The Apostery.

The name rang in Cooper's head like a silver bell-the final note of the cacophony of the tolling he'd just endured-and he turned to see who had spoken. Something moved in the shadows. More than one thing, or one thing that made the sounds of many- a footstep to his left; the scuffle of gravel quickly silenced to the right; the quick sniffing sound of Cooper's scent being tasted on the air. Something circled him.

Cooper saw it as it spoke again, a figure in black lurking beneath the lintel stone of a nearby archway. He tried to position himself with his back to a wall, but stumbled and half fell against a column while his vision spun. Cooper fought down panic.

"The Apostatic Cemetery," the voice explained. "You came to hear the story?"

Then he slunk out from the dark, angling toward Cooper with predatory speed. His kohl-rimmed eyes were hungry and as black as the plugs in his earlobes, his body slant-ribbed and white where it showed through his tattered clothes. Despite Cooper's fear, he was trapped, rapt, unable to move. The youth stepped close and drew back his arm as if to gut Cooper with a dagger- but when his hand sprang forward the light from above struck no naked blade but a poppy, sepia red and fresh.

Cooper blinked at the young man's face, wondering if he could smell spilled beer. The stranger simply stood there, transfixing Cooper with his eyes.

He was a birthday magician, and Cooper the rabbit in his hat.

"For you," he said with a smile. White teeth crooked at the center and a shy blush made his handsome face lovely. Beneath the slits in his shirt blue stars spread across his chest and arms, buffeted by tattooed winds and waves.

Iamthesailorsstarstoguideyouhome. Iamtwinstorms of airandwatertodrownand freezeyou. Iwillhelpyou breathe when the sky has broken. Fear me, Cooper.

Cooper heard the words in his head but paid them no mind. His attention was focused on the pair of agate eyes gazing deeply into his own, as though the two of them were not standing beneath the glare of countless dispossessed religions, but were alone in a corner somewhere loud and smoky where nothing existed but two pairs of eyes and two pairs of lips, getting closer.

"I'm Marvin," said the stranger as Cooper took the poppy from his hand. Their fingers touched; Marvin's skin was warm and dry and felt for all the world like the most amazing thing Cooper had encountered since he arrived in this doomed city.

"I'm Cooper."

Silence. Comfortable silence, Cooper had half a mind to notice. For lack of an alternative, he tucked the flower behind his ear. Marvin had another tattoo inside his lower lip, but Cooper couldn't make it out.

"You came for the story?" Marvin asked again, more shyly, his earlier aggressiveness now evaporated in the face of, what? Something mutual. Something unexpected.

"Why are you talking to me?" Cooper asked, immediately wishing he hadn't sounded so defensive.

Marvin looked as uncertain as Cooper felt, and Cooper wondered if maybe he wasn't the only lost boy in this city. "I . . . I thought you looked like you could use a friend." It didn't sound very convincing, but it had the desired effect.

"Oh." Cooper hung his head, now wishing he hadn't taken the stein of ale and drained it so quickly. "I'm sorry. I just got here-"

"-I can tell-"

"-and I'm a little on guard, to say the least. I'm also a little bit tipsy. You said something about a story?"

Marvin nodded. "It's all they do down here, tell stories. Since you're new you wouldn't know it, but the Apostery is one of the oldest places in the city. It grows all the time. Whenever a faith dies out, so they say. The pilgrims and locals both come here to remember the songs they used to sing, back when they had something to sing about." Marvin thought about what he'd said, and made a face. "It's kind of fascinatingly pathetic, I think."

"Pilgrims?" Cooper asked as Marvin led him across the cobbled floor of the city's navel, toward the only archway that was more than a shallow front.

"The Dying," Marvin answered simply, as if that were obvious.

"That place is amazing." Cooper marveled as Marvin led him past the opening of plain rock into another pa.s.sageway, a darkened progress that led on beyond the well of faiths.

"That?" Marvin said. "That was just the courtyard."

Nixon ran along the ca.n.a.l even though the edge was barely as wide as one of his feet. The other children wouldn't dare, but it was the fastest way between Rind and Ruin south of Lindenstra.s.se, and Nixon couldn't go into Lindenstra.s.se until the shops closed or he'd find himself hanging upside down from a thievespole. One too many apples s.n.a.t.c.hed too boldly from the greengrocers' tony displays had earned him a bad reputation in the neighborhood.

Nixon could cope with a bad reputation. Most of the other street children avoided him like the plague. Some were afraid of kids who did business, and that was probably for the best. The others, the ones like him . . . they ran their own rackets. If he'd learned one thing since he'd come to the city, it was to keep his nose out of other peoples' games: impossible things happened here every day, and few of them were anything but awful.

And yet, the City Unspoken had given Nixon a golden opportunity for what he considered quite possibly the finest grift the metaverse had to offer: juvenile reincarnation.

It was true that without intervention of some kind, the soul of a person who died would transmigrate elsewhere, guided more by its own incurable nature than any cosmic plan, and would clothe itself in flesh that reflected the spirit's own self-image. Nixon represented one of the variant incarnations. Not the kind of folk who were just young at heart and tended to incarnate very young-no, Nixon and his fellow juvenile- incarnated anomalies were sick jokes: murderers and rapists and thieves of every caliber-generals, popes, and greedy opportunists. In a way, Nixon suspected that the young bodies into which they'd been incarnated represented an ultimate deviance of the soul-they may not see themselves as children, but each and every member of his loosely aligned group of reborn unboys and nongirls intuitively grasped the advantage of starting new lives dressed in the bodies of cherubs: it was the perfect scam. Less ambitious pseudochildren found employment between the sheets, but to Nixon's eye that was a life better suited to the city's three kinds of wh.o.r.es-the possibilities presented to a canny mind in a child's body knew no limit.

Take his current errand, for instance. The job was simple enough, but no regular kid could handle the employer. . . . Nixon scampered a little faster along the ca.n.a.l wall. It would not do to be late returning to the abandoned room, and the meeting should be over quickly enough- the a.s.s end of a spy job rarely took long. All he'd need to do was nod. "Yes ma'am, miss crazy hair, I saw him, ma'am, clear as cut crystal." Then grab the money and run.

It was true, Nixon conceded, that there might be more glamorous or powerful lives to live-the endless b.l.o.o.d.y deaths of a Coffinstepper, for instance, hunting dangerous quarry across dozens of realities at once. Or the days of a plutocrat n.o.ble ruling a city with a stranglehold on the ultimate commodity. Those might be thrilling lives, but they weren't his. Not yet.

Nixon leaped over the boundary fence at the end of the ca.n.a.l and landed on Ruin Street without a sound. He dropped into a patch of sunshine, the street around him empty. The sun still shone overhead-the sky wasn't sane yet, but it was on its way, and Nixon took a few seconds to enjoy the heat on his face and chest. That green sun would go away, he could feel it, and an honest sky would take its place. From Nixon's vantage, the strangest thing about the City Unspoken-which was saying something-was its variable sky. Depending on the mood of the firmament, you'd wake up to any number of possible skies, and if it hadn't changed by lunchtime, you counted yourself lucky.

He patted his tan little belly and pictured the meal he'd buy himself with the coin he'd earn today. He pictured the sun he'd eat it under. Imagine that, Nixon marveled: honest coin, a yellow sun in a blue sky, and meat in a bowl at the end of the day. Life was good.

He pa.s.sed the building with the blue door and shimmied up its gutter to the second- story window, where the red ribbon was tied around a bent nail sticking out of the cas.e.m.e.nt. The window was still open, and Nixon pulled himself into the abandoned room with a brave face. He wouldn't let his legs shake this time, he promised himself as he felt his way through the boarded-up room and into the deeper darkness beyond, no matter how pretty the lady was, or how she burned the air just by standing in it.

When the sudden flare of a lantern splintered the darkness, Nixon barely suppressed a squeal.

In the hallway stood a small woman with a sweet face and red curls, who hung the lantern on the wall and smiled at Nixon. She wasn't wearing any shoes, just a faded shift, and there were far more curves exposed than Nixon was usually allowed to see. A ribbon as red as the one on the windowsill adorned her ankle, and she lifted a lovely foot off the floor just slightly.

"Did he come?" she asked. Her red hair moved like clouds across the sky, though the air was still.

"Who are you?" He asked the question before he could stop himself. And what do you care about the gray hippie picking up some portly stiff?

"Did he come?" she asked again. Nixon had the feeling this woman possessed extraordinary patience, but he couldn't say why. She felt too real, was all he could think-the hairs on her forearm, the pucker of her lips, it was as if the rest of the world were a grainy film reel and she, a true woman, had stepped in front of the screen. Thing was, Nixon was pretty sure she was anything but a true woman. There were things that looked like people, he'd learned, but weren't. Things that might even convince you they were G.o.ds- but they weren't that, either.

"I mean it," he insisted, "I really need to know who you are." He didn't, but he wanted to be able to lord this story over the other gutter rats, and how could he do that if he never found out the ident.i.ty of the slight little thing who brimmed with power?

"If you're worried about the rest of your money . . . don't be." The woman handed Nixon a little wooden box, and he peeked beneath the lid. It brimmed with nickeldimes, easily twice as much as he'd been promised.

"He came!" The words were out of Nixon's mouth before he could stop himself. He held the box behind his back and retreated a step toward the exit; his curiosity evaporated in the face of cash.

A Cheshire grin lit the barefoot woman's face, brightening even the abandoned building that decayed around them. She did a little dance and held her hand out in an invitation, one eye shining in the torchlight, the other dark. Nixon hesitated, then tentatively put his small brown hand in hers. Her skin felt feverish-hot and cold as the vacuum of s.p.a.ce, and for half a moment her bright eye blinded him as the darkness in the other yawned vertiginously.

She pulled the length of red ribbon from her ankle and tied it around Nixon's thumb. "When you see him again, I want you to do me one little itty-bitty favor. I want you to give him this. He'll be new and untrusting, but I want you to do it anyway. Use that disarming smile of yours." Dropping his hand, the being shaped like a redhead stood back and admired the boy as she might admire a puppy in a shop. "Will you do that for me?"

Nixon wasn't listening, which was nothing new. Then he snapped himself out of it and nodded with an earnest grin even though he didn't follow her logic-any newcomer should be untrusting, and what would he want with ribbons?

"You're a spicy one, aren't you?" she asked with a trill of a laugh. Nixon didn't know what she meant by that, either, so he looked at his feet. When he raised his eyes, he was alone in the hallway with a lantern and a ribbon and a boxful of dinner.

The Apostery was as vast inside as it was outside. For a long minute the only thing Cooper could process was the hugeness of the s.p.a.ce: a vaulted cathedral ceiling soaring higher than any he could recall seeing before; ma.s.sive support columns the girth of small houses rising into the darkness above, etched with names and signs, inlaid with silver and steel; smoke-stained wheels of candelabra dangling from chains as thick as his torso; and the light-the light that came streaming from all angles ahead, slanted on an angle that caught in the air, veiling the enormity of the s.p.a.ce in serene curtains of dust and smoke that wafted through the air, unlike the barometric fumes that billowed up the well of the courtyard. Any bishop would give his favorite catamite for a place of worship like this. But this, Cooper began to understand, was no cathedral-rather a mausoleum. A grave for buried G.o.ds and the stories they told.

He and Marvin walked toward the light, their footsteps the only discernable sound in the enormous s.p.a.ce. As they grew nearer, he saw past the columns to the source of the light, and that was the real glory. As the Apostery's courtyard was a vault of doorways, here was a court of windows-stained gla.s.s portraits ringed about the walls and rising in layers to the ceiling. It appeared that the mountain was hollow. Each picture captured the likeness of some being-G.o.ds, it could only be-of every sort imaginable and more. A blue woman with severed b.r.e.a.s.t.s and eyes like sapphires glared down from a throne of ice; a man with stag's horns crouched half-hidden behind a mask of leaves; a gray sword, point down, with garnet eyes staring impa.s.sively from the quillon. Panes of gold gla.s.s as tall as sequoias stretched upward beyond sight. On and on the windows shone, each more artfully worked than the next, and each was lit from behind as if by perfect afternoon sunlight, although it was eve ning already, they were far underground and, in any case, the sun could not possibly be in so many places at once. The light filled the air now, shading its smoke- strata a hundred colors.

"Apostery." Cooper repeated the name like an invocation. "Apostatic? You said? Like an apostle?"

Marvin shook his head. "Like an apostate. I told you, these people have nothing left to believe." Marvin indicated the visitors who sat with their own thoughts or strolled from window to window. "Atheism is the traditional faith of the City Unspoken. When your own persistence disproves the truth of every religion you've ever encountered, churches lose their punch. Hence the Apostery-the Apostatic Cemetery, where we mourn our lost G.o.ds, whether they were real or not."

Marvin steered them to an alcove off to the side, beneath a clerestory where a small group of people milled about. They joined the others and Cooper smelled the familiar scent of a campfire. He craned his neck and saw the reason for the gathering.

An old woman sat on a broken column, warming her toes over a fire tended by those gathered around her. The crowd bore many faces, and Marvin whispered to Cooper that he might even recognize some; they hovered near the fire pit-there were eyes faceted like gemstones, antennae and feelers and protuberances aplenty; jawless tongue-flapping faces; viridian and scarlet and mauve faces; fey-touched and bedeviled faces.

"The usual stuff, if you get around," Marvin explained, nodding at the more unusual-looking people. "Which, of course, you will. Eventually."

One feature every face shared was a certain flavor of antic.i.p.ation, a kind of lonely hunger. And patience. Patience, because many of them had heard the old woman tell her stories before and knew it would bring them a measure of peace; those who had not heard the story had traveled far and long to hear it, which was why the faces of this gathering were stranger than those Cooper remembered seeing in the city above, and although they might not know that it was this particular story for which they had come, they had all learned patience along the way and gained the knack of sensing important when it was near.

Are these the Dying, then? They seemed nothing like the crazed man who'd a.s.sailed him earlier on the streets of the Guiselaine.

Only a hooded woman at the other end of the gathering seemed impatient. She tapped a pencil against a pad of paper, insistently, and pursed her lips. Pursed lips were all of her face that Cooper could see, obscured as she was by others, but he wished she'd stop tapping that pencil.

The old woman looked something of a scoundrel. Something about her seemed different than the others, as diverse as they were- a smile that lived in her eyes, a kind mischief crouched in her wrinkled mouth. Her spa.r.s.e white hair braided with beads and bolts and bottle-caps, she smiled at the pencil-tapper. Cooper imagined that she would draw this one out, just because she could.

Eventually, after much tapping of the pencil, the old woman gave a conciliatory nod and began speaking. Her voice was strong and clear, not at all what he'd expected.

"Sataswarhi, hear me; be my midwife in the birthing of these words."

Marvin leaned in close to Cooper and whispered, "She is Dorcas, an elder of the Winnowed, a tribe that live beneath the city. They're rarely seen aboveground, but they send elders to the Apostery to tell a version of this story from time to time. It's never even remotely the same." Cooper heard the words and drunkenly processed something about an underground tribe and stories of debunked deities, but all he could focus on was Marvin's clove- scented breath hot against his neck. He wished it would move closer.

The elder Winnowed continued: "Sataswarhi, heed me; I call you up from the depths beneath the crust of the worlds."

The hooded woman had stopped tapping her pencil and was hunched over her pad, scribbling. Cooper's head spun.

"Sataswarhi, help me; there is more weight in this story than my voice can carry without your touch upon my work." For a moment the old woman hesitated, looking up at the towering windows as if they were old friends; she smiled at her stained gla.s.s family. Then she explained herself: "Storytelling is my contribution to the Great Work in which we are all instruments. This is a story our people tell about the origin of our city, not a tale of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses. It is not a real story, but it carries some truth. Perhaps.

"Sataswarhi. Clear Star of the First People, the origin and namesake of the celestial river that flows from above down through every land, from the most distant dim heaven through every isolated cosmos until it spills, here, beneath our feet. Far below the source of the river lies its mouth, where the waters empty into the void beyond creation. Here." The old woman, Dorcas, pounded her perch with a shriveled fist.

"Here did a tribe of the First People build a city. They named it, as it has been named and renamed ever since, again and again-until, like the snake that swallows its own tail, there was nothing left to hold a name. Today it is simply a city, and we call it as we like; we curse it or praise it according to our mood, but we know better than to ask its name. It is sometimes easier to live with a thing when you do not know its name, especially if you do know its nature.

"However, this is not a story of the nature of the City Unspoken as it sprawls and oozes today. This is not a story of our time, the time of the Third People, we who comprise what the shortsighted call history." A careful flick of the eyes to the woman with the note pad. Would the note- taker know that the tale was only one version among many, crumbs scattered for the faithless flock? "Nor is it a story of the Second People, whose crime was so great that nothing remains of them, as everyone knows, neither bones nor stones nor names. This is a story of the First People, the bright and dark ones who were born in the crucible of creation, who are the direct children of the Mother and the Father, born of Their destruction. They who are the children of the dawn.

"We only ever had two G.o.ds, and They murdered Themselves to give us life, and it was terrible. A thing to shatter galaxies, if there had been matter or gravity then. When the storm of shadow and light had pa.s.sed into mere turbulence, when the worlds first coalesced from the divine fallout of the Apostatic Union, then did the First People open their eyes. They rose from the dust and glitter of the worlds, or they gasped their first breaths in the ether between universes, that starless stuff which is empty yet always full. Wherever they stirred, the First People shaped the worlds around them. Some were great, and pulled the fabric of existence behind them like a heavy cape as they moved; it is true that some few of these still persist today in one form or another, disguised at the edges of our lives as G.o.ds or demons or half-whispered nothings that caress our hearts in the darkness. Many of the First People were not great, however, but lived much as we do, which is to say they depended upon one another. Community. They came together for shelter and solace, for survival, and so they laid down the foundations for everything.

"They built the first cities."

Marvin elbowed Cooper. This is the good part, so listen up. Cooper might have wondered why Marvin's voice in his head was clearer than before, or how he knew to think at Cooper rather than whisper, but Cooper's attention was so finely divided between following the story and trying to resist the further-intoxicating scent of his new guide that these arguably more important considerations were, for the moment, beyond him. He thought he might need another drink soon.

"Now of the great ones, there were many who found no interest in their minor siblings, and those who took interest often did so for less than generous reasons. The smaller children of the dawn could be fed upon, or manipulated and ama.s.sed into armies of soldiers or servants, or simply toyed with for the amus.e.m.e.nt of their more powerful kin. Still, there were a handful who were both great and kind, and it is to these- where they have endured-that the most lasting monuments, mythologies, and blood-memories are dedicated. There is Chesmarul, the red thread, who is called first-among-the-lost, who others claim was the first daughter of the Mother and Father and witnessed Their destruction with her own new-wrought, tear- stung eyes. There is the Watcher at NightTide, who does not condescend to speak his own name but bequeaths knowledge to those with the mind to seek it and the fort.i.tude to withstand it. Another is his father, Avvverith, inscriber of the first triangle and all that sprang from it- all things which come in threes, including architecture, which is idea written in three dimensions.

"This is not a story about Chesmarul, although we suspect she is always with us, after her fashion. Neither is it a story of the Watcher, even though it is his nature to observe all things. Avvverith Sum-of- Square gifted the lesser First People with the tools they used to build their cities, but has ever since been absent, so this cannot be his story.

"Instead we turn to Sataswarhi, the Clear Star, who made her home atop the ceiling of the heavens where she could look down upon all the worlds, all the baby universes exploding and expanding in their own pockets of s.p.a.ce. She is said to be the source of all art, the inspiration behind inspiration. Not a muse as some consider the notion, not a pa.s.sive beauty that turns men into dreamers-Sataswarhi is the active catalyst that turns dreamers into doers, poets into bards, wonderers into wanderers. From her home at the apex of creation a river flows, it is said, that touches upon every world in every little universe at least once. How it winds and where it turns are unknown quant.i.ties, and the legend tells us that in these days of the Third People, the river Sataswarhi flows still but is buried beneath aeons of rock and ruin.

"Of one thing we are certain, both then and now, that the river Sataswarhi begins at the highest point and ends at the lowest, the nadir, that land which sits like a drain at the bottom of creation, where all things must eventually find themselves before they pa.s.s out of existence and into oblivion. It was at this sacred but troubled place that the First People built the original incarnation of our city, fashioning a series of great gates encircling each other, a maze of concentricity crafted of diamond and gold, something bright to raise the spirits of the Dying as they made their pilgrimage. Here the First People built a fortress around a threshold, beyond which lay True Death.

"Now, listen closely; this is important. Although if you are here, you must know it already. It bears repeating."

Now. Marvin thought fiercely. Magic voices sound louder when you're a little f.u.c.ked up, Cooper noted.

"There are many deaths, some larger than others. We are born only once but die many times. Each death is followed by an awakening on a distant world, where one lives again until another death comes to ferry the spirit across the void toward the next step of one's own journey. This is life; this is what it means to live. We are born, and we live. We find ourselves and lose one another only to be reunited somewhere most unlikely, for although the worlds are finite they are of nearly infinite variety- some are cold and lifeless; some are bright but blind to the teeming others which surround them; many are rich in magic or invention, or both.

"There is only one common destination shared by everything that is born, and that is the City of the Gates, which we inhabit today like squatters in an abandoned mansion-eventually, all things that are must come to this place so that they can attain iriit and cease to be. It is the cloaca of the metaverse, the Pit, the great drain, the Exit."

"Iriit?" Cooper whispered, but Marvin shushed him. Cooper tried something new-he flexed a muscle in his head and thought, somehow, loudly: What is that?

An older word for True Death. Marvin thought back. What makes this city famous. For the first time, Cooper became conscious of the fact that he did not hear any fear in any Marvin's thoughts. What made Marvin different?

"You may believe the river Sataswarhi is the blood of the Father- G.o.d, or the spirit of the Mother- G.o.ddess; you may believe it is only a metaphor for the processes of life and death; you may even doubt its existence entirely, and choose to believe that it is a myth cultivated to aggrandize the City Unspoken and its cash crop, True Death. My people, who live beneath the city where the old waters still flow, share these opinions and more besides, even though it is the river-well, a river-that sustains our troglodyte lives.

"And while the Winnowed venerate diversity of belief and nonbelief, living far beneath the streets of the city has given us an unusual education regarding its long-forgotten beginning. We make our beds beside the cornerstones of the founders, architecture long ago buried but still recognizable as the handiwork of the group of First People who built here-not the scattered poseurs of this era who masquerade as deities, or ply their petty schemes, or find refuge in distant worlds- but a people who lived as we do.

"We recognize the authority of no G.o.ds, but we approach worship in the reverence with which we see the footprints of the founders of the city. What stone survives tells us only enough about them to appreciate the depth of our own ignorance. They named their tribe 'aesr,' and appeared as brilliant-skinned people whose flesh was made of white light; they had only one eye, or perhaps four; proud crests topped their scintillating heads that might have been ornamentation or part of their anatomy; their limbs were arms and wings, and they tended to a grove at the heart of their city-maze that, I believe, was itself the remains of a primeval forest that covered the land during an even earlier age."

Cooper tried to picture the creature the Winnowed woman had described. What would he say to such a thing?

"The First People of the city-the aesr-had no king, but were governed by a prince; this much alone seems to have survived although the rest of their lives have been overwritten a thousand thousand times by the palimpsest feet that have walked the streets of this city throughout its history.

"What became of our founders remains one of the city's greatest mysteries. If the scale of time were less vast, we might know their fate-did they vanish or perish, did they file through the Last Gate? Did they Die at once or did they slowly become extinct? Did they travel elsewhere? What we can say for sure is this: they are gone, save one. He who ruled this place, the monster of light who locked up the n.o.bility inside the Dome, and then fled.

"All that is left aboveground, tangibly, of the greatest of the cities of the First People now sits within a Dome half as big as the sky itself, the seat of our prince, last of his kind, who until recently maintained his lonely vigil over oblivion, as his kind have done since before we acquired memory. This is why we must have faith in the face of recent events: it is the prince's charge to protect True Death, for it is essential to the cycle of life on all worlds. What is born must die. What is here today must be gone tomorrow, or the next morrow, or the next. Like the river Sataswarhi, our lives must eventually empty into nothingness to create room for the waters that rush behind us. Otherwise comes the svarning."

The hooded woman gasped at the word. Cooper looked at her more closely now, and noticed the unmistakably pink hair she'd begun twisting around her pencil. f.u.c.k. Why was Sesstri here, and had she seen him? Why had she gasped? He took a half a step behind Marvin, hiding. It was unwise, he knew, not to run to Sesstri and beg her for help, but he held back. She'd probably ordered Asher to get rid of him, for one thing. And then there was Marvin, who smelled like rum and smoke.

Old Dorcas faltered, looked confused, as though she'd forgotten where she was or why she was surrounded by her audience. Then she shook her head and finished abruptly.

"If the Last Gate closes, then we will all drown."

The barest hint of a susurration pa.s.sed through those who stood listening. There were glances of ac knowledgment tinged with something that resembled alarm. From his perch behind Marvin's shoulder, Cooper saw that neither Sesstri nor the Winnowed elder failed to notice the crowd's reaction. They held each other's eyes for a moment, and both looked haunted.

Marvin c.o.c.ked his head back and rubbed his scalp against Cooper's ear, then craned his neck until their lips almost touched. Again, he spoke without words: Don't you believe that, because it's a lie. The end of True Death would mean freedom for us all.

Twirling a piece of red string knotted around a loose dreadlock, the crone continued with her story. Marvin snaked his arm around the small of Cooper's back, leading him away from the gathering. The old woman's story vanished from his thoughts with Marvin's touch, and it was all Cooper could do to keep his knees locked and his body upright. They walked toward the courtyard in a l.u.s.ty haze, and through the drunkenness he felt electric fingers on his spine, testosterone sweat perfuming his thoughts with sailor tattoos and black gutta-percha earplugs, the promise of full lips and two bodies crushing together.

Then talons tore into his shoulder and spun Cooper around like a puppet. Sesstri's other hand yanked his wrist and pulled him away from Marvin.

"What. Are. You. Doing?" she hissed. "Don't you know what he is? And where the h.e.l.l is Asher?"

The b.i.t.c.hiness in her tone brought out something that had lain dormant in Cooper throughout the whole day. He withdrew from her touch and lifted his chin, remembering her words that morning, when she'd been an angel cradling his head in her hands.

"What the f.u.c.k do you think I know? How could I know anything?" He spat- actually spat-in her face. "I'm a t.u.r.d, remember?"

Sesstri had the good sense to hold back her anger but gave no sign of remorse or sympathy. She left the spittle to dry on her cheek.

"This animal," she pointed at Marvin, "will drag you back to his cohorts, who will rape you until you cannot remember your own name, force you to pollute your soul and offer it up to their masters. Know that, when your lips have been bitten off and you can't spit in any more faces."

She's lying. Marvin thought at Cooper. And you know it.

"You're wrong." Cooper didn't know it, but he knew he was furious and he let the rage speak for him. "You insult me and abandon me and then a.s.sault me when someone gives me a moment of basic human decency? Who do you think you are?"

Sesstri grabbed him by the arm and stalked toward the exit. "I'm the only chance you have at saving yourself, Cooper, and if you'd stop behaving like a brat who needs a spanking you might even understand when I explain why." Light from the courtyard streamed in through the incense smoke, and Marvin followed at a clip.