bottles, he sighed and stretched his legs. “How I hate shoes. God save my kind from shoes. And those awful prosthetic feet!”
Christian dropped his gaze to the black, shining, bony hooves at the end of Fallows’s ankles. He tried to scream again but was all screamed out.
Fallows saw him recoil, and the faintest smile twitched at his lips. “I had to shatter my own ankles—smash and reset them, you know. When I first came to your world. Later I had them broken and rebuilt again, by a doctor who was offered a million dollars to keep my secret and was paid in lead to confirm his silence.” Fallows brushed back his curly hair and touched the tip of one pink ear. “Thank goodness I am not a Mountain Faun but only a mere faun of the plains! The Mountain Faun have ears just like the deer of your world, whereas we simple country faun have the ears of men. Though I would have gladly cut my ears off for her if it had been necessary. I would have cut my heart out and offered it to her slippery and red and beating in my own hands.”
Fallows rose and took a step toward him. The torch, which he had never set aside, shifted from blue to a lurid, polluted emerald. Sparks began to fall from the flames.
“I don’t need my torch,” Fallows said, “to know what you are. And I didn’t need to see your sketches to know your heart.”
He tossed the sketchbook at Christian’s feet.
Christian looked down at a drawing of severed heads on sticks: a lion, a zebra, a girl, a man, a child. The breeze caught the pages and leafed through them idly. Drawings of guns. Drawings of slaughter. Christian’s stunned, frightened gaze shifted to the torch.
“Why is it changing color? I’m not a menace!”
“Charn doesn’t know much about devil-thorn. It doesn’t change color in the presence of menace but of wickedness.”
“I never killed anything!” Christian said.
“No. You only laughed while other men killed. Who is worse, Christian, the sadist who serves his true nature honestly or the ordinary man who does nothing to stop him?”
“You killed! You went to Africa to kill a lion!”
“I went to Africa to free as many of my empress’s friends as I could, and so I did, after putting a little money in the right hands. A dozen elephants and two dozen giraffes. The lions I infected with one of your unclean world’s many diseases, to give them their dignity and release. As for the grandfather I shot, he was ready to walk the tall grass in the savanna of ghosts. I asked his forgiveness the day before the hunt, and he gave it. You spoke to him, too—after I shot him. Do you remember what you said as he bled out?”
Christian’s face shriveled with emotion, and his eyes stung terribly.
“You asked him how it felt to die. He tried to show you, Christian, and he almost did it. How I wish you hadn’t escaped him. It would’ve saved me an ugly bit of work here.”
“I’m sorry!” Christian cried.
“Aye,” Fallows said. “Aren’t we both?”
He lowered the barrel of the gun. The steel kissed Christian’s right temple.
“Wait, I—” Christian shrieked.
His voice was lost to the rolling sound of thunder.
The Sleeper Awakes
After, Fallows sat by the girl to wait. For a long time, nothing happened. Fauns crept close to the dolmen but stayed respectfully outside the circle, looking in. The oldest of them, Forgiveknot, an elderly faun with a rippling scar across his leathern face, began to sing. He sang Fallows’s old name, the name he had left behind in this world when he fled through the little door with the last of the empress’s treasures, to find the breath of kings and return her to life.
The light had taken on a faint, pearly glow when the girl yawned and rubbed one fist in a sleepy eye. She looked up, her eyes fogged with drowsiness, and her gaze found Fallows. For a moment she didn’t recognize him, her brow creased with puzzlement. Then she did, and she laughed.
“Oh, Slowfoot,” she said. “You’ve gone and grown up without me! And you have lost your proud horns! Oh, my darling. Oh, my old playmate!”
By the time Fallows had shed his human clothes and Forgiveknot was cutting his hair with a wide-bladed knife, she was sitting on the edge of the stone altar, swinging her feet above the grass, as the fauns formed a line to kneel