He did not know how much time went by. He dreamed awhile, images drifting through his mind.

He was sitting with Obsidia Dram, and she was hunched over a stream, catching water in a basin while he sifted grain in a bowl. She was clumsy, moving as if everything she wore were several sizes too large. And that hunch between her shoulders-had she been born like that, or was it an injury?

"Do you like kites, my boy?" she asked. "I don't suppose anyone's ever taught you to make one."

"Auralia," he had answered. "I saw some kites in her caves. You should see the ribbons she ties to the tails."

"I'd like that," said Obsidia. "I'd so like to go and meet her sometime. She sounds ... she sounds like family."

"Oh," said a whisper.

The dream shattered, and the ale boy woke, his teeth chattering. The suspended man was staring at him. With eyes. Eyes that had emerged from the dark depths of vacant cavities. Small, human eyes.

"Ohh," the creature sighed.

He sees.

So cold he couldn't move without shaking, the boy reached for the bundle caught in Jaralaine's embrace. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "But I'm going to need to borrow this."

Intending only to draw it around him for warmth, he shook it out, and it unfurled. As the cave filled with light and color, a slight red ribbon was cast into the air. The ale boy caught the string and unthinkingly threaded it through the loops to bind it at his throat.

He felt a spark. The cloak brightened. The darkness vanished, vanquished by the full spectrum of Auralia's colors.

In this way Tammos Raak beheld again the glory of all he'd abandoned.

The light of all colors flooded his cell-whiter than white, infused with every hue the Expanse had ever known and worlds more than those.

The light burned deep into the great ancestor's gaze. Colors penetrated his mind and body like rivers saturating a desert. They resonated like the meeting of strings and a bow. They sang in a language that his heart-frail and buried deep within the many-chambered engine that had encompassed and overpowered it-had forgotten.

Received, these colors were not discovered but recognized. Memories broke the dam that he had set up against them, and they quenched his fearful, wasteful desire to be separate and solitary, to be disconnected from the whole. For he knew that these colors had been sent by his sister as a declaration of love, love in spite of all his offenses.

He saw the whole Expanse from a high place, through a lens of crystalline cloud. The stark white and black of winter; the rough, seething green of spring; the ripeness of summer; and autumn's smoldering fire. This was the view he had once known from the home he had abandoned.

Like a stone cast to shatter a vast and frozen sea within him, the light shocked his broken heart to beating once again.

He was caught by surprise. Before he could open up the deep reservoir of lies he had gathered to shield himself, he felt a powerful emotion welling up from deep inside.

Gratitude.

I abandoned my family. I rejected the gift of who and how I was invited to be. I left my sister and my source behind. And yet here is an invitation. I can be sewn again into their dance, join their music. I can live.

This burst of life drove the water from the flask that Tammos Raak had swallowed coursing through his body, out into his limbs.

The root of the disease, which fed upon the stony deadness in Tammos Raak's heart, had nothing left to eat, for his heart was alive again. The shock of that deprival shot out through the roots of Deathweed, out through the limbs, the fingers, the filaments that lurked in the ground of the Expanse, that wormed their way into the trees of the forests, that distorted the nature of all things green and growing.

The trees of the world shuddered in a distress felt by the crawling branches they had cast off to fulfill the Curse's appetite.

The poisonous pump providing Essence to those who craved its deforming influence slowed to a stop. The Curse of the Cent Regus was broken, and all that had gone out from him began to wither and crumble, unable to poison anything further. It became nothing at all.

Stunned, the Deathweed shivered. For it had always been eating, never satisfied, ever pursuing an ongoing emptiness. But now it had been tricked into absorbing something that satisfied, and all its needs dried up. It tasted relief. Its wretched web of distortion was cleansed, becoming a net of white threads spreading throughout the fabric of the Expanse-bones around which new forms of life would grow.

This quake cast a cloud of dust into the skies all across the Expanse.

The Seers' grand designs had failed. They could craft nothing themselves but more opportunities for their rival to redeem and reconcile, increasing mystery's mastery and sharpening their shame.

All that remained now was a surrender to joy.

Tammos Raak saw the five blue suspended ghosts flaring with rage at their humiliation.

Relief spread out from his tiny heart, warming him to the furthest reaches of his distorted form. He drove the last wisp of his strength into a word of gratitude, hoarse and hollow, spoken into that chamber filled with colors.

His heart, unprepared to sustain a life, beat a few times more, and then collapsed. His sight faded slowly, its last vision a wild dance of colors, as he waited for the Northchildren to come and unstitch him from this exhausted body and carry him home.

Hearing the last word of Tammos Raak, the ale boy sensed the relief in it.

He tried to move, each breath a shock like the blow of an ax. He reached again for Jaralaine's outstretched hand, and as he did, he saw the wicked grasp of the Deathweed surrender her body and shrivel.

Jaralaine tumbled to the floor beside him. He got to his knees and tried to lift her, but a searing pain ran jagged through his chest.

So he crawled. He crawled, dragging Jaralaine with him, his way lit by the colors he wore, as if he were pouring a river of fire down the stairs. Then the last spark of strength went out of him, and he fell down the stairs toward the river.

He saw a vast creature descend from the ceiling, spreading its wings. He felt the wind from their unfolding, and then he felt a soft embrace.

"Please," he whispered. "Take us to Auralia."

31.

THE FALLS.

his is where I stood in the dream. Cal-raven did not understand it. He had stepped through a door on the south side of the mountain range, walked a strange, resonating path, a pulse like the earth's own heartbeat thrumming around him. And when he stepped out onto a stony ledge, he was on the other side.

There, he had staggered down a rugged slope until the strength went out of him. Faint with loss of blood, he lay on the ledge and looked down at his sword, saw his reflection in the blade. His straight red hair. His long brown cloak. His scarred face and ragged patches of beard.

They'll say that I failed.

Colliding oceans of clouds engulfed the country that spilled down from the base of these mountains, the echelons of soaring birds before him, and the heavens above. It rolled like waves of foam about his feet. When the seams parted, he glimpsed still more clouds rising in pillars, curling outward.

They came from the light upon the snowy peaks around and behind him. They billowed from a lake that spread as far to the east and west as he could see. And they came from something-some tremendous, silent presence suspended in the air.

In the center of his view, a silver curtain spread, wide as House Abascar's walls. It spilled from the sky's realm of cloud like linen from a loom, crashing into the great, shining lake before him. Water sprayed up as mist, rushed at the shore in surges, foamed up in a wall of froth upon a radiant beach of bright gemstones.

"No one in Abascar, Bel Amica, Jenta, Cent Regus ... or even House Auralia should be the guardian or gatekeeper for this."

Shadows slipped through the clouds above him, the angular outlines of creatures in graceful flight.

Scharr ben Fray would have kept this world to himself. He would have told me only what he thought would keep House Auralia in order.

"No."

Cal-raven struggled to his feet, and the wind enveloped him, whipping his brown cloak back over his shoulders. He took the ring of keys in his left hand and cast them from the ledge. They fell so far into the crevasses below that he never heard them strike a stone.

But he did hear, as in his dream, footsteps in pursuit. He gripped his sword hilt firmly and turned.

Old Soro, his kites trailing behind him, was skidding down the rocky incline above him, dragging the sails down with mighty tugs and murmuring to himself as though this were a very busy day.

"You! How did you ... Why are you here?"

The old man pointed to the sword. "Do you intend to use that?" Cal-raven quietly sheathed it. "Will you let me carry you?"

Cal-raven turned his back and spread his white-sleeved arms as if to embrace the clouds.

Soro cast something into the bushes, and he heard a sound like sails catching the wind. Half turning, Cal-raven saw Soro's cape discarded, and the old man seized and lifted him.

The hunch beneath Soro's cape had unfolded, spreading into wings.

Soro soared into the clouds, his wings guiding them with greater grace than any kite.

"What are you?" Cal-raven shouted. "And why do you use kites if you have ... if you have these?"

"Do you think wings can last in a world full of arrows?" he answered. "You think they'd let me do my work?"

They moved through clouds, where landscapes, forests, fields, and cities suggested themselves and then vanished as if drawn in the sky with chalk and erased.

Cal-raven blinked as water beaded on his eyelashes. They tilted into a sweeping dive, the world below greening into a field of softly rippling grasses. Not far away, gemstones glittered on the pebbled shoreline.

As they drifted to a stop and Soro released him, Cal-raven realized that he felt stronger, and the pain from his wound was muffled. Perhaps I can go back. If only I can find her.

Then he caught sight of two figures standing on the grass ahead of him, looking down toward the shore. A giant and a girl. The girl held a glass trumpet.

Jordam. And ... Auralia.

Down at the water's edge lay a body. As he stared, a bundle of tumbling fog moved away, revealing the very creature that had caught him up in its claws on Barnashum's threshold. Unfolding layer upon layer of wings, the Keeper cupped its tremendous claws, grasping a mysterious blue cloud that trailed long and jagged strings.

"What's it carrying?"

Old Soro did not answer, but the wind snatched tears from his eyes. Then he spread his wings again, and lifting swiftly, he wheeled away into the clouds. As Soro vanished, the creature rose up on its hind legs, presenting its treasure of translucent blue and barking a sonorous sound like a salute to him.

Using his sword as a crutch, Cal-raven forced himself along through the grass, groaning at the ache in his chest and the burning down his left arm.

He called out Auralia's name, and she turned. She seized Jordam's hand tightly, as if she were afraid. Jordam said something to her, putting his other hand against his heart. Then he let her go.

She walked toward Cal-raven. And then she ran.

He stumbled, fell to his knees in a patch of tiny blue flowers that bloomed at the ends of coiling green stems. He took her hands, which were wet, and he knew that she had been wiping away tears.

He recognized the silverbrown hair, the inquisitive eyes, her small bare feet.

"You have to go back," she said. "This is the place where the Keepers bear us away."

"Auralia. You have to come back with me. Please. I've searched for you since I saw you in Abascar's dungeon. I searched for you even before that. Forgive me. You were right in front of me, and I didn't see you."

"You only thought you were searching for me," she said, and she pulled her hands away. "But I'm not what you need. You're following the colors I revealed to you."

The creature behind her bent its knees and then lifted skyward, pebbles falling from its feet. Auralia looked over her shoulder, and Cal-raven's gaze followed hers, up the span of the waterfall's curtain into the cloud world.

"Someone's going home," she said.

Canopies of soft light pulsed in the heavens-like lakes of shimmering glass beneath a veiled, suspended continent.

A flying mountain.

"Do you see it?" Auralia whispered.

The magnificent Imityri, wings outspread, were drifting in a slow circuit along the ragged edges of that sky-bound country. From the fringe of the hovering mountain, this waterfall poured, and others like it, silver threads of melt from the mountain's snowy gown-waters infused with all the colors of the world, purged of all corruption by invisible engines of wind.

"I see it," he said. "I've seen it before. Through a glass, from far away. It scarred me. And then again, in a painting. A painting I thought was unfinished. But I was wrong."

"And now you know," she said, "that there is no curse beyond the wall, save those we've made for ourselves. Take that to your people. Here, curses lose their power in the mystery, and all is reconciled."

Cal-raven looked past her to the pebbled shore, to the body lying before the creature's footprints. "Is that ... was that Ryllion?"

"I'm not sure," said Auralia. "I thought so. But when they unstitched him, he seemed to be someone else." She clutched at her side as if the memory pained her.

Jordam knelt, touching the edge of the creature's footprint as it slowly pooled with shore water.

"Is Jordam ... Will the Keeper come for him too?"

Auralia did not reply.

Jordam stared into the sky toward the mountain, and clouds roiled around him as if undecided. Out of the white heavens, one of the Imityri descended on its great array of wings, and lightning flared from its wing tips. From the fog rolling in from the water, a crowd of shining figures closed in around the beastman, who struggled to rise.

"No," she whispered. "Please. Jordam's story has only begun. It's not time."

"O-raya?" Jordam roared, eyes widening in surprise. Lurching forward, he fell, and his arms pounded the pebbles as if he were caught by an invisible tide. Then he shouted out a question, but over the falls' roar, his words were lost.

"We must help him."

"No, Cal-raven. The Northchildren are kind, and the Keepers can be trusted here."

"The Keepers."

"It's a good name. There are others. Out there, when they've been tending to mystery's design in the dark, they sometimes get tired and confused. Poisoned. Trapped. Impatient with each other. Keeps them from their work. But they remember more than we do. And the closer they come to the mountain, the clearer it all becomes."