his voice shook Sancia from her reverie. Startled, she drew Clef away from his palm. She saw that Crasedes’s body was now smoking strangely, thick reams of black smoke unfurling from between his wrappings to coil around his form. He was still breathing, though, long, gasping, miserable breaths, over and over again, as if succumbing to an infection.
said Gregor, standing over her shoulder.
“I CAN SAVE YOU!” cried Crasedes. “I CAN SAVE YOU ALL!”
“Shut up,” said Sancia.
But Crasedes kept screaming. “I CAN DO IT! PAPA! PAPA, STOP, I CAN SAVE YOU ALL!”
said Sancia.
said Clef.
“Yes,” said Sancia raggedly. “Let’s get it over with, and make sure the first of all hierophants is also the last.”
But before Clef made contact, they heard a surprising sound.
Crasedes was laughing. Great, mad peals of laughter, as if he couldn’t believe what she’d just said.
“After all this!” he shrieked. “After all this! You…You still think I was the first? Sancia, Sancia…I never gave myself that title. I was never the first! Never, never, never!”
“Shut up,” said Sancia.
She stabbed Clef down into Crasedes’s palm.
Sancia had expected the same experience again: to have her mind filled up with arguments, with commands, with the articulation of reality itself…
But this was not what happened. Instead, she and Clef heard Crasedes’s voice, bellowing back at them—and she sensed Clef was shocked to hear it as well.
Crasedes screamed at them,
cried Clef.
A memory came hurtling up through her connection to Clef, so suddenly and so ferociously that she couldn’t prepare for it, and the next thing they knew they were…
Somewhere…
Else.
Sand, and the sky, and the road.
Two figures limped along the wandering path through the sandy wastes. Burned-out buildings and scorched stone lay on either side of them. The sky overhead was so clear and blue and bright that it hurt to see.
The two people were wrapped tightly in gray and black cloth from head to toe to keep the sand from infiltrating their bodies, so it was impossible to tell their race or gender or age, but one was large enough to be a man, and the other was quite small, perhaps a child just approaching maturity. Iron manacles were attached to their wrists and ankles, each one bearing a few links of iron chain that had apparently been severed. Each staggering step made a slight clinking sound.
The small figure looked back, peering along the road behind them. “I don’t see them, Papa,” said the boy.
“They’re there. Maybe a few miles back. But they’re following us. The Tsogenese won’t let us go so easily, love.”
They rounded a ruined palace, its turrets and arches cracked and crumbling. The boy stumbled over a huge stone lying half-submerged in the sandy road, and the father helped pick him back up.
Finally they came to what must have once been the center square of this ruined city. The father pulled down his wrappings slightly to peer around, and spied a half-burned wagon in the far corner. “There! There it is!”
The boy began coughing, deep, unsettlingly wet coughs. The father looked at him, and though his face was covered, he was clearly worried.
“Almost there,” he said. “Almost there, my love.”
The two of them limped to the wagon, and the father gestured to a blank stretch of sand. “It’s there. I put it there, long ago. Here. You sit here.” Grunting, he picked up his son and placed him on the edge of the wagon. At first he lifted the child too hard, too fast, and was plainly surprised by it—he had not thought his son could be so