play. I thought I knew what it was, Stella, but I may have been wrong.”
Lenares spoke. “How long has the Most High lived?” she asked.
“What?” The Undying Man seemed bemused by the question.
“How long has he lived? Longer than you?”
“Of course he has.”
“And you claim a better view of his plan than we have,” she continued.
“Yes, but—ah.”
“Yes, ah,” she said, a manic grin plastered across her face. “Think it through.”
“You’re reminding me that he began planning this two thousand years ago? But that would mean he intended me to… it was his plan that I rebel and drink of the Fountain?”
“He says he doesn’t have a plan,” Noetos said.
“You’ve spoken to him?”
“I’ve been possessed by him.”
“And you haven’t told anyone? Am I surrounded by fools?”
“The Father might not have a plan,” Lenares said, “but that doesn’t stop him making it up as he goes along. How can he have one single plan if we have freedom to do what we want? He must have hundreds, thousands of plans, changing from one to another every time one of us decides to do something he doesn’t want us to do.”
“So he had a plan for me to defeat the gods two thousand years ago, a full thousand years after they drove him out of Elamaq north to Faltha. I was probably not his first plan then.”
“Nor his last,” Lenares said, her voice shaking with suppressed emotion. She was actually bouncing up and down on her toes as she spoke. “You refused your calling, then rebelled and broke his law by drinking the magical water. So he changed his plan. Your rebellion held things back two thousand years.”
Silence as everyone took this in. A few of the refugees had drifted away, but most stood listening.
“Look around you,” Noetos said eventually. “Those thousands of corpses you’re so angry about? They are the stinking fruit of your rebellion. Well the Falthans named you Destroyer.”
“The Most High put too much pressure on him,” Stella said, the words tumbling from her lips. “Who here would have coped well with his calling at such a young age?”
“A thousand years of careful breeding,” said Moralye. “The Most High knew what he was doing. Kannwar was the reason for the First Men’s existence, and their confinement in the Vale. A vast breeding program designed to generate one man. So Hauthius always taught, though he never said why he believed this.”
“You know who Hauthius was, don’t you?” Kannwar asked softly.
Moralye’s face crumpled in horror. “No, no,” she breathed.
“Oh, yes,” said the Undying Man. Revelation upon revelation: Stella could hardly bear the way her mind was being enlarged. “Yes. How else was I to keep a close eye on my enemies?”
“How else was the Most High to prepare you all for this eventual partnership?” Lenares said, and again everyone stilled.
“You asked who else would have coped with Kannwar’s calling,” Noetos said. “According to him, none of us are like him. He ought to have coped.”
“Like you, the scion of a noble grandfather, coped with the deaths of your family?” Kannwar shot back. “For all my faults, I never turned my back on my responsibility!”
Noetos’s angry reply was lost in a general uproar. Shouting, arguing, hands clinging to arms in an attempt to restrain them, or waving in a threatening manner, yet no use of magic or steel.
We are drawn together by the will of the Most High, Stella acknowledged, but we are not yet one instrument of his will.
The travellers ate a nervous meal, eyeing each other balefully over the last of the stale bread. Before they moved on there was one last debate over the fate of Kidson’s body. Cylene asked for it to be buried, but Sauxa argued against this.
“Let him rot,” he said. “He deserves not a moment more of our time. He will not be dignified by a burial. Better men than he are rotting in crushed houses and open fields as we speak. Let him join them.”
The flaw in Robal’s plan became apparent when he returned to Mensaya and the Malayu Basin. Of course he’d anticipated his quarry would have moved on by this time—there had, after all, been talk of finding a relatively unpopulated area near the coast—but the further coast-ward he travelled, the less he heard of his former companions. Those few people he came in contact with were far too busy rebuilding their lives to answer his hail; it took nearly two full days’ steady travel east of Mensaya to meet someone who could