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pilings of the wharf. The shadows of the roof demons stretched long across the sand, centering upon the spot where the candidate stood. Everything was stretching toward the moment, adding its strength to his.

'Ogoun will judge me,' said the candidate.

'I am his judgment here in Badagris,' said the Aspect, irked by the man's gross impiety, his needless disruption of the silence. 'And like his mercies, his judgments hold no comfort for the weak.'

He drew his left hand back behind his ear, extended his right, and set an iridescent halo glowing about the candidate. The man began to quiver, and with a series of cracks like a roll of castanets, his fingers fused into crooked knots. A foam of blood fringed his nostrils; the web of capillaries - his new mask of death - faded into view. Another crack, much louder, and the pyramid of a fracture rose at the midpoint of his shoulder. Oh, how he wanted to scream, to retreat into meditation, but tie endured. The Aspect silently applauded his endurance and tested it more severely, causing his eyes to pop millimetre by millimetre until the irises were bull's eyes in the midst of veined white globes rimmed with blood. Loud as tree trunks snapping, his thighbones shattered and he fell, his suit changed shape with every subsequent crack. His chest breeched, and something the size of a grapefruit was pushed forward; it dimpled and bulged against the coating of black energy; before long, before the candidate's skull caved inward, it had become still.

After victory, diminution-.

The old cadre wisdom was right. He derived no real pleasure from the aftermath of battle. It simply meant he must now live until the next one, and despite his poetry, his meditation, that was never easy. Soon the townspeople would pour out the doors, throw open the shutters and debase the purity of night with their outcries and orange lanterns. Full of praise, they would gather around and ogle the corpse who, having met his death with courage, deserved better. Perhaps he would go to Pointcario's Inn, touch the waist of the ebony girl lost forever in the doorway, pretend some other woman was she. But first there was something to do. The business of the aberrant High Aspect of Mounanchou. He reached up for the circuits of his ourdha, concentrated his thoughts into a point of sapphire light, and spun round and round until he arrived at Maravillosa.

The inside of his head was warm, unpleasantly so, as he jumped down, but his muscles were supple, his strength undiminished. He started toward the house, but was brought up short by the sight of the two corpses lying apart from the candidate. From Valcours. Disoriented, he looked around at the moonlit devastation, the gaping roof of the house, and a part of him which had been dormant raised an inner voice to remind him of certain verities. He understood now the meaning of the warmth, the nature of his newfound strength, and as another voice - a more familiar one of late - whispered to him, he also understood how that strength must be put to use.

Chapter 19

September 19, 1987

Donnell was standing beside the veve when Jocundra and the Baron came down from the hill. Hearing their footsteps, he glanced up. His skin was pale and his eyes were terminal, the pupils gone inside radiant green flares. She ran toward him, but he thrust out his hand and boomed her with such force that she held up a dozen feet away.

'They're all over,' he said dully. 'All goddamn over!' He slammed his fist against the veve, and the copper bulged downward half a foot. He lifted the fist to his eyes, as if inspecting a peculiar root; then, with an inarticulate yell, he struck again and again at the strut, battering the welded strips apart. His hand was bleeding, already swelling.

'Please, Donnell,' she said. 'Get back on it. Maybe...'

'Too late,' he said, and pointed to a spray of broken blood vessels on his forehead. 'I was dead the second he hit me. It changed them, it...'

She started toward him again.

'Stay the hell away,' he said. 'I'm not going to end up twitching at your gates, mauling you like some damned animal!' He looked at her, nodding. 'Now I know what all those other poor freaks saw.'

'He ain't got no way to come to you,' said the Baron, pulling at Jocundra's arm. 'Get away from him.'

But everything was balling up inside her chest, and