Mirai looked at their mounts with a frown. They were lapping at the water contentedly, just as they would with blood. He had seen that image before. And though they had left the carnage behind, in some part of the mind, all of it got stuck and waited for a time when the tired brain would let the thoughts go free. The way out of the Hub had been littered with corpses of his former Lord's army and of the Chainkeepers who had stood in their way. What the Lord of Greed planned to do with his new city was anyone's guess. But one thing was certain. He owned it now, and everyone in it. Senn hoped that would keep him satisfied for a while, and Mirai had to believe in that too. Senn knew the creature's mind better than anyone else.

They had made it as far as the Fork without incident. It helped that they had managed to round up those three stray canids to take them. Their growls kept the crowds and the fighters away. But Naial had said something to them, put her hand upon one of their snouts, and with that simple, unthinkable act, had performed another miracle. Mirai had expected to see the blood gushing out from her severed hand. But as she had brought Senn back from the brink, she had brought something out of the beasts. Some atavistic impulse told them the humans were not their enemies, their lords, or tormentors. That at some point in time, they might have been friends and allies and could be so again. Naial had said something along those lines. But to Mirai, that had been a greater miracle than Senn standing again, or the power that their God could give his followers. There was something about the simplicity of an outstretched hand, open and awaiting the other being's contact, that no leash or whip or sword could replace. They were less powerful and less effective. There was a lesson there he couldn't wrap his head around yet.

He turned around and looked at Senn and Naial. She was sitting by the water, letting her feet soak in the cold stream. She looked as if she didn't have a care in the world, but Mirai could almost sense the thoughts spinning around Senn as he paced back and forth. He had never seen him so thoughtful. He was the kind who decided quickly on a course of action and convinced himself it was the best. He abhorred indecision. But that was the old Senn. Maybe the new one was full of doubts. Or he had been since Naial had told him she had borne a son of his all those years ago and that he had been taken from her to be raised in the Fortress. His whole world had to be upside down. Or rather, it was upside down a day before, after rejecting his god and his previous life and embracing a different path. Now… who knew where that path could lead. Mirai had seen parents caring for their young in Lordstown, of course. It was completely different from how things had been in the Hub. Life was tough in Lordstown, it was a struggle to survive, just like it was anywhere. But a parent wasn't stripped from his children. They could die of hunger, sickness, or violence, and they often did. But they were free to care for them and love them. The first time Mirai had seen a mother cradle a boy and sing to him as he slept, he had cried, and he hadn't realized why at the time. He had been barely a child himself. And he had seen parents fight to the death to protect their children. Would Senn turn into one of them? Would it change him even further?

"Are you ready to go?" he yelled, to cover up for the lump in his throat and to make it seem as if he wasn't interrupting anything of consequence.

Senn looked at Naial and held her gaze.

"I am. But you should stay here, Naial."

She stared back and frowned.

"You don't know me at all if you think I'm spending the first free day of my life cowering in a cave and waiting for you to come back to me. I'm going to get my son."

"It will be dangerous. Impossible, really. Deadly, to be honest. And possibly, without meaning. He won't recognize you or me. He may be a Chainkeeper by now. One of them."

"Does it matter? Even if I die, and it is him that kills me, I'll rest in peace knowing I've died a free woman and that I've seen my son's face again."

Mirai walked up to them and knelt by Naial.

"Look, I don't know you, lady, but there's no need to be so dramatic. Let's all go together as far as we can get to the Fortress, and then we'll see what plan we come up with. Then we'll decide if we all die needlessly or if we come up with a plan that keeps us all alive."

"There's no need for you to come either, Mirai," said Senn.

Mirai looked up at him and averted his gaze quickly. "I have nothing better to do, nowhere else to go. Might as well tag along while I figure out what to do."

Senn sighed loudly.

"If you two get killed, I won't let it haunt me. I tried to talk you out of it. Now, let's mount up and get going."

Mirai and Senn approached the canids warily. It took a long time to make one of them submit to their rider. Neither of them seemed to trust how long the effect of what Naial had done to them would last.

"Don't be such babies," she said, rolling their eyes at them, patting the canid she had chosen, and climbing up with some difficulty.

They followed her lead and mounted the beasts. They set out at a trot, Mirai in the lead, Senn holding the rearguard. The plan that Senn had half-cooked up on the way to the Fork was simple but it relied on an assumption that they couldn't confirm until they were near the Fortress. Somehow, word had to come up to the Fortress about what had happened in the Hub. There had to be a steady stream of supplies and information going back and forth. Even if no news reached the Fortress, if all the runners had been killed before leaving the Hub, the mere absence of traffic would tell them there was something wrong in the Hub. When that happened, they would dispatch a force. Senn said he was counting on that, that's why they were following the cart-trodden road that would lead to the Fortress. After the Fork, the road turned southwest. The Fortress was supposed to be somewhere in that direction, from what Senn's spies over the years had managed to ascertain. But none had managed to get a look at it. It was a stretch of land that was, like most of the surrounding desert, impossible to sneak around in, and the road to the Fortress was, if not heavily traveled, at least frequently used. If Senn and his group spotted a caravan or riders, they would have nowhere to hide and no cover. But at least with the canids, they could try to pass as Chainkeepers.

It was noon before they saw dust rising ahead of them.

"Caravan?" asked Naial.

"No," said Mirai. "It wouldn't kick that much dust unless they were going fast. Probably a pack of canids with their Chainkeepers in tow."

"Great."

Senn caught up with them.

"If they stop us, we'll say we're bringing her in," he said.

"Do you think they'll believe we are Chainkeepers? I have no leash. We have no chains," said Mirai.

"Look into your saddlebags, boy. There's a length of chain in mine. I'll tie her up and you turn your torq around so they don't see the opening."

"I don't want to be chained," said Naial nervously. "We can do something else to fool them."

"What? Look around, woman," replied Senn. "Our best hope is to fool them. They won't believe us any other way."

"We won't fool them."

"Probably not. But they won't attack us on sight, and I like our chances better if they get close to us and we can surprise them."

"I don't have my powers anymore," said Mirai. "Are yours gone too?"

"Yes," said Senn. "Something happened to me back there and Naial's healing couldn't restore it."

"Damn. We'll have to do this the old way."

Mirai looked into the canid's bag and took out a chain and hook, removed the hook from it, dismounted, and walked up to Naial. She had to bow to allow him to tie the chain to her leash. She hadn't even gotten it removed or turned into a torque and she was once again enslaved. Mirai knew what it would have meant for him to let a chain tie him up again. He couldn't imagine how much worse it would be for someone that had spent all her life like that, and now have to tie herself up willingly not even a day after becoming a free person. He did it as gently as he could and put his hand on her shoulder as if to reassure her it was a temporary measure. But she recoiled anyway and frowned from that point onward.

They rode ahead slowly. The canids seemed to hear or sense their kin because they started heaving excitedly and straining at the reins. All Senn and Mirai could do was hold them back and wait. By the time the dust cloud dissolved into a pack of twelve riders, Naial was sweating profusely and pulling at her chain.

"How do you want to handle it, old man?" asked Mirai.

"Our old abilities would come in handy right now," said Senn.

"And barring that?"

"I guess praying to our disgruntled Lord wouldn't do any good either?

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"Doubtful."

"Then, the way I see it, we're going to die unless those are bottom-of-the-litter Chainkeepers. If there's a Sparked among them, we're done."

"Do you have any useful comment, old fart, considering they'll reach us in no time?"

Senn scratched his head playfully before replying.

"They are tiring their canids needlessly. We'll have an advantage there. Plus, these are probably from the same kennels, so their canids won't chomp at us or our mounts. They'll be confused, at least for a few heartbeats. Apart from that, all I can say is: I'll take the ones on the right, you take the ones on the left."

"It's a miracle we survived as long as we did," said Mirai, sighing. "Leave it to me, then. I have a plan."

"Do you care to share it?" asked Naial, who had overheard the entire exchange with widening eyes and disbelieving their nonchalance in the face of death.

"Nah. It's a little embarrassing. Just follow my lead."

When the riders were about a hundred paces away and slowing their mounts to meet up with them, Mirai spurred his canid to a trot. Senn looked at Naial, shrugged, and imitated him. Her canid's reins were in his hands, so she had no option but to follow along. She just hoped it wasn't to their deaths.

"HEY!" shouted Mirai, and kept on shouting. "What took you so long? The hub is in chaos! Didn't the riders reach you? Where are the rest of our men? You're not enough!"

A couple of the riders glanced at one of their number, who Mirai assumed was the leader, and he kept shouting at him as he stopped right in front of him, circling back and forth with his mount.

"There's a revolt, they've killed I don't know how many of us!" he shouted desperately. "We need more men! We're going up to the Fortress to warn everyone. You should have been there already, you son of a bitch," he said in a lower tone, pointing his finger at the leader. 'You'd better go ahead and hold the line at the northern end before it spreads. If I come back with reinforcements and the whole Hub is on fire, you'd better ask one of those mud-eaters to slice your throat because I'll be less gentle."

He finished his tirade, bumped his canid against the leader of the riders, pushing the man away, and rode past them, followed by Senn and Naial. They started picking up speed and Naial caught up to Mirai.

"Did that work? Are they following us?" she asked.

"Don't look back, woman. Or they'll know."

"Then what…"

Senn caught up to them and spurred his canid noisily.

"Now the leading man is wondering what to do," he said. "He has doubts about who we are or he wouldn't have let us pass. If he had ever been in a fight with us, he would know we're no Chainkeepers. So he's not that experienced. And now he has to decide if he saves face with his men by sending them all after us, but risking a whipping if we're the real thing, or hurrying to the Hub and looking like a whipped canid in front of his men. It all depends on if he values his men's perceptions of him more than his duty."

"It seems he chose the third option," said Mirai. He was slumping to the side of his saddle as if he was looking in his saddlebags, but he was catching a look at the Chainkeepers. "He's sending a couple of them after us in case we're impostors while hurrying to the Hub in case we're telling the truth. Smart man."

"Except he should have sent more of them. But he doesn't know how we fight."

Senn and Mirai rode closer together, with Naial in the middle. They exchanged a few words that Naial couldn't understand. Soon enough, the riders started to catch up with them.

"Why are we letting them get to us?" asked Naial.

"Because it's tiresome to outrun them and I'd rather face them here than at the foot of the Fortress, with backup to help them," said Senn.

"Are you going to kill them?"

Senn looked at her as if he was about to answer a child's question, but stopped before he could blurt out something hurtful. He kept forgetting that even though she knew violence and death, she wasn't shaped by it. It was just something that other people did to her and others. It wasn't something in which she could see herself taking part.

"We'll need to kill them, or otherwise disable them to the point they're not a threat to us. That usually ends up being the same thing."

He saw her shoulders slump a little bit and her reply was weary.

"Can you make your best attempt at not killing them? For me?"

"Sure," he said, caught by surprise by her request.

"That'll be a first," said Mirai with a snort.

The riders started shouting at them, and Senn gave Mirai a meaningful glance. He seemed to be counting something, whether it was time or how fast the sound of the canid's feet was thumping. Then he grabbed a length of chain with one hand while keeping the other one on the reins. And then Senn and Mirai disappeared from Naial's view.

If she could have seen what happened in those few heartbeats, she would have seen Senn and Mirai fall back behind her canid, kicking their own canid's side, slumping ahead and to the opposite side of the kick as the beasts jumped, turning around quickly, unspooling a long chain from their hands until it was taut and horizontal, riding past their startled persecutors so the chain knocked them down hard, jumping down, punching the men, tying them up with the chain, and taking a long breath.

"Can we kill them now?" asked Mirai. "It'll be gentler than leaving them here under the sun. Who knows when the next patrol will be around? Probably… never."

"We're not here to be gentle," said Senn. "If she wants to let them live, I'll grant it. But not anything else."

"Their canids will eat them."

"All right… we'll tie them up across their mounts and send them on their way. The canids may decide to take them to the Hub. In any case, they won't hurry and won't pose a problem to us. Is that all right, my lady?" he asked with a shout and an attempt at a flourish, which performed by him looked like a threatening gesture.

Naial had stopped some distance away and was looking back at them. She nodded and Senn and Mirai grabbed the captives and set to tying them to their mounts.

"Thank you," said one of them.

"Don't thank them, you traitor," said the other one. "They're rebels. Scum of the earth."

"They could have killed us."

"What do you think they'll do to us if they find us like this? A slap on the wrist? A flaying, for sure."

The first man shuddered.

"Still… that gives us some time to live. Who knows? We may end up alive at the end of it."

The second man gave him a look that would have boiled water but Mirai laughed at both of them and gave their canids a blow with a length of chain so they would get out of their sight. Soon enough, they did, going toward the Hub, though the canids kept trying to bite back at their riders, who were tied just outside the reach of their jaws. The beasts were too stupid to collaborate and eat each other's riders. Though there is a lot of time for them to figure it out, thought Mirai.

"Did you realize it?" said Naial. "Even among them… some glimmer of hope. They're not completely lost to us."

Senn looked at her with wide-open eyes.

"They're. Our. Oppressors."

"They're victims of tyranny, just like us. They just ended up on the opposite side of the hovel."

"Forgive me if I have problems warming up to that idea," said Senn.

"Our son could be one of them. Would he be to blame if they turned him into that?"

"I don't know. Some people are just evil. Or born mean."

"You weren't a violent child when I met you. Things happened that made you into a killer of men. And I don't think it's all your fault or that you wanted all of it."

"Naial. You don't know anything about me or what happened to me. I may be just as bad as them."

She brought up the reins and stopped her mount. Senn looked back at her, wondering why she was looking at him like that.

"No," she said, and then pushed her heel to the canid's side, pushing him to a trot again. "No, you're not, and you know it. I know it. Mirai knows it, too. You're not a bad man. You've done good things and bad ones too, but that's not because of what you are. You've just been following the wrong god."

"I wish it were that simple," said Senn. He spurred his canid ahead. I can't keep looking back, or I'll stop moving completely. And then something will kill me. That's what he wanted to tell Naial to get her off his back, but he couldn't. Every word that passed between them seared him. He just wanted to be done with this. Get her… their son… back. And then get the next thing over with. And the next one. That's the only way he could cope with every blow that came his way.

After a long while riding in silence, Naial spoke.

"I think that's it."

"What?" asked Senn.

"The Fortress. That's it," she said, pointing toward the nearest range of mountains. They had been riding toward it and Senn hadn't even been looking at it.

"Where, exactly?"

"It's kind of hidden. You can't see it from here since it's built on the side facing away from us. But it's there, trust me. I got a good look at it when they brought me out here to work for a few days."

"Did you get a good look at how many guards were there?" asked Mirai.

Naial looked at him with a frown.

"Of course I did. I was thinking about my son all the time I was there. Looking out of the corner of my eyes every chance I could get, searching, looking at the passages, the guards, everything. I'm not a warlord like you two, but I've been paying attention just to stay alive all my life, boys. I know how to be invisible when I want to be."

"That would be a nice gift to have right now," said Mirai. "Too bad we don't know the correct god for that."

"I know a few more than you, and believe me, it's better to stay away from them," said Senn. "But having Naial will be good enough. Provided her information is useful and her abilities don't disappear, we may yet make it out alive."

They discussed the ways in and out of the Fortress as they rode side-by-side and the mountain range grew bigger, but could reach no consensus.

"In the best situation," said Mirai, "provided they don't spot us until the last minute, which is unlikely, then we'll have to face a minimum of ten soldiers, in groups of three at most since the passageways are small. But there could be ten times that amount in the Fortress and we'll never know until we meet them."

"You make it sound as if we have little chance of pulling it off," said Senn.

"I apologize, I meant to make it sound as if we have no fucking chance."

Senn smiled. "Are you turning into a coward now, Mirai?"

"No, I'm just turning old like you."

When they reached the shadow of the mountain range, they looked for a place to hide their canids. They found a crevasse with some outcroppings to which Mirai tied a few lengths of chain and tied those to the canids' collars. Then they threw some food at them and watched them fight over it. Hopefully, they wouldn't go hungry and tear each other apart before they came back. Unless they didn't manage to make it back. In that case, the beasts would indeed fight and eat each other. They're not so different from us, thought Senn.

They found a goat's path along the slope that should lead them to the Fortress. Mirai took the lead but kept looking back at Naial to check they were going in the right direction. They walked for a while over unsteady ground and Senn had to prop up Naial a few times as she slipped on the pebbles.

"Careful," said Senn. "If you break your ankle, it's over."

"Would you leave me here for the carrion-eaters?" she asked, half-jokingly.

"No. But we'd probably have to carry you all the way, and it's damn hard to fight with someone on your back."

"You forget that I healed you, and you were broken. I should be able to heal a broken ankle."

Senn looked at her with a frown.

"Don't rely on something you can't understand and don't control. We can only rely on ourselves. You've had these powers for a day. You've lived an entire life without any power or control. Remember what it was like. The gods, whoever they are, are fickle, as I well know. It's best not to expect them to be there all the time, because they may not be."

"Hey," called out Mirai. "Stop it with the hugs and kisses."

"We're just…" started Naial.

"We're here," said Mirai, and as Senn and Naial turned a corner, they saw the Fortress. It was teeming with soldiers.

"Well… this is it," said Senn. "This is the greatest gift we've ever been given."

"Sure. I asked to be trapped between an army and a mountain since I was little," said Mirai.

"What do you mean, Senn?" asked Naial.

Senn turned toward them and slumped against the rock.

"This is our chance of killing the Forever King."