The Anvil of the World

The oars had begun to beat again by the time Smith could scramble to the helm and bring her around, thanking all the gods they hadn’t grounded a second time.

“Was anybody hit?” he cried. The demons were still howling, hurling threats palpable as boulders back upriver. “Shut up! Was anybody hit?”

“I wasn’t,” said Willowspear, picking himself up. “My lord? My lord!”

Smith spotted Lord Ermenwyr still crouched behind the boilers, his teeth bared, his eyes squeezed shut. Sweat was pouring from his face. Smith groaned and punched the wheel, and Willowspear was beside his liege lord at once, struggling to open his collar; but Lord Ermenwyr shook his head.

“I’m not hit,” he said.

“But what’s—”

“I lost one of them,” he said, opening sick eyes. “And Mother’s right. It hurts worse than anything I’ve ever known. Damn, damn, damn.”

“What can I do for you, my lord?” Willowspear lowered his voice.

“Help me up,” Lord Ermenwyr replied. “They need me to do something.”

“Who were those people? What happens now?” Smith asked, steering downriver.

The lordling did not reply, but steadied himself on his feet with Willowspear’s help. He brushed himself off and marched aft to Cutt, Crish, and Stabb. By the time he reached them he was swaggering.

“Now, boys, that’s enough! What good will shouting do?” he demanded.

They fell silent at once and turned to him meekly, and Smith was astonished to see their hideous faces wet with tears.

“Now we are no longer a set of four, Master,” said Cutt.

“Of course you are. Look! I’ve caught old Strangel right here.” Lord Ermenwyr held up a button he’d plucked from his waistcoat. “See? There’s his living soul. I’ll put it in a new body as soon as ever we’re home. But what does he need now?”

The demons stared at him, blank. Then they looked at one another, blanker still.

“Revenge!” Lord Ermenwyr told them. “Lots of bloody and terrible revenge! And who’s going to be the hideous force that dishes it out, eh?”

“…Us?” Stabb’s eyes lit again, and so did Cutt’s and so did the eyes of Crish.

“Yes!” Lord Ermenwyr sang, prancing back and forth before them. “Yes, you! Kill, kill, kill, kill! You’re going to break heads! You’re going to rip off limbs! You’re going to do amusing things with entrails!”

“Kill, kill, kill!” the demons chanted, lurching from foot to foot, and the deck boomed under their feet.

“Happy, happy, happy!”

“Happy, happy, happy!” The planks creaked alarmingly.

“Kill, kill, kill!”

“Kill, kill, kill!”



A while later they had come about and were steaming back up the river again, at their best speed.

“Half a point starboard!” Smith called down from the masthead. Below him, Willowspear at the helm steered to his direction cautiously, glancing now and then at the backs of his hands, where STARBOARD was chalked on the right and PORT on the left. On either side stood Cutt and Crish, shielding him each with a stateroom door removed from its hinges. Lord Ermenwyr sat behind him in a folding chair, shadowed over by Stabb with yet a third door. The lordling had his smoking tube out, but its barrel was loaded with poison darts gleaned from the deck, and he rolled it in his fingers and glared at the forest gliding past.

They drew level with the place where they had been attacked, and there was the cut cable trailing in the water; but of their assailants there was no sign.

“Two points to port,” Smith advised, and peered ahead.

The fogbanks of the coast lay far behind them; the air was clear and bright as a candle flame. From his high seat he could see forest rolling away for miles, thinning to yellow savanna far to the north and east, and he knew that the grain country of Troon was out beyond there. Westward the land rose gradually to a mountain range that paralleled the river. Far ahead, nearly over the curve of the world perhaps, the mountains got quite sharp, with a pallor nastily suggestive of snow though it was high summer.

And in all that great distance he could see no house, no smoke of encampments, no castle wall or city wall, and no other ship on the wide river. He saw no green men, either; but he knew they would not let themselves be seen.

“One point to starboard,” he cried, and his voice fell into vast silence.



By evening they had gone far enough, fast enough, for Smith to judge it safe to drop anchor off an island in the middle of the river. Crish and Stabb were left on deck to keep watch, and Curt blocked the companionway like a landslide.

“This is a good wine,” Lord Ermenwyr remarked, emerging from the galley with a dusty bottle. “Nice to know there are still a few honest merchants left, eh?”

Smith sighed, warming his hands at the little stove.. He looked around the saloon. It was quite elegant. More polished brass and nautical curtains, bulkheads paneled in expensive woods, not one whiff of mildew. And nothing useful. No weapons other than in potential: a couple of pointless works of art in one corner, a dolphin and a seagull cast in bronze, slightly larger than life and heavy enough to kill somebody with. They didn’t suit Smith’s tastes, as art. He preferred mermaid motifs himself, especially mermaids with fine big bosoms like—

“Here,” said Lord Ermenwyr, pressing on him a stoneware cup of black wine. “A good stiff drink’s what you want, Smith.”

“I’ll tell you what I want,” Smith replied, taking the cup and setting it down. “I want to know who killed Strangel.”

Lord Ermenwyr shifted in his seat.

“He isn’t really dead,” he said hastily. “Not as we think of being dead. Really. With demons, you see—”

“They were the Steadfast Orphans,” said Willowspear. “Those of our people who refused to accept the Lady’s marriage and … and subsequent offspring. They are an order of fighters, Smith. They will kill if they believe it’s justified.”

“Like Flowering Reed,” Lord Ermenwyr explained. “He was one of them.”

“Hell,” said Smith, with feeling. “Are they after you again?”

After an awkward pause, Lord Ermenwyr said, “I don’t think so. They might have been on their way to Hlinjerith.”

Smith thought of the pleading man on the landing, and his horror registered on his face.

“They wouldn’t harm those men,” Willowspear assured him. “Especially not if they were ill. The Orphans are stubborn and intolerant and—and bigoted, but they never attack unless they are attacked first.”

“So as to have the moral edge,” sneered Lord Ermenwyr. “Mind you, they have no difficulty hiring someone else to kill for them. And they’ll go to great lengths to arrange ‘accidents,’ the hypocritical bastards.”

“Strangel charged them, so they took him out,” said Smith. “All right. But what’d they go after me for?”

“I think they’d probably spotted me on deck by then,” the lordling replied, “and it’s open season on me all year round, you know, what with me being an Abomination and all.”





“But they worship your mother, don’t they?” Smith knitted his brows. “I’ve never understood why they think she won’t mind if they murder her children.”

“They worship Her as a sacred virgin,” Willowspear explained. “And it is thought that Her … defilement, hm, is a temporary state of affairs, and if, hm, if Her husband and children cease to exist, then the cosmic imbalance will be righted and She will be released from Her, hm, enslavement and return to Her proper consciousness.”

“It doesn’t help that Daddy’s a Lord of Darkness,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “Complete with black armor and other evil clichés. But the fact is, the Orphans simply don’t like anybody. They despise people like Willowspear for not holding to the Old Faith. They don’t like demons just on principle, because chaos isn’t in line with their idea of cosmic harmony. And they really hate your people, Smith. Especially now. Which is unfortunate, because nobody else likes you much either.”

“Oh, what did we ever do to anybody?” Smith demanded. He was cold, and tired, and starting to feel mean.

Lord Ermenwyr pursed his lips. “Well… let’s start with acting as though you’re the only people in the world and it all belongs to you. The rest of us get relegated to ‘forest denizen’ status, as though we were another species of beast, or maybe inconvenient rock formations. It never seems to occur to you that we might resent it.

“Then, too, there’s the innocent abandon with which you wreck the world, and I say innocent because I really can’t fathom how anybody but simpletons could pour sewage into their own drinking water. You cut down forests, your mines leave cratered pits like open sores, and—have you noticed how expensive fish is lately? You’ve nearly fished out the seas. I might add that the whales are not fond of you, by the way.”

“And the other races never do anything wrong, I suppose,” said Smith.

“Oh, by no means; but they don’t have quite the impact of the Children of the Sun,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “You’re such ingenious artificers, you see, that’s part of the problem. Yet I do so love your cities, and your clever toys, like this charming boat for example. I’d be desolated if I had to live in the forest like the Yendri. Do you know, they didn’t even have fire until Mother taught them how to make it? I can’t imagine dressing myself in leaves and living in a bush and, and having nasty tasteless straj for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” He glared at Willowspear, who rolled his eyes.

“It is a simple and harmonious life, my lord,” he said. “And it harms not the earth, nor any other living thing.”

“But it’s damned boring,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “Give me the Children of the Sun any day. If only they would learn to use birth control!” He looked back at Smith imploringly.

“Sex is good for you,” said Smith. “And you don’t get a baby every time, you know. If we have more than anybody else, it’s because we’re made better than other people, see? Physically, I mean, and no offense to any races present. But you can’t ask people not to make love.”

“But—” Lord Ermenwyr pulled at his beard in frustration. “You could use—”

“They don’t know about it, my lord,” said Willowspear.

“I beg your pardon?” The lordling stared.

“They don’t know about it,” said Willowspear quietly, gazing into his cup of wine. “My Burnbright was as innocent as a child on the subject. She didn’t believe me when I explained. Even afterward, she was skeptical. And, of course, with our baby on the way, there has been no opportunity—”

“Oh, you’re lying!”

“I swear by your Mother.”

Lord Ermenwyr began to giggle uneasily. “So that’s why prostitutes always seem so surprised when I—”

“What are you talking about?” Smith demanded, looking from one to the other of them. Lord Ermenwyr met his stare and closed his eyes in embarrassment.

“No, Smith, you’re a man of the world, surely you know,” he said.

“What?”

“Oh, gods, you’re old enough to be my father, this is too—it really is too—you really don’t know, do you?” Lord Ermenwyr opened his eyes and began to grin. He set down his drink, wriggled to the edge of his seat, and leaned forward. Swiftly, in terse but admirably descriptive words, he told Smith.

Smith heard in blank-faced incomprehension.

“Oh, that’d never work,” he said at last.



On the seventh day, they came to the falls.

Smith had been expecting them. He had heard the distant rumble, seen the high haze of mist and the land rising ahead in a gentle shelf.

“You’d better fetch his lordship,” he told Willowspear, who was standing at the rail between Cutt and Crish, scanning the riverbank. So far there had been no sign of the Yendri.

“What is it?”

“We’re going to run out of navigable river up ahead, and he’ll have to decide what he wants us to do next.”

“Ah. The Pool of Reth,” said Willowspear.

“You knew about it?”

“The monastery is not far above. Three days’ journey this way, perhaps. His Mother corresponds with them often.”

“Fine. What are we going to do about the waterfall?”

Willowspear spread his slender hands in a shrug. “My lord assumed you would think of a way. You people are so clever, after all,” he added, with only the faintest trace of sarcasm.

Smith spun the wheel, edging the Kingfisher’s Nest around a dead snag. “Funny how everyone thinks we’re the worst people in the world, until they need something done. Then we’re the wonderful clever people with ideas.”

Willowspear sighed.

“You mustn’t take it personally.”

“All I know is, if you put a naked Yendri and a naked Child of the Sun down in a wilderness, with nothing to eat and nowhere to sleep, the Yendri would sit there and do nothing for fear of stepping on a blade of grass. The Child of the Sun would figure out how to make himself clothes and tools and shelter and—in ten generations the Child of the Sun would have cities and trade goods and—and culture, dammit, while the Yendri would still be sitting there scared to move,” said Smith.

“If I were going to argue with you, I would point out that in ten more generations the Child of the Sun would have wars, famine, and plague, and the Yendri would still be there. And in ten more generations the Child of the Sun would be dead, leaving a wrecked place where no blade of grass grew; and the Yendri would still be there,” said Willowspear. “So who is wiser, Smith?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Lord Ermenwyr, climbing up on deck. Stabb followed him. “But the only way anyone would ever win this stupid experiment would be to make the naked Yendri and the naked Child of the Sun of opposite sexes. Then they’d think of something much more interesting to do. What’s that noise up ahead, Smith?”

“You’ll see in a minute,” said Smith. They came around a long bar of mud alive with basking water snakes, yellow as coiled brass, and beheld the Pool of Reth.

It opened four acres of forest to the sun, and the water was clear as green glass endlessly rippling, save at the edge where the Rethestlin thundered down in its white torrent from the cliff, along a wide shelf the height of a house. Green ferns taller than a man leaned from the bank, feeding on the air that was wet with rainbows. Tiny things, birds maybe, flitted across in the sunlight, and now and then one of them would make an apparently suicidal plunge into the cascade.

Willowspear pointed silently. On the bank to one side was an open meadow, and two tall stones stood there, carved with signs as the three at Hlinjerith had been carved. The same flowers had been planted about their bases, but in this more sheltered place had grown to great size. Rose brambles were thick as Willowspear’s arm, poppy blooms the size of dishes, and the standing stones seemed smaller by comparison. A trail led from them to the base of the cliff, where it switchbacked up broadly, an easy climb.

“Here the Star-Cloaked faltered,” said Willowspear. He drew a deep breath and sang: ” ‘Leading the unchained-lost-amazed, holding the Child, the blood of his body in every step he took; this was the first place his strength failed him, and he fell from the top of the cliff. The Child fell with him. The people came swift down running lamenting, and found Her floating, for the river would not drown the Blessed-Miraculous-Beloved; and in Her fist She held the edge of his starry cloak, as in Her hand She now holds the heavens and all that is in them.

“‘And so he was brought into the air, the Imperfect Beloved, and the people wept for him; but the Child pulled his hair, and he opened his eyes and lived. And he was stunned-silent-forgetful a long while, but when he spoke again it was to praise Her. And the people praised Her. In this place, they first knew She was the Mother of Strength and Mercy, and they knelt and praised Her.’”

Lord Ermenwyr grimaced, and in a perfectly ordinary voice said, “So, Smith, how do we get up the falls?”

“Oh, that’ll be easy,” said Smith, guiding the Kingfisher’s Nest into the Pool. “You just arrange to have a team of engineers brought in, with a small army and heavy equipment. We could work out a system of locks and dams that’d get us up to the top in ten minutes. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of years to build.”

“Ha-ha,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “No, Smith, really.”

“Drop the anchor!” ordered Smith, and opened the stopcock as the demons obeyed him. Steam shot forth white, adding more rainbows to the air as it gradually subsided. The ever-clanking sound of the oars stopped. “Really,” he said.

“Look, I happen to know the Yendri get up this river all the time,” said Lord Ermenwyr heatedly.

“Not in one of these galleys, they don’t,” said Smith.

“Well, can’t you do something with one of those, what are those things called, levers? One of my tutors, another one of your people by the way, told me you could move anything with a lever.”

“Why, yes. All we need is a lever, say, ten times the length of the keel, and a place to balance it, and a place to stand … oh, and tools and materials we don’t happen to have,” said Smith.

“You’re being unnecessarily negative about this, aren’t you?”

“Why don’t you use sorcery, then, your lordship?”

Willowspear cleared his throat.

“The Yendri,” he said, “travel in small light craft. When they arrive here, they get out and carry the boats up that path, and so along the bank above until they can set sail and push against the current again.”

“Portage,” said Smith. “The only trouble being, this vessel weighs a lot more than a canoe.”

“Coracle.”

“Whatever.”

Lord Ermenwyr looked hopefully at his bodyguards. “What do you think, boys? Could you carry my boat up there?”

The three demons blinked at him.

“Yes, Master,” said Curt, and they all three dove overboard and a moment later the Kingfisher’s Nest rocked in the water as her anchor was dragged along the bottom.

“No! Wait!” shouted Smith, tottering backward, for the bow was rising out of the water. “This won’t work!”

“You don’t know demons!” cried Lord Ermenwyr gleefully, wrapping his arms around the mast.

The stern was free of the water, and to Smith’s astonishment the whole vessel lurched purposefully up the shore—

And abruptly there was a most odd and unpleasant noise, and her bow went down.

Willowspear, who had been clinging to the rail, peered over to see what had happened. He said something horrified in Yendri.

“Master,” said a mournful voice from beneath them, “I am afraid that now Crish will need a new body too.”



Lord Ermenwyr blew his nose.

“No,” he said wretchedly, “it has to be me. But I’m damned if I’m going to do it with these clothes on.”

He yanked at one of his boots manfully and ineffectively, until Willowspear arose and went to him and took the lordling’s foot in his hands.

“Pull backward,” he advised.

“Thank you.”

They sat in the lee of the Kingfisher’s Nest, looking vast as a beached whale where it had settled on the shore. Smith had built a small fire and was adding sticks to it now and then, but it wasn’t able to do much against the damp and the growing darkness. Lord Ermenwyr disrobed quickly once his other boot was off. He stood shivering and pale in the purple twilight.

“Right,” he said, and picked his way along the edge of the Pool until he found a broken branch of a good size. Stripping the leaves and twigs away gave him something that would pass for a staff. Muttering to himself, he walked a certain number of paces, turned, and began to sketch the outline of a body in the mud.

He worked quickly, and did not take great pains with detail. The result was a squared-off blocky thing that did not look particularly human, with a scored gash for a mouth and two hastily jabbed pits for its eyes. But it did look remarkably like Cutt and Stabb, who sat like boulders in the firelight, watching him.

“There’s old Strangel,” he said, nodding with satisfaction. “Now for Crish.”

He marked out another figure of the same size and general appearance.

“So he can really … re-body them?” Smith asked Willowspear in a low voice. Willowspear nodded. “How’s he do that?”

“It is his lord father’s skill,” said Willowspear, in an equally low voice, though Cutt and Stabb heard him and genuflected. “His lord father can speak with the spirits in the air. He binds them into his service, and in return he gives them physical bodies, that they may experience life as we do.”

Smith poked the fire, thinking about that.

“Did his father, er, create Balnshik?” he asked.

“Long ago,” said Willowspear. “Which is to say, he sculpted the flesh she wears.”

“He’s quite an artist, then, you’re right,” said Smith.

“My lord is still young, and learning his craft,” said Willowspear, a little apologetically, glancing over his shoulder at Cutt and Stabb. “But he has the power from his father, and he is his Mother’s son.”

“So’s Lord Eyrdway,” said Smith. “How d’you reconcile somebody like him being the offspring of Goodness Incarnate?”

Willowspear looked pained. “My Lord Eyrdway was, hm, engendered under circumstances that… affected his development.”

“Too much magic, eh?” - “Perhaps. He is a tragaba, a… moral idiot. Like a beast, he cannot help what he does. Whereas my Lord Ermenwyr knows well when he is being an insufferable little—”

“I ought to make a couple of others, don’t you think?” Lord Ermenwyr’s voice came floating out of the darkness.

“Good idea,” Smith called back, but Willowspear turned sharply.

“Is that wise, my lord?”

“It is if we want to get any farther upriver,” was the reply.

“What’s the matter?” asked Smith.

“It is no easy process,” said Willowspear, “giving life.”

They sat in silence for a while, and Smith let the fire die back a little so they could see farther into the darkness. They watched as the pale figure moved along the edge of the Pool, crouching in the starlight beside each of the figures he had drawn. One after another he excavated, digging with his hands along each outline, scooping away enough mud to turn a drawing into a bas-relief, and then into a statue lying in a shallow pit. Finally, they saw him wandering back. He was wet and muddy, and no longer looked sleek; his eyes were sunk back into his head with exhaustion.

“Wine, please,” he said. Smith passed him the bottle from which he had been drinking, but he shook his head.

“I need a cup of wine,” Lord Ermenwyr said. “And an athalme. A boot knife would do, I suppose.”

Smith fished one of his throwing knives out of his boot top and handed it over hilt first, as Willowspear poured wine into a tea mug they’d brought out of the galley.

“Thank you,” Lord Ermenwyr said, and trudged away into the night again. They heard him muttering for a while in the darkness, and could just glimpse him pacing from one muddy hole to the next. Willowspear averted his eyes and added more wood to the fire.

“He’ll need warmth, when this is over,” he said. “I wish, in all that indigestible clutter of pickles and sweets he brought, that there was anything suitable for making a simple broth.”

The night drew on. They heard him chanting a long while in the darkness, and then as the late moon rose above the forest canopy they glimpsed him. He was standing motionless, his arms upraised, staring skyward. As the white light flowed down onto the bank and lit the Pool of Reth, his voice rose: smooth, imperative, somehow wheedling and desperate too. He was speaking no language Smith knew. He was making odd gestures with his hands, as though to coax the stars down…

The air crackled blue over the first pit. It became a mass of brilliant sparks that settled down slowly about the figure there. Smith held his hand up before his eyes, for the whole clearing was lit brighter than day, and hollow black shadows leaned away from the tree trunks clear across the Pool as another mass of light formed above the second pit, and then the third, and then the fourth. Flaring, they drifted down, and the four recumbent forms caught fire.

Whoosh. The fire went out. There was blackness, and complete silence. Even the sounds of the night forest had halted, even the relentless thunder of the falling water. Had the river stopped flowing? Then a shadow rose against the stars beside Smith, and he heard Willowspear call out in Yendri. Sound began to flow back, as though it were timid.

“It’s all right,” was the reply, sounding faint but relieved.

Willowspear sat down again but Cutt and Stabb rose, staring forward through the dark.

“Seems to have worked, anyway.” Lord Ermenwyr’s voice was nearer. “Come along, boys. One-two-one-two. That’s it.”

By the returning moonlight Smith saw the lordling, staggering rather as he led four immense figures along the edge of the pool.

“See, boys? Here’s our Crish and Strangel again,” he said, laughing somewhat breathlessly. “Just as I promised you.”

“Now we are a set of six!” said Cutt, in quiet pride.

“Master, what is our name?” said one of the giants.

“Yes, you must have names, mustn’t you, you two newlings?” Lord Ermenwyr reached the Kingfisher’s Nest and looked down sadly at the ashes of the fire. “Oh, bugger. No! No! Let’s not name anybody that!”

Giggling, he turned back to his servants and raised a shaking hand to point at them in turn.

“Your name is, ah, Clubb! And your name is … Smosh, how about that?” His whole body was trembling now, as he whooped with laughter. “Isn’t that great?”

Then his eyes rolled back in his head, and he pitched forward into the mud.



Nothing would rekindle the fire, so they made a bed for him in one of the tilted staterooms, stacking mattresses against what was for the moment a floor, and on Willowspear’s advice swaddling him tight in blankets.

“He’s taken a chill,” said Willowspear, looking at him unhappily.

“He should have kept his clothes on,” grumbled Smith, crawling along the bulkhead to fetch more blankets and another bottle of wine.

They bundled up on either side of the lordling, cramped and close but warm, and lay there in the dark listening to the night sounds.

“So … if something happens to him, what do we do?” said Smith at last. “Turn around and go home?”

He heard Willowspear sigh.

“If the Lady Svnae is truly in danger, it’s my duty to come to her aid.”

“But you’re a married man,” said Smith. “You’ve got a baby on the way. Don’t you miss your wife?”

“More than you can imagine,” Willowspear replied.

“Though I suppose it’s a little cramped in that attic room with the two of you…” Smith did not add, And the sound of Burnbright’s voice would have me shipping out after a month.

“No.” Willowspear stretched out in the darkness, folding his arms behind his head. “It’s a paradise in our room. In summer it’s so hot… one night, we … there was a box of children’s paints in the storeroom. A guest had left it behind, I think. We took it and painted each other’s bodies. Orchids and vines twining our flesh. Unexpected beasts. Wings. Flames. Rivers. The stars shone down through the holes in the slates, and we pretended we were seeing them through the jungle canopy. The whole house slept silent in the heat, but we two were awake, exploring … the night insects sang and our sweat ran down and the paint melted on her little body, and she plundered me, she was a hummingbird after nectar … and afterward we ran downstairs hand in hand, naked as ghosts, and bathed in the fountain in the garden. We pretended it was a jungle pool. Oh, she said, wouldn’t it be awful if anybody saw us like this? And her eyes sparkled so…”

He fell silent. Smith drank more wine, remembering.

“Have you ever been in love like that?” Willowspear inquired at last.

“Not really,” said Smith. “I never stayed anywhere long enough. My mother died when I was a baby, so… my aunt’s family took me in. And I had to work for my keep, so I was apprenticed out young. And one night I was coming back from delivering an order and … some thieves jumped me. I killed all three of ‘em. Standing there with bodies all around, scared out of my wits at what I’d done. So I ran away to sea. And later I was in the army. And later still •.. so, I was never any place to meet the kind of girl you settle down with. Lots of women, but, you know …. you both just get down to business. It isn’t especially romantic.”

A silence fell. Finally, Smith said, “You could go home. I could go on and rescue the lady. I haven’t got as much to lose, and I’m better with weapons.”

“I don’t doubt that,” said Willowspear. “But what would my mother say, Smith?”

“You think Fenallise would miss me?” Smith blinked. It had never occurred to him.

“Of course she would,” Willowspear replied. “And I am still bound by honor. Lady Svnae’s Mother raised me, Smith. She guided me on the path that brought me to my own mother and my wife. If Her daughter is in danger, how can I walk away?”

“I guess you couldn’t,” Smith agreed.

“It may even be,” Willowspear said dreamily, “that this is a quest, and She means me to travel on. She knows the journey of each star in the heavens, and all the journeys of the little streams to the great sea; and each man’s path through life, She knows, Smith. Even yours. Even mine.”

A hollow voice spoke out of the darkness.

“You won’t leave off worshipping her, will you?” said Lord Ermenwyr. “Give me some of that wine.”

“Yes, my lord.” Willowspear propped him up. Smith tilted the bottle. Lord Ermenwyr drank, and settled back with a sigh.

” ‘Yes, my lord,’ he says. Why should I be your lord? All my life, even when I was a snotty little thing in long clothes, there you were all big-eyed watching my family like we were kings and queens,” said Lord Ermenwyr hoarsely. “You and the servants. Yes, my lord, Yes, Master, Kneel to your Lady Mother! All her damn disciples climbing our mountain on their knees, expecting her to solve all their problems for them!”

“But She always did,” said Willowspear.

“That’s the worst part,” Lord Ermenwyr replied. “She does. You know what it’s like, growing up with a mother who knows everything? You, you look in her eyes, and you see—everything you really are—”

He went into a coughing fit. Willowspear scrambled away, returning unsteadily through the darkness with his medicine kit and the box containing Lord Ermenwyr’s medication. He drew a sealed glass jar from the kit and gave it a vigorous shake. To Smith’s astonishment, it at once began to glow with a chilly green light.

“I thought you couldn’t do magic,” he said.

“I can’t,” Willowspear replied. He fitted a medicine cartridge into the hummingbird needle and gave Lord Ermenwyr an injection. “Have you ever seen a phosphorescent tide? It works on the same principle. Lie still now, my lord.”

The lordling subsided and lay breathing harshly, looking even more like a corpse in the unearthly light.

“Oh, put it out,” he demanded. “I want to sleep.”

“At once, my lord.” Tight-lipped, Willowspear set the jar in the box and closed the lid.

“And you can just get that look off your face.” Lord Ermenwyr’s voice floated out of the abrupt darkness. “You know I have insomnia. Did you know that, Smith? Chronic insomniac, ever since I was a baby.”

“Really.” Smith lay down again, drew up his blanket.

“Nothing helped but sleeping with Mother and Daddy. I hated the night nursery. Eyrdway came and took horrible shapes at the foot of my cot, until Svnae got up and hit him with her wooden dragon. I ran out the door, down the long dark halls, right between the legs of the guards. I scrambled into bed with Mother and Daddy.

“Daddy growled, but Mother was ever so gentle in that ruthless way of hers and explained I couldn’t stop in their bed, but she’d take me back and stay with me until I was asleep. The servants made her up a bed by my cot. She told me we were going to go to sleep. I closed my eyes tight, but I could hear my heart beating, and that always scared me, because what if it stopped?

“So I opened my eyes at last. Mummy was asleep.

“And I thought: Mummy knows everything, even Daddy’s servants say so, and she is all the Good in the world. And she’s asleep. What happens to the world when Good sleeps?

“I’ll bet you never wondered about that, did you, Willowspear?”

“No, my lord, I never did.” Willowspear sounded exhausted.

“Well, I did. I’ve been scared to sleep ever since.”

“My lord,” said Smith. “We’ve got hard work to do tomorrow.”

A sullen silence fell, and remained.

Once or twice there were screams in the forest, brief ones. Smith told himself it was animals, and went back to sleep.



He was cautious when he crawled out in the dawn, all the same.

“Child of the Sun.”

Smith met the gaze of six pairs of red eyes, at the level of his own before he swung himself over the rail and dropped to the ground. He nearly landed on a motionless body, and staggered back; but it was only a wood deer, or had been, for its head had been torn off and it had been clumsily, if thoroughly gutted.

“We hunted,” said Cutt. “Now our master can have broth.”

“That was a good idea,” said Smith, looking up at Cutt. He gaped as he saw the single green dart that protruded from between Cutt’s eyes. “Hold still.”

Very carefully indeed, he reached up and pulled the dart out. Cutt made a strange noise. It was something like a deep note played on a bowstring, and something like the distant boom of ice breaking in polar seas.

“We hunted,” he repeated, in a satisfied kind of way.

By the time the sun had risen above the trees, it looked down on the Kingfisher’s Nest inching its way up the portage trail on the massive shoulders of Cutt, Crish, Clubb, Stabb, Strangel, and Smosh, preceded by Smith and Willowspear hacking madly away at the nearer edge of the forest canopy to make them room. Smith had only the kindling hatchet and Willowspear the largest of the carving knives from the galley, so the work was not going as quickly as it might have done.

Nevertheless, before the sun stood at midday they had arrived at the top of the bluff, sweating and triumphant, and by afternoon the Kingfisher’s Nest was clanking away upriver at last. Her owner, who had made the whole remarkable journey in his bunk, fastened in with sheets like a dead chieftain in a particularly splendid tomb, was sound asleep and hence unconscious of his good fortune.



But he was sitting up in bed and smoking by the time Smith moored that evening and went below.

“Well done, Smith,” he called cheerily. “I must remember to buy you a nice big shiny machete of your very own when this is all over. One for Willowspear, too.”

“So you didn’t die again, eh?” Smith leaned against the bulkhead. His arms felt as though he had been hammering steel all day. “Great.”

“Must be all this damned fresh air,” Lord Ermenwyr said, and blew a smoke ring. “Our humble servant Willowspear actually handled meat to prepare me a cup of broth, can you believe it? And he grilled the ribs of whatever-it-was for you. They’re in the kitchen.”

“Galley,” said Smith automatically.

“In the covered blue dish,” Willowspear called.

With a grateful heart Smith hurried in and found that Willowspear had indeed inherited his mother’s ability to cook. He carried a plate back to the lordling’s stateroom.

“How much farther is this monastery?” he inquired, slicing off a portion with his knife. “I went aloft three times today, and I couldn’t spot a building anywhere.”

“Oh, well, it’s not what you or I would think of as a building,” said Lord Ermenwyr dismissively. Willowspear looked indignant.

“The brothers live in bowers, open to the air,” he said. “They need no more than that, because they own nothing the air can hurt.”

“Except for writings,” said Lord Ermenwyr.

“They have a library,” Willowspear conceded.

“So they do have one building?” Smith inquired through a full mouth.

“No; the library is housed in a deep cave,” Willowspear explained. “All the Lady’s epistles are archived there.”

“So … will I have any way of knowing when we’re close?”

“Oh, you can’t miss, it,” said Lord Ermenwyr. “There’s this whacking great rock spire, and the river goes behind it through a gorge. There’s even a landing.”

“Great,” said Smith. “The sooner we can get this over with, the better.”

He told them about the dart he had found on Cutt. Lord Ermenwyr scowled.

“Nine Hells. I’d have thought the Steadfast Orphans were all at Hlinjerith for the big race war by now. Well, perhaps the boys got them all.”

“We have to go past Hlinjerith on our way back!” said Smith.

“Don’t get excited! I’ll be downstairs here, well out of sight. If you just sail past, they shouldn’t bother you,” Lord Ermenwyr said. “Other than shooting at you a little.”

“They would do no such thing,” said Willowspear severely. “They’re surely going there to protect a sacred place and for no other purpose.”

“But if you time it right with the, er, tide and all that nautical business, they’ll be past before you know it,” Lord Ermenwyr assured him.