Coupling. It was something she did... A kind of blankness rose within her, an absence where human feeling should have been. Men always wanted her, and she almost always despised them for it. Almost always. Sometimes, when she needed things or when she simply wanted to feel dead, her body answered their want, and she took them into her. She held them while they laboured and trembled, she bore them as a burden upon her back. And she almost never thought about it afterward, simply continued running through her running life.

She had endured innumerable suitors while on the Andiamine Heights, an insufferable parade of dandies and widowers, some cruel, others despondent, all of them hungry for the peach of Imperial power. To a man she had spurned them, had even managed to provoke a handful of formal protestations. One, the Patridomos of House Israti, even brought a suit before the Judges, claiming that she should be forced to marry him as punishment for her slander. Mother had seen to that fool.

But she had been bedded nonetheless. And despite years of carrying a whore-shell, despite the chaos of her menstrual cycle, pregnancy was not impossible. The strong seed forces the womb...

Her mother was proof of that.

Three, she tells herself. There are only three occasions she can think of that would make the accursed creature true. There was the darling body-slave-little more than a boy-who attended to her ledgers before her flight. As absurd as it is, she owns estates across the Three Seas-as does everyone in the Imperial Family. There was Imhailas, the vain Captain of the Eothic guard, who helped her escape in exchange for a taste of her peach.

Then there was Achamian, who yearned so for the mother she so resembled. She had yielded and he had taken-their "first mistake together," he had called it-in exchange for a sorcery she no longer desired.

Three, she tells herself, when in fact there is only one.

She dwells on the skin-spy and its revelation, makes adversaries of its words and an arena of her soul.

"I can smell the fetus within you..."

She battles it with unvoiced denunciations. Liar! she rails within. Obscene deceiver! But hers is a treacherous heart, forever miring what should be simple with unwanted implications. So she hears the Wizard speaking in rejoinder...

"The Judging Eye is the eye of the Unborn..."

Trying to explain away the horror of her accursed sight.

"The eye that watches from the vantage of the God."

On and on the voices tangle, until it seems they are one and the same, the sorcerer and the spy.

"Kill the Captain, and it will be saved."

No, she tells herself. No. No. No. The brothel has taught her the power of pretense, the way facts will sometimes fade into oblivion, if you deny them with enough ferocity.

This is what she will do.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

- - Several days pass without sign of the thing called Soma. She tells herself she is relieved, yet she lingers in the lonely dark nonetheless, gazing up through the dead branches, listening to the blackness croak and creak.

One night she finds a small pool bathed in a miraculous shaft of moonlight. She crouches beside it, stares up through the hanging tunnel to consider the moon. She gazes at her image poised between floating leaves and finds herself troubled. The skin-spy, she realizes, was the last time she saw her own face. She wants to fret over her appearance in the old way, to primp and preen, but it all seems so foolish, life before this, the Slog of Slogs.

Then, in the empty interval between breaths, the Judging Eye opens.

For a time she gazes in stupefaction, then she weeps at the transformation.

Her hair cropped penitent short. Her clothing fine, but with the smell of borrowed things. Her belly low and heavy with child...

And a halo about her head, bright and silver and so very holy. The encircling waters darken for its glow.

She convulses about breathless sobs, falls clutching her knees for anguish...

For she sees that she is good-and this she cannot bear.

The old Wizard pesters her with questions when she returns. He wonders at her swollen eyes-worries. She withdraws the way she always withdraws when dismay overwhelms her ability to think clearly. She can see the hurt and the confusion in the Wizard's eyes, knows that he has treasured the gradual intimacy that has grown between them-that he truly has come to think of her as his daughter...

But this can never be, for fathers do not lie with their daughters.

So she spurns him, even as she allows him to curl about her.

To shelter.

- - Weeks pass. Weeks of marching gloom and touches of Qirri. Weeks of battling clans of Sranc.

Weeks of tracing the line of her stomach in the murk.

At last they walk clear of the Mop, and it seems like climbing, setting foot on land open to the sun. They gather in a line across a low ridge, thirteen of them including the Hags, their skin and clothes black from sleeping across mossy earth, the splint and chainlinks of their armour rusted for rain and torn for battling Sranc. The Skin Eaters remain intact, but the Hags have dwindled to three: the Tydonni thane, Hurm, who remains as hale as any; the Galeoth freeman, Koll, whose body seems to be wasting about his will; and the deranged Conriyan, Hilikas-or Grinner, as Galian calls him-who seems to draw sustenance from madness.

The ground collapses into broad skirts of rock and gravel below the company's feet. A smattering of trees cling to the base, hedged by surging nettles and sumac, a tangle of stem and colour that abruptly ends in blue-green swathes of reed, a kind of papyrus, hazy miles cut by black-water channels. Salt marshes. The Cerish Sea forms a featureless plate across the northern horizon, iron dark save where the sun silvers its faraway swells.

They watch ripples of lighter green sweep over the marshes-the apparition of the wind across the rushes. And then they see it, the bones of once-mighty walls, the scapular remains of a gate, and the fields beyond clotted with ruins. She gazes in silent wonder, watches the shadow of a cloud soundlessly soak the distances grey and blue.

"Behold!" the old Wizard calls out from her side. "Ancient Kelmeol. Home to the Sons of Meori. The Far Antique capital of these wastes ere the First Apocalypse."

She gazes at him, unaware of the palm that has strayed to her belly.

Your father.

She bites her lip, hard, as proof against getting sick.

- - Achamian could scarce believe his fortune.

Until sighting Kelmeol, he had not realized just how little he had believed in his own mission. Ever since Marrow, some seditious faction within his soul had doubted he would survive even this far. And it seemed a kind of miracle that Men could suffer such trials in the absence of belief, that deeds worthy of wonder and song could be accomplished on the strength of a doubting will.

Unable to find the causeway, the company waded through the mire, beset by clouds of mosquitoes and biting flies. Several actually cried out in relief when they finally clambered onto hard ground and into the wind. After a mere watch Sarl looked poxed, he was covered with so many welts.

Kelmeol lay before them, the terrain humped with tells, the grasses so high it seemed a field in Massentia save for the grand remains of towers and temples breaching the near distance. Achamian had wandered the ruins of antique cities before, but never one so vast or so old. Seswatha had come to Kelmeol in 2150, one more refugee of the fall of the High Norsirai nations. And though those dreamed glimpses were two thousand years old, Achamian could not shake the sense that Kelmeol had fallen in his lifetime, that he was witness to a miraculous obliteration. With every glance a part of him wanted to cry out in disbelief.

There, where the mighty twin statues of Aulyanau had looked down the processional and out across the harbour and over the turquoise sea. Later he would find one of the great heads staring out of the high grasses, more than half-buried and yet still taller than a man. The harbour itself had been swallowed by waving miles of reeds, its very shape lost to the creep of earth and ages.

There, where the Hull, the white-washed curtain walls, had traced the circuit of the city. In some places nothing more than a berm remained of the once-celebrated fortifications, whereas in others sections remained remarkably intact, missing only the polished bronze spikes that had once adorned the crenulations.

There, where the ponderous lines of the Nausk Mausoleum had loomed over the lesser structures of the Pow, the low harbour district-a place of drawn blades and bared breasts. He could still see the rear walls of the Nausk rising like a husk from the ruins of the facade, the stone black save where matted with white and green lichens. The Pow, however, had utterly vanished beneath the waving sheets of green.

And there, the Heilor, the sacred acropolis where the Three Auguries once read the future in the blood of stags, rising like a low-hewn tree stump against the blue band of the Cerish Sea. The citadel had been razed to its foundations. The palace, where Seswatha had taken refuge from the Whirlwind, was little more than a mouth of ruined teeth behind the marble-pillared porticoes.

The decision was made to camp on the ruined acropolis, where they could defend against whatever Sranc clans ranged the marshes. In the Mop, they had slogged in a loose file. Now they spread out across the fields, walked in a ragged rank. They opened and closed about fragments of structure and ornamentation, heaps of spilled masonry, and square columns fallen for so long that the ground had climbed to encompass all but their leaning crowns. In some places, the ruins crowded thick enough to break their formation altogether.

A sadness welled through the old Wizard as he walked and peered, a mourning that possessed the airy clutch of premonition. There was poetry in loss and ruin, a wisdom that even children and idiots understood. For a time he suffered the eerie sense that he walked one of the great capitals of the Three Seas, that these were the ruins of Momemn, Carythusal, or Invishi, and they were the Last Men, thirteen instead of the one hundred and forty-four thousand of legend, and that no matter how far they travelled, how many horizons they outran, all they would find was soot and broken stone.

The world became strange with loneliness. And quiet, very quiet.

Insects whirred to and fro. Fluff scribbled across the back of warring gusts.

Without thinking he reached out for Mimara's hand. He did not answer her wondering gaze.

By happenstance, he found himself abreast Galian and one of the remaining Stone Hags, the dispossessed Tydonni thane, Tuborsa Hurm.

Hurm was perhaps the strangest of Stone Hags, both in appearance and behaviour. He continued to shave, for one, long after even Galian had abandoned his bare chin. At the close of the day's march, when his brothers could scarce speak for exhaustion, he would set to sharpening his dagger, which he had worn as narrow as a fish knife, for use on his cheeks at first light. Apparently this was a kind of ritual protest among the ordinarily long-bearded Tydonni, a way to proclaim the theft of one's honour.

Either way, it spoke to the man's stamina: even without Qirri he seemed to have little difficulty matching the company's pace. He had one of those lean physiques, with powerful shoulders perpetually angled forward as if in anticipation of a sprint. His face, which remained ruddy even in the perpetual gloom of the Mop, was shaped like the outward curve of a bow, with close-set eyes and a tiny, even womanish mouth beneath a shark-fin nose.

Galian was pressing the man with questions about the Stone Hags and the scalpers they robbed and murdered-an indelicate topic even given the crude standards of the slog.

"Gali..." Achamian heard Pokwas murmur in warning.

The former Columnary scowled up at the towering Zeumi. "I want to know what moves a man to kill his own kind when skinnies are stacked to the horizon."

"Scalps," Hurm said, grinning. "The Custom House counts. It makes no distinction between the likes of you and the likes of me."

"I don't understand," Galian said, his voice lowered in mock caution. Somewhere, somehow, Achamian realized with more than a little dismay, the man had lost his fear of their Captain. "The Bounty is the Holy Bounty, is it not?"

"Holy, is it?"

"What else would it be?"

A phlegmatic snort. "Gold," Hurm said after spitting a string of phlegm. "Gold for mead. Gold for pork-and-onion stew..." His porcine gaze clicked from place to place, then settled on Mimara, appraised her with a kind of milky viciousness. His lips parsed about rotted teeth. "Gold for pretty, pretty peaches."

Perhaps this was when Achamian first sensed the madness about to happen.

"You would wager damnation for these things?" Galian asked.

"Damnation?"

A sly grin. "The Holy Bounty is Holy because it has been decreed by the Aspect-Emperor."

"The Aspect-Emperor, is it? Would you like to know what I think of our glorious tyrant?"

Achamian recognized the triumph in the Columnary's look. Galian used the same baiting manner with Soma, only with more mischief than malice in his eyes.

"Very much."

What was happening here?

The Tydonni thane grinned with alehouse cruelty. "I think his gold was born to burden my purse. I think he overlooks the likes of me... and of you! I think all those prayers, all those little wire circumfixes, are naught but wasted effort! Because in the end," he continued with a conspiratorial lean, "I think he's no different than you or me. A sinner. A dog. A demon when too deep in his cups! A fool. A fraud. A scalper of sou-!"

Lord Kosoter materialized at the man's side, his knife out... Achamian blinked in confusion. A stabbing motion. Hurm crushed his cheek against his shoulder, as if plagued by a mosquito in his ear.

Mimara cried out for shock. Achamian stood dumbfounded.

Gripping a nest of black hair, the Captain-impossibly-held the man upright while he hacked at the man's neck with his free hand. For an instant there was no blood. Then it seemed to gush from the jerking form.

"Blasphemer!" Sarl chortled, his teeth and gums shining, his eyes squeezed into creases. "No blasphemers on the slog!"

Galian had known this would happen, the old Wizard realized.

The Captain continued his savage work, grimacing in yellow-toothed disgust. He did not so much cut the head from the body as hack the body from under the head. The Hag's black-stained limbs flumped senseless between the grasses. His head yanked high like a freed kite.

"Anasurimbor Kellhus!" the Captain raved at the survivors. "He is the God! And this"-he swung Hurm's head so that blood flew from the crimson lobes of its mouth-"is His work!"

Achamian could only watch with detached wonder, the kind that afflicts the survivors of sudden catastrophes. He saw well enough. He knew well enough. And yet none of it made the slightest sense.

He found himself wondering how long before Cleric called on them to dispense the Qirri. He needed it. To the point of wringing hands and clenched teeth, he needed it.

The Captain, it seemed, was a Believer.

Zaudunyani.

- - The pretense of thought twined through the fraud that was its soul...

It ran like a dog, bent, so that the grasses whipped in wet shags about its face and shoulders. The morning sun hung low, a pale orb in the mists that always greeted the dawn on the shore of a great sea. Gold limned any stonework bared to the sky. The acropolis rose from the ink of its own shadow, a silhouette without depth in the haze. There was beauty in the destruction, as well as thunderous proof of the Old Fathers and their power. Here, the will and might of Men had perished before the rapacious hunger of the Derived. Here, the glorious multitudes had coupled with the screaming, the broken and the dead.

These were holy facts-sacred. But the thing called Soma did not raise its head to contemplate or to consider. It did not dare. There was the tracker, Xonghis, whose almond eyes missed little. And there was the Nonman, whose senses almost rivalled its own in some respects.

There was the mission.

It paused over the headless corpse of the Stone Hag, listened to the music of carrion flies. It lingered for a moment, long enough to savour the thickness between its thighs, the arching bloat. Then it continued racing along the company's blundering trail.

On the heights of what had once been called the Heilor, it dashed through concentric shells of ruin, crept along debris-choked foundations. It ignored the vista: the city scattered like bones, the steaming marshes, the plate of the Cerish Sea. Instead it rooted through the remains of the scalper camp, sniffing the sweet where their anuses had pressed against the grasses. It found the spot where the female had made water, only to flee from the reek of her fetus.

It paused over the sour musk of the Nonman.

Something was happening... Something unanticipated by the Old Fathers.

It cringed, swatted its face in slouching fear. Had anyone happened upon it at that moment, they would have seen a crazed creature, limbed like a man but possessing a woman's beautiful face, greased with blood and filth, rocking from foot to foot like a bereaved ape.

It bent back its head until the base of its skull pressed against the crown of its spine, unsheathed its second voice...

And screamed.

"There's no need..." a small voice piped from above. "I have followed you since sunrise."

It whirled in feral alarm.

A series of ruined walls fenced the ground behind, each rising and falling like miniature mountain ranges. A bird perched on the summit of the nearest, its body glossy black, shot with strains of violet, its head white with marmoreal translucence-and human.

A Synthese... vessel of the Old Fathers. Flowering weeds trembled in the wind beside its clicking feet. A daylight moon, pale as a blind cat's eye, rose above its obsidian back.

The thing called Soma fell to its false face.

"You were to watch him," the bird said, a miniature scowl creasing its expression.