Treason

Chapter 13 -- Treason

How they had found him I didn't know, but it couldn't have been hard. The integrity of the manager was suspect at best; stories of our odd midday arrival might have circulated up through the symbiotic chain of criminals and police until it reached the attention of someone who was aware of Barton's miraculous salvation from the archers. The mutilation of his body was probably because, having seen me again after I seemed thoroughly dead, the illuders and their unwitting assistants wanted to make sure there was no chance of error. And they left him in the whorehouse so I'd be sure to find him.

I was still in qincktime as I surveyed the destruction of my friend. It had been, to me, ten "days" since I left Anderson, nineteen "days" since had left Barton. In realtime, however, it was early evening of the day after I left. I couldn't help wondering if I could have saved Barton by coming back a little faster, or by not leaving him quite so soon. But as I gave him grief, I realized that the guilt I felt because I might have saved him was a trivial thing compared to thie pain of the earth's scream in Anderson. The earth did not hold me responsible for Bartons death, and after the illuders had added Lord Barton's murder to their list of crimes, I couldn't bring myself to feel guilt for the killing of that hideous man in Anderson. So I was able to shrug off the blame for this and remember only that I loved the man, that he was good, and that I had to stop others like him from dying at the illuders' hands.

With Barton gone, I had no reason to delay the next stage in my journey; I had every reason to hasten it. None of the illuders would escape. No matter what it took, Treason would be free of them before I was through. Any doubt I had about the rightness of my intended killings was gone. I was beyond thought, and intended only to carry out the decision I had so reluctantly made, yet was now grimly glad to fulfill.

There was a matter of priorities. Before moving against the Andersons who were running things in other Families, I had to see to it that the home island was depopulated. No replacements, no angry and deceptive and irresistible army from Anderson should be able to rescue the rulers. And the population of Anderson could be as much as a million; certainly it was no less than a hundred thousand. That would be long and weary work in quicktime, with me armed only with my iron knife and forced to go from person to person. It would use up my lifetime before I was half through. Their destruction required a cataclysm they could not resist, that would kill them all at once. It was not something I knew how to do.

I needed help, and there was only one place I could get it. But could I persuade the people of Schwartz to kill, even when that killing would save other lives-- and, perhaps more importantly, make millions of lives more worth living? There was little room for making value judgments in the Schwartzes' thinking, I knew too well. Life was life. Murder was murder. And I, who had left them still innocent, was coming back to them with blood on my hands, asking them to help me with my killing.

For weeks I had lived utterly alone in quicktime, neither eating nor drinking, neither speaking nor hearing another human voice except that of the beautiful girl in Anderson. Yet I had no time to waste. So for another thirty days I traversed the whole southland of the continent, from Wood to Huss. The trees gave way to lush grassland. The grass gave way to brush that could survive the low rainfall. And finally the brush gave way to endless sand and sunbroken rocks.

I stopped, in quicktime, by the last bush I could see, and there slipped into realtime. I could not find the Schwartzes. They would have to find me. And find me they would, I knew.

For a moment I toyed with the thought of turning back. My reunion with them would not be happy. They couldn't possibly kill me, but when I had lived with them I had known the kind of love they give. I had depended on it. It would not be there now.

I had walked into the desert for half a day when the first Schwartz began paralleling my path, visible from time to time a few dunes away, or at the crest of another rockpile. By afternoon there were three others, and by evening, when I stopped in the shadow of a rise of rock, there were nearly a hundred all around me, more than I had ever seen at one time when I lived among them.

They were silent, all watching me. I did not eat, of course, but sat before them and in my mind reached into the sand, found the water far below, and pulled the water to the surface. It glittered in the reflected light from rocks that still caught the sun. I leaned down to drink. The water withdrew, sank away from me. They had judged me, just as I feared.

I stood, then, and spoke to the Schwartzes.

"I need your help."

"You'll get nothing from Schwartz," said an old man.

"The world needs your help."

"The earth needs nothing but life." And someone murmured, "Killer."

"I didn't say the earth!" I answered, sharply. "I said the world. Men. You know what men are-- they're the ones who still have to eat to live, who still worry about dying."

"Who still fear murderers," said the old min. "We heard the echoes of that scream, Lanik Mueller. You performed the act, so only you heard it clearly, but we know what you did. We taught you, and you used the knowledge to kill. You forced the earth itself to be your sword. If we ever longed to kill, you would be the one whose death we'd seek. Can I say it more plainly? Leave us. Youll get nothing from Schwartz."

"Helmut?" I asked, recognizing him, though I didn't know how.

"Yes," the old man answered.

"I thought you wanted to remain young forever."

"A friend betrayed me, and I grew old."

Then he turned his back on me, and so did the others. Yet none of them left.

The darkness came in then, swiftly as it comes to the desert once the sun is down. But soon Dissent passed through the sky, casting little light but at least providing a reference point so the vertigo of utter darkness did not overtake me. The silence was unbroken, however, until at last I could stand it no longer. My memory of my months among the Schwartzes was too acute. I had been one of them, and now they hated me; I had a task to perform and now I would fail; there were people I cared for, and they would not be freed. I took off my clothes and pressed myself into the sand and wept.

I wept for myself, who had betrayed the trust of the rock and killed. I wept for Barton, whose wit and courage in trusting a stranger had cost him his life, even as he opened up the possibility of saving the world. I wept for the thousands of people I had passed in my journey here, none of them even suspecting that their fate was passing by, that their future would soon be hanging in the balance.

And I wept because I knew that in the end it would be largely futile. Even when the Andersons were gone, if I could destroy them, how free would anyone on Treason be? The Muellers would again make iron swords and attack their neighbors; the Nkumai would again descend from the trees and overrun those who fought with wood and glass. Killing the Andersons would open up a flood of death on the earth. Unfree as the world was, they didn't really know it, and they were at peace.

Who was I to think that this peace was worse than war?

The real enemy was not the Andersons. The real enemy was iron. Not iron for starships to escape from Treason and return to the rest of the human race. Iron to bring blood from soldiers and make them die-- that was what was destroying us. Because what choice did anyone have? If they had something, anything that could be sold to the Ambassadors for iron, then a Family had an advantage over all the others. And so it was necessary for a Family to protect its independence by striking down all other Families that might develop or had developed something the Ambassadors would buy.

As I lay in the sand, my head resting on my arms, I realized that killing the Andersons would accomplish nothing unless I also destroyed the Ambassadors. As long as dead iron could be sent from other worlds to shed blood on this one, the dying would go on.

"You taught me," I said, "that there is iron in the earth."

They didn't answer me, had not turned even when I wept, supposing, probably, that I wept the tears of the guilty and the damned.

"Why is none of this iron on the surface?"

No answer.

"There was some iron on the surface, wasn't there? That's why the first Schwartz came here, wasn't it? The geological survey showed that there weren't any easily accessible iron deposits. But there was iron here, wasn't there?"

Helmut spoke: "No one will ever find iron in Schwartz."

"But it was here, wasn't it? It was here, and you knew, or your ancestors knew, what iron could do, didn't they? They knew the iron would kill. They knew that in the scramble for supremacy, so much blood would be shed that any victory would be meaningless. Didn't they!"

Helmut turned to me, a strange, twisted expression on his face. "No one has ever left Schwartz believing that."

"You had the iron! And you decided not to use it! Didn't you!"

Helmut stood, angry. "Don't you know anything? Haven't you seen the mountains? Why do you think we never let it rain here? If we let the rain fall in Schwartz, the rust in the rocks would be visible for miles! We'd have no peace, not here, not anywhere in the world! We have kept the iron hidden, and you will not bring the world in here to take it and kill with it!"

Others were facing me now, and they looked angry too.

"You don't understand. I don't want to tell anyone about it. I want to finish the work your fathers started. You live here in Schwartz protecting mankind from iron, but out there iron a shedding blood anyway. Don't you know that?"

"Of course we know that," said Helmut. "But we haven't the power to change men's hearts. We're not responsible. It isn't our fault."

"Your hands are clean, aren't they? Out here where the sun keeps everything pure. But you're not pure. Because if you can stop the suffering and dying and don't stop it, then you are guilty. It is your fault."

"We kill no one. We do not let them kill us. We have nothing to do with them."

I had the thread of an argument, though, and I pursued it. "If you help me, I can stop the iron from coming here. I can completely stop the flow of iron from the Republic, and I can end the fear and competition that has been causing these wars. But I can't do it without your help."

"You're a killer."

"So are you!"

Helmut's eyes widened.

I pressed the point. "In Hanks, hundreds of thousands of people died at swordpoint or from the famine when the land was scorched by the armies of Gill. On the Rebel River plain, hundreds of thousands died when the armies of Nkumai destroyed every living thing in their path. Had any army ever done that kind of thing before? Ever?"

"The sound of it was terrible," Helmut said faintly.

"The reason that kind of war was waged was because of iron. Was because Nkumai and Mueller were both getting iron, and it seemed inevitable that one of them would become supreme among the Families. But there was another Family-- one that had a product they could never export. The Ambassador would never give them iron. But what they could do, what they have done, is go out and take the iron the other Families got."

"What do we care what happens to Mueller and Nkumai?" Helmut said scornfully.

"Nothing at all. But you should care what happens to humanity, for the sake of the rock if for no other reason. The Family I speak of is Anderson, and their power is to lie. Not just to tell someone something that isn't true, but to make them believe it, against their will, to make them so sure that the he is true that it never occurs to them to question it." I told them about Dinte, about Mwabao Mawa, about Percy Barton.

Helmut looked concerned at List. "These are the people who have been killing so many?"

"They are."

"And what would you do? Kill them all?"

My pause was answer enough. Helmut's look changed to loathing. "And you want us to help. You were never my friend, not if you can believe we would do it."

"Listen to me!" I shouted, as if sheer volume would make him open his mind. "The Andersons are irresistible. No man can fight them. They've come subtly this time, insinuating themselves in governments and ruling people who don't know they're ruled by them. But if they're aroused, they can come from their island in force, and no army could resist them, because they would come appearing to be terrible monsters; or they would come invisibly in the night; or they would fight openly, and yet when a man struck at them his enemy would no longer be where he seemed to be, and every soldier would be killed before he ever put his sword to good effect."

"I know what warfare is," Helmut said contemptuously, "and I reject it."

"Of course you reject it. Who can kill you? You'll never die. But out there are millions of people who can die, and when someone comes up to them with a sword in his hand and says, 'Obey me or I'll kill you and your wife and your children,' what does he do? He obeys. Even if he's a hero, he obeys, because he knows that anyone who has the power to kill and is willing to use it will defeat all enemies unless they are just as eager to kill. The power to steal life is the ultimate power in this world, and before that power every other man is weak."

"We aren't weak."

"You aren't men. Men are mortal. You can laugh at a soldier and throw up a wall of rock that will keep him out forever. You can stand on that wall and watch as he and his children and his grandchildren grow old and die, and you'll never understand why it is that they're so constantly afraid. They're afraid because the rain might not come and if their crop fails they'll starve; because floods or earthquakes can snatch away their lives without warning; but most of all because in the night another man can come and lift a sword and cut them off completely from the world. They're afraid of death I. Can you at least imagine what that means?"

"We fear death, too," Helmut said.

"No, Helmut, you resent death. You regret death. But as for your own life, you know perfectly well that no one can threaten it at all. Death is something that happens to someone else."

"And because of that you want us to kill, people? You want us to do the same thing?"

"No, I don't. I want you to help me stop everyone on this planet from having the power to be irresistible. I want to destroy the Ambassadors so that no Family will ever be able to raise iron weapons against wooden ones. And I want to destroy the Andersons because they, like iron, kill wantonly and cannot he withstood."

"How would we be different from them, killing those whose actions we don't like?"

"I don't know! Maybe there's a measuring rod somewhere in the universe where men's acts are judged, and those who kill other men for the sake of power will be judged more harshly than those who kill those power-hungry men for the sake of freedom. But if there's no place in the universe for a man to resist the thieves of freedom and still be called a good man, then I don't think there is any good or evil in the universe, and if that's true then it all means nothing and it wouldn't make any difference then whether you kill or not but that can't be true, it can't be that way, it does make a difference, there comes a time when you have to take lives in order to-- listen to me! --In order to--"

But there was no way to convince them. I saw that now. They watched me impassively, and I despaired. "All right. I can't compel you. Nobody can force you to do anything." Bitterly I hurled insults it them. "You hold freedom like a prize, and it's in your power to help others be free, but you're too selfish to reach out and give them freedom, too. Keep your freedom, keep your immortality, but somewhere along the line I hope you figure out what you're living forever for. What noble purpose you mean to achieve. Because you're no good to anyone here, not even to yourselves."

I turned and walked away, back the way I had come, toward Huss and civilization and hopelessness. I walked for hours, and then I realized that someone was close behind me. It was Helmut, and he looked different. It took me a moment to realize why, but it was because his hair was no longer white with age.

"Lanik," he said, and his voice was younger. "Lanik, I must talk to you."

"What for?" I asked, not daring to believe that my words might have had an effect on him after all.

"Because you love me. Hearing you talk like that, I realized that I love you, too. Despite everything."

So I stopped and sat in the sand, and so did he.

"Lanik, you have to understand something. We aren't deaf to other men. We heard you. We understood. And we want to achieve the goal you set out. We want to destroy the Ambassadors. We hate the Andersons and their murders and their deceptions as much as you-- nothing is worse to us than those who murder, not for anger or hurt or revenge or because they believe it is their duty, but for profit. Do you see that? We hate what you hate. And we long for it to be destroyed.

"But Lanik, we can't do it. Did you think our hatred of killing was just an opinion, just an emotion, just a wish that no more suffering take place? We cannot kill. It's that simple. We suffer from the song of death among the rocks even now. But you heard the scream of the earth when you made the earth kill that man in Anderson. You heard it. What was it like?"

I answered honestly. "It was the worst thing in the world."

"Well, Lanik, you have more ability with the earth than any one of us. We told you that years ago, before you left. And so you heard that scream more clearly than any of us could ever hear it.

"But if we were to destroy Anderson, we'd have to swallow up the island in the sea and the earth, take it completely from the surface, and you know as well as I do that there isn't one of us, alone, that could do that."

I nodded. "I hoped the council--"

"That's, the problem, Lanik. The council is a collection of individuals. Weak ones, like me. Together, we can twist and turn the earth in ways you couldn't imagme. We could sink Anderson into the sea in moments. We could build a mountain range from one end of the world to the other in an hour. We could, if it were ever necessary, take this entire planet and twist it in its orbit until it was cooler or warmer, farther from or closer to the sun.

"But if we should kill everyone on Anderson by sinking the island under the sea, the scream you heard from one man would be magnified hundreds of thousands of times. Can you comprehend that? And those hundred thousand screams would be borne by a mere three or four hundred of us. Each of us would bear a scream hundreds of times more terrible than what you heard. And worse, because we would be the council, we would have penetrated deeper into the heart of the earth than you could ever pierce, yet we would still be individuals, and there where the rock's voice is loudest, we would be individually less able to resist. The scream would penetrate us deeper, and we would be drowned in it as surely as the sea would drown the people of Anderson.

"Do you understand, Lanik? To do that would destroy us. And who would control the anger of the earth then? Who would absorb the hatred of the rocks? Who would cool that burning? No one. We would destroy the earth because we would no longer be able to contain his wrath. That's why we can't agree to what you propose."

I hadn't known that. I hadn't understood the price they would have to pay. "I'll do my best without your help."

I got up to leave. Helmut got up, too, and after looking into his eyes a moment, I turned away.

"Lanik," he said.

"Yes," I answered.

"They asked me to tell you the way."

"The way to what?"

"The way to do what you want to do."

I studied him, unsure of what he meant. "You said that it's impossible."

He shook his head, and tears came to his eyes. "I said it was impossible for us. But there's another way. I didn't want to tell you, Lanik, for fear you'd accept it, because it would destroy you and I love you and I don't want you destroyed."

"If there's a way, Helmut, I'll take it, even if I die. God knows every alternative means death one way or another. I never planned to live forever, anyway." Even as I said these words, I wondered if I meant them, if I would really choose to die, or if instead I wouldn't prefer to find a place to live, a quiet place like Humping, or a hidden wood like Ku Kuei, or even here on this desert with the beautiful strange people of Schwartz. I could hide, and I could live, so whyever would I choose to die?

Helmut put my own doubts in words. "You have so little love for your own life?"

And in answering him, I answered myself. "Helmut, you don't know, you've never been alone like I have, but in my solitude I've discovered something. That I'm passing through the world invisibly. Even when people see or speak to me it's as if I didn't exist, as if I had no right to exist. I tread across their land and they don't see me. I act and act and act and nothing makes any difference in the world. But they touch me. There's a family in the hills of the poorest part of Britton, and they needed me, and their very need became the most important thing in my life. There's a woman frozen in time by a lake in Ku Kuei, and she needed me, but we've been torn apart and if I could do anything to take her from the eternal death she's consigned herself to I'd do it. A man who wasn't old enough to die killed himself in Ku Kuei, and when he died I realized that half of me was him, and that half died with him, and the other half will never stop mourning. I'll do what it takes, Helmut, so no one else will choose to die rather than live in this world. I'll do what it takes."

At other times and on other days, both before and since, I couldn't have said those words. Heroes and victims are the product of the mood they were in when opportunity came or when circumstances were at their worst, and had I not walked three thousand solitary kilometers only to be met with refusal and despair. I don't know if I would have said so easily, "I'll do what it takes."

But I said it, and I meant it, and Helmut embraced me and explained. "When we act together, we don't all have to go into the earth. We can send one, and he he's among the rock and sings all our songs with his voice, and he hears all the earth's song with his heart. It can be joyful, and we honor our greatest men by sending them for us on such occasions. It can be painful, and we also honor our greatest by entrusting them with the pain for all of us. But there's not a man among us who could bear this. And so we can't send any of us into the earth. You, however, are stronger than any of us. How much stronger, we don't know. But if you went into the earth for us, we could hope you might survive. And if you died, and the fury of the earth continued, we would still be alive to contain it and keep the world safe."

We lay together in the sand, all with our arms spread; I lay in the middle, curled into a ball, and as I sank into the sand I felt them join me, one by one, until all their songs were singing in my mind as the sand swallowed me up and bore me down.

Always I had stopped at bedrock before. But now the rock softened and flowed out around me, like cold mud, closing again over my face. The deeper I sank, the warmer the rock became and the faster it seemed I fell, until the heat was as much as I could bear and even when I stopped sinking, the rock seethed and twisted around me.

With the knowledge of the hundreds of Schwartzes above me, I easily found Anderson Island, this time not an aberration of the surface but instead the leading edge of a plate of rock floating on a sea of molten granite. The flow was incredibly slow, but once I found the island I began to draw the magma out from under it.

The settling seemed slow where I was working, of course, but the damage began on the surface from the first instant. The rock sank abruptly, and every building and living thing on the island tumbled to the ground. Then, as the island continued to sink, the sea rushed in from both sides and met in a great wave in the middle of the island, along its length from north to south.

Because of the interruption of the plate of rock, hot magma surged up to the surface, striking ocean and leaping still higher until it shot into the sky, throwing hot ash and steam and mud and lava out of the sea. The water boiled, and anything left alive in that part of the sea was killed as thousands of hectares of the ocean turned to steam.

All this happened because I, with the strength of all the Schwartzes to sustain me, had forced the earth to act. And the earth, ignorant of time and so of consequences, obeyed. It was not until the screams of death began that the earth rebelled, and in that moment the Schwartzes left me. Now they had to work to keep the earth from tearing apart, to keep the crust of the earth from shrugging off the irritating life that had caused it so much agony and so little joy. They had to stem the tide of molten rock that seethed to escape and win its way to the surface at that had felt the trembling when the every point island fell.

I, however, knew nothing of their work. There were other matters at hand, because the earth was screaming at the murder of half a million men, and I was the only listener.

So many of those who died were innocent. These were the ones that would haunt me from then on-- the fishermen innocently casting nets in Britton's Bay when the huge wave struck the shore; the people in tall buildings in Hess and Gill and Israel who were killed when the structures couldn't bear the shock wave riding out from Anderson; and however many people of Anderson who, even though they were illuders, were not murderers and meant only good to other people.

As for the earth, however, there was no distinction between the innocent and the guilty, between those whose deaths achieved no purpose and those who had to die if mankind on Treason was to mean anything. The earth knew that this was not like the reaping of flelds; it could not comprehend the human logic that had brought us to this point. The earth only knew that we who had gathered there in Schwartz had commanded the earth itself to murder people who were so far away that in no sense could we call our act self-defense.

The rocks groaned horribly as if to say, "We trusted you, we gave you power, we obeyed you, and you used us to kill!" The rocks screamed "Traitor!" as the heat swept back and forth across my body.

In a moment I lost all mooring, all connections with reality, all sense of time, and where the scream of the man I killed in Anderson lasted for seconds, the scream of the earth this time lasted forever. It had no end because there was no time, and for an infinity I felt an agony of infinite magnitude and I longed for only one thing. Not to die, because death would only add to the scream of the stone, but rather to be annihilated, to have never existed, to have never lived because my life had reached this point, and this point was unreachable, unendurable, impossible.

"Treason," screamed the earth forever.

"Forgive me," I pleaded.

And when at last time returned and infinity was over, the rock spewed me out, the sand vomited me up, and I was thrown into the air and rushed headlong toward the stars.

I rose, and then the rising stopped, and I fell back toward the earth. It was the same feeling I had had when I stepped off the precipice in the darkness before Dissent rose, and I wondered whether the sand would receive me after all, or whether this time I would strike the surface and simply stop, broken and spread out for my blood to soak into the sand and for the sun to dry my flesh to leather and then to dust.

Yet even in the air, I exulted. Even if I died now, I had done the first and greatest work. I had lived through it, if only for a while. I had heard the most terrible scream of the earth and had lived.

Then as I fell I listened and realized that the scream was not over. I could still hear it, even in the air, unconnected with the earth. If I lived, I would hear it forever.

I reached the sand and it gave, it bore me up, it let me sink slowly and gently on the earth's surface again, at rest, though never to be at peace again. The earth would never (the rock could never) forgive me for having betrayed its trust. But while it did not forgive, it could still endure me. It knew my heart, and it would bear my life. As long as I wished to keep on living, the earth would permit me to live.

The Schwartzes lay around me. After a long time I realized they were weeping. Then, strangely, I remembered Mwabao Mawa singing morningsong from a perch high in Nkumai. The melody played endlessly through my head. For the first time I understood the haunting beauty of the song. It was the song of a killer who longed to die. It was the song of justice yearned for but not yet done.

We lay there, all of us, exhausted beyond movement.

Hours later-- or was it a day later, or days? --the vast cloud of vapor from the sea that had poured into the sky above the sinking of Anderson came over Schwartz, and for the first time in millennia it rained there, and water touched the iron-rich mountains and water bled into the sand and cooled it and water mingled with the tears on the faces of the people of Schwartz and erased and washed away their weeping and Helmut arose and walked to me in the rainstorm and said, "Lanik, you lived."

"Yes," I said, because he was really saying, "Lanik, I love you and you still live,"' and I was really saying, "Helmut, I love you and I still live."

"We've done what we've done," Helmut said, "and we won't regret it because it was necessary if not good. But even so, we ask you to leave. We won't thrust you out because without you worse things would have happened, but please, Lanik, leave us now and never come back."

"You'll still hear of me. I have more work to do. I'll cause you more pain."

"Do your work," he said. "I hope that someday the blood will wash from your hands."

"Guard your iron. Keep it safe. Don't let it rust."

He smiled (a grisly thing at the moment, and yet more surprising and refreshing than the rain) and he embraced me and he said, "'I thought you had betrayed me when you left before. I didn't understand, Lanik. I thought that when I trusted you, that meant you would always act the way I wanted you to. I think perhaps I'll be young again after all, and let someone else be spokesman. I've had enough responsibility for a lifetime."

"And I for ten," I answered. He kissed me and embraced me and then sent me away. I walked eastward toward Huss. Somewhere along the way I found my clothes, neady folded and placed in my path, and on top of them my knife. It was the Schwartzes' benediction, absolution in advance for the murders I had yet to commit.

I put on the clothes and held the iron knife in my hand and shoved myself again into quicktime, and for the next three years of my own time I spoke to no man and heard no man's voice, and spent my days walking between murders, listening to the cry of the dying and dead and hearing the earth's scream and knowing that someday I would have found them all, they would all be dead, and I would never have to kill again.

Percy Barton I killed willingly, for that old woman had deceived and murdered my friend. But her death scream harrows up my soul as loudly as that of Mwabao Mawa, even though she (no, he, a bald white man ruling a nation of proud, unknowing blacks) had sung the beautiful morningsong. There was no distinction. The hated and the loved died the same, and in the end my knife went no more easily into Percy Barton's throat than into Mwabao Mawa's.

Destroying the Ambassadors was easier, for the earth made no protest at their death. They were machines, already lifeless. All I had to do was break the seal where it said, "Warning, tampering will result in the destruction of this machine and the death of anyone within 500 meters of it," and then walk away in quicktime faster than the explosion could follow.

I killed along a path radiating outward from the ruins of the lands bordering Anderson, visiting every capital of every Family to make sure I found all the Andersons and killed every one, and to make sure that no Ambassador survived. Because I was in my fastest timeflow, all this took a week of realtime. I was ahead of every messenger. So far as the people of the world knew, a sudden scourge removed the rulers from their world, and the Ambassadors as well.

I wondered what the people thought when they found an old woman's corpse sitting on Percy Barton's throne. Would they make a connection? Or always wonder who it was they found, and never know why or where their king had disappeared?

There was no point in keeping a calendar during my long journey of assassination. By the end of it, a week after it began, I was, as closely as I can guess, about twenty four years old. When my father was twenty-four I was already alive, and he had played with me in the morning and gone out and led his men into battle in the afternoon. I had no child, but neither could my murders weigh as lightly on my soul as my father's did. He knew no better, and thought the killing would make him a good king. I hadn't even the faint right of kings, and I knew exactly how much murder cost. I was twenty-four in years, but at heart I was unbearably old, and my body was weighted down and weary.

There was one place, however, where I had not yet gone, and when all the other Andersons and all the other Ambassadors were dead, there was one yet to kill: the one who had been my brother Dinte, the one who had destroyed my father; the one who had robbed me of my inheritance; the one that I had hated and rivaled and resented in all our years together; the one who, inexplicably, was still my brother regardless of how much I knew he was really not.

Could Lord Barton actually have killed the man he once believed was his son? Could I really kill Dinte?

That I would find out when the time arrived. And so I came at last to Mueller-on-the-River, and for the first time in years I entered a city, not hidden by quicktime, but openly. I was Lanik Mueller, and this place had been my home, and whether I was welcome here or not, I would come in proudly and declare, at last, when all the Andersons were dead, the work that I was doing and the work that I had done. The world thought of Lanik Mueller as a monster back when I still wasn't one; now that I was, I wanted them to know it. Even those regarded as evil want their deeds to be known.

I walked into the court where Dinte sat upon the throne and strode firmly to the middle of the room. While many there did not recognize me, for even those who had known me had last seen me as a fifteen-year-old boy, enough did recognize me that the whisper "Lanik Mueller" ran through the room. Every eye was upon me and, for a moment, everyone feared to act.

My brother Dinte arose from the throne and held his arms stiffly out, and in an unnaturally loud voice he said, "Well, brother. Have you come at last to take your throne?" He stepped aside to let me sit where by right I should sit. He commanded the people there to kneel as I mounted the dais. They knelt. Dinte waited for me, smiling, welcoming.