsimaksimin and he became one for them with that black and fecund earth, himself huge, dark and powerful.

The land itself fought them. A miasma oozed from the earth and coiled round them when they slept; breeding nightmares in them, humming in their ears go away turn back go away turn back. Coiled round them when they rode, burning their eyes, cocooning them in stench, whispering go away turn back go away turn back. The hangfire storm was oppressive, it was hard to breathe, crooked blue lightning snapped from fingertips to just about anything they brushed against. The mules balked, balked again, exasperating. Brann because she had to jolt each one every time they did it. The ambushes kept on happening, a futile idiotic pecking that accomplished nothing except to exhaust Danny Blue who had to keep his shield ready, his senses alert. Amortis had laid a smother across the Plain, more oppressive for him than the storm; each time he had to flex his magic muscle he was working against an immense resistance. By the end of the day he was so depleted he could barely hold himself in the saddle.

The third morning on the Plain. Left in pastures unmilked, cows bawled their discomfort. Farmyard dogs barked and whined and finally sated their hunger on fowl let out to feed themselves while their owners were gone. Aside from those small noises and the sounds they made themselves, there was an eerie silence around them. The harvest waited half-gathered in the fields, the stock grazed or stood around, twitching nervously, the houses were empty, unwelcoming, no children’s laughter and shouts, no gossiping over bread ovens or laundry tubs, no voices anywhere. No more ambushes either.

Danny Blue sighed with relief when the morning passed without a stone flung at them, but the smother was still there, pressing down on him, forcing him to push back because it would have crushed him if he didn’t.

Night came finally. They stopped at a deserted farmhouse, caught two of the farmer’s chickens, cooked them in a pot on the farmer’s stove with assorted vegetables, tubers and some rice. It was a small neat house, shining copper pots hanging from black iron hooks, richly colored earthenware on handrubbed shelves, the furniture in every room was crafted with love and skill, bright blankets hung on the walls, huge oval braided rugs were spread on every floor, and it was a new house, evidence of the farmer’s prosperity. After supper three of them stretched out on leather cushions around the farmer’s hearth while the fire danced and crackled and they drank hot mulled cider from the farmer’s cellar. Jaril was flying watch overhead.

Yaril sighed with a mixture of pleasure and regret; she set her mug on her thigh, ran her free hand through her pale blond hair. “We’ll reach the hills sometime late tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “There’s a problem.”

Brann was stretched out half on a braided rug, half on Danny Blue who was leaning against an ancient chest, a pillow tucked between him and the wood. He opened heavy eyes, looked at Yaril, let his lids drop again. “How big?” he murmured.

“Oh, somewhere around ten thousand folk sitting on those hills waiting for us.”

His eyes snapped open. “What?”

“Miles of them on both sides of the river. One shout and we’ve got hundreds pressed around us, maybe thousands.”

Brann sat up, her elbow slamming into Dan’s stomach. She patted him, muttered an offhand apology, turned a thoughtful gaze on Yaril. She said nothing.

Dan crossed his ankles, rubbed the sore spot. “The river?”

“Boatmen. Flatboats. Roped together bank to bank, six rows of them, more arriving both sides. Nets strung under them. Bramble, you and Danny Blue are going to have to be very very clever unless you plan on killing lots of landfolk.”

Brann got to her feet. “Us? What about the two of yon?-She strolled to the fireplace and stood leaning against the stone mantel.

Yaril set the mug down, scratched at her thigh. “We already tried, Bramble. You know how there started to be nobody anywhere? Not long after that Jay and I saw lines and lines of landfolk moving across the Plain. Jay flew ahead to see what was happening and came back worried. We tossed ideas around all afternoon. You know what we came up with? Nothing, that’s what. It’s up to you. We quit.”

Danny Blue went downcellar and fetched another demijohn of cider. He poured it into the pot swung out from the fire, tossed in pinches of the mulling spices, stirred the mix with a longhandled wooden spoon. Brann and Yaril watched in silence until he came back to the chest that he was using as a backrest, then, while the cider heated, the three of them went round and round over the difficulties that faced them.

BRANN: We could try outflanking them.

YARIL: Plan on walking then, the terrain by those hills is full of ravines and tangles of brush and unstable landslips. Mules can’t possibly handle it.

DANNY (yawning): Don’t forget Amortis; with Maksim to point her, she can snap up a few hundred bodies and drop them in front of us and do it faster than we can shift direction.

BRANN: You said she’s afraid of the changers and me.

DANNY: Sure, but she wouldn’t, have to get anywhere near you, she could do all that from Malcsim’s tower in the city.

BRANN: Shuh! There’s a thought there, though. What about you, Dan? If she can snap a couple hundred over a distance of miles, surely you can do the same with two over say a dozen yards. Enough to take you and me past them.

DANNY: Get rid of Amortis first, then sure. Otherwise, with the smother getting heavier as we get closer to the hills, just breathing is going to make me sweat.

BRANN: Then you’d better busy yourself deciding what you can do now. Yaro, what about you and Jay? How many could you stun how fast?

YARIL: Jay and I working together, um, couple dozen a minute. Listen, that won’t work, same reason it wouldn’t work going round them. With that many sitting on those hills, there’s bound to be one or two we miss who’ lets out a yell and there we are, nose-deep in landfolk. Another thing you better think about, you can’t get through them without riding up to them somewhere, announcing your interest as ’twere, and once that’s done, guess what else is going to happen. Bramble, Jay and I, we went round and round on this. Remember how the Chained God shifted you and Danny’s sires poppop back and forth across that ship? We thought about that, we thought about it so much we just about overheated our brains. We figured Amortis could do the same if she took a notion to, so you and Danny have to cross the line without getting close to it. We figured we could gnaw on that idea till we went to stone without getting anywhere. We figured we can fly across with no difficulty, it’s you and Danny here who have the problem, so it’s you and Danny who have to come up with the answer.

DANNY Roll back a sec, stun them? since when and how?

YARIL: Um, Jay took a look at your stunner, remember? He figured a way to repattern a part of his body to produce the same effect, he powered it from his internal energy stores, tested it on those baby assassins. You saw the results.

DANNY: So I did. Repatterning… mmm.

While Brann and Yaril chewed over the problem of acting without being seen to act, Danny Blue withdrew into himself to track down a wisp of an idea. Once upon a time when Daniel Akamarino was very new among the stars and still feeling around for what and who he was, he signed onto a scruffy free trader called the Herring Finn and promptly learned the^-vast difference between a well-financed, superbly run passenger line and the bucket for whose engines he was suddenly responsible. And not only the engines. He was called on to repair, rebuild or construct from whatever came to hand everything the ship needed of a propulsive nature. One of those projects was a lift sled for loading cargo in places so remote they not only didn’t have starports, they very often didn’t have wheels. He’d rebuilt that thing so many times it was engraved into his brain. And with a little prodding Danny Blue found he could retrieve the patterns. From his other progenitor he culled the memory of his lessons in Reshaping, one of the earliest skills a Sorceror’s apprentice had to master. Hour on hour of practice, until he could shut his eyes and make the shape without error perceptible to the closest scrutiny which he got because Settsimaksimin was a good teacher whatever other failings he might have. There was still the problem of power. He decided to worry about that after he knew whether or not he could shape a sled. I need something to work on, he thought, something solid enough to hold Brann and me, but not too heavy.

He got to his feet and wandere^-d through the house. The beds were too clumsy, besides they were mainly frame and rope with a straw paillasse for a mattress and billowing quilts. He fingered a quilt, thinking about the nip in the air once the sun went down, shook his head and wandered on. Everything that caught his eye had too many problems with it until he reached the kitchen and inspected the hard-used worktable backed into an alcove around the corner from the cooking hearth. The tabletop was a tough ivory wood scarred with thousands of shallow knifecuts, scrubbed and rubbed to a surface that felt like satin; it was around twelve centimeters thick, two meters wide and three long (from the positioning of the cuts at least eight women gathered about it when they were making meals or doing whatever else they did there). He fetched a candle, dropped into a squat and peered at the underside. Looks solid, he thought, have to test it. Hmm, those legs… if they don’t add to much weight, they might be useful, some sort of windscreen… mmm, the front four anyway, whichever end I call front… how’m I going to get this thing out where I can see what I’m doing? Ah! talking about seeing, I’m going to have to set up a shield. If I can. He rose from the squat, set the candle on the table and hitched a hip beside it, unwrapped and began to finger his anger, his resentment of the constraints laid on him, his frustration. Daniel Akamarino went where he wanted when he wanted, Ahzurdan was constrained only by his internal confusions, whatever he wanted or needed he had the power to take if some fool tried to deny him. Danny Blue was too young an entity to know much about who and what he was, but he resonated sufficiently with his progenitors to feel a bitter anger at the Chains the god had put on him. He felt the compulsion clamp down on his head when he tried to give voice to that anger; he could not do, say or even think anything that might (might!) work against the god. He knew, though he had deliberately refrained from thinking about it, that he suffered the smother without trying to fight it because it offered-or seemed to offer-an escape for him, a way he could thwart the god without having to fight the compulsion. After the landfolk shut down their ambushes, he’d ridden relaxed under it exerting himself just enough to keep from being crushed, smiling out of vague general satisfaction as the weight of the smother increased and the possibility of action diminished. He carried that satisfaction into dinner and beyond, but somewhere in the middle of the discussion, he lost it. The Hand of the God came down on him harder than the smother, find the answer, find it, no more dawdling, I’ll have no more excuses for failure, failure will not be permitted. Get through that line however you can, stomp the landfolk like ants if you have to, do whatever you have to, but bring me BinYAHtii.

He wiped the sweat off his face, beat his fist on the tabletop until it boomed, working off some of the rage that threatened to explode out of the cramping grip of the god and blow the fragile psyche of Danny Blue into dust. He might be young and wobbly on his feet, but he had a ferocious will to survive. Not as Ahzurdan, not as Daniel Akamarino. As Danny Blue the New.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

He looked up. Brann was standing in the arch of the alcove looking worried. He opened his mouth to explain but his tongue wouldn’t move and his throat closed on him. It was forbidden to think, do or say anything against the god. His face went hot and congested as he wrestled with the ban; he felt as if he were strangling on the words that wouldn’t come out She came to him, put her hand on his arm. “Never mind,” she said, “I know.”

He slammed fist against table one last time, sighed and stood up. “Help me turn this thing over.”

Brann pushed her hair off her face, blinked at him, then began laughing. He looked up, startled. “What?”

“You wouldn’t understand. Why turn the table over?”

“Don’t want to talk about it, you know why.”

“Ah. Can the changers help?”

“No. You take that end, I’ll take this. Watch the legs. -

“Better move the candle first, unless you’re planning to burn the house down. If you want light, why not touch on the wall lamps?”

“Lamps?” He looked up. There were ten glass and copper bracket lamps with resevoirs full of oil spaced along the walls of the alcove two meters and a half above the floor; he hadn’t noticed them because he hadn’t bothered to look higher than his head. “Do you know how irritating a woman is when she’s always right? Here.” He thrust the candle at, her. “Light the ones on your side.”

When the table was inverted and lay with its legs in the air, Danny Blue knelt on it and thumped at various portions of it to make sure the wood was solid; finished with that, he sat on his heels and looked thoughtfully at Brann. “You fed Ahzurdan, you think you can do that for me?”

She frowned at him, moved to the arch. “Yaril, I need you.”

Drifting above the clouds, Jaril spread out and out and out, shaping himself into a mile wide parabolic collector seducing into himself starlight, moonlight, gathering every erg of power he could find; Yaril was a glimmering glassy filament stretching from Jaril to Brann, feeding that power into her; Brann was a transformer kneeling beside Danny Blue, feeding that power into him as fast as he could take it.

Using Ahzurdan’s memories, Danny Blue wove a shield about them like the one Ahzurdan had thrown about the room in the Blue Seamaid; he worked more slowly and had to draw more power than Ahzurdan had, the memories were there but he was no longer completely Ahzurdan and the resonances of word and act were no longer quite true. With Brann feeding energy into him, he got the shield completed, locked it into automatic and found that he’d gained two advantages he hadn’t expected. The smother couldn’t reach him, couldn’t wear at him. And the shield once it was completed took almost no maintaining. Whistling a cheerful tune he unbuckled his sandals and kicked them across the room, grabbed hold of Brann and pulled her into the alcove, shrinking the shield until it covered only that smaller room, it’d attract less attention and he had no illusions about how irritated Maksim was going to be at losing sight of what they were doing. But it was so damn good to be working again on something as simple and elegant and altogether beautiful as lift field circuits-he felt like a sculptor who’d lost his hands in some accident or other, then had to spend an small eternity waiting for them to be regrown.

Yaril filament had no difficulty penetrating the shield; she continued to transmit moonlight and starlight into Brann who kept one hand lightly on Danny’s spine, maintaining the feed as he dropped to his knees on the underside of the tabletop. He brushed his fingertips across the wood, sketched the outline of a sensor panel, but left it as faint marks on the surface. Hands moving slowly, surely, the chant pouring out of him with a rightness that was another thing he hadn’t expected (as if the magic and his Daniel memories had conspired to teach him in that instant what it’d taken Ahzurdan years to learn, as if the rightness and elegance of the design dictated the chant and all the rest), he Reshaped the wood into metal and ceramic and the esoteric crystals that were the heart and brain of the field, layer on layer of them embedded in the wood, shielded from it by intricate polymers, his body the conduit by which the device flowed out of memory into reality, his will and intellect disregarded. When the circuits were at last completed, he sculpted twin energy sinks near the tail (full, they’d power the sled twice about the world) and finished his work with a canted sensor plate that would let him control start-up, velocity, direction and altitude. After a moment’s thought, he keyed the plate to his hand and Brann’s; whatever happened, Maksim wasn’t going to be playing with this toy, it was his, Danny Blue the New, no one else’s. He added Brann, (reluctantly, forcing himself to be practical when the thought of sharing his creation made him irrationally angry), because there was too good a chance he’d be injured and incapable and he trusted her to get away from Maksim if she could possibly do it so he didn’t want to limit her options. He sat on his heels, gave Brann a broad but weary grin. “Finished.”

She inspected the underside of the table; except for the collection of milkglass squares on the tilted board near one end she couldn’t see much change in the wood. “If you say so. Shall I call the changers in?”

He tested the shielding and his own reserves. “Why not. But you’d better tell them I’m going to need them in the morning when there’s sunlight, we have to charge the power cells before we go anywhere.”

She nudged the tabletop with her toe. “I’ve heard of flying carpets, but flying kitchen tables, hunh!”

He jumped up, laughed, “Bramble all thorns, no you won’t spank me for that.” He caught her by the waist,, swung her into an exuberant dance about the kitchen whistling the cheeriest tune he knew; he was flying higher than Jaril had, the pleasure of using both strands of his technical knowledge to produce a thing of beauty was better than any other pleasure in both his lives, better than sex, better than smokedreams; he sang that in her ear, felt her respond, stopped the dance and stood holding her. “Brann…

Mmmtn?”

“Still hating me?”

She leaned against his arms, pushing him back so she could see his face, her own face grave at first, then warming with laughter. She made a fist, pounded it lightly against his chest. “If you mess me up again, I swear, Dan, I’ll… I don’t know what I’ll do, but I guarantee it’ll be so awful you’ll never ever recover from it.”

He stroked her hands down her back, closed them over her buttocks, pulled her against him. “Feel me shaking?”

“Like a leaf in a high wind.”

He tugged her toward the alcove, but she broke away. “I’m not going to bruise my behind or my knees,” she said. “Privacy yes,” she said, “but give me some comfort too. Pillows,” she said. “And quilts. Fire’s down, it’s getting chilly in here.”

The children were curled up on the couch in the living room, sunk in the dormancy that was their form of sleep. Brann touched them lightly, affectionately as she moved past them, then ran laughing up the stairs to the sleeping floor. She started throwing the pillows out the doors leaving them in the hall for Dan to collect and carry downstairs, came after him with a billowing slippery armload of feather comforters.

Brann blinked, yawned, scrubbed her hands across her face. She felt extraordinarily good though her mouth tasted like something had died there, she was disagreeably sticky in spots and when she stretched, the comforter brushing like silk across her body, she winced at a number of small sharp twinges from pulled muscles and a bite or two, which only emphasized how very very good she was feeling. She lay still a moment, enjoying a long leisurely yawn, taking pleasure in the solid feel of Dan’s body as her hip moved against his. But she’d never been able to stay abed once she was awake, so she kicked free of the quilts and sat up.

Dan was still deeply asleep, fine black hair twisting about his head, a heavy stubble bluing his chin and cheeks, long silky eyelashes fanned across blue veined skin whose delicacy she hadn’t noticed before. She bent over him, lifted a stray strand of hair away from his mouth, traced the crisp outlines of that mouth with moth-touches of her forefinger. The mouth opened abruptly, teeth closed on her finger. Growling deep in his throat, Dan caught her around the waist, whirled her onto her back and began gnawing at her shoulder, working his way along it to her neck.

Brann dunked a corner of the towel in the basin of cold water, shivered luxuriously as she scrubbed at herself. “The changers are still dormant. I suppose I should wake them.”

“They worked hard and there’s more to do, leave them alone a while yet… mmm… scrub my back?”

“Do mine first. I’d love to wash my hair, but I’m too lazy to heat the water. Dan…?”

“Dan Dan the handyman. How’s that feel?” He rubbed the wet soapy towel vigorously across her back and down her spine, lifted her hair and worked more gently on her neck. When he was finished, he dropped a quick kiss on the curve of her shoulder, traded towels with her and began wiping away the soap.

“Handyman has splendid hands,” she murmured. “Give me a minute more and I’ll do you.”

“Trade you, Bramble, you cook breakfast for us and I’ll haul hot water for your hair.”

“Cozy.” A deep rumbling voice filled with laughter.

Brann whipped round, hands out, reaching toward the huge dark man in a white linen robe who stood a short distance from them.

Dan moved hastily away from her “No use, Brann, it’s only an eidolon.”

“What?” As soon as she said it, she no longer needed an answer, the eidolon had moved a step away and she could see the kitchen fire glow through it.

“Projected image. He’s nowhere near here.” Dan’s voice came from a slight distance, when she looked round, he was coming from the alcove with his trousers and her shirt.

“He can see and hear us?” She took the shirt, pulled it around her and buttoned up the front.

“Out here. If we went into the alcove, no.” He tied off his trouser laces and came to lean against the pump sink beside and a little behind her.

“So,” Brann said, “it’s your move, image. What does he want with us?”

The eidolon lifted a large shapely hand, pointed its forefinger at the alcove.

“NO!” Dan got out half a word and the beginning of a gesture, then sank back, simmering, as the eidolon dropped its arm and laughed.

“Busy busy, baby Dan?” The eidolon folded its arms across its massive chest. “I presume you have cobbled together some means of coping with the landfolk. A small warning to the two of you which you can pass on to your versatile young friends. Don’t touch my folk. I don’t expect an answer to that. What I’ve sent the eidolon for is this, a small bargain. I will refrain from any more attacks against you, I’ll even call off Amortis; you will come direct to me on Deadfire Island.” The eidolon turned its head, yellow eyes shifting from Brann to Danny Blue. Its mouth stretched into a mocking smile. “A bargain that needs no chaffering because you have no choice, the two of you. Come to me because you must and let us finish this thing.” Giving them no time to respond, it vanished.

The table hovered waist high above the flags of the paved yard. Still inverted, its front four legs supported a stiff windbreak made of something that looked rather like waxy glass, another of Danny Blue’s transformations. He sat in the middle of the sled grinning at her; liftsled, that’s what he’d called it and when she told him no sled she’d ever seen looked like that he took it as a compliment. Yaril and Jaril were sitting on the rim of a stone bowl planted with broadleaved shrubs that were looking wrinkled and shopworn (end of the year symptoms or they needed watering); the changers were enjoying_, the performance (hers and Dan’s as well as the table’s).

Brann shivered. The wind was more than chill this morning, it was cold. If those clouds ever let down their load, it would fall as sleet rather than rain, a few degrees more and the Plain might have this year’s first snow. “Yaro, collect us two or three of those quilts, please? And here,” she tossed two golds to Yaril, ‘leave these somewhere the farmwife will find them but a thief would miss. I know we’re gifting the farmer with three fine mules, but he didn’t sew the quilts and he doesn’t use the table we’re walking off with. I know, I know, not walking, flying. You happy now, Dan? Shuh! save your ah hmm wit until we’re somewhere you can back it up. If you need something to occupy you, figure for me how long our flying table will need to get us to Deadfire.”

Danny Blue danced his fingers over the sensors; the table lowered itself smoothly to the flagging. He got to his feet, stretched, stood fingering a small cut the sorcerously sharpened knife had inflicted on him when he used it to shave away his stubble. Ahzurdan jogged my hand, he told Brann, he keeps growling at me that adult males need beards to proclaim their manhood, it’s the one advantage he had over Maksim, he could grow a healthy beard and his teacher couldn’t, the m’darjin blood in him prevented, but I can’t stand fur on my face so all old Ahzurdan can do is twitch a little. He fingered the cut and scowled past Brann at the wooden fence around the kitchen garden.-It’s hard to say, Bramble. Last night, who was it, Yaril, she said we’d reach the mountains late afternoon today, say we were riding, that’s… hmm… what? Sixty, seventy miles? Jay, from this side the hills, how far would you say it is to Deadfire Island?”

Jaril kicked his heels against the pot. “Clouds,” he said. “We couldn’t get high enough to look over the hills.” He closed his eyes. ‘Before we left on the Skia Hetaira,” he said, his voice slow and remembering, “we wanted to get a look down into Maksim’s Citadel, we weren’t paying much attention to the hills… Yaro?” Yaril dumped quilts and pillows onto the table, walked over to him. She settled beside him, her hand light on his shoulder. They sat there quietly a moment communing in their own way, pooling their memories.

Jaril straightened, opened his eyes. “Far as we can remember, those hills ahead are right on the coast. You just have to get through them, then you’re more or less at Silagmatys. About the same distance, I’d say, from here to the hills, from the hills to Deadfire. Maybe a hundred miles altogether, give or take a handful.”

Dan nodded. “I see. Well…” He clasped his hands behind him and considered the table. “If the sled goes like it’s supposed to, flying time’s somewhere between hour and a half, two hours.”

“Instead of two days,” Brann said slowly. She looked up. The heavy clouds hid the sun, there wasn’t even a watery glow to mark its position, the grayed-down light was so diffuse there were no shadows. She moved her shoulders impatiently. “Jay, can you tell what time it is?”

Jaril squinted at the clouds, turned his head slowly until he located the sun. “Half hour before noon.”

Brann thrust her hands through her hair. Her stomach was knotting, there was a metallic taste in her mouth. Instead of two days, two hours. Two hours! Things rushing at her. Danny was cool as a newt, the kids were cooler, but her head was in a whirl. She felt like kicking them. They were waiting for her to give the word. She looked at the table, smiled because she couldn’t help it, charging through the sky on a kitchen table was pleasantly absurd though what was going to happen at the end of that flight was enough to chase away her brief flash of amusement. She wiped her hands down her sides. “Ahh!” she said. “Let’s go.”

16. The Beginning Of The End.

SCENE: Deadfire island. Taking color from the clouds, the bay’s water is leaden and dull; it licks at a nailparing of a beach with sand like powdered charcoal; horizontal ripples of stone rise from the sand at a steep slant in a truncated pyramid with a rectangular base. About halfway up, the walls rise sheer in a squared-off oval to a level top whose long axis is a little over half a mile, the short axis about five hundred yards, with elaborate structures carved into the living stone (the dominant one being an immense temple with fat-waisted columns thirty feet high and a central dome of demon-blown glass, black about the base, clear on top, the clear part acting as a concentrating lens when the sun’s in the proper place which happens only at the two equinoxes). On the side facing Silagamatys a stubby landing juts into the bay; a road runs from the landing through a gate flanked with huge beast paws carved from black basalt, larger than a two-story house, three-toed with short powerful claws; it continues between tapering brick walls that ripple like ribbons in a breeze, then climbs in an oscillating sprawl to the heights.

Settsimaksimin stands in the temple garden, leaning on a hoe as he watches a narrow stream of water trickle around the roots of bell bushes and trumpet vines. Most of the flowering plants have been shifted from the flowerbeds into winter storage, but there are enough bushes with brilliantly colored frost-touched leaves to leaven the dullness of the surroundings. Behind him Amortis in assorted forms is flickering restlessly about the temple, her fire alternately caged and released by the temple pillars; she is working herself into a fury so she can forget her fear.

Maksim scratched at his chest, then scratched some dirt into the channel to redirect the water. When he was satisfied, he swung the hoe handle onto his shoulder and strolled to the waist-high wall about the garden. Sliding between Deadfire and Silagamatys, glittering ferociously, shooting those glitters at him, the Godalau swam like a limber gem, through the gray matrix of the sea. was nowhere in view, no doubt heesh was around, watching for a crack where hisser’s thumbs could go. Past noon. Divination said they’d be here in an hour or so, riding Danny’s little toy. He had a last look around, took the hoe to the silent brown man squatting in a corner sipping at a straw colored tea and went back across the grass to the minor stairs that led to a side door into the temple.

The Dome Chamber was an immense hexagonal room at the heart of the temple, it was also an immense hexagonal trap set to catch Brann, Danny Blue and the changers. A complicated trap with overlapping, reinforcing dangers. In each of the six walls, two arched alcoves bound by quickrelease pentacles, twelve cells holding different numbers of different sorts of demons, fly-in-amber-waiting. A blackstone thronechair on a dais two thirds the length of the room from the entrance, massive, carved with simple blocky fireforms, unobtrusive lowrelief carvings that decorated every inch of the chair’s surface, caught the constantly shifting light and changed the look of the chair_from moment to moment until the surface seemed to flow like water, a power-sink, a defensive pole, not dangerous in itself, only in its occupant. Pentacles everywhere, etched into the basalt floor like silverwire snowflakes widecast about the dais, some dull, some glowing with life, some punctuated with black candles awaiting an igniting gesture, some left bare (though scarcely less dangerous), some drawn black on black so only sorceror’s sight could see them. Between the pentacles, sink traps scattered hapazardly (the unpattern carefully plotted in Maksim’s head so he wouldn’t trap himself), waiting for an unwary foot, a toe touch sufficient to send the toe’s owner into a pocket universe like the one that held the Chained God only not nearly so large. Other traps written into the air itself, drifting on the eddying currents in that air. Amortis, shape abandoned, a seething fireball, floating up under the dome filling the space there with herself, keeping herself clear of the traps, waiting for her chance to attack and destroy the midges who’d dared to threaten her, waiting her chance also to sneak a killing hit at Maksim, waiting for him to forget her long enough to let her strike, not knowing he’d made her bait in another trap; if the changers tried to tap her godfire, they tipped themselves into a far reality, removing themselves permanently from the battle.

As Maksim moved through the forest of columns, he tugged the clasp from his braid, pulled the plait apart until his hair lay in crinkles about his shoulders, unlaced the ties at the neck of his torn wrinkled workrobe. He turned aside before he reached the Dome Chamber, entering a small room he’d set up as a vestry. Humming in a rumbling burr, he stripped off the robe, dropped onto a low stool and planted one foot in a basin filled with hot soapy water. With a small, stiff-bristled brush he scrubbed at the foot, examined his toenails intently then with satisfaction, wiped that foot and began on the other. When he had washed away the dirt of his play at gardening, he buffed his fingernails and toenails until he was satisfied with their matte sheen, then he started brushing his hair, clicking his tongue at the amount of gray that had crept into the black while he was busy with Brann and the Council. He brushed and brushed, humming, his tuneless song, vaguely regretting Todichi Yahzi wasn’t here to do the brushing for him (it was one of his more innocent pleasures, sitting before the fire on a winter evening while little Todich tended his hair, brushing it a thousand strokes, combing it into order, until every hair end was tucked neatly away, braiding it, smoothing the braid with his clever nervous hands). Maksim clicked his tongue again, shook his head. No time for dreaming. He plaited his hair into a soft loose braid, pressed the clasp about the end, pulled on an immaculate white robe, touched it here and there to smooth away the last vestige of a wrinkle. Standing before a full length mirror, he drew the wide starched collar back from his neck, brought BinYAHtii out and set the dull red stone on the white linen. He weighed the effect, nodded, reached for his sleeveless outer robe. It was heavily embroidered velvet, a brownish red so dark it was almost black. He eased into it, careful not to crush the points of his collar, settled the folds of the crusted velvet into stately verticals, slid heavy rings onto the fingers of both hands, six rings, ornamental and useful, invested with small but deadly spells shaped to slip through defenses busy with more massive attacks. Holding his hands so the rings showed,, he closed his fingers on the front panels of the over-robe and studied the image in the mirror. He smiled with satisfaction then with amusement at the vanity he’d cultivated like a gardener experimenting with one of the weeds that came up among his blooms. He licked his thumb and smoothed an eyebrow, licked it a second time and smoothed the other, winked at his image in the mirror and left the room.

His staff was leaning against a column beside the broad low arch that was the only entrance to the Dome Chamber; he’d left it there because he’d need it to move around the chamber without getting wrapped in one of his own traps. He went through the arch at its center, turned sharply left, moved along the wall to the first of the cells then began a careful circuitous almostdance across the floor, staff held before him to sweep aside the air webs. He reached the chair intact and immaculate, with a memory of heat close to him. Having seated himself in the greatchair which was ample enough to hold him with room to spare and more comfortable than it looked, but not much, he laid his staff across the arms and settled himself to wait.

A whitish waxy muzzle nosed slowly, awkwardly, through the low arch. He waited. When the thing emerged a bit more, he was amused to see it was an inverted table with Brann and Danny Blue crouched betwe^,:m its legs. Floating a yard above the floor, it inched forward until it was clear of the arch then stopped, rocking gently as if blown by summer breezes on a summer pond. The changers followed it in, twin glimmer-spheres so pale they were visible only as smudges of light against the blackstone wall as they hovered one on each side of the table.

For a breath or two he considered calling to them, working out some sort of compromise, but Amortis was seething overhead, ready to seize and swallow at the first sign of hesitation, not caring whom she took, him or them, BihYAHtii trembled on his chest, hungrier and more deadly than the god, and, beyond all this, he remembered the thousands of landfolk who’d left home and harvest for him, trying to interpose their bodies between him and those on that table. There was no room left for talking. There never had been, really. He swung the staff up, knocked its end against the dais three times and took all restraints off his voice. “I give you this warning,” he roared at them, “This alone. Leave here. Or die. There is nothing for you here.” While he was still speaking, before the warning was half finished, he fingered the staff and loosed a sucking airtrap, throwing it at the table. There were many ways of managing that lift effect; it didn’t matter which Danny Blue had chosen, for the trap would negate the magic behind the effect, send the table crashing to the floor and prison it with its riders in one or another of the stonetraps.

Nothing like that happened. Danny Blue didn’t even try to counter the trap. While it twined about the table and withered futilely away, Dan spat into his palm, blew at the spittle. It flew off his hand, elongated into a blue-white water form that arrowed at Maksim, a water elemental (which surprised Maksim quite a lot since Ahzurdan’s forte had been fire and fire-callers, like earth-singers, seldom could handle water at all, let alone handle it well; this was either the Godalau’s work or the Akamarino melded with him, which made one wonder what else he could do and what his weaknesses were); Maksim drew briefly on the chair’s power, channeled it through his staff and twisted a tunnel through the air that sucked in the elemental and flung it into the bay.

The table moved az^,hair or two forward. Dan was frowning, trying to read floor, air, ceiling, walls as if he had forty eyes not two. The Drinker of Souls knelt beside him, silent, frowning, one hand resting lightly on his shoulder. The changers drifted beside the table, waiting. For what, Maksim did not know, perhaps they wanted to get closer before they came at him; one thing he did know, he did not want them anywhere near him. He prodded a reluctant Amortis, ordered her to stir herself and start attacking, wanting her to draw the changers into striking back at her, thereby taking themselves out of the game. While she shaped and flung a storm of firedarts at the sled, he scanned his prisoned demons, chose the players for his first demon gambit.

Third cell on the right: small bat-winged flyers with adamantine teeth and claws, a poison dart at the tip of whippy tails. He released the pentacle and sent the flyers racing at the sled.

Third cell on the left: one creature there, a knotty tentacled acid spitter, capable of instantaneous transfer across short distances, capable also of terrific psychic punches when it was within touching distance. He tripped the pentacle on this one a few seconds after the other, waiting until Danny Blue was focused on the first set of demons, fishing for the release call that would send them home.

Demons in the remaining ten cells, waiting to be loosed to battle.

In two separate cells, two vegetative serpents thirty feet long and big around as a man’s thigh, immensely powerful with shortrange stunner organs that they can use to freeze their prey before they drop on it.

In three separate cells, three swarms of Hive demons each three inches long, they suck up magic like flies suck up blood, hundreds of units in each swarm.

In three separate cells, three tarry black leech things, eyeless, with feelers that they extrude and withdraw into themselves, each with a rhythm of its own; like the hivers they drink magic rather than blood, they are capable of sensing traps and avoiding them and nothing but death or dismissal will take them off a trail they’re started on.

A mist creature, a subtle thing, slow, insinuating; given sufficient time it can penetrate any shield no matter how tight; once in, it consumes whatever lives inside that shield.

A roarer, a swamp lizard mostly mouth and lungs, it attacks with sound, battering with noise, stirring terror with subsonics, drilling into the brain with supersonics.

Dan shouted the release that flipped the flyers to their home reality a micro instant before the tentacled demon slammed into the shield sphere, gushed acid over it and wound itself up to punch at the people inside. As the sled rocked and groaned under the added weight, before Dan had time to shift his focus, Brann had the stunner out of his pocket; she thumbed the slide back and slashed the invisible beam in a wide X across the creature.

It howled in agony, pulled its tentacles into a tight knot and tumbled off the shield, crashing to the floor inside one of the pentacle traps which locked around it and held it stiff as a board against stone that sucked at it and sucked at it, slowly slowly absorbing the demon into its substance.

The changers wheeled above the shield, catching the firedarts and eating them. Amortis stirred uneasily in the dome and stopped wasting her substance for no result.

Danny Blue shivered the shield to rid it of the remnants of the acid, then he scraped the sweat off his brow and peered into the air ahead of him, searching out the airtraps, inching the sled between them, gaining another foot before he stopped to catch his breath and prepare another attack.

Maksim frowned. That shield should be costing Danny Blue more than he could afford-unless he had something similar to BinYAHtii feeding him. Her. Had to be her. Forty Mortal Hells, I have to get to her. How, how, how… ah! The sled had whined and dropped lower under the weight of the demon. If he could crash it, if he could put them on foot…

Second gambit. Complex. Crushing weight, pile stone elementals on that shield sphere, attack on every side with everything I can throw at them, distract the changers, tempt them once more to attack Amortis.

Settsimaksimin tripped the pentacles, flipped the serpents and the roarer at the sled and left the others to make their own way; he goaded Amortis into attacking again, instructing her to slam the sled about as much as she could while she flooded it with fire; he reached deep into the stone, wakened the elementals sleeping there, sent them boiling up (bipedal forms with powerful clumsy limbs, forms altering constantly but very slowly, growing, breaking off into smaller versions like a glacier calving icebergs, gray and black and brown and brindle, stone colors, stone flesh, stone heavy), standing on each other, climbing over each other until they were up and over the shield sphere, saving only where the serpents were. Once they were in place, they swung their arms and crashed their fists into it, pounding it, pounding…

The Roarer crouched on its bit of safe ground and hammered at them with with great gusts of SOUND, blasts so tremendous they seemed to shake the temple, threatening to bring the columns crashing down around the chamber. The effect of this SOUND was diminished slightly by the insulating effect of the crawling stone bodies of the elementals, but not enough, not nearly enough. The serpents tightened their grip on the shield, flat sucker faces pressed against it, sensors searching for life within, stun organ pulsing, ready to loose its hammer the moment it had a target…

Danny Blue cursed and fought the numbing of that SOUND and searched through Ahzurdan’s memories for the names and dismissals he needed. Brann tried the stunner again, but she couldn’t get at the Roarer and the serpents were stunners themselves with a natural immunity that bled off the field before it could harm them. She felt something like tentacles moving over her, slimy, cold, nauseating, closing around her; force like a fist blow raced through them, struck at her, almost took her out, but Dan found one reality he wanted, one name he needed, shouted the WORD at the serpents and banished them.

He pulled more and more energy from her as the pressure on the shield increased and she was beginning to wilt as the drain on her resources intensified. “Yaril,” she cried. A tentacle of light snaked through the shield, touched her. *I need help, I’m nearly empty.*

*Gotcha, Bramble. Just a moment.* Yaril merged briefly with Jaril. When they separated, Jaril dived at the elementals, swept through and through them, stealing energy from them, sloughing what he couldn’t contain, Yaril expanded into a flat oval, a shield over the shield, absorbed the fire from Amortis, sent some of it along a thread to Brann and flared off the rest, doing her best to splash the overflow toward Maksim.

As the godfire poured into her, Brann gasped, closed her eyes tight, tears of agony squeezing out the sides. She contained the fire, controlled it, transmuted it and fed it into Dan to replace the energy flooding out of him.

The hivers sucked at the weave of the shield, softening it, draining it. The slugs were still a few yards out, oozing their way warily past the traps on the floor, but Dan could already feel them. The roarer battered at him, it was impossible to think with that noise drilling into his brain, plucking at his nerves, making him shudder with dread. After more frantic searching, he chanced across another NAME and another WORD, and with a sigh of relief he banished the Roarer and its SOUND.

The shield softened further and he couldn’t stop it, no matter how much strength he poured into the weave, he could only slow it a little. He scowled at the buzzing hivers, trying to get a closer look at them, chilled inside because nothing he remembered came close to matching them, and if he didn’t get rid of them soon…

He didn’t attempt to do anything about the elementals; earth was Maksim’s forte and this close to him no one, not even a god, would wrest them from his control, Jaril was distracting them, weakening them, that was all anyone could hope for.

He was furious and frustrated. Maksim hesitating to attack, HAH! he’d kept them on the defensive from the moment they reached the chamber. His ground. No doubt he’d been preparing it for days, perhaps for decades, not specifically for them but for anyone who thought to challenge him. He shook off his malaise. “Brann, the swarms, see if the stunner will knock them down. Ahzurdan doesn’t know them, I can’t…”

“I hear.” She began playing the stunner along the undersurface of the sphere, an undersurface clearly marked by the stony bodies of the elementals. Dan made a little sound, a combination gasp and involuntary chuckle as the hivers fell away from the shield, pattering to the floor with tiny clatters like wind driven seeds against windowpanes.

More elementals came out of the earth and crawled onto the shield, closing the last interstices so he could not longer see the slugs. The sled groaned and shivered and sank lower until it was only six inches off the stone, in minutes it was going to touch the floor, it was bound to land in one of the pentacles or sink into a trap. The elementals stopped pounding on the shield, they were weakened by Jaril’s raids, but that didn’t help, it was the weight of them that did the damage. Water, he thought, water, somehow I’ve got to get water in here, some… how… The slugs pulled harder at him, they were going to swallow him if he didn’t do something. Where where did Maksim get them, I seem to remember… Magic Man, where where… ah! He spoke the NAME, he spoke the WORD, the pressure diminished so suddenly, so sharply, he almost fell on his face, his skin felt too thin as if he were about to explode, his grip on the shieldweave wavered. His hands snapped into fists as he caught hold of the shield and tightened it again. He forced himself to sit up, pressed a fist against his thigh and straightened the fingers one by one, working them carefully until he had some control over them. Bending over the sensor panel, he started the sled forward, got a little momentum and was able to break away from the elementals still boiling up through the floor, though the ones already clinging to the shield sphere stayed with him and he couldn’t gain height. He didn’t have to worry about airtraps any more, the bodies of the elementals protected him from those. He felt the sled jolt and knew that Maksim was hammering at him. The jolting grew harder, came faster without any pattern to it. Amortis was slamming at them too, her blows amplifying or interfering with Maksim’s, she wasn’t concerned with that, she screamed her hate and fury as she put all her strength into those clouts. The sled rocked precariously, tilted far to one side, bucked and twisted, throwing Danny Blue and Brann against the legs, threatening to whip them through the shield into the arms of the elementals. This wasn’t something he planned for, the sled was reasonably stable but even its prototype wasn’t built for this kind of strain; the table groaned and whined, rocked wildly, one moment a corner scraped against the stone; luck and luck alone kept them from trap or pentacle. He fought the sled level again, managed to squeeze more forward speed from the field, hoping as they got closer to Maksim that Amortis would have to take more care, giving him a chance to think a little. Somehow he had to strip away the elementals so he could see Maksim, as long as he was blind all he could do was hold his defenses tight.

Maksim watched the mound of oozing stone forms surge, tilt, shudder, heard the sled scrape the floor, ground his teeth when he was sure it had touched down in one of the few clean spaces. It labored on, creeping toward him; so far nothing had worked to stop it. He glared up at Amortis, shouted at her to stop wasting fire, she was only feeding the changers, to concentrate on slamming the sled about. A mistake, that fire, it meant the changers didn’t have to draw from the source. He’d misread the events in Amortis’ first attack, he saw that now, and he’d made other mistakes in play; shouldn’t have hit them so hard from so many directions, he wasted the demons that way (though he hadn’t expected all that much from them since Ahzurdan knew them as well as he did, except the hivers, too bad about them, that cursed weapon Akamarino brought with him, the mist demon was still in the game, Ahzurdan knew its form and home, but Danny Blue would have to see it before he could do anything about it). Wasted his best trap too, there was no one clear danger, he should have made Amortis the clear danger, then the changers might have attacked her, they were too busy defending the sled to be tempted that way. The mist demon finally reached the sled and began oozing among the elementals, the overflow from the fire was bothering it, he could feel it whining, he snarled at Amortis again, subsided as the flood of fire choked off and the sled tottered as she put muscle into her immaterial arm and her immaterial fist slammed into it.

He pulled more elementals from the stone and threw them atop the pile. The sled groaned and dropped an inch lower, but still kept coming. He wondered briefly whether Danny Blue meant to slam into the stairs of the dais, or didn’t know he was getting close to them; the elementals flowed so thickly about him, there seemed no way he could see where he was going. Unless the changers were piloting him. They went through the rind of elementals and that peculiar shield as if neither existed. That shield, it was like nothing he’d seen before; he assumed it was an amalgam of the knowledge held by Ahzurdan and Akamarino. It was certainly effective. Fascinating, what the Chained God had done with those two men. He moved his staff, sent a ram of hardened air at the sled; it swung and shuddered, then came on even faster. He scowled, deflected a splash of earthfire slung at him by one of the changers as it drained strength from the elementals and pried bits of the elastic stone from the shield sphere, thumped the sled once more. He didn’t want to give up the trap woven round Amortis, but if that thing got too close he might have to; he began shifting his intent, began gathering himself for one last grand effort.

The sled swerved sharply, picked up yet more speed and began running at the wall on Maxim’s right, rocking, sliding, tottering under the increasing force and speed of the whacks from Amortis’ immaterial fists. It must be hellish inside there.

The sled swerved again, scooted behind the chair and stopped. The changers sucked great gulps of energy from the earth elementals and washed it across the back of the thronechair. The obsidian chairback exploded in a spray of molten stone; part of the energy in that eruption came from his own power which he’d stored in the chair, part from the stone life in the elementals, stone against stone, stone melting stone. Maksim jumped to his feet, did a hasty dance with his staff to shunt the melted obsidian away from him, cursed, then laughed, appreciating the irony in this interweaving of chance and intention. He leaped onto the chairseat, drew what remained of the stored power into himself and flung the fire back at the changers and the sled.

Hampered by the narrow space and nervous about getting too close to Maksim, Amortis struck at them, hit the sled hard enough to slam it into the backwall, hit it again when it rebounded. And again.

The elementals kept trying to crush the shield, pushing that futile attack because Maksim wouldn’t release them. They pressed more substance into their fists and beat on the shield, they grew knife-edged talons on feet and hands, gouged at the shield, they oozed themselves up toward the top of the shield sphere, oozed back down again when they couldn’t get a hold on it, their stony substance stretching and flowing like cold taffy.

The changers went wheeling and whipping through the elementals, they scooped huge gouts of earthfire out of them and flung it at Maksim, flung it with such power it seemed to reach him almost before it left their hands. He deflected it, but he was linked too closely to the elementals to escape their pain, their fury, the heat got at him, the fire raised blisters on his face and arms.

The exchange went on and on, neither side seriously affecting the other. Maksim kept waiting for the mist to act, but nothing seemed to be happening on the sled. It slammed against the wall, bounced against the back of the dais, it groaned and whined, it came close to capsizing, but the shield never faltered. He cast up a deflector of his own to carry the changers’ attack away from him and away from the chair so its stone wouldn’t melt from under him, he slapped his right foot on the stone, slapped his left foot on the stone, yelled a wordless defiance that filled the chamber, set himself firm as stone, set himself for a last throw, unknotting the trap-web about Amortis, dragging it back into himself, dragging an unwilling Amortis down from the dome, holding her shivering on the dais beside him, her mass compacted until she was a mere ten feet tall, a vaguely bipedal shape of red-gold white-gold light. Sullen light. He muttered to himself, pulling from his sorceror’s trickbag the preparatory syllables that would set the points for the wild web he was planning to spin.

Sometime later he happened to glance round, no particular reason for it, it was just something he did; he saw black, dull black shirt and trousers, threadbare, wrinkled, a round graceless form silhouetted against the flare of the deflected earthfire. Tungjii. Watching. It jolted him. What’s that one doing here? Never mind. Concentrate, Maksim, don’t give himmer a crack for hisser thumbs. Forget himmer, you’ve got them in your hands, you can throw them anywhere you want once you’re ready. Ready ready, almost ready…

His voice boomed in a reverberant chant, filling the chamber with sound so powerful it was a tangible THING, the intricately linked syllables weaving a fine gold web about the sled…