She had no time to react to the evil that had come upon her. Kanos’s footfalls fell faster than any man could run, and before Farisa could go into the blue, arms ten times stronger than any man’s threw her down a chute. She bumped her head on the way down and lost consciousness before hitting the bottom.

Awareness of darkness came first. A sharp pain spread through her ribcage every time she breathed. The coarse rocks underneath her would not move, but the sense of falling or slipping into the abyss did not abate until she, hands cautiously overhead, stood up on the uneven natural floor..

She felt a healing presence; the air in her body seemed to work kinks and knots out of her muscles until her aches were gone. An orange-yellow light filled the cavern.

Don’t worry. There’s no flashfire here.

She looked around to see boulders and gullies, stretching across the cave’s bottom in all directions. The winged animal overhead continued giving off light with puffs of flame.

Your friends need you.

She stepped around a hedge of stalagmites. She felt a warm gust on her face when the beast landed. A pair of green lights hovered at chest level.

Last time we saw each other, you were the baby. Now, I am the baby.

The eyes brightened like fire, illuminating the silver-scaled creature, about four feet high and twice as long.

Farisa, darling, do you know who I am?

“Mother?”

I could have stayed in the pure land, but I took rebirth. The worlds are joined now, so I will be needed.

Farisa stepped forward and hugged the dragon, whose metallic scales were so hot, she could only withstand the embrace for an instant. Kyana-as-dragon, for the same reason, seemed to prefer to keep an inch of distance, but placed its head near Farisa’s shoulder.

Farisa’s eyes watered. “Is Father... where is he?”

I never saw him in the life between lives.

“My sisters?”

All alive, I believe. I don’t know more. You don’t see this world much from that one. Catella, I know, is closer than you think.

Farisa had so many questions to ask, but they all came into her mind at once, preventing any from being voiced. What was it like, and what had her mother seen, in the life between lives? How had she chosen to become a dragon—did one get to choose such things at all? Would she get lonely down here? Was she still Kyana? In adulthood, would she remember having been—would the dragon, once full grown, recognize Farisa at all?

“Can I stay here with you, Mother?”

You cannot. Your friends are in danger. I must guard this place, and you must go into the world you have opened.

“When will I see you again?”

If you follow a path of knowledge and virtue, we will meet again. The world you are in gives so little time, but the pure land gives much of it. The dragon flapped her wings and rose into the air. There’s a door up here. There’s flashfire vapor seeping in, so I can’t light a fire, but I’ll lead you out. One flap of my wings means: stop. Two: turn left. Three: turn right.

“I can make my own light.”

No. You must conserve that.

Farisa, arms outstretched and legs tense, crept forward as guided by the dragon’s signals until she found a staircase-like ledge she could scramble up. At the top, she used a tiny bit of her magic to see the dragon’s form one last time. She kissed her on the forehead, where the M would be on a cat.

“I love you, Mom.”

I love you too, Farisa. The door is straight ahead. Trust your sense of smell.

The door’s handle was rusty and it had been designed with an orc’s strength in mind, so both arms were required to budge it. Beyond, she found a slow-slanted corridor more typical of Switch Cave, and walked in the direction she believed was upward.

To think of her mother, alone in this place for however long a dragon lived, threatened to turn the bridge of her nose into a sinkhole of tears, but she could hardly afford time for sadness, in this strange and lightless place, so she kept walking, even in six directions of darkness. Trust my sense of smell. She touched the hip of her denim jeans and found that a tiny glass cylinder—the vial of Bloodhound Essence—had survived the fall. She ingested the smallest drop she could; this first caused her to retch—this orcish city’s solution to its sewage needs had been to dig further into the cave—but, once she could ignore those, she could detect the untas, their odors welcome in comparison, not too far away. This, when she was not sure which way to go, led her.

A shadow. All things in all directions were the same color, black, so it was odd that her mind came to that old Lyrian riddle. What color is a shadow? What could be a shadow, when there is no light? She did notice a pocket of air, somewhere about knee level, where odors were less intense, albeit by a tiny margin—the cave’s scent was there, but diminished by shade, suggesting a place one-tenth of a flag cooler than it had ought to be. She crouched, then reached around in a granite nook, near the point of giving up until she found a ring that must have been there for thousands of years.

The band was made of unremarkable brass, but the metal had been twisted into an unusual form to give the sole and central gem a full inch of distance from the wearer’s finger, and she didn’t need to see the stone to know why, or what it was: ydenstone. The object’s power to chill had faded—in fact, she could hold her fingertip on the stone as long as she wanted—but there was no mistaking what the gem, as hard as a diamond, was and had once been. She put it in her pocket—it might be useful,

When she spotted the lantern light of her companions, she hurried. The smell of death—at least one person had been killed in the past hour—would have daunted her, but she kept herself going, because Kyana had asked her to do so. If the Goddess had needed Farisa’s sweet mother to come back as a dragon, She would soon make demands of the mage, too.

#

Runar’s arms came around Farisa as she climbed into Switch Cave’s main corridor. “It’s good to see you.”

“Aye,” Farisa said. “The same.”

“Your eyes are red.”

Farisa wiped a tear away. “Flashfire.”

“The rest of them are a quarter mile up. We had a... visit... from Kanos.”

“I thought it was him. And is he the one who...?”

“It should have been done a long time ago,” Runar admitted.

She showed Runar the ydenstone ring. She wasn’t ready to talk about the dragon. “I found this where I fell. It may have once had the ability to radiate cold.”

“Radiate cold?”

“Contrary to all we know about physics, yes. The accounts are—naturally—variable, so who knows?”

When they rejoined the group, Kanos’s headless corpse lay on the cave floor.

Farisa scratched her neck. “Only him?”

“We’re pretty sure he killed Talyn in the process,” said Runar.

Saito was wrapping something around Mazie’s arm.

“What happened to your—?”

Mazie gave the mixed smile of one hiding sadness. “You should see the other guy.”

Farisa noticed she’d lost her right forearm. “I will reattach it.”

Runar shook his head. “That, you won’t be able to do.”

“I’m sure I can find a way to—”

He pointed to a pile of ash. “That was her arm. Kanos’s blade was—”

“Cursed,” he and Farisa said together.

“Fuck you.” Farisa kicked Kanos’s body in the flank, causing blood to spurt from the neck. “Fuck you.”

Mazie, hiding pain, forced a chuckle. “I’d say you should see the other guy, but now you have.”

Farisa buried her head in her hands. “I’m so sorry, Mazie.”

#

The corridor grew harder to navigate as they walked along; the arched ceiling had crumbled, and sections had fallen inward, so they had to work through rubble. An hour or two had passed by the time Farisa saw the harsh light, blue in comparison to their lamps, of the outside world.

Mazie walked to the exit.

Farisa said, “What do you see out there?”

Mazie looked back. “Not the Ashes. It’s green.”

“Green?” Runar said.

“Aye. Our path goes right up into the hills.”

They all cheered. The animals also lifted their heads to match the group’s improved mood.

“The Mountain Road is real,” Farisa said.

“It may be.” Mazie admitted.

Just outside the cave’s mouth, they gathered on a scree flat with the long wall of mountains behind them. Bushes with yellow flowers—Farisa could smell their pollen—dotted the land ahead of them, up to a swift narrow stream half a mile away, beyond which the grassland rose. Visible hilltops wore crowns of conifers.

Farisa said, “It’s...”

Mazie nodded.

“It’s beautiful.” To see vegetation at all would have merited such a response.

Ravens flew overhead.

Runar said, “With no clear signs of a Road, where do we go?”

Andor raised a spyglass. “I suppose the Mountain Road is where we say it is."

Farisa raised her own binocular glasses, formerly Garet’s. “A blank spot on a map.”

“A whole map of blank spots,” Mazie added.

Claes, looking through his own field glasses, said, “There’s something interesting at a bearing of one-five-five.”

Andor: “Just under the tree line?”

“Uh-huh.”

Farisa, knowing Mazie had the sharpest eyes in the group, gave her binoculars to the woman, using one of her own hands to stabilize the glasses.

Mazie said, “Where is it in relation to the white rock?”

“Slightly lower and to the left,” Andor said.

“Slightly lower,” Mazie muttered.

“It’s far away, so it’s tough to—”

“No, I’ve got it. It’s two or three...” Mazie looked at Farisa. “Towers.”

“Towers?” Andor said. “Rock pillars? Boulders?”

“No,” Mazie said. “If you look at the one on the right, it has windows.”

Andor adjusted a knob on his glasses to change focus. “You’re right.”

“Let us see what’s there,” Claes said. “We’ll give it a cautious look before getting too close.”

“A heading,” said Farisa under her breath.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.” She was not ready to express the strange feeling she had. A heading. One-five-five. She had hoped, on discovering this new world, to have a more decisive sense of what to do with it—what to do in it.

In this great expanse, the towers were as good a destination as any. She hadn’t decided whether she hoped to find habitation or ruin, though as they got closer, the towers’ state of disrepair suggested the latter. They cut through tall grass and brush, finding no evidence that a road or trail had existed here. Their machetes were getting dull and would soon require sharpening. The animals seemed to find the local grass tolerable; that was good. The terrain brought no obstruction they hadn’t handled before, and by nightfall, they had gained at least two thousand feet of elevation. Switch Cave’s mouth, six or seven miles away, was nearly invisible.

Once they had set camp and had dinner, Andor grabbed their strongest telescope and climbed a grassy mound to observe the towers again before the darkness took them as its own.

No lights came on in the overgrown ruins. The wind picked up, sweating their campfire. The wind picked up, sweating their campfire. Before bedtime, Farisa felt a chill on her arms that caused her whole body to tingle. Garet’s thermometer said it was closer to five flags than four, but after such a long spell of miserable heat, even the slightest reprieve brought joy to her heart. That night, she slept well for the first time in weeks.

The next morning, Saito found a mountain stream cool enough that their animals drank without hesitation. Andor went fishing with Eric, and they returned having caught six trout, the heaviest more than ten pounds. Farisa patted a husker on her side. The animal’s ribs were palpable and she, like the seven living humans, showed signs of wear from the struggle, but there was good fodder here and the animals were eating it, and the berries were familiar enough to be confident they were edible.

“The worst is over,” Farisa said, hoping it was true.

#

Mazie, fighting through the pain of her wounded arm, struggled to keep up as the others walked toward the towers, black against the sunny sky, for what was now the second day. She imagined the stone structures had been built in a time when their height alone intimidated the people for miles—they still, to some degree, had that effect, and yet she was curious, intensely curious, to know if they would find any clues to what sorts of people had lived here.

Her missing hand wrapped fingers around a thumb, the ruined nerves delivering the sensation with such fidelity that she questioned the report of her eyes. This had been happening all morning; she had spent all night petting Ouragan’s soft fur, realizing after dawn that the cat had moved elsewhere hours ago. Sometimes the hand held a sword; sometimes, a gun.

As the day passed, the pain worsened. As they scrambled up a steep hill, Mazie’s phantom right hand grabbed a handle of rock and refused to let go. She could pull herself away from the powerless nonexistent limb, but this required her to, in some psychological sense, tear herself apart to break free. Other times, the rogue hand would grab a stick or a stone. The worst was when her missing fingers delivered that sharp tingling pain that came in childhood when a cruel cousin wrapped twine too tight around them. She struggled, as they cut through brush, to wield a machete with her left arm, because although she was strong, she had made it a second rider in so many ways she had ignored until its sudden promotion to first.

As she attempted a hip-stretching bounce-step on a smooth granite scramble, her footing failed. She swung her arms to restore balance, but the body of her reflexes no longer matched the body she had. She fell, sliding several feet down the rock face.

She looked at her bandaged stump. “Damn Kanos to hell.”

Farisa extended a hand to help her up. “I suspect he got there without our petition.”

Mazie took her assistance. “They ought to build a new hell under the old one for that piece of shit.” She looked around to make sure she hadn’t been overheard—she didn’t want to be seen as bitter. “Ah, well. I will get used to this.”

“I think this is the last scramble for a while,” Farisa said as she pointed at the flat grassland that stretched all the way to the ruins. “You’ve done great.”

“Don’t fucking say that, Farisa.” The old Mazie danced up slopes the others had climb; the old Mazie encouraged others, did not require it.

The pain in her wounded arm lessened as they left the rocks behind them. She could focus instead on the gentle brush of wind against her shoulders, and it was not so bad. On the flat, she was still the fastest in the group. She did not want to imagine what she looked like while doing so, with her stump bobbing, but she could run.

She asked Farisa, “Do you think Claes would mind if I used some of our bullets?”

“He said we’re running low.”

“I know, but I need to practice shooting.”

“You’ve got the best aim—”

Mazie felt wet rawhide tighten around the missing forearm and winced as the pain spread into her chest.

“Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“It isn’t you.”

“Does it still hurt?”

Mazie nodded. “A little.”

“I should do something. We’ll take rest in an hour.”

“It’ll heal on its own.”

Farisa said, “I can't stand to see you in pain.”

Mazie wanted to change the subject. Time was precious on a journey like this, and although her arm did hurt—the phantom hand had been clenching and grasping all day, beyond the limits of fatigue—she did not want to delay the others. Pain, she had been told as a child, could be multiplied by the number of people one told about it; if no one else knew, that number was zero.

“I’ve felt a lot worse. It isn’t so bad.”

The sun was hovering over the west when they reached the four towers, each large enough to have housed a family on each floor. One had shrunk to a waist-high nub, surrounded by rubble and colonized by the same hardscrabble cedar bushes that had also taken over the square plaza between them. Two of the others—one about four stories high, the other six—had been beaten so severely by weather and vines that it would have been impossible to enter. The southeastern one, however, stood intact, missing only window glass and its front door.

Claes walked the tower’s perimeter. “How long do you think it’s been since anyone has lived here?”

“Hundreds of years, at least,” Andor said as he kicked away a sheet of moss, exposing more of the stone wall.

Farisa looked around the grounds. This plateau, surrounded by high forested mountains, gave her a sense of protection as well as magnificence. Mango trees held up the blue southern sky; grassy fields to the north and west might have been pastures once. She could imagine a different set of people, having come here, not wanting to leave.

“It’s as good a place as any to set up camp,” Claes said.

Runar and Farisa put up the tent, while Claes and Andor used the last daylight to scout and forage. Eric grabbed his fishing gear and went to look for water. Saito found a few stones of polished flint he suspected were arrowheads; he mentioned giving them to his children, if he ever saw them again.

As night fell, Mazie’s phantom pain worsened. The fight for each mile had given her a distraction from it, but now that she could take putative rest, the darkness left her alone with sensations that would not be so bothersome but for their refusal to abate. She had to hide her face so no one would see her wince, and she feared she would need two doses of Saito’s laudanum to get any sleep.

An hour after bedtime, with no sleep achieved, she walked outside and sat on a log, facing away from the fire.

“Let me see,” Farisa said as she sat next to Mazie.

Mazie shook her head.

“It won’t change how I see you.”

“It’s gross, Farisa. It smells bad.”

“That means it’s not healing. And nothing about you is gross, Mazie, not to me.”

“I trust Saito’s judgment.”

“So do I,” Farisa said. “He knows as much about medicine as the world we came from knows, and in that world, that was enough.”

“And you think...?”

“The blade was cursed. There’s a chance that you need me. Let me see.”

“I don’t want you to do this just because—”

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“Don’t be daft.” Farisa looked around, then opened the bandage. “I’d do this for any of us.”

Mazie looked up at the sky before saying, “Thank you. I needed to hear you say that.”

Farisa set the bandage aside. Mazie looked away; if her wound had blackened, she didn’t want to see it. Farisa’s silence did not allay her concerns.

Mazie said, “I think I finally understand Lorani foot modesty.”

Farisa laughed. “Makes one of us, then.”

“It’s about vulnerability.”

“It could be.”

”If I go back to our prior world with this deformity—”

“Don’t think about that.” Farisa lifted Mazie’s damaged arm. “Just sit still. I promise I can end the pain.”

Farisa’s eyes glowed blue—faintly so; Mazie would not have seen this change by daylight—then closed. Her face turned stony, as if no emotion had ever traversed it. Mazie shook from pain; she felt sensation from not just one ruined right hand but two, then four, then eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two as the boundary between her body and space liquefied. She bit the side of her mouth and dug her hip into the log they were sitting on, and the agony that spread through her chest struck a shivering sweat, causing her eyes to shut.

In an eerie monotone, Farisa said, “I’m finished.”

Mazie looked at her arm. In lieu of a wound, she had a clean, painless stump. “It’s as good as... well, not really as good as new, but...” She laughed. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“I love you, Mazie.”

“I love you, Farisa.”

The girls stretched their legs out and watched the stars move across the sky.

#

The bride had lived in this castle her whole life. As a young princess, she had explored three of its four towers, but the one on the southeast had been locked forever, as far as she knew. Even her father, who was a king, had never dared enter. Her grandfather had once claimed in his wild old age to have been inside, but refused to say what he had seen there.

She stood on the dais smiling and waving with fingers only, wrists locked in place, as she had been taught. She used all the willpower she had not to touch her itching face, lest she foul the arsenic makeup her maids had spent all night putting on.

The chancellor spoke in a nearby hallway. “The gods will not remove the curse until what is ours is returned to our kingdom.”

An unfamiliar voice: “But is this the way?”

“It is the only way.”

A red-haired seven-year-old, the niece of a local noble, brought a cup of “mountain tea.” The bride thanked her. She concealed the beverage, knowing that the southerners who had come all this way disapproved of the remedy’s use, but sipped it nevertheless because, while she was used to this altitude, she had been sleepless for thirty hours and had no other way to stay awake.

Exhausted and nervous, she hoped her arriving husband, whose face she had never seen, would allow her to defer consummation.

The small redhead tugged at her dress. “That’s a beautiful bracelet.”

The bride turned it on her wrist. The opalescent stones were Liths of Sophya, also known as mage’s tears. These stones were rare; like kasai, they were never newly made, for the ability had died out long ago.

“Can I have it?”

“It isn’t mine to give,” the bride said. She had plenty of jewelry, and no attachment to this piece, but she knew that if she gave anything to a child, everyone else would expect a gift.

The little girl tugged the bride’s dress again and whispered, “The voices will go away if I wear it. The Liths scare them off.”

The princess felt an odd spirit of generosity, a current of mind that seemed to come from some other time, as if she had been moved or possessed by the intentions of a future person. She stepped behind the priest’s pulpit, set the bracelet there, and returned to her original place. She whispered to the little girl, “It’s over there. Take it and tell no one.”

The red-haired girl did so. Her smile exposed a mouth where one baby tooth had fallen out.

Guests, in greater numbers than before, filtered into the chamber and sat in the pews. The bride could afford no more departures from decorum. She hoped she would not have to stand still here for too long. When the bells of the northwestern tower announced noon, a veil was lowered over her face so the ceremony could begin.

The king spoke. The daughter had heard this deadpan rhapsody when her sisters had been married off, and the speech had not changed. She tried to imagine what her husband would look like. She knew that he was thirty, that he was a war hero who had taken a minor wound, and that he stood to inherit a kingdom, even before this union, richer and more vast than hers. She had been permitted to see a portrait—the man’s face, in it, had been unremarkable but handsome enough.

When the double doors of the great hall opened, the music rose. Her veil admitted very little detail, but she could see his figure: a tall man who walked with a cane. She wasn’t upset by his hobbled manner of walking—in the eyes of any decent woman, injuries taken in honorable combat made a man more compelling, as she would continue telling herself if she found more features like so.

The king walked to the groom and patted his arm. “Neither late nor early.”

“I hope I’m not in the wrong place.”

The king laughed. “As do I, young man.”

“Has she bled yet?”

She wondered if the men were aware that she could hear them, or if they simply didn’t care. The king shuffled his feet. “In the North, we do not ask our daughters such questions, so I do not know. She is the right age for marriage: ten months and—”

Fourteen. Unlucky fourteen. Fourteen dragons entombed in stone. Fourteen generations of war, for each at peace. Fourteen shadows cross the equator. She wished they could have waited for spring—three-of-fives would have been a more ready age for this.

“Very well,” said the groom.

The guests sat down; the king took his proper place on the throne, with the groom by his side. Two young men, holding a squawking hen by her wings, came down the aisle. The high priest, in a blue robe and conical white hat, severed the bird’s head with shears. The crowd shouted at the headless bird, “Run, run!” When the man set the body down, however, the animal did not. Blood spurted and it fell.

“A dropper,” the king said to the groom. “I made his son a knight, and he gives us a bad hen.”

“Not to worry. We don’t believe in any of that down South.”

“Nor do I,” the king whispered as he hid his mouth with an upright hand. “The problem is that some of my people do.”

“I have seen your daughter from afar. She is very beautiful.”

The sun’s warmth doubled.

The high priest spoke. “The hen did not walk, she did not run. Our princess will not deliver a worthy child unless the City of Honey bears our flag.”

Murmurs filled the throne room.

The king stood and bellowed. “That poses no difficulty at all. With the armies and gold the gods join to us this day, we shall take Malisse with ease.”

Applause rose. The princess felt uneasy. Her father had won every war he had started, but the City of Honey had not fallen for thousands of years, and prophecy had said it would not be conquered until the end of time, and by sorcery unimaginably evil. She was old enough to know that it was a highborn daughter’s destiny to be sold off for gold, land, and armies, but had her father joined houses into something more... infernal?

The priest droned on about love—he spoke of it as if it had already been attained, but the princess knew it to be a fortunate accident marriage sometimes allowed—and then he spoke of the prosperity the two entwined kingdoms would attain, their future empire stretching from the equator to the northern dust.

“I am but a poor shadow of the least of our gods,” he said, “but I carry the authority, in the sight of heaven and the world’s best men, to join these two. Time has come for the embrace.”

The room’s cheers echoed. The king sipped wine, loudly, from a gold chalice.

The bride felt the groom’s large hand around hers and turned to face him. He removed the veil. The man had no skin, eyes, or nose. Strands of rotting flesh clung to the bony hands he threw around her. She looked at her father, a king whose mouth now lacked lips or teeth, an old man whose red wine leaked from his porous innards and splashed on the floor. The groom’s breath smelled of sulfur as he forced her into a kiss. She had been married into the world’s oldest and largest family—the only one whose numbers were guaranteed forever to grow.

#

Farisa slapped a hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. The nightmare had been so vivid, it felt like it had been a whole short life. She was in the waking world now, but she had wandered from camp without memory of doing so, and was now in an enclosed darkness, as there were no stars nor hints of light anywhere. A bolt of pain spread up her shinbone. The blunt object landed next on her thigh. She willed a bubble of light into existence to see an animate skeleton using one of its ribs as a cudgel. She dodged its next swing and reached for a weapon, finding she had brought none, so she ducked and tackled it by the pelvis, which slid out of place. The abomination collapsed.

She ran up a stone staircase. Her head struck the ceiling not far up. A trapdoor lay above, but even when she pushed with all her strength, she couldn’t budge it. The skeleton, which had reassembled itself, came on all fours. She kicked it in the collarbone, and some bones fell away, but the skull flew into her stomach, knocking the wind out of her. She threw the skull into the wall, causing its jawbone to break and its teeth to shatter. As if pulled by an inward wind, the monstrosity collected itself and came again.

Sliding her hand along the trapdoor, she found a patch of rot she could punch through, making a helmet-sized hole. To widen the fissure, she broke pieces off the rim until she could stand through. She got her head and arms above it, but her hips got stuck. The skeletal creature snarled. Struggling to extricate herself from the broken door, she kicked helplessly.

A girl’s voice called. “Come, my liege! It’s not safe here.”

Farisa pounded fists on the trapdoor. Its rim dug into her hip bone, but with another bounce, she broke free. A young girl, the redhead Farisa had seen in her dream, stood in front of her in a luminous white gown. Once Farisa stepped away from the broken trapdoor, it caught fire and the emerging skeleton, as it lunged, fell to pieces and did not rise.

The girl said, “Fire keeps them dead for three nights. Now follow me.”

Farisa ran across the stone floor after her. “Who are you?”

“I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Are there others?”

The redheaded girl ran up a staircase. “I’m the only one who seems to have a body, though.”

“You mean you’re a...?”

The girl stopped, turned around, and gave Farisa an icy stare.

“You’re not stuck here forever, are you? That can’t actually happen, can it?”

“Not forever.” The girl turned around a bend. “She is just.”

Farisa checked her own neck for a pulse. “Who’s she?”

“There’s no time for that. The Living come at dawn, and I need you for something.”

The girl led Farisa up an ornate hallway with a rounded arch, and through a red wooden door that slammed shut behind them. It had been the middle of the night, but now abundant sunlight filled the bedchamber. Windows were open and the outside air was hot, although the bare trees and snow on distant mountains suggested it was winter, as much as seasons existed here.

“Farisa, how well do you trust your memory?”

“It has been better.”

“Will you read to me?”

Farisa walked around the room. She tested this place’s reality. She had escaped Exmore’s madhouse twenty times before getting out—she still had her reality tests, and she ran through them. Her hand did not pass through solid objects. Symbols on the girl’s school slates, though she could not read them, remained the same from glance to glance. No dream retained this resolution or consistency; this was real.

“I will, but if you think I’m the princess, I’m not her.”

“I know that. She passed away a long time ago.” The girl pointed at a storybook that sat between two shelf plants, an oak and a cedar tree that had been pruned in miniature to look like their full-grown cousins outside. “Read to me anyway.”

At first, the letters were unrecognizable, appearing as convoluted knots in a string of ink, but the little girl waved a hand over the paper. The lettering swirled and swam until it settled in place as Lyrian. As the red-haired girl got into bed, Farisa told her the story in the book, also gathering the textile animals—a white husker with brown spots, a gray mountain fox, and a black-maned golden lion—that lay around the room, pacing them around the girl for additional comfort. When the child’s eyes closed, the words on the page faded to white.

(“Farisa, how well do you trust your memory?”)

A map, showing the vast Bezelian continent in full, appeared on the paper as if it had emerged from the ocean. A thick black double line, running north to south, divided it. Farisa studied its features. Cities existed along the Road on both sides of Switch Cave. Some, to the north, coincided with places she had seen; to the south, but slightly above the equator, was the Road’s terminus marked with a honeycomb and a bee: Malisse, the City of Honey.

The girl said, “Thank you, Farisa.”

“For reading to you?”

“Not only that.” A tear, gleaming in the afternoon sun, came down the girl’s face. “The princess is nice now.”

“Please don’t cry.” Farisa tried to hug the child, but her arms passed as if through vapor. She could touch everything else here and it would touch back, but the girl’s figure remained nothing but a visual impression—self-placed light. Still, the girl did not seem bothered by this.

“I should show you one more thing.” The girl wiped a tear from her face with one hand and, with the other, she plucked leaves from the tiny cedar tree, mixed them together with sand from a bowl, made a fist around it all, and closed her eyes. When her hand opened, she had an opal-like stone that she placed on a table. “Take it, Farisa. It’s for you.”

Farisa put the round, shiny pebble in her pocket. The girl reappeared in bed with a silk mask over her eyes. Time passed quickly here; it had been mid-afternoon a minute ago, but the sun was setting and a cool mountain breeze had come into the bedroom.

The girl added, “When you leave, know that the skeletons will not bother you if you walk between the black pillars. The Dead in this place follow the rules. The Living, however, mean you harm.”

“Do you mean... the people I came with?”

“No, not them. There are other Living. I believe your people call them ‘orcs.’ Your friends, in fact, need your protection from them. Night in this world is morning in yours, and that’s when the orcs attack.”

Farisa hated the idea of abandoning this girl in a cursed ruin. “You should come with us.”

“I can’t,” said the girl. “And you must go.”

The sun set and darkness spread through the bedchamber, emptying the room.

#

Farisa, who might have attributed the bruises on her shins to sleepwalking, stepped out of the tower into the dawn light. The opalescent pebble in her hand made clear that she had not been dreaming. She snuck to camp to find her shoes before anyone saw her, and to avoid anyone realizing she had, against all good reasoning, though also outside the span of wakefulness, gone into the ruined tower.

She managed the first of these goals; as for the second, Saito seemed to intuit at breakfast that she had been inside.

“I was,” she confessed. “I had the weirdest dream.”

“This whole place feels haunted,” Saito said.

“Ghosts,” Andor said. “We find a new place in the world, and the first thing we do is fill it with our ghosts.”

“I’m not afraid of ghosts.” Unaware she was saying it until she had, Farisa added, “I’m afraid of the Living.”

Claes had begun to roll up their tent. “Afraid of us?”

“It’s what they call the...” Farisa rubbed her eyes. “Never mind.”

“We’ve all been having odd dreams.” He paused. “Is everyone ready to go?”

Runar said, “Oh, shit.”

Claes and Andor and Saito looked at him, waiting for him to say more.

“Orcs.” A mass of them was moving in from the southwest.

Andor pointed to a mound, three or four stories high. “Let’s get up there so we can see them.”

“Right,” said Claes. They led their animals uphill, through tall brush. The odor, much like a spoiled egg fermenting inside a boar’s carcass, spread everywhere.

Farisa said, “The Living?”

Saito said, “Not this time.”

“We need visibility,” she said as she climbed the sole tree on the hill.

The orcs were numerous, but their movements were jerky, yet synchronized. They wore no clothes, but had no shame in their nakedness. Festering wounds exposed ribs and femurs to open air. Many were missing limbs; more than a quarter had lost one foot or both, but walked unimpeded on torn-up leg stumps with no expressions of pain.

Mazie cut clearings in vegetation so the others could move about and see each other, while remaining out of the advancing undead’s sights. Claes told everyone to grab a rifle. They did, and once the enemy were within range, they began firing.

Claes asked, “Is it doing any good?”

“Not enough,” Farisa said. Very few of the enemy had fallen.

“Let’s try for head shots,” said Saito. “Farisa, how many are out there?”

“At least two hundred.”

The Living, I was told. These are not living.

Farisa slung an arm down. “Mazie! I need the spyglass.”

Eric handed Mazie the binoculars; she raised her stump and frowned.

“As hard as you can is good enough.”

Mazie lobbed the device. Farisa went into the blue; when the spyglass reached the top of its trajectory, she pulled it up the last two feet and caught it. Then she climbed as high as she could om the tree. Some of the walking corpses had become tangled up in vegetation—a few hand impaled themselves on branches—and others had fallen to rifle fire, but hundreds more were coming. Claes and Andor had already drawn swords for close combat.

Saito said, “Do you see patterns in their movement?”

“I...” Farisa said. The dead did not seem to improvise much; although they plenty dangerous for their number, the thought did make sense that they were sharing too few minds among them. “I do. There’s a group over there that step all at the same time.”

“Thralls,” said Saito. “Find the masters.”

The Living. Who commanded these armies of dead? The orcish mages were not stupid; they had disguised themselves well. She looked at the sky. A buzzard flew overhead. What did such a creature know, if not death? The bird was so high, though, that she felt her speed in the blue dwindle, like a swimming arrow, as she found her way to it, permitting her only a brief scan of the field before it fled.

“Four living,” she told Saito.

“Where?”

She could see, now that she had identified the masters of these undead platoons, the faint purplish tendrils of control. The closest thralls, the ones Claes was exhausting himself to fend off, belonged to...

Farisa shouted, “First target, three-one-zero, forty-five yards off. Faded blue tunic.”

Runar fired. The orcish necromancer’s jaw imploded. Scores of rotting orcs collapsed like dominos.

Claes and Andor, covered in sweat, gave Runar their thanks; he had bought them a few seconds of time.

Saito said, “Next?”

Farisa said, “Bearing two-zero-five, fifty yards. White helmet.”

“Are you sure? He looks dead to me.”

The clever fucker had coated himself in the meat, blood, and feces of his companions. “I’m sure of it.”

Eric fired and hit the orc in the shoulder. The shot did not kill him, but was sufficient to wrest him from the blue. The dead fell in a circle around him; the orcish mage screamed as the bodies pinned him down. Runar, taking advantage of this immobility, scored a head shot.

“Mazie, this one’s yours.” The woman had mounted her rifle on an unta’s back to make up for her missing arm. “Two-seven-zero, about thirty yards. He’s the one with—”

“Goddamn!” “Oh, fuck me!” The third mage fell on the third shot. “Got ‘im.”

The deceased, though less coordinated, closed in, swinging fists and clubs with enough autonomy to be dangerous. Saito and Eric, the latter fighting atop an unta, had abandoned their rifles in favor of close-combat weapons. Against a thrall, nothing worked but removing the head—the dead were impervious to pain and fatigue, which were beginning to beset the living humans.

Runar asked, “Where the fuck’s the last one?”

Farisa spotted an orc in the distance who squeezed his eyes shut and made fists as airy purple tendrils continued erupting from his chest; pulling the other necromancers’ squads back to life in his own moving mass. “It’s your shot to make. Three-zero-zero. Two hundred yards.”

“Two hundred?”

“He’s the one in chain mail, standing apart a bit.”

“I see him, but there’s no way—”

“Try!”

Runar fired. The shot had been perfect, but one of the thralls threw itself in the way, taking the bullet that should have ended the fight. Runar fired again—a miss. A pair of undead arms grabbed Runar’s legs and tried to tackle him. Four of the dead, in coordinated motion, charged Claes and Andor, causing the men to collide with each other. Mazie, who had also set her rifle aside and was defending the huskers with her large wooden shield, blocked a blow from an orc’s massive iron hammer, causing the wood to break.

Farisa knew no spell that worked at a range of two hundred yards; worse yet, she had climbed so high in this tree, she doubted she could afford to invest the attention a difficult spell would require, lest she lose balance and fall. She would bluff. She formed a ball of red plasma between her hands and lobbed it twenty yards, charring an orcish corpse. The next one flew twenty yards more, cutting a red line through the air before it burst into flames. She changed her stance, holding the tree’s branches so tight her hands hurt, and stretched her mind as far as it could go, reaching a distance of about eighty yards. The smell of cooking orc flesh filled the air.

A translucent blue dome enclosed the orcish mage and much of his army.

“Runar!” Farisa shouted. “Charge!”

The man ran over rotting burning corpses to the fallen orc. The rival mage could not fight through his thrall arms while maintaining the barrier, so nothing interposed. The dome faded, the orc fell, and his army crumpled at the speed of surrender.

Saito yelled, “Runar, stop!”

Farisa shook a branch. “No! We have to kill him now.”

“I will kill him,” Saito said. “I don’t expect you to understand, but I owe the world this.”

Saito ran to the fallen orcish mage. Claes, who had come along, lifted the head by its ratty yellow hair, and Saito’s knife opened the throat, spilling dirt-colored blood. The necromancer, who woke up, begged for its life in some language none of them could understand, but its neck had already been severed.

The dead would fight no more that day.

#

Farisa learned that, toward the end of the fight, Eric had taken a club hit to the ribs. Mazie, in defending an unta, had taken a glancing blow. They all agreed it could have been a lot worse. With Saito’s laudanum down to a few doses, both agreed to face their wounds edge-on as they walked the day’s southward miles.

They set camp, they ate a small dinner, they went to sleep, and they rose around ten minutes before sunrise to eat breakfast and walk again. In this way, the new world’s daily rhythm was not unlike the old world’s. The natural monotony—the daily chores had been performed so often they were rote—could be pleasing, and gave backing to the highlights and vistas. It was good to be neither in ten-flag heat nor an underground orcish city, though the recent fight kept them attentive to the odor of death, which it did not need to be said they would avoid if they came upon it.

Mazie’s mood seemed to be worsening. The next day, a group of orcs—weaponry crude, fighting skill nonexistent—attempted an ambush, though it did not take much gunfire to scare them off. After two successful shots, all had fled but the dagger-wielding orcling that had tried to kill an unta—Farisa, catching it in the attempt, kicked out its legs and bashed its head into a wagon wheel. Mazie, after the scuffle, looked at her stump and frowned.

Farisa said, “What’s wrong?”

“I’m not as good as I used to be. I was a crack shot when I had two hands, and now...”

“I’m sure you’re a better shot than I am.”

“That’s not saying much.”

“Hey!”

“Don’t be silly, though. You have other talents. I’m barely useful out here.”

“That’s not true.” Farisa put her hand on Mazie’s shoulder. “You’re smart. You’re funny. You’re still quite athletic, not to mention viciously attractive.”

Mazie sighed and looked at Farisa. “Forgive me if I take that as a compliment.”

Farisa put her other hand on the other shoulder, facing Mazie, and smiled. “It was meant as one.”

“I’m not whole anymore.”

“Who is?”

“This would make me even more of an outcast if we ever went back to the world we came from.”

“We’re not.” Farisa chuckled. “We’re not going back to that place unless to rule it.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

They continued on. Three months ago, any kind of ambush would have been terrifying; this time, five minutes after the event, they were walking. The sights, now that they were back in the mountains, were often disarmingly beautiful—the overhead sun and charmingly cool air made every flower and leaflet a touch brighter. It was difficult to harbor a dark thought until evening, when the cool winds made it hard to set a fire and, intending nothing, Eric made a comment about the new world’s “orcish zombies.”

“Thralls,” said Saito. “The ones we fought yesterday were thralls.”

Runar said, “What’s the difference?”

“Zombies would have been worse. A thrall goes down when its master dies, unless another one comes into it. Zombies keep going. The hunger drives them.”

Mazie audibly shuddered.

“Zombies are horrid, but even they aren’t one-tenth as bad as ghouls.”

“Ghouls?” Farisa said. She had read about them in Sixteen Winds; they were said to have the strength of giants and the speed of galloping horses. “They’re real?”

Saito inhaled and looked at the ground between his feet, as if he were about to reveal something about himself. “They are. I have seen one, but that is a story for another time.”

After the campfire had been put out, but before they all went to sleep, Farisa checked her jacket to make sure she still had the opalescent stone, the Lith of Sophya.

When they got into their sleeping bags. Farisa and Mazie faced each other.

Mazie looked at her missing hand. “You mean it? That I’m not useless?”

“Of course not.” Farisa chuckled. “You’re keeping me sane.”

#

They continued climbing. The sky, even during midday, seemed halfway dark; the sun, more white than yellow. Altitude had a sense of irony—this high up, the illusion that was a solid sky seemed even more distant than from sea level. The grasses in this oak savannah were the color of cut hay; stands of ruddy junipers became increasingly common. Mornings were often chilly, but afternoons were hot. Farisa’s shoulders stung of sun, and Mazie’s neck was rhubarb red.

As they progressed through a long forested valley, Claes looked back at Farisa. “First of October, isn’t it?”

“I believe so,” she said.

“You’re twenty-one, then.”

“Guilty as charged,” Farisa said. “Don’t tell the others. I don’t want anyone to feel obliged to buy gifts.”

“Nothing to buy out here.”

“That’s the joke.” Farisa adjusted her hat.

It was a pleasing thought that no concept of exclusive possession existed here. The idea of land ownership had become as untenable and absurd as God had meant it to be; a mountain vista belonged equally to everyone, and the pleasant soreness in one’s muscles after a long hike was something one had to earn. There were, alas, undead here; still, the undead ideas of the Company’s world were gone.

“What would you want for your birthday, though?”

“The same thing I want every other day. To survive it.”

Claes chuckled. “Out here, that’s not one to leave in the box.”

“No, it’s not,” Farisa said. “I don’t know that I can ever go back, though. I sure don’t want to.”

Claes seemed to stifle tears. Farisa realized she had said something insensitive—the man had a family to miss—and was not sure whether she should apologize for the comment, or ignore having said it for an apology would worsen its sting.

He smiled, then. “Is this like anywhere you thought you’d ever see, at twenty?”

“No.” She laughed. She could barely remember six months, let alone a full year, ago. She had been out here for half her life, it seemed, and she realized, with some bit of ambiguous sadness, that if this adventure ever did end—and it would someday, wouldn’t it?—these proportions might reverse, leaving this span of time to be the forgotten anomaly, compressed down to minutes. Cait Forest had made a warm bath under the stars into another boring luxury, but what if this long walk, as she came around a bend and looked over a wild orange poppies, lit by the sun, one day seemed as remote as a place in a century-old novel?

Cait Forest... April. It’s not been half a year. The Monster, the Monster; that thing is... that thing is why. I owe this whole journey to it. She could not recall what it had looked like. The count of its eyes—forty—remained clear, and she remembered how every pair looked a little bit different, but the body of the thing was as long forgotten already as the smells and sights of her infancy.

“Farisa!” Mazie was calling. “Do you see something?”

She had stopped—the others had passed her—amidst a stand of sand oaks, a group of trees that seemed out of place in this southern wild, though she could not say why. Their color was just not what the thousand miles behind them had trained her eye to expect.

“I got lost in the view. That’s all.” She hurried to catch up with the others.