Wyrms

Chapter 4. FATHER'S HEAD

THE HEADSMAN STOOD OUTSIDE THE DOOR AS patience waited for her father to die. He lay on the high bed, his face grey, his hands no longer trembling. Yesterday, the day before, as word of his final disease spread through King's Hill and down into King's Gift and High Town, a steady stream of visitors had come to say good-bye, to receive a final benediction. They all murmured some excuse to Patience as they left: We were friends in Balakaim. He taught me Dwelf. But she knew why they came. To touch, to see, to speak to the man who should have been Heptarch. There was blessing in the breath of the dying King.

Now Patience, who had heard nothing but wisdom and brilliance from him all her life, watched the old man's lips move in the forms of two dozen languages, babbling the empty phrases of courtesy that had been his stock in trade. It was as if Peace had to purge himself of all the words of grace before he died.

"Father," she whispered.

The door opened suddenly. The headsman peered inside.

"Not yet," she said. "Go away."

But the headsman first waited until he saw Peace's hand move a little. Then he closed the door again.

Father lifted his hand to touch his collarbone, where a small wound was still unhealed.

"Yes," she said. His memory was going.

He murmured.

"I can't hear you," she said.

"Patience," he whispered. She was not sure if he was saying her name or giving her a command.

"Father, what should I do now? How should I use my life, if I can keep it?"

He murmured.

"I can't hear you, Father."

"Serve and save," he said in Dwelf. And then, in Gauntish, "The King's House."

"Oruc will never let me serve him as you did," she said in Geblic.

He answered in Agarant, the common speech, which the headsman could surely understand. "The King's House is all the world." Even as he died, he had to make sure that the story of his loyalty reached Oruc's ears. Patience saw what it was for: so Oruc would begin to doubt that Peace ever was disloyal to him. Let him wonder if he misjudged the both of us all along.

But Patience knew it also had another meaning for her.

Even though in her life she might never bear the title, she nevertheless had the Heptarch's responsibility. She was to serve the world. She was to have universal magnanimity.

"You taught me to survive," she whispered. "Not to be a savior of the world."

"Or a sacrifice," said his breathless lips.

Then his lips were still, and his body shuddered. The headsman heard the squeak of the bed and knew. He opened the door and came in, the headpot in his left hand, the long wire of the scalpel in his right.

"Miss Patience," he said, not looking at her, "its best you not watch this."

But she watched, and he could not stop her, since he had not a second to lose if he was to have the head alive.

The scalpel was nothing but a coarser and stronger version of Patience's own loop. He passed it around her father's neck and locked the end of the wire in place.

Then he whipped left and right, severing all the loose flesh and muscle instantly. It took a moment longer to work the wire through the cartilage and nerves between the vertebrae. Peace had been dead scarcely ten seconds before the headsman lifted the old man's head by the lower jaw and laid it gently in the headpot.

The headpot rocked a few moments as the gools that lived inside jostled for position on the veins and arteries of the open throat. They would keep the head alive until it could be installed in Slaves' Hall.

Of course they did not leave her the body, either. Lord Peace may have been the King's ambassador in life, but in death his body was the corpse of the Last Pretender, and if the priests of Crossriver Delving or Lost Souls'

Island got their hands on it, there'd be no end of trouble.

So the diggers took him away to the King's Boneyard, and she was alone in the house.

She wasted no time-Father had told her long ago how dangerous would be the moment of his death. First protect secrets, he had always taught her. He had never kept many written documents. She found them all in moments and without hesitation she quickly burned them and raked the ashes into dust.

Then she took the tiny amber globe that had dwelt in her father's flesh and swallowed it. She wasn't sure whether the crystal it was made of could survive the process of digestion, but she didn't know what it was or how to implant it in her own body, and she didn't want it found if she were searched.

She had already prepared her traveling bag. It was filled with the tools of survival. Masks and makeup and wigs, money and jewels, a small flash of water, pellets of sugar. Not much, so it wouldn't encumber her. But enough. Her weapons were concealed in the open, where she could reach them easily. The loop in her hair. The glass blowgun in the cross that hung fashionably between her breasts. The poison in a plastic pellet between her toes. She was ready to survive, had been ready throughout the deathwatch, knowing the Oruc would surely arrange for her to die at the same time as her father, if not of the same disease.

She waited. The house was empty, the servants gone.

They had been there, watching, spying all her life. If she had harbored any hopes that Oruc would let her live, the absence of the servants dispelled them. He wanted no witnesses, especially not witnesses whose tongues were professionally loose.

There was a knock on the door. It was the bailiff. It would be the bailiff, then-he was one of the many King's slaves trained to kill at the King's command. He apologized and presented her with papers of eviction.

"It's a house for a King's slave, Miss Patience," he said, "and the King's slave is dead, you see." He stood between her and the other rooms of the house; she would not be allowed to take any of her belongings, he explained.

They had known it would be this way, of course.

Angel had taken everything of consequence with him some time ago. She would get it when she left King's Hill and joined him.

She smiled graciously and walked slowly toward the door. The bailiff made no sound that she consciously heard, nor was there a shadow. Perhaps it was the faintest trembling in the stone floor, or the slightest pressure of moving air on her hair. Without knowing how she knew, she knew that he was about to kill her. She lurched to the right, shifted her weight, and twisted and kicked all in a smooth motion. The bailiff had just begun to lunge with the dagger he held in his left hand, and now he had time only to show the surprise on his face as her foot caught him in the knee, bending it sideways.

He gasped in agony and dropped the dagger. Some assassin, she thought with contempt. Did Oruc think that such an oaf could kill the daughter of Lord Peace? It was not even a struggle. She left the dagger in his right eye.

Only when the bailiff lay on the floor with the dagger sticking up like a jaunty decoration did she realize that this was the first time she had ever acted against the will of the King. It was surprisingly easy, and she enjoyed thwarting him even more than she had enjoyed serving him. King Oruc, you have made a foolish mistake by not trying to use me in my father's place. I have a certain flair for government work. And now it will work against you.

Then she reminded herself that she was still not Oruc's enemy, even if he had chosen to be hers. She was the servant of the King's House, and she would do nothing to weaken his reign unless she knew it would bring about a greater good.

She went to the door and opened it at once. There would be soldiers all around, of course, but it was likely that they did not know she was supposed to be killed.

There was too much lingering support for the ancient bloodline. So as long as she seemed calm, she could probably get by. No, not calm. Grief-stricken.

She wept as she left the house. It was the cry that Father had insisted she learn, the soft, feminine sobbing I that roused the pity of men and made them feel strong and protective.

"Damned shame," one of the soldiers whispered as she passed.

And she knew that all of them were thinking: She should be Heptarch. She should be in Heptagon House,; and now they won't even let her stay in King's Hill. But she was thinking that she would be lucky to live till morning.

Angel had told her to go to Admiralty Row at once, as soon as they tried to kill her. They had developed three separate escape plans. But she did not intend to use any of them. After all, she knew at least as much about the ways in and out of King's Hill as he did. As a child, permanently trapped within the walls of the King's quarter, she had been free to explore as she liked, and she knew ways over and under walls, through hidden passages in buildings, and though she had grown too large to fit through some of them now, she could still get from here to there in many different ways. And she was not going to leave King's Hill until she had spoken to her father's head. He had been so distant, so subtle in his life, but she would get some secrets from him now. He would talk to her now as he had never talked to her in life. It was a simple matter to dodge into the well-tended gardens of King's Wood. The ground was soft, taking footprints easily, but she was soon clambering from limb to limb among the trees. These giants had been old trees when her great-grandfather ruled in Heptagon House and the Fourteen Families had offered their heads to him forever. Now their leaves concealed her and their branches were her highway to the south wall of the garden. They could not follow her footsteps in the air.

She paused once in a safe cluster of branches to strip off her women's clothing. Underneath it she wore the short breeches and long shirt of a common boy. She was almost too large now to play the part, since boys took to long pants or professional gowns as soon as they could these days. At least her breasts were not too large yet, and Father had been gracious enough not to die when it was her time of month. She smudged her face, pulled off her wig, and tousled her short hair. She decided to keep the wig-it was a perfect match for her hair, and she'd be hard put to find another. She stuffed it into her bag.

The dress she jammed into the crook of a branch. It was black, of course, and it wouldn't be easy to see it from the ground.

It was already dusk when she got to the wall and dropped to the ground on Granary Row. No one saw her.

She appropriated one of the drawcarts and pulled it by its rope to Larder Row. After years of practice with Angel, her boyish stride was utterly convincing. No one took a second look at her. She had no trouble leaving her cart and walking, as so many servants did, to pay her respects to the dead in Slaves' Hall. If those who saw her had thought to examine her face, they might have known her-the daughter of Lord Peace had the best-known face in King's Hill. But the essence of disguise, Angel had always said, is to avoid close examination. The clothing, the walk, the dirt, the coarseness kept them from noticing her at all.

The doorkeeper wasn't there. He rarely was, and would have caused her no problem if he had been. He was almost blind.

She wandered among the shelves of living heads. She had spent many hours here, and knew most of the faces, had talked to many of them. Long-dead ministers of long-dead kings, they had once wielded vast power or influenced monarchs or served as the King's voice in hundreds of foreign courts. As usual, most of the eyes were closed, since few of the dead took much pleasure in living company. Instead they dreamed and remembered, remembered and dreamed, calling up with perfect clarity all that they had ever seen and felt in their lives. Only a few of them watched her pass; even if one of them had been able to muster up some curiosity, he could not have turned his head to see where she would go.

Father would not be here, of course, not upstairs among the favorites. It would be too soon for that-his head had to be trained and broken to the King's will first. So Patience made her way to the place under the stairs where a wooden louver in the heating vent was missing.

The weather was warm enough that none of the ovens was alight; the air was cool in the stone passageway. She climbed downward into the darkness. At the bottom she turned-left?-yes, left, and crawled until she came to a wooden grating on the floor. It was dark under her. They had not yet started on Father, then.

So she lay near the grating, absolutely still, listening to the sounds that tunneled through the heating system.

There were places all over Slaves' Hall where conversations could be heard distinctly in these passages. A good part of Patience's self-education in politics had taken place here, as she listened to the cleverest ministers and ambassadors pry for information from the dead or conspire for power with the living.

To her surprise, they did come to Slaves' Hall looking for her-she heard the soldiers ask the gatekeeper and search the public floors. But they were searching in a desultory way, not because they expected to find her here but because they had been told to search everywhere.

Good. They had lost her in King's Wood and had no idea where she had gone from there.

Later, the headkeeper came into the cellar room, lit the bright oil lamps, and began to work on her father.

She had heard and seen the process often enough before. It took less than an hour to link the headworms with the nerves in her father's spine. She watched coldly as her father's face sometimes writhed in agony, for most nerves caused pain when they were awakened by the headworms. Finally, though, the headkeeper dismissed his apprentices. The physical process was finished.

His neck bones were attached to a rack, his windpipe was attached to the breath bladder, and his neck was just touching the gel that sustained the headworms that clung to his nerves and the gools that sent tendrils through his blood vessels. They would keep his head alive, his memories intact, for the next thousand years-or until a King grew tired of him and had his head thrown out.

The headkeeper talked to him then, asking him questions.

He taught the headworms by dripping certain chemicals into the canister when Lord Peace's answers were forthright, and other chemicals when he hesitated or seemed agitated. The headworms quickly learned which of the head's nerves caused pleasure and which caused suffering.

In a short time they were ready, and needed no more stimulation from the headkeeper. Now the headworms would be agitated by the increased tension of resistance, of lying. Then they in turn would stimulate other nerves, so the head felt extremes of urgent needs-the bowel or bladder full, the belly famished, the throat dry with thirst, the nerves of sexual pleasure on the edge of orgasm but never quite there. When the head answered truthfully, it got some measure of relief. When it lied, the longings increased until they were agony. Isolated from their bodies, heads never had much stamina, and their will was usually broken in a single night, however much they might resist.

Patience calmed herself, prepared herself to listen to her father endure much before the worms broke him.

And at first it seemed his resistance might be long and painful. Then to her surprise he began to whine. It was a sound she had never heard before, and she thought she knew all his voices.

"No matter what I do," he said. "You can always make it worse and worse."

"That's right," said the headkeeper. "The worms will find the things you most long for, and you'll never be satisfied until you learn to speak the truth."

"Ask me again. Ask me anything."

They did, and he told them. No resistance at all.

Intimate things, terrible things, secrets of state, secrets of his own body. Patience listened in disgust. She had been prepared for her father's pain, but not for his quick capitulation.

They thought he was resisting them when he said he didn't know where Patience was. But Patience knew that he had held nothing back. Perhaps he had known he would break this easily-perhaps that's why he had prepared so well for her escape. He must have known his own weakness, though he concealed it from everyone else until now.

"I knew that you'd ask me, and so I made sure I didn't know. I told Angel a year ago to make plans with her, and tell me nothing of them. Then when I felt death was coming on, I sent Angel away-I knew they'd kill her bodyguard first. Patience is on her own until she can meet him. But Angel and I trained my daughter carefully, gentlemen. She speaks every language that I speak, she is a more accomplished assassin than Angel himself, and she is cleverer by far than any adviser to the king.

You will never catch her. She's probably gone already."

The headkeeper finally believed him. "We'll tell the King you're ready now."

"Will he come and talk to me?" asked the head.

"If he wants to. But no one else ever will. With the things you know, there's no chance he'll put you in a public room. Who knows? Maybe he'll install you in his private chambers." The headkeeper laughed. "You can watch every intimate moment of the King's life, and he can get your advice whenever he wants it. There is precedent, you know. Your grandfather-"

"My grandfather was a twisted wreck. King Omc is not."

"You hope," said the headkeeper.

"King Oruc is a great Heptarch."

The headkeeper looked at him suspiciously. Then he smiled. "You really do mean it. And all this time everyone thought you served Oruc because your daughter was a hostage. Turns out you really were loyal. A weakling."

The headkeeper slapped him lightly on the cheek. "You were nothing, and now you're less than nothing."

He doused the lights and left.

As soon as he was gone and the brass key turned in the lock. Patience lifted the grating and dropped into the room.

"Hullo, Father," she said. She fumbled in the darkness until she found his breath bladder. Then she pumped air so he could speak.

"Go away," he said. "I already taught you everything I know."

"I know," she said. "Now I want you to tell me everything you fear."

"I don't fear anything now," he said. "Right now I'm voiding my bladder, which I haven't done without pain in three years. Go away."

"You have neither bladder nor urine. Father. It's just an illusion."

"The only reality a human being ever knows, my darling girl, is what his nerves tell him, and mine are telling me that-oh, you vicious and ungrateful worm of a girl, the headworms are torturing me again because I'm resisting you."

"Then don't resist me, Father."

"I'm not your father, I'm a piece of dead brain tissue kept alive by the probing tendrils of the gools and stimulated by trained worms."

"You never were my father." Was that a catch in his throat? A tiny gasp of surprise? "You always made speeches to me, for the servants to overhear. Angel was the only father I had."

"Don't waste your time trying to hurt me. I'm past hurting."

"Did you ever love me?"

"I don't remember. If I did, I certainly don't love you anymore. The only thing I desire now is to urinate forever.

I would gladly trade a daughter for a decent prostate."

She found the matches where the headkeepers had set them down, and lit a single lamp. Her father's eyes blinked in the light. She smiled at him. "You're going to tell Oruc everything, but you're going to tell me first. All my life you've been able to keep secrets from me. But not anymore."

"You don't need to know any of the secrets. I saw to it you knew everything. I thought you were intelligent enough to know that every word Angel spoke to you came originally from my lips."

"He told me that you would willingly let me die if it would serve the best interests of the King's House."

"What would you rather? That I tell you that I thought your life was more important than the whole world?

What sort of egomaniacal monster are you?"

"A human being," she said.

"The worst kind of monster," he said. "We're all monsters, living in utter isolation, sending out words like ambassadors that beg for tribute, for worship. Love me, love me. And then when the words come back, 'I love you, I worship you, you are great and good,' these monsters doubt, these monsters know that it's a lie.

'Prove it,' they say. 'Obey me, give me power.' And when they are obeyed, the monster grows hungrier. 'How do I know you aren't manipulating me?' cries the monster.

'If you love me, die for me, kill for me, give all to me and leave nothing for yourself!' "

"If human beings are all monsters, why should I sacrifice anything for them?"

"Because they are beautiful monsters," he whispered.

"And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty."

"That's as mystical as what the priests babble about."

"It is what the priests babble about."

"You have sacrificed the possibility of power, you have made us strangers all these years, and all for some invisible, nonexistent connection between human beings you've never even met?" She tried to put as much contempt as possible into her voice.

"You're fifteen. You know nothing. Go away."

"I know your life has been a deception and a disguise."

"And when I dropped the disguise and told you what I have lived for, you mocked me. The babble of the priests!

Do you think that because something is invisible, it doesn't exist? There is nothing but empty space between the infinitesimal pieces of matter; the only thing connecting them is their behavior, their influence on each other, and yet out of those empty, invisible connections is built all that exists in the universe. Most of it empty, the web insensible. Yet if for a single moment the web broke down, everything would flash out of existence. Do you think it's any different for us? Do you think that you exist independent of your connections with other people?

Do you think that you can ever serve your own interest without also serving theirs? Then I should have killed you in the cradle, because you aren't fit to be Heptarch."

She saw in his face the same fervency she had seen in Prekeptor. Father, too, was a believer. But she could not believe that this was a belief that anyone could sacrifice for. "Was this the secret you hid from me all these years? Was this what you would have said to me if for one single moment we could have been alone and honest with each other? Was this what I yearned for all my life?" He had taught her how to show devastating contempt, as a diplomatic tool. She used it now: "I could have learned as much from any teacher in the School."

His face went slack again, went back to the neutral expression that he cultivated when he wished to show nothing. "If you don't get out of here at once, before Oruc or his men get here, you're quite likely to be with me in loving proximity for the next thousand years, getting sucked out by gools in a bowl of soup. I don't like you well enough to want your company. I used to think you were a well-behaved child, but now I see you're a selfish, inconsiderate brat."

"No," she said. "There are things I need to know.

Practical things, that I can use to survive."

"Survival I taught you from infancy. You'll survive.

Go away."

"What was it that you feared the most?"

His face took on a mockingly devoted expression.

"That you would die. I did all that I did to keep you alive. Why else do you think I served the Usurper's Son so faithfully? He had you hostage here."

He wanted her to believe, that he was lying. But she could also see that the headworms were not tormenting him. He had told her the truth. He simply didn't want her to know it was the truth. So she was asking the questions that would give her the answers she wanted. "Why were you afraid of my death?"

"Because I loved you. Back when I was alive. I remember it dimly."

But this was a lie. She could see the trembling around his lips; the headworms were in control of his nerves, and tortured him in unconcealable ways when he resisted.

So it wasn't love. It was something else. And thinking of that took her back to a time in her early childhood, to the night that most haunted her nightmares.

There was something in his face now that reminded her of his face that night. "You lied to me that night," she said. "I realize now, you lied about something."

"What night?" he asked.

"What was it you didn't tell me, Father, the night they brought you Mother's body in seven sacks?"

"You remember that?"

"For some reason it sticks in my mind."

He raised an eyebrow."! Don't remember it."

"Now more than ever you remember."

"God help me, if I must remember that night, then have the grace to take me from this rack and let me die."

"That night when you opened the first sack and saw what it was, you shouted, 'I'll never go, I'll never let you have her, not my daughter, not ever.' Who were you shouting at? What was it that made you so afraid? You trembled, Father. I never saw you tremble before or since."

"I was afraid of King Oruc, of course."

"You never were afraid of him. And lying does you no good-see what the headworms do with you?"

Abruptly he changed tactics. He smiled, and wryly said, "Even the headkeeper had some mercy. Now I feel like I've been constipated for a month and a diarrhea attack is beginning. You have no idea how bad these worms can be."

"Tell me now and have your ease."

Lightly he said, as if it didn't matter, "I feared the call to Cranning. It was the caller that I shouted at, whoever it was."

"Who else could it be but the gebling king?" asked Patience.

"Oh, you think you've solved it?"

"Angel told me that the gebling kings have always been able to command their people without a word. From mind to mind."

"Did Angel tell you that this power of the geblings has never touched a human being? We're deaf as a post when the geblings cry out to each other."

"The Cranning call-if it isn't the geblings, who is it, and why do you fear it?"

"I don't know who it is, but I fear him. I fear what he can do to people. The Wise of Grandfather's day were brilliant and strong, the greatest minds in the history of the world, working together, building on each other's learning, until they did things that had never been done on any world. Here, where iron is so hard to find that we can never rely on the machines that have always made humans powerful, they unlocked the powers of life. They weren't just petty breeders, like the Tassaliki, like the ancient scientists who created these headworms and gools four thousand years ago-those were mountebanks by comparison. The Wise of Grandfather's day had taught the chromosomes to name themselves in crystals, atom for atom, in patterns that could be seen and read by the naked eye. They had found how passion fish mate with clams to make cressid plants. And when I was born, they changed me so that I could never sire anything but sons."

Patience thought about that for a moment. "They did it so the prophecy wouldn't be fulfilled. So there'd be no seventh seventh seventh daughter."

"That was the plan."

"Why did you change your mind? Why did you have Angel undo what they did? Surely you didn't become a Watcher."

"No, not a Watcher. The Wise did this to me when I was still a child. As soon as they had made my body incapable of siring girlchildren, the Cranning call began.

One by one, the best of them began to leave. They would go off to teach somewhere. They would retire to a country home. They would be sent as ambassadors or governors.

But they would never arrive at their destination.

Instead they would be seen along the rivers and roads leading to Cranning."

"Your father was Heptarch then?"

"Not yet. My father watched what happened to the empire, as all the able men disappeared. He went to them and begged them not to go. The ones who hadn't yet felt the Cranning call vowed most solemnly to stay. The ones who had felt it, though-they promised anything but they broke all their promises. And Grandfather did nothing to stop it. It was a frightening time, with provinces in rebellion, the army in disarray. Father finally had Grandfather arrested and took over the government."

"So the Usurper wasn't the first to overthrow a Heptarch."

"For the good of the King's House, even treason.

Yes. But it was too late. Even when he tortured some of them, even when he killed some as an example, they went. Even when he cut off their heads and put them here, in Slaves' Hall, the Cranning call was so strong in their minds that the headworms had no power over them.

The Cranning call was more urgent than anything the headworms could do to them."

"What were they wanted for?"

"Do you think Father didn't try to find out? But they themselves didn't know. And no one ever knew what became of them, once they got to Cranning. Father's spies never came back. And after a few years, the empire was lost. Twelve of the Fourteen Families were in revolt.

Oruc's father led it. But he wasn't called the Usurper then. He was called the Liberator. He came, he said, to restore Grandfather to his rightful place on the Heptarch's throne."

"Ah."

"Father should have killed Grandfather."

"As Oruc should have killed us?"

"Grandfather wasn't the-seventh seventh seventh daughter." Lord Peace closed his eyes. Patience knew that if he still had his body, he would put his fingertips together, then touch them to his mouth; she could almost see his hands rise. She felt the grief for his death well up in her for the first time, seeing him half-alive like this, remembering him whole.

She shook off the feeling. "How was I born, Father?"

"My father lost the city of Heptam before I came of age. I led one army, he led another. He lost and was captured and killed. I never lost. I wandered the wilderness with an ever-shrinking guerrilla band. One by one my sons came to adulthood. One by one they were killed. The enemy seemed to find my boys so easily-as if some traitor led them. It was as if some terrible invisible power guided them to destroy everyone but me.

Everyone but me. My first wife, my father, my children, and I alone was alive."

"So you could sire the daughter of prophecy."

"I studied the chronicles. I realized that my family's fall began almost the moment they undaughtered me.

That was the crime for which the Wise were taken and the throne was lost. You see, Patience, the prophecies that these men of science had long thought were mere superstition-someone or something of great power meant to have them fulfilled. And we thought-perhaps if we find a way to undo what was done. Perhaps if I could have a girlchild, then the Wise would come home, and all could be restored as it was. Peace could be restored to the world. But how could we undo the work of the Wise, so my daughter could be born? Who would know how to do it, when the Wise were all gone?"

"Angel," said Patience. "I know this story."

"I was in my forties then. He came to me, a very young man then, and said he had been studying the journals of the great men, and he thought he knew a way to refresh and revivify my woman-making sperm. He explained, but I could not understand it-I know what every educated man knows about genetics, but he was deep in the chemistry and mathematics of it, catalysts and countercatalysts and inducers and blocks. I said to him, 'You know too much. You've become one of the Wise. The Cranning call will come to you.' He only smiled and said, 'Lord Peace, my Heptarch, if the caller wants you to have a daughter, then he will leave me here.' "

"So my birth ... served the purpose of the Cranning call."

"Angel and I argued over it. Better to be castrated than to give in to what this enemy wants, I said. But it came to this: We didn't know what purpose the Cranning call might have for you, but we knew that as long as you remained unborn, the world was in turmoil. We were at Ilium at the time, under the protection of Lady Hekat.

She told us, 'The prophecies are ambiguous. The seventh seventh seventh daughter is called the destruction of the world, and the salvation of the world. Why not let her be born, and then teach her to be a savior?' So I took Lady Hekat as my second wife, and Angel made the change in me, and you were born."

"Lady Hekat." Patience saw her mother's face as it had been the last time she saw her. Weeping as the soldiers took Patience away from her. Crying out, My daughter, my daughter, my child, God be with you, always with you; and then the knock on Father's door, and the sudden cry of agony as father looked into the bag that was delivered there. I saw his face. His face, Mother's face, the same agony. "And you trained me to be an assassin," she said.

"I taught you to serve the King's House. However much you think you hate me now, I know you. You will always act for the good of the King's House. You are the hope of humanity. Not as the Watchers and Vigilants believe, as the mere mother of some imagined god. You yourself. I know it."

"I'm a child, fifteen years old. I'm the hope of nothing.

I have no great purpose."

"If you have no purpose of your own, then you will fulfill the purpose of the Cranning call. It waits for you, Daughter. But Angel and I have done all we could to teach you what the Heptarch lives for. If you haven't learned it, we could do no more."

"You don't know anything Father. You don't know who is calling from Cranning, you don't know what he wants me for, and you don't even know me."

"How could I know you, Patience? I felt the Cranning call, too. Are you surprised? I never felt it until you were born, but then it began. A terrible urgency to take you there, to carry you to Skyfoot and give you-to whatever waits there. Whenever I was with you, all your life, I have felt a longing worse than anything these petty worms can do to me. So I have spent as little time with you as I could, for fear I would break under the pain of it, and carry you off before you were ready."

"Ready for what?"

"To face whatever waits there."

"Am I ready now?"

"How can I know? But you're as ready as I could make you in my life. Trust Angel now. He is the last of the Wise, the only one who can protect you from the thing that calls. From Unwyrm."

"You know its name?"

"One prophecy says that you will take the world into Unwyrm's lair and give it to him, and all mankind will die and be reborn. It's the only prophecy that gives a name."

"Who made the prophecy?"

"A prophet, I suppose. What matters is that the Cranning call is proof that the prophecies are true-or some undefeatable power wants to make them true, which amounts to the same thing."

"There's no such thing as an undefeatable power," said Patience. "You always taught me that."

"Go now, Patience. I've told you everything. Now don't let them find you here, or my whole life was for nothing. And if they ask me, I'll have to tell them that I saw you. It'll give them a fresh trail."

Almost she obeyed him. But then she realized that he had not fully answered her. There was still a twitching in his face, a sign that he was resisting, that he had not told her all that she had asked for.

"One more story," she said.

"No more."

"The one you don't want to tell me."

The face grimaced as the head tried to resist the urging of the worms. "Leave me in peace, child! Let my name be something more than a terrible irony."

"Whatever you want so badly not to tell, that is the thing I most badly need to know."

"You're wrong, you fool! If you needed to know I would have told you! Leave me this one secret to take to the grave."

"I'll have it from you, Father! I'll have it, or wait here until Oruc takes me!"

Finally, sweating and weeping, the head spoke. Patience pumped steadily, but the voice was high and strange.

"The priests say that the Starship Captain was taken in the spirit by God, made some prophecies, and then disappeared into heaven."

"I know the tales."

"I know the truth. The captain of the starship Konkeptoine went mad as our ancestors orbited the world. It's true that he wrote the prophecy with his right hand in the ship's log. He also drew the map of the world, showing all the great deposits of iron and coal, the stuff that steel is made of. Then he .used the ship's powers to destroy those deposits. In that one act he determined the future of the world. Imakulata is not naturally poor in iron. Because of his insane act of destruction, we children of the great engine builders are deprived of steel. We have no great machines. We are weaker in this world than human beings have ever been before."

"If he was insane enough to do that, why did anyone think he was a prophet?"

"Because his map was more accurate than the one the ship's own mind drew. He knew things about the world that could not be known. They said at the time he seemed to be possessed. I who have felt the Cranning call know now that this was probably true. Whatever controlled him in the ship, that compulsive power is still alive. He left the ship in a landing craft and was never seen again. His craft was never found."

"If something like this happened, why isn't it in any of the histories?"

"There are stories passed from Heptarch to Heptarch that none of the historians know. I meant you to know this much, anyway; I told Angel, and he was to tell you.

The priests know only of the map he drew with his right hand, and the words he spoke with his mouth. The words that his possessor wanted us to believe. Words about how Kristos would come to Imakulata and make the human race new and perfect. But his daughter Irena, the first Heptarch, she saw something that only the Heptarchs know: As he spoke the prophecy and drew the map with his right hand, his left hand slowly tapped out into the mind of the ship, 'Save my daughter from the lair of the wyrms, or they will devour all mankind.' "

"His daughter-"

"Not Irena, child. You. His distant daughter. At first they didn't know how distant. There were prophecies that it would be the seventh seventh daughter. Magic numbers.

Only in the last thousand years have there been prophets who said that the Daughter of Prophecy, the Mother of God, is to be the seventh seventh seventh daughter of the Starship Captain."

"Then there's no reason to believe that the prophecy is anything more than the raving of a Vigilant."

"Of course. Except that the Cranning call obviously intends to fulfill that prophecy. I have no doubt that you are the daughter that needs saving, as the Starship Captain warned."

"But what is the lair of the worms-this? The headworms?"

"He wrote a word that in Star Speech, the most ancient of languages, means 'monster,' and not just any ' monster, but the most dangerous and cunning and powerful of enemies. An enemy powerful enough to take control of the Starship Captain's mind while the Konkeptoine still orbited Imakulata. An enemy powerful enough to call all the Wise to Cranning. Do you understand the danger of the world, Patience? We are facing an enemy that formed its plans seven thousand years ago, when we first arrived here. Whatever ruled Imakulata before humankind came here wants to rule again."

"A gebling then. They were the highest native life, as intelligent as humankind-"

"Were they? Then why is Geblic merely another corrupt form of Star Speech? And Dwelf and Gauntish, why did they have to take their language from mankind? They rose to where they are when humanity arrived; there was, something more powerful, an intelligence older than they.

I meant for Angel to warn you of this. I didn't mean for you to be ignorant of it. But that's all now. That's all, now go."

But even now, there was more, she could see what the headworms told her, that he was hiding still another secret from her. The headkeeper hadn't broken him. His power of resistance was still strong. But she would do what the headkeeper had failed to do. She would break him and have from him the tale he didn't want to tell.

"I know you better than that, Father," she said. "If I am such a danger to the world, you would have killed me in my childhood."

"The Starship Captain didn't say to kill his daughter.

He said to save her. And even if he had not said so, I could not have killed you. Anyone else could die, child, anyone at all, but you would live. To destroy mankind or to save the world, I cannot guess, but you would live, whatever the cost."

"Why! Not because I'm your daughter-so why!"

His face twisted in agony. She had asked him the unbearable question, and the headworms would torture the answer from him. But even as she realized this, she also remembered something else. This was the expression on his face the night of Mother's death. This was the mask of pain he wore. "In all your talking, Father, you never told me what you meant when you cried out on the night they brought Mother's body to you."

His mouth opened wide to form a scream that never sounded.

"The Cranning call. For me, the need wasn't for me to come. It was to bring you. Whole and alive. When I wasn't with you, I felt no call at all."

"That doesn't answer my-"

"Your mother was always with you. She was also called. She was weaker than I was. She tried to take you.

That's why I carried you away from her. She vowed she would never rest until she had you back, that she would do anything to get you away from me."

Even now, though the dread was thick within her, she could not bring herself to understand what he meant.

"Listen, foolish girl! Didn't Angel and I teach you how to listen? My father was weak enough to let Grandfather live, when he should have died. I was stronger than my father was. Hekat meant to take you to Cranning.

I had no strength to kill you, against the Cranning call, but I still had strength."

Patience stopped pumping breath for him.

"You," she whispered. "You told me it was a group of soldiers trying to curry favor with Oruc. You told me-they were even executed for it-but it was you."

His lips formed words as he ran out of air. I never meant to tell you. His eyes accused her. You made me tell you, and you didn't need to know.

It was more than she could bear.

"Why didn't you let her take me to Cranning. I would rather have suffered anything, and have her live."

"The King's House is all the world," said his lips.

"You weren't the Heptarch! You didn't have any responsibility for the whole world! You didn't have to kill my mother!" And she swept him from the table, spilling him to the floor. At once she rushed to him, to lift the head back to the table, restore the gel that would keep his gools alive.

But he looked at her steadily as she knelt over him, and his lips moved and said, Let me die.

So she did the only thing she could do. She took Lord Peace by the jaw and tore the head away from the rack that held it. The headworms wriggled in the open air and the gools slid off and slopped onto the floor. All the time her father's eyes looked at her in gratitude and love.

Then, gasping with grief and fury, she tossed the head through the open grate in the ceiling and climbed up after it. She carried it with her for ten minutes as she scrambled through the heating system to the vent by the garrison barracks. By then it was dead beyond reviving, and she thought of leaving it at the barracks door. Let the soldiers explain to King Oruc how she got it there without being seen.

No. She could not leave his head like the carcass of a cat in the street. Not that he would care-he was beyond such concerns as respect and dignity. It was herself she was concerned for, Patience who could not bear to treat even this fragment of her father's body with disrespect.

What she could not understand was why she did not hate him.

He had killed Mother. All his weeping when they showed how she had been mutilated, all his grief, all his embraces as he tried to comfort his daughter-and he was the one who killed her. All because of some madness about an ancient prophecy. Seven thousand years ago their ancestor went mad, and a few hundred thinkers took unlicensed trips to the gebling city, and for that her mother was murdered by her own husband.

Yet it was this monster who had made her what she was. For her own honor, if not for his, she could not shame him in death. Not because she loved him. She certainly certainly did not love him.

As she made her way along the ledges of the cliff outside the wall of King's Hill, she filled her father's throat and mouth with rocks and tossed the cold, misshapen thing into the sea.