World's End

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freezing. Savages the lowest-born Kharemoughi would not even call human humiliate and harass him, leaving him with nothing--not privacy, not decency, not even shame. He tries to escape, and fails. For punishment he is given to Taryd Roh, whose pleasure is creating pain.

And then he is left alone, in such agony that he cannot move, to ask the unforgiving silence Why?

Why has this happened to him? All his life he has been told that virtue is rewarded, all his life he has tried to do what was right

. . . but now, lying in his own blood and vomit, he looks back over his life and sees only failure: his mother's leaving, his father's death, his brothers' mocking faces.

Without honor, without hope, all that he has left is a black hunger for death.

And so, when he can find the strength to move again,

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he takes the lid of a can and opens his veins (as his mother disappears into the colors of dawn), but the girl who keeps the

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animals finds him too soon. He refuses to eat or drink (as incense rises into the clear air above his father's tomb), until

Taryd Roh brings him a meal. He runs out into the heart of a blizzard when they forget to watch him (believing that the Change is past, that his own people have left Tiamat forever; wanting only to die a free man), only to wander in circles in the storm and be recaptured. . . .

Delirious with sickness and fever, he lies in the arms of Death; and her face is the Child Stealer's, as fair as aurora-glow--a ghost out of boyhood nursery tales, a changer of souls. She smiles and makes him drink strange herbal brews; she promises him that soon ... She grants him sleep.

But he wakes again, to find the Child Stealer wearing the grieving, weary face of another prisoner, whose name is Moon. She is a Tiamatan, and when his mind is clear enough to think at all, he feels only suspicion and anger. But she speaks to him in his own language, telling him news of his home; she heals him with a sibyl's skills and a gentleness he can scarcely believe. He begins to trust her, as she forces him to remember that a universe still exists somewhere beyond the frozen fields of hell.

He watches Moon in Transfer, and feels the awe that

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even the nomads feel to see her control powers no ordinary human could endure. And he begins to realize the greater power that is hers--the strength of her spirit, which lets her accept and endure and still struggle to change what he knows is hopeless. Despair has become a prison deeper than the cave of stone for him; but every day she makes him admit that, at least for this day, he can bear to go on living. She tells him stories to make him laugh; she tells him the Page 63

Hegemony is unjust, to make him react. She helps him repair a piece of the 78

WORLD S END

stolen equipment that the nomads bring to him; and it is not her hands working alongside his own, but her calm belief in his competence that makes him succeed.

And she tells him about the lover who left her when she became a sibyl; how she has searched for him ever since, even though she knows he loves someone else-- Arienrhod, the ageless, corrupt queen of Winter.

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Moon's clone, her own mother, her opposition in a game of fate played out by the unpredictable, omniscient sibyl machinery. . . . But she knows nothing of that, now. She only knows that her obsession has brought her to this place; just as his own failures have brought him here.

She asks him, finally, about the half-healed wounds on his wrists. But when he tells her what they mean, he sees nothing in her eyes except a profound knowledge of shared pain. He realizes with a kind of wonder that to her he is not his father's son. He is not a highborn Kharemoughi disgraced beyond enduring. He is not a failed suicide, a weakling, a coward.

Reflected in her eyes at last he sees the man he has always longed to be

... a quiet, intelligent, capable man, a man who serves the law, a man who has shown her only gentleness and respect. An honorable man.

She believes in him; she believes the future that her sibyl visions have shown to her still exists, for both of them. And suddenly all that matters to him is that he is no longer alone. He takes her into his arms, holding her briefly, chastely, only for a moment; filled with a gratitude too profound for words.

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And as he tries to let her go, she clings to him, murmuring, "No, not yet. Hold me, just for now.

. . ."

He is afraid, as suddenly he knows that he was afraid all along, that if he felt her body so close to him he would never let her go. But he takes her in his arms 79

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