He must have been seeing where he was going, since he didn’t bump into anything, but he had no memory of what he saw or where he had been. He ended up in the Fountains district, not far from the neighborhood of Rasa’s house; and in his mind, he had circled through the same thoughts over and over again, finally ending up not very far from where he started.

  One thing he knew, though: He couldn’t dismiss this all as madness. Father was not crazy, however new and strange he might seem; and as for Mother, if her vision of the burning of Earth was madness, then she had been mad since before he was born. So there was something that put ideas and desires and visions into his parents’ minds—and into Luet’s, too, couldn’t forget her. People called this something the Oversoul, but that was just a name, a label. What was it? What did it want? What could it actually do? If it could talk to some people, why didn’t it just talk to everybody?

  Nafai stopped across a fairly wide street from what might be the largest house in Basilica. He knew it well enough, since the head of the Palwashantu clan was mated with the woman who lived there. Nafai couldn’t remember her name—she was nobody, everyone knew she had bought this ancient house with her mate’s money, and if she didn’t renew his contract then even with the house she’d be nobody—but he was Gaballufix. There was a family connection—his mother was Hosni, who later on became Wetchik’s auntie and the mother of Elemak. Between that blood connection and the fact that Father was perhaps the second most prestigious Palwashantu clansman in Basilica, they had visited this house at least once, usually two or three times a year since as long ago as Nafai could remember.

  As he stood there, stupidly watching the front of that landmark building, he suddenly came alert, for without meaning to he had recognized someone moving along the street. Elemak should have been home sleeping—he had traveled all night, hadn’t he? Yet here he was, in mid-afternoon. For a panicked moment Nafai wondered if Elya was looking for him—was it possible that Mother had missed him and worried and now the whole family, perhaps even Father’s employees as well, were combing the city looking for him?

  But no. Elemak wasn’t looking for anybody. He was moving too casually, too easily. Looking in no particular direction at all.

  And then he was gone.

  No, he had turned down into the gap between Gaballufix’s house and the building next door. So he did have a destination.

  Nafai had to know what Elemak was doing. He trotted along the street to where he had a clear view down the narrow road. He got there in time to see Elemak ducking into a low alley doorway into Gaballufix’s house.

  Nafai couldn’t imagine what business Elya might have with Gaballufix—especially something so urgent that he had to go to his house the same day he got back from a long trip. True, Gaballufix was technically Elya’s half-brother, but there were sixteen years between them and Gaballufix had never openly recognized Elya as his brother. That didn’t mean, though, that they couldn’t start behaving more like close kinsmen now. Still, it bothered Nafai that Elemak had never mentioned it and seemed to be concealing it now.

  Whether the question bothered him or not, Nafai knew that it would be a very bad idea to ask Elemak about it directly. When Elya wanted anybody to know what he was doing with Gaballufix, he’d tell them. In the meantime, the secret would be safe inside Elya’s head.

  A secret inside somebody’s head.

  Luet had known that Nafai was in love with Eiadh. Well, it wasn’t all that secret—Luet might have guessed it from the way that he looked at her. But there on the front porch of Mother’s house, Luet had said, “You’re the bastard,” as if she were answering him for calling her a bastard. Only he hadn’t said anything. He had only thought of her as a bastard. It wasn’t an opinion he had expressed before. He had only thought of it at that moment, because he was annoyed with Luet. Yet she had known.

  Was that the Oversoul, too? Not just putting ideas into people’s heads, but also taking them out and telling them to other people? The Oversoul wasn’t just a provider of strange dreams—it was a spy and a gossip as well.

  It made Nafai afraid, to think that not only was the Oversoul real, but also that it had the power to read his most secret, transitory thoughts and tell them to someone else. And to someone as repulsive as the little bastard witchgirl, no less.

  It frightened him like the first time he went out into the sea by himself. Father had taken them all on a holiday, down to the beach. The first afternoon there, they had all gone out into the sea together, and surrounded by his father and brothers—except Issib, of course, who watched them from his chair on the beach—he had felt the sea play with him, the waves shoving him toward shore, then trying to draw him out again. It was fun, exhilarating. He even dared to swim out to where his feet couldn’t quite touch the bottom, all the while playing with Meb and Elya and Father. A good day, a great day, when his older brothers still liked him. But the next morning he got up early, left the tent and went out to the water alone. He could swim like a fish; he was in no danger. And yet as he walked out into the water he felt an inexplicable unease. The water tugging at him, pushing him; he was only a few meters from shore, and yet with no one else in the water, all by himself, he felt as if he had lost his place, as if he had already been washed out to sea, as if he were caught in the grasp of something so huge that any part of it could swallow him up. He panicked then. He ran to shore, struggling against the water, convinced that it would never let him go, dragging at him, sucking him down. And then he was on the sand, on the dry sand above the tide line, and he fell to his knees and wept because he was safe.

  But for those few moments out in the water he had felt the terror of knowing how small and helpless he was, how much power there was in the world, and how easily it could do to him whatever it wanted and there was nothing he could do to resist it.

  That was the fear he felt now. Not so strong, not so specific as it had been that day on the beach—but then, he wasn’t a five-year-old anymore, either, and he was better at dealing with fear. The Oversoul wasn’t an old legend, it was alive, and it could force visions into his own parents’ minds and it could search out secrets inside Nafai’s head and tell them to other people, to people that Nafai didn’t like and who didn’t like him.

  The worst thing was knowing that the reason why Luet didn’t like him was probably because of what the Oversoul had told her about his thoughts. His most private thoughts exposed to this unsympathetic little monster. What next? Would Father’s next vision be Nafai’s fantasies about Eiadh? Worse yet, would Mother be shown?

  On the beach, he had been able to run for shore. Where did you run to get away from the Oversoul?

  You didn’t. You couldn’t hide, either—how could you disguise your own thoughts so even you didn’t know what you were thinking?

  The only choice he had was to try to find out what the Oversoul was, to try to understand what it wanted, what it was trying to do to his family, to him. He had to understand the Oversoul and, if possible, get it to leave him alone.

  FOUR

  MASKS

  There would be no point in going back to Mother’s house so late in the school day. Explaining himself would probably take up what little time was left. Making excuses could wait until tomorrow.

  Or maybe Nafai would never go back. There was a thought. After all, Mebbekew didn’t go to school. In fact he didn’t do anything, didn’t even come home if he decided not to.

  When had that started? Was Meb already doing that sort of thing at fourteen? Well, whether he was or not, Nafai could start now and who was going to stop him? He was as tall as any man, and he was old enough for a man’s trade. Not Father’s trade, though—never the plant business. If you followed that trade long enough, you started seeing visions in the dark beside desert roads.

  But there were other trades. Maybe Nafai could apprentice himself to some artist. A poet, or a singer—Nafai’s voice was young, but he could follow a tune, and with training maybe he could actually become good. Or maybe he was really a dancer, or an actor, in spite of Mother’s joke this morning. Those arts had nothing to do with going to school—if he was supposed to pursue one, then staying on with Mother was a waste of time.

  That notion possessed him through the afternoon, carrying him south at first, toward the inner market, where there would be songs and poems to hear, perhaps some fine new myachik to buy and listen to at home. Of course, if he stopped attending school, Mother would no doubt cut off his myachik allowance. But as an apprentice there’d probably be some spending money, and if not, so what? He’d be doing a real art himself, in the flesh. Soon he would no longer even want recordings of art on little glass balls.

  By the time he reached the inner market, he had talked himself into having no interest in recordings, now that he was going to be making a career out of creating the real thing. He headed east, through the neighborhoods called Pens and Gardens and Olive Grove, a few narrow streets of houses between the city wall and the rim of the valley where men could not go. At last he came to the place that was narrowest of all, a single street with a high white wall behind the houses, so that a man standing on the red wall of the city couldn’t see over the houses and down into the valley. He had only come this way a few times in his life, and never alone.

  Never alone, because Dolltown was a place for company and fellowship, a place for sitting in a crowded audience and watching dances and plays, or listening to recitations and concerts. Now, though, Nafai was coming to Dolltown as an artist, not to be part of the audience. It wasn’t fellowship he was looking for, but vocation.

  The sun was still up, so the streets of Dolltown weren’t crowded. Dusk would bring out the frolicking apprentices and schoolboys, and full dark would call forth the lovers and the connoisseurs and the revelers. But even now, in late afternoon, some of the theatres were open, and the galleries were doing good business in the daylight.

  Nafai stopped into several galleries, more because they were open than because he seriously thought he might apprentice himself to a painter or a sculptor. Nafai’s skill at drawing was never good, and when he tried sculpture as a child his projects always had to have titles so people could tell what they were supposed to be. Browsing through the galleries, Nafai tried to look thoughtful and studious, but the artsellers were never fooled—Nafai might be tall as a man, but he was still far too young to be a serious customer. So they never came up and talked to him, the way they did when adults came into the shops. He had to glean his information from what he overheard. The prices astonished him. Of course the cost of the originals was completely out of reach, but even the high-resolution holographic copies were too expensive for him to dream of buying one. Worst of all was the fact that the paintings and sculptures he liked the best were invariably the most expensive. Maybe that meant that he had excellent taste. Or maybe it meant that the artists who knew how to impress the ignorant were able to make the most money.

  Bored at last with the galleries, and determined to see which art should be the channel for his future, Nafai wandered down to the open theatre, a series of tiny stages dotting the broad lawns near the wall. A few plays were in rehearsal. Since there was no real audience yet, the sound bubbles hadn’t been turned on, and as Nafai walked from stage to stage, the sounds of more distant plays kept intruding into every pause in the one close at hand. After a while, though, Nafai discovered that if he stood and watched a rehearsal long enough to get interested, he stopped noticing any other noises.

  What intrigued him most was a troupe of satirists. He had always thought satire must be the most exciting kind of play, because the scripts were always as new as today’s gossip. And, just as he had imagined, there sat the satirist at the rehearsal, scribbling his verse on paper—on paper—and handing the scraps to a script boy who ran them up to the stage and handed them to the player that the lines were intended for. The players who weren’t onstage at the moment were either pacing back and forth or hunched over on the lawn, saying their lines over and over again, to memorize them for tonight’s performance. This was why satires were always sloppy and ill-timed, with sudden silences and absurd non sequiturs abounding. But no one expected a satire to be good—it only had to be funny and nasty and new.

  This one seemed to be about an old man who sold love potions. The masker playing the old man seemed quite young, no more than twenty, and he wasn’t very good at faking an older voice. But that was part of the fun of it—maskers were almost always apprentice actors who hadn’t yet managed to get a part with a serious company of players. They claimed that the reason they wore masks instead of makeup was to protect them from reprisals from angry victims of satire—but, watching them, Nafai suspected that the mask was as much to protect the young actor from the ridicule of his peers.

  The afternoon had turned hot, and some of the actors had taken off their shirts; those with pale skin seemed oblivious to the fact that they were burning to the color of tomatoes. Nafai laughed silently at the thought that maskers were probably the only people in Basilica who could get a sunburn everywhere but their faces.

  The script boy handed a verse to a player who had been sitting hunched over in the grass. The young man looked at it, then got up and walked to the satirist.

  “I can’t say this,” he said.

  The satirist’s back was to Nafai, so he couldn’t hear the answer.

  “What, is my part so unimportant that my lines don’t have to rhyme?”

  Now the satirist’s answer was loud enough that Nafai caught a few phrases, ending with the clincher, “Write the thing yourself!”

  The young man angrily pulled his mask off his face and shouted, “I couldn’t do worse than this!”

  The satirist burst into laughter. “Probably not,” he said. “Go ahead, give it a try, I don’t have time to be brilliant with every scene.”

  Mollified, the young man put his mask back on. But Nafai had seen enough. For the young masker who wanted his lines to rhyme was none other than Nafai’s brother Mebbekew.

  So this was the source of his income. Not borrowing at all. The idea that had seemed so clever and fresh to Nafai—apprenticing himself in an art to earn his independence—had long since occurred to Mebbekew, and he was doing it. In a way it was encouraging—if Mebbekew can do it, why can’t I?—but it was also discouraging to think that of all people, Nafai had happened to choose Mebbekew to emulate. Meb, the brother who had hated him all his life instead of coming to hate him more recently, like Elya. Is this what I was born for? To become a second Mebbekew?

  Then came the nastiest thought of all. Wouldn’t it be funny if I entered the acting profession, years after Meb, and got a job with a serious company right away? It would be deliciously humiliating; Meb would be suicidal.

  Well, maybe not. Meb was far more likely to turn murderous.

  Nafai was drawn out of his spiteful little daydream by the scene on the stage. The old potion-seller was trying to persuade a reluctant young woman to buy an herb from him.

  Put the leaves in his tea

  Put the flower in your bed

  And by half past three

  He’ll be dead—I beg your pardon,

  Just a slip of the tongue.

  The plot was finally making sense. The old man wanted to poison the girl’s lover by persuading her that the fatal herb was a love potion. She apparently didn’t catch on—all characters in satire were amazingly stupid—but for other reasons she was still resisting the sale.

  I’d sooner be hung

  Than use a flower from your garden.

  I want nothing from you.

  I want his love to be true.

  Suddenly the old man burst into an operatic song. His voice was actually not bad, even with exaggeration for comic effect.

  The dream of love is so enchanting!

  At that moment Mebbekew, his mask back in place, bounded onto the stage and directly addressed the audience.

  Listen to the old man ranting!

  They proceeded to perform a strange duet, the old potion-seller singing a line and Mebbekew’s young character answering with a spoken comment to the audience.

  But love can come in many ways!

  (I’ve followed him for several days.)

  One lover might be very willing!

  (I know he plots her lover’s killing.)

  The other endlessly delays!

  (Listen how the donkey brays!)

  Oh, do not make the wrong decision!

  (I think I’ll give this ass a vision.)

  When I can take you to your goal!

  (He’ll think it’s from the Oversoul.)

  No limits bind the lover’s game.

  (A vision needs a little flame . . .)

  No matter how you win it,

  Because your heart is in it,

  You’ll love your lover’s loving still the same.

  A vision from the Oversoul. Flame. Nafai didn’t like the turn this was taking. He didn’t like the fact that the old potion-seller’s mask had a wild mane of white hair and a full white beard. Was it possible that word had already spread so far and fast? Some satirists were famous for getting the gossip before anyone else—as often as not, people attended the satires just to find out what was happening—and many people left the satires asking each other, What was that really about?

  Mebbekew was fiddling with a box on the stage. The satirist called out to him, “Never mind the fire effect. We’ll pretend it’s working.”

  “We have to try it sometime,” Mebbekew answered.

  “Not now.”

  “When?”

  The satirist got to his feet, strode to the foot of the stage directly in front of Meb, cupped his hands around his mouth, and bellowed: “We . . . will . . . do . . . the . . . effect . . . later!”