hung on. Below lay a skiff, anchored and storm-tossed. As the span shook apart, he leapt over the rail and down into it. It was half full of water and he fell, but he untied the lines and with a long pole pushed away. The edge of the span split behind him and the wind threw flinders at him. Between the piers the water swirled, capturing the collapsing fragments in its force, sucking them in, and like a fire fueled by new wood, the whirlpool expanded across the water.
“Auuenau tried to pole his skiff away, but he couldn’t. The thing had caught him, and helplessly he began to whirl around it, faster and faster, riding the crest but certain to follow everything else down into the star-shot blackness of eternity in the maw of the pool.
“He comprehended suddenly what would satisfy it. As he clung with one hand to the side of the skiff, he tore the small shell out of his robe as if tearing out his own heart. He stared at the striped nautilus and understood that he and the whirlpool were of one substance now, one purpose shared. It was his shadow self, rapacious and unappeasable unless he gave it the one thing it wanted. He lifted the shell, and the pearl rattled inside it. He grinned sickly, and that was the first moment when he felt the faces of those he’d absorbed moving across his own—the features of the monk and his apprentice.
“He tossed the shell over the side and into the mouth of the maelstrom. He didn’t even watch it vanish, but set down the pole and lay back to let events play out.
“The whirlpool devoured his soul. At once it shrank beneath him.
“Within moments Auuenau’s skiff was circling a patch of foam, of nothing, of water indistinguishable from any other. Of the span of Dyauspitar all that remained was the ridge of rock that had supported it, the spine of Dyaus. The rest, all of his brethren, all of the people, were gone, absorbed, the fuel that fed his immortality.
“He, the embodiment of Chaos, began to laugh. He looked at his hands, his arms, his skin transformed into something harder than flesh.
“Light rain sprayed over him, but the winds had ceased their howl and sun-speckled clouds floated overhead. Even the storm had been sucked down into the horror of the force he’d unleashed. Lying back in the skiff, he let the currents of the ocean take him wherever they would. He was deathless and fearsome now. He needed a new name for his new self, and by the time he reached another spiral, he had one, extracted from ancient legends, the name of a god: Tophet the Destroyer, the Lord of Chaos. Thus Auuenau became a god, and no one the wiser save for a real god whose span he’d destroyed.”
She reached into the dust and picked up the gnarled burnished pearl in her fist.
Casually, she added, “If you like I could repeat the whole tale for you with puppets,” she said. “It’s better with puppets.”
When he said nothing, she gathered herself up and walked to the throne. No one tried to stop her. No one moved at all. The golden mask hung before her, his last protection.
“When you had Bardsham’s puppet cases brought here—you didn’t know that, did you? That these are his?—when you did that, you brought the very thing you feared, not just the story of it. Your tale, like the whirlpool in it, comes full circle. After all, you never were a god.”
She went around the mask. He sat defiantly, but his head was tilted away as if in fear of her. His robe had fallen open, and she saw that his body was covered in spurs and sharp splinters of bone that had pushed out of his skin. She stepped up to the end of the throne, between his knees. He reached out suddenly, triumphantly, and grabbed her wrist. She winced, stiffening at the frigid pain that burned to her marrow. But then suddenly the flow reversed and a charge ran out of her fist into him.
His fingers leapt free of her and he bucked violently with a great cracking gasp.
She opened her palm and the knobby black pearl was gone.
Tophet’s head began to vibrate from side to side faster and faster until she couldn’t distinguish the awful features anymore, the millions of faces blurring into a smudge upon the air. The blur flung off sparks that spun through