He sat facing her, miserable as mud. A thorn he had been unable to dig out of his back gave him a fresh jab. “Do you have anything to eat?” he asked.

  “Where is your pack? Is our food then at the bottom of the gorge.” She gave a rueful sigh, dug into a pocket and handed him a cloth in which a few edible roots and nuts were wrapped.

  The roots yielded a bitter juice and, as he gnawed on one, he experienced a sharp pain in his jaw.

  She watched him probe the inside of his gum with a forefinger and said, “When we met in Kaspara Viatatus, I worried that you were much like Cugel. The manner in which you dealt with Vasker and the rest reminded me of him. After you crippled the Deodand, I understood you were nothing like Cugel. He does not have your courage and, though your fighting style is not optimal, it reflects a directness of personality. A type of honesty, I thought. Now, having seen you destroy hundreds of lives by means of a foolhardy act, I wonder if what I assumed to be honesty was simply brute stupidity. And I ask myself, is moral incompetence any different from outright iniquity? The result is the same. Innocents die.”

  “Are you so naïve that you believe Melorious had a festive weekend planned for those in his cages? His spells had bedizened them—they were dead already. Or perhaps it is for Melorious you grieve?”

  She seemed about to speak, but bit back the words. Finally she said, “You forced me to jump into the gorge and race across the forehead of a gid. Does this not, in retrospect, seem ill-considered?”

  “Risky, yes. But we have reached our objective, so it can hardly be countenanced ill-considered.”

  “ ‘Patience finds a way’, you said. I suppose this is exemplary of the quality of your patience?”

  “One must recognize when the time for patience has passed. I made a decision.”

  She brushed dirt from her trousers. “Kindly consult me in detail as to all your future decisions.”

  The sky cleared by mid-morning and the sun struck shifting black crescents of shadow from the field of boulders that lay beneath the tower; but the tower itself cast no shadow, a fact that gave Thiago pause, as did the presence of a pelgrane that flapped up from the summit and briefly circled above them before returning to her perch. A female and, judging by her clumsy and erratic flight, gravid—a condition that would render her especially vicious and unpredictable. None of this had a discernable effect upon Derwe Coreme, whose eagerness increased with every step. As they drew near, she could no longer contain her enthusiasm and broke into a trot. By the time Thiago reached the base of the tower, however, she was the picture of dismay, darting about, sliding her hands along the walls and making noises of frustration.

  “There’s no door!” she said. “Nothing. There’s nothing!”

  The tower was a seamless flow of stone, a single unbroken piece more than a hundred feet high, evolving at its top into a bulbous shape—this had been cut into an intricate filigree pattern of windows that would allow someone inside to scan the area below without revealing themselves. Leaving Derwe Coreme to vent her anger, Thiago began a circumnavigation of the base, testing each slight declivity and projection in hopes that pressing upon one of them would cause a hidden door to open. After an hour or thereabouts, his circuit less than a third complete, he heard bellicose voices coming from the opposite side of the tower, Derwe Coreme’s hoarse outcries loudest of all. She had struck a defensive pose, knives in both her hands, and was fending off five men who encircled her. A sixth lay upon the ground, bleeding from slashes on his arm and chest. On seeing Thiago, the men fell back and their menacing talk subsided. They were a motley group, ranging in age from a mere lad to an elderly, weather-beaten individual with a conical red hat, identical to the roofs of the village below, jammed low onto his brow so that wisps of gray hair stuck out beneath it like bent wires. They were armed with rakes and clad in coarse white garments that were belted about their waists with green sashes. Lead amulets bearing the image of a crude anthropomorphic figure hung from their necks.

  “Ho! What’s this?” Thiago gestured with his fist and this served to drive the men farther from Derwe Coreme. “Explain yourselves at once.”

  The elderly man was pushed to the fore. “I am Ido, the spiritual chargeman of Joko Anwar. We sought only to inquire of the woman in the name of Yando and she rasped at us in a demon’s voice and attacked. Poor Stellig has suffered a dreadful wound.”

  “Lies! They laid hands on me!” Derwe Coreme surged toward the men and Thiago side-stepped to block her way.

  “Enlighten me as to the nature of this Yando,” he said.

  “He is the god of Joko Anwar,” Ido said. “Indeed, it is said he is the god of all forlorn places.”

  “By whom is this said?”

  “Why, by Yando himself.”

  A portly man with a patchy beard whispered in his ear and Ido said, “To clarify. Yando often appears as a man of burning silver and in this guise he does not speak. But of late he sends his avatar, who confides in us Yando’s truth.”

  Derwe Coreme, who had relaxed from her defensive posture, laughed derisively and started to speak, but Thiago intervened.

  “Lately, you say? Did the appearance of the avatar predate Sylgarmo’s Proclamation?”

  “On the contrary,” said Ido. “It was not long after the Proclamation that Yando sent him to instruct us so we might be saved by the instrumentality of his disciple, Pandelume.”

  Thiago gave the matter a turn or two. “This avatar . . . does he bear some resemblance to me? Does, for instance, his hair come down in peak over his forehead? Like so?”

  Ido examined Thiago’s hair. “There is a passing similarity, but the avatar’s hair is black and of a supreme gloss.”

  Derwe Coreme hissed a curse. Thiago laid a hand on her arm. “What form did the avatar’s instruction take?”

  All the men whispered together and after they had done, Ido said, “Am I to understand that you wish to undergo purification?”

  Thiago hesitated, and Derwe Coreme sprang forward, putting her knife to Ido’s throat.

  “We wish access to the tower,” she said.

  “Sacrilege!” cried the portly man. “The Red Hat is assaulted! Alert the village!”

  Two men ran back toward the village, giving shouts of alarm. Derwe Coreme pressed on the blade and blood trickled from its edge.

  “Grant us immediate access,” she said. “Or die.”

  Ido closed his eyes. “Only through purification can one gain entrance to the tower and the salvation that lies beyond.”

  Derwe Coreme might have sliced him open then and there, but Thiago caught her wrist and squeezed, forcing her to relinquish the knife. Ido stumbled away, rubbing his neck.

  Thiago sought to pacify Ido and the portly man, but they refused to listen to his entreaties—they huddled together, lips moving silently, offering ornate gestures of unknown significance to the heavens. At length, giving up on reason, he asked Derwe Coreme, “Can you persuade them to instruct us in the rite of purification?”

  She had retrieved her knife and was testing the edge with her thumb, contemplating him with a brooding stare.

  Well,” he said. “Can you do so? Preferably without a fatality? I would consider it a personal favor if we could avoid a pitched battle with the villagers.”

  She walked over to Ido and held up the blade stained with his blood to his eyes. He loosed a pitiable wail and clutched the portly man more tightly.

  “Without interference, I can work wonders,” she said.

  At darkest dusk, Derwe Coreme and Thiago stood alone and shivering in the boulder-strewn field beneath the tower. They wore a twin harness of wood and withe that culminated in a great loop above their heads—this, Ido explained, would allow Yando’s winged servant to lift them on high and bring them to salvation. Except for a kind of diaper, designed so as to prevent the harness from cutting into their skin, they were naked and their bodies were festooned with painted symbols, the purpose of which had also been explained in excruciating detail.

  Though no more risible than the tenets of other religions, the rites and doctrines of Yando as dictated by the avatar revealed the workings of a dry, sardonic wit. Thiago had no doubt they were his cousin’s creation.

  “Consider the green blotch currently being applied,” Ido had said. “By no means is its placement arbitrary. When Yando was summoned from the Uncreate to protect us, he woke to discover that he had inadvertently crushed a litter of copiropith whelps beneath his left thigh. The blotch replicates the stain left by those gentle creatures. 3 ”

  A last blush of purple faded from the sky. Thiago could barely make out Derwe Coreme beside him, hugging herself against the chill. He cleared his throat and launched into a hymn of praise to Yando, stopping when he noticed that Derwe Coreme remained silent.

  “Come,” he said. “We must sing.”

  “No, I will not,” she said sullenly.

  “The winged servant may not appear.”

  “If by ‘winged servant’ you refer to the pelgrane, hunger will bring her to us. I refuse to play the fool for Cugel.”

  “In the first place, that the pelgrane and the winged servant are one is merely my hypothesis. Granted, it seems the most likely possibility, but the winged servant may prove to be another agency, one with a discriminating ear. Secondly, if the pelgrane is the winged servant and notices that we are less than enthusiastic in our obedience to ritual, this may arouse its suspicions and cause it to deviate from its routine. I feel such a deviation would not be in interests.”

  Derwe Coreme was silent.

  “Do you agree?” Thiago asked.

  “I agree,” she said grudgingly.

  “Very well. On the count of three, may I suggest you join me in rendering with brio, “At Yando’s Whim, So We Ascend In Gladness’.”

  They had just begun the second chorus when the oily reek of a pelgrane filled Thiago’s nostrils. Great wings buffeted the air and they were dragged aloft. The harness swayed like a drunken bell, making it difficult to sustain the vocal, yet they persevered even when the pelgrane spoke.

  “Ah, my lunchkins!” it said merrily. “Soon one of you will rest in my belly. But who, who, who shall it be?”

  Thiago sang with greater fervor. The pelgrane’s egg sac, a vague white shape, depended from its globular abdomen. He pointed this out to Derwe Coreme and she reached into her diaper. He shook his head violently and added urgency to his delivery of the words “not yet” in the line, “ . . . though not yet do we glimpse the heights . . . ” Scowling, she withdrew her hand.

  A pale nimbus of light bulged from the sloping summit of the tower. As they were about to land, Derwe Coreme unhitched herself from the harness. She clung to the loop by one hand, slashed open the sac with the knife that had been hidden in herd diaper, and spilled the eggs into the dark below, drawing an agonized shriek from the pelgrane. Thiago also unhitched. The moment his feet touched stone, he made a leap, grabbed a wing strut and sawed at it with one of Derwe Coreme’s knives. With a wing nearly severed from its body, the pelgrane lost its balance, toppled onto its side and slid toward the abyss, gnashing its tusks and tossing its great stag-beetle head in pain. It hung at the edge, frantically beating its good wing and clawing at the stone.

  Breathing heavily, Thiago sat down amongst the bones that littered the summit and watched it struggle. “Why only one of us?” he asked.

  The pelgrane continued to struggle.

  “You are doomed,” Thiago said. “Your arms will not long support your weight and you will fall. Why not answer my question? You said that soon one of us would be in your belly? Why just one?”

  The pelgrane achieved an uneasy equilibrium, a claw hooked on an imperfection in the stone. “He only wanted the women. The men provided me with sustenance.”

  “By ‘he’, do you mean Cugel?”

  Drool fettered the pelgrane’s tusks. “My time was near and it was onerous for me to hunt. I struck a bargain with the devil!”

  “Was it Cugel? Tell me!”

  The pelgrane glared at him, loosed its hold on the edge and slipped away into the darkness without a sound.

  At the apex of the summit, pale light that emanated from no apparent source spilled from a shaft enclosing a spiral staircase. With her prey close at hand, Derwe Coreme lost all regard for modesty. She ripped off the diaper and, a knife in each hand, began her descent. Thiago’s diaper caught on the railing and he, too, rid himself of the garment.

  The shaft opened onto a circular room into whose walls the windows Thiago had seen from the ground were cut. It was absent all furnishings and lit by the same pale sourceless light. A second stairway led down to an even larger room, pentagonal in shape, its gray marble walls resplendent with intricate volutes and a fantastic bestiary carved in bas relief. The air retained a faint sourness, as of dried sweat. Cut into the floor, also of gray marble, was a complicated abstract design. Five curving corridors angled off from the room, receding to a depth Thiago would have believed impossible, given the dimensions of the tower; but this, he reminded himself, was a magician’s tower that cast no shadow and likely was governed by laws other than those to which he was accustomed.

  They went cautiously along the first of the corridors, passing a number of doors, all locked, and came at last to a door at the corridor’s end that stood open and admitted to a room, a laboratory of sorts. Derwe Coreme made to enter, but Thiago barred her way with his arm.

  “Look first,” he said.

  She frowned, yet raised no objection.

  Many-colored light penetrated the room from panels in a domed ceiling, shifting from dull orange to peach to lavender. Volumes of obvious antiquity lined the walls. Upon a long table, vials bubbled over low flames and the components of a mysterious device, a puzzle of glittering steel and crystal, lay scattered about. An immense bell jar contained dark objects suspended in what looked to be a red fluid. Several more such jars held items that Thiago could not identify, a few of which appeared to be moving. Then the scene changed. Their view was still of the same room, yet they were considerably closer to the table. The objects submerged in red fluid were fragments of a sunken ship. Gray creatures with sucker mouths, elongated hands and paddle feet crawled over the wreck, as if searching for something. Another jar enclosed a miniature city with a strange geometric uniformity to its architecture whose two tallest towers were aflame. Beneath the largest glass bell, a herd of four-legged beasts with flowing blond hair and womanly breasts fled across a mossy plain, pursued by an army of trees (or a single multi-trunked tree) that extended root-like tentacles to haul itself along.

  Unsettled, Thiago and Derwe Coreme returned to the room of gray marble and entered a second corridor, passing along it until they reached a door at its nether end. Through it they saw a valley of golden grasses lorded over by hills with promontories of corroded-looking black rock that might have been the ruins of colossal statuary rendered unrecognizable by time. They could discern no signs of life, no movement whatsoever. The absence of all kinetic value bred a sense of foreboding in Thiago. At the end of a third corridor they stood overlooking a vista that could have been part of the Sousanese Coast south of Val Ombrio: a high reddish sun, barren hills, a stretch of forest, and then a lowland declining to water that glowed a rich pthalocyanine blue. All seemed normal until a flight of winged serpents the size of barges soared low along the coast and in the eye of one that flew straight at the door, veering aside at the last second, Thiago glimpsed their terrified reflection.

  They had quit trying the doors, but as they retreated toward the marble room, Thiago idly turned a doorknob and thought to hear a gasp issue from the other side.

  “Who’s there?” Thiago gave the door a shake.

  He received no answer. Again he rattled the door and said, “We have come to free you. Let me in!”

  After an interval, a woman’s voice cried out, “Please help us! We have no key.”

  Derwe Coreme pressed on; when Thiago called to her, she said, “Whoever she is, she can wait. I have two more corridors to inspect.”

  Before he could speak further, she passed beyond the bend in the corridor. He felt diminished by her absence and this both surprised and iritated him.

  He examined the hinges of the door. The bolts were flush to the metal and he did not think he could loosen them with a knife. He set his shoulder to the planking and gave it a test blow. Solid. The corridor, however, was narrow enough that he could brace his back against the opposite wall and put all his strength into a kick. He did so and felt the lock give way the slightest bit. The sound of the kick was startlingly loud, but he drove his foot into the lock again and again until the wood splintered. A few more blows and the door swung open. Two beautiful dark-haired women attired in gauzy costumes that left little to the imagination stood gaping at him in the center of a room furnished with a bed, an armoire, and a mirror. In reflex, Thiago covered himself as best he could.

  The younger of the women, scarcely more than a girl, prostrated herself. The older woman regarded him with a mix of hauteur and suspicion; then she stepped forward, standing almost eye-to-eye. She had the well-tended look and fine bone structure of the patrician women with whom he had consorted in Kaiin. Her hair was bound with an ivory and emerald clip. He could not picture her ladling dumplings onto a farmer’s plate in Joko Anwar.

  “Who are you?” she asked in a firm voice.

  “Thiago Alves of Kaiin.”

  “My name is Diletta Orday. I was traveling in . . . ”

  “We have no time to exchange personal histories. Is there somewhere you can hide? I cannot fight and watch over you both.”