Epiphany

Laura had seen the scabbard when he came. She had never seen the blade. It came out long and straight and plain, without a sound, and the gold still hanging in the air ran down it from the hilt to the point. He didn’t look at it. He let it hang low at his side as if it had always hung from that hand, and through the bond she could feel why. There was no thought in him about the sword at all. His hand knew its weight. His wrist knew which way it wanted to turn. The knowing sat in him as quietly as breath.

She didn’t know where he had got it. She didn’t know what it was called. Her mother’s arm tightened around her.

Andy walked out into the Ring.

Be careful, she sent after him. It was the only thing she could think of that wasn’t come back.

I will. It came to her from a few yards off, steady, in his own voice behind her eyes, and he didn’t turn his head.

He went across the ash at an ordinary pace, not hurrying, his mantle swinging behind him, wet at the hem. Laura watched him go with every one of her eyes. A little way along from her, Myra stood inside Marie’s arm with her cane disappeared in her Inventory, and her face turned after him as he passed, as it turned when a color changed. Riley’s hair lifted off her shoulders and went still again. Sandra had hold of her. Meatball lay across her feet. Beyond them, at the far edge of the Ring, Mildred stood where she had stood all night, hands folded in front of her, and at the rim Arabella stood a little apart from everyone with her bloodied hand hanging open at her side. None of them moved.

Out in the middle, the man in the funeral robes hadn’t seen him yet. He had his face turned down after another breath from Sumiku, his right hand drawn back for the sweep, the vine pulled taut behind him to the rim. He stood very straight, his weight off the left leg. Erin was holding it with her whole body. Laura could see it in the line of her arms.

The fight saw him coming. Laura saw it see him. Sumiku turned with gold fire running along the edges of her wings and in small bursts out of her mouth, the torn left wing slowly mending. Norah came back a step on her heels with her sticks up. Erin didn’t lower her hands; only her eyes moved. The four of them gave him room. Then they fell back a step each, all together, and left the man in the middle of the Ring standing on his own with Erin’s thick vine still wound tight around his ankle. Samson Drei let go of the other leg and backed off with them, stiff-legged, his lips drawn back from his teeth.

Sam came back last. She came past Andy close, Thrustworthy still up and the blood dried on her chin, and spoke to him as she passed, low, and the Ring was quiet enough by then that Laura heard it.

“Doesn’t cut, Andy. Nothing does. Not Thrustworthy, not Sumiku’s naginata, not Norah’s sticks, not Erin’s gun. We had to beat him up the old-fashioned way. Just so you know.”

Andy nodded. He walked on until he stood in front of the man in the funeral robes, a little more than a sword’s length off, and stopped there. Samson Drei left the others and came after him, and planted himself at Andy’s heel with his teeth bared, his eyes on the man in front of them.

“Abi-Eshu,” he said quietly.

It wasn’t loud. It went across the whole of the Ring anyway. Laura had known the name since before the wedding. Claire had found it in the Sky Archive and told everyone, and they had all gone on saying Nergal, because Nergal was the one who was coming. Abi-Eshu was a man in one of Arabella’s stories. A Master, seven thousand years ago, who had been mortal once, and died. Andy said it to his face as if that were all he had ever been.

Abi-Eshu turned all the way around, the vine dragging at his ankle, and looked at Andy, and Laura watched him fail to understand what he was looking at. It went across what was left of the gray of his face, between the closed eye and the swollen cheek, and stayed there. He looked at the mantle and the wet hem, at the circlet with her blue rose in it, and back at Andy’s face, as if it were a sum that wouldn’t come out.

“You,” he said. “I sent you down. Where I sent you, nothing comes back. I have sent a great many there.”

“I came back,” Andy said.

Then Abi-Eshu’s eyes went to the sword, and Laura watched his face put itself back together. It went flat and gray again, granite once more, with one eye shut and the cheek gone black under it. Whatever he saw in Andy’s hand, it didn’t trouble him.

“Four of your pets could not defeat me,” he said. He didn’t raise his voice. He hadn’t raised it once, all night. “The dragon. The one who falls over her own feet. The one whose sword rings. The green one, holding my foot as a child holds a dog on a string.” He didn’t look at any of them. “Four. They have been at it for some time. You saw. Tell me why you believe that you can.”

Laura felt it go into Andy and not catch on anything. Nothing in him moved to meet it.

“I don’t,” Andy said. “I’m not fighting for me.”

Something stirred in the black beard that might have been the beginning of a smile. “Then you will lose for someone else,” Abi-Eshu said, “and they will stand there and watch you do it. I have watched it before. It does not take long.”

His eyes left Andy then. They came past him, across the ash, and found Laura where she stood in her mother’s arm, and rested on her. On all three of her, one after the other, slowly, as he had looked at her all night. Counting. Laura felt it land on her as his hand had landed, and every one of her went cold in the same place.

Down the bond, the cold in Andy went deeper. Laura’s hands closed at her sides, all three of them.

“You hurt Laura,” Andy said softly. He said her name as he always said it. It came down the bond to her with the whole weight of him behind it, and there was nothing at all of that weight in his voice. The sword glimmered.

“You hurt Riley, and Myra. I took the chains off them myself.” At the edge of the ash Riley’s hair came up round her shoulders again. Flickers of blue-white light danced on the blade’s edge. “This was Erin’s garden, and you destroyed it. You hurt her.” At the rim, Erin’s outstretched hands were shaking harder. Blue-white fire limned the sword now.

“You hurt Emily. She still can’t get up.” Far across the ash, Emi bent lower over the girl in her arms. The flames flickered brighter. “You hurt Chloe, and Marissa, and Claire, and Dawn, and Emi. You hurt Katherine and Eden. You hurt Sam, and Sumiku, and Norah. You hurt Anna and Arabella. You hurt every one of my family tonight, and I wasn’t here.” He let a breath go by. The sword burned now, limned in blue-white fire. “That’s who this is for. I’m here for them.”

Abi-Eshu drew a breath to answer him.

He never used it. Andy stepped in.

Laura didn’t see the sword move. She felt it. The cold in Andy didn’t change at all, not by a hair. One long step, and his whole weight going in behind his arm, and the blade was in Abi-Eshu’s belly almost to the hilt.

Thrustworthy had rung off him all night. Sam had smacked him around like a rag doll, and between the four of them they had closed an eye, burned the robe off him and bruised him black down one side, but nobody had been able to cut through his skin.

The sword made no sound at all.

Abi-Eshu looked down, and Laura looked with him. The blade had gone into the funeral robes and through them and into him, and it stayed there, and Andy’s hand stayed on the hilt. The blue-white fire bathed him in spectral light. Abi-Eshu’s great hands, blistered across the backs, came up on either side of the steel and stopped short of the fire, open, not touching it, as though he didn’t know what they were for. His breath went out of him in one long, slow push.

His face changed. First it was surprise. Plain surprise, almost a child’s. Laura had watched that face all night, over the chains and through the pain and down the length of his arm while his hand closed on her. She had seen it bored, and pleased, and hungry. She had never seen it frightened.

She saw it now.

Around them nobody moved. Sumiku had come down onto the ash behind him with her wings half open and the fire gone still along their edges. Norah stood with both sticks lowered. Sam had Thrustworthy up and didn’t use it. At the rim Erin still held the vine, both hands closed on the air in front of her as though the rope of it ran through them.

“My Queen,” Abi-Eshu said.

Andy didn’t move. His hand stayed on the hilt. The blade stayed where he had put it. Through the bond, nothing in him had changed. The cold was all still there, level and quiet and certain, and under it the settled thing she couldn’t see into. She could feel every bit of him now, and she didn’t know what he was going to do next. She didn’t know if he knew.

Laura stood in her mother’s arm, with her hand still warm from his, and waited, as he had asked her to.

——

The blade was still in Abi-Eshu’s belly, a hand’s width short of the guard, and Abi-Eshu’s call still hung over the Ring with nothing answering it. Andy could feel the grip under his palm, the leather of it, and the weight on the far end of the steel. He could feel nothing in the sword at all. It hadn’t told him anything, going in. It had simply gone where his hand had already known it would go.

Behind him, through the bond, Laura was waiting where he had left her. He didn’t have to turn to know it. He could feel her mother’s arm around her and the warmth still in the hand he had let go of, and her worry, and under the worry the steadiness that was holding it in place. She was doing what he had asked. He held on to that for a moment, as a man on a ledge keeps one hand on the rock.

Then he drew the sword out. It came free without resistance. Abi-Eshu’s breath went in hard as it came, and his knees went, and he came down onto them in the ash in front of Andy, slowly, all of that great weight folding at once. One hand went to the wound and pressed there. The other stayed open on the ground beside him, fingers spread. Erin’s vine was still wound tight round his ankle, and it drew in a little as he went down, and more of them wrapped up around his calves, as if they meant to keep him there.

Andy stepped back a pace. He held the blade low at his side, still burning brightly, and could feel the entire harem in that fire. His arm was steady. He didn’t know where the steadiness was coming from and he didn’t look at it too closely.

The four women who had fought him stayed where they had fallen back to give him room. Sam had Thrustworthy up and her jaw set, and the split in her lip had opened again. Norah stood on her heels with both sticks raised, breathing hard, her weight off one hip. Sumiku stood behind them on the ash with her wings half open and the fire lying quiet along their edges, and at the rim Erin held the vine, both hands out, relaxing a little now, breathing deeply. Nobody spoke. Abi-Eshu knelt in the ash and breathed.

Between one breath and the next, Ereshkigal was standing on the ash in front of Abi-Eshu, over him.

She stood half turned from Andy for no longer than it took him to know that someone was there, and then she turned her head, and he saw her face.

She was tall for a woman, a head shorter than Andy, and she stood as if she were the taller of the two of them. Her robe was dark and fell straight to the ash, and it left her back bare from the nape to the waist. Her skin was pale, white with blue under it, the pale of skin that had been a long time under water. Her hair hung black and straight to the small of her back. On it sat a crown of bone-white gold, plain, with seven points. The air around her smelled of cold stone and dark water, the kind of cold that came up out of a cellar door in August, and Andy breathed it in before he understood what he was smelling.

Her eyes were black all the way through. At the outer corner of the left one was a small mole.

The face was Alla’s.

He had seen it in the dark under the Hotel, on a reed mat in a knot of paired women, crying so hard she couldn’t finish a braid. In a roofless mudbrick room the same girl had rubbed cold hearth ash over that mole with her fingertips, so she could walk out of the door in Anna’s place. Inside Arabella’s memory he had watched the face again, older and already gone pale, on a stone seat at the bottom of the Irkalla stair, ruling that Dumuzid’s name stayed written and Dumuzid stayed dead. Before any of that, at the masquerade in the Fifth Challenge, he had danced with her, her hand cold in his and a mask over the mole.

Andy’s breath went out of him. His hand closed on the hilt until the leather creaked.

Down the bond, Laura’s worry leapt. He felt it go up all at once, the whole height of it, and he couldn’t do anything about it but stand there and let her feel him standing.

Across the Ring the household had gone still. Sumiku folded her wings, and the last of the fire went out of their edges. Riley’s hair had come up round her and Sandra both. Myra’s face had turned toward the woman on the ash before anyone else’s had, and her free hand had found Marie’s sleeve. Over by Anna, Chloe lifted her head, the dark circlet crooked in her curls, and didn’t look away again.

At the edge of the Ring, Arabella had turned her face toward the woman on the ash. Her bloodied hand still hung open at her side. Farther off, Mildred stood apart where she had stood all night, with her hands folded in front of her, and didn’t move at all.

Abi-Eshu lifted his head. “My Queen.” It came out of him in pieces, low, the breath catching on it. “You came. My Queen, I— you came up.”

There was a look in his face Andy had not seen in it all night, and it took him a moment to know it for hope. Abi-Eshu was looking up at her the way a man in the water looks at the boat.

Ereshkigal’s eyes passed over him as they would have passed over a stone in a field. They passed over the sword in Andy’s hand, and over Andy, and went on past both of them, across the Ring, to its edge.

Anna lay there on her side in the ash. Her head was in Marissa’s lap. Katherine knelt beside her and held one of her hands in both of hers, against her own chest. Eden knelt close on Anna’s other side with her long hair spilling over the ash. Anna didn’t move. From where he stood Andy couldn’t tell whether she was breathing, and he watched Ereshkigal look, and look, as if she couldn’t tell either.

Her eyes went next to Emily. Emily lay in Emi’s arms at the far end of the rim, all six of Emi’s arms folded round her, and she had stopped shaking. She lay quite still against Emi’s chest with her hair fallen over her face. Emi was rocking her, barely. The air round the two of them was warm. Andy could smell it even from the middle of the Ring, faint under the cold stone and the dark water: cut grass, and something flowering, and sun on a wall at the end of a long afternoon, as though someone had opened a door onto a garden that wasn’t there. He had smelled it on the dance floor tonight, with her hands on his shoulders. She never asked it to.

Ereshkigal looked at Emily for a long moment, and then her eyes went back to Anna, and stayed.

Her face didn’t move. It stayed as composed as it had been when she arrived, still and straight. But a thing came into the black eyes and didn’t go out of them again. Andy had seen regret in that face once, on the seat in Irkalla, plain enough that he couldn’t mistake it. What he saw there now was not regret, but something a good deal closer to horror, held in behind a face that wouldn’t let a single line of it through.

“I thought my sister had left this place,” Ereshkigal said. She didn’t say it to anyone. She said it to the ash between herself and Anna. “When the Fifth Challenge ended. I thought she had gone.”

Her voice was level. It didn’t rise on any word of it. Nobody answered her.

He understood. Once Anna came out of that first season a goddess, Alla had taken her down to Irkalla and hidden her there, because she was afraid Abi-Eshu would come for her again, and take her back, and break her. That was what the girl with ash on her face had been trying to stop, in the mudbrick room. That was what she had gone down under the world to stop.

And the man she had been hiding her sister from had been sent here under her own command, and her sister was lying on her side in the ash.

“I will hear what was done here,” Ereshkigal said.

Abi-Eshu drew a breath to answer her. “My Queen. Where the Law— where it is silent, the one who carries it may—”

She turned her face away from him while he was still speaking, as she might have turned it from a draft, and looked at the women of the household.

Marissa moved first. Chloe and Dawn were already coming, Chloe on her knees across the ash and Dawn with her ears straight up, and they knelt on either side of Anna and took her between them. Marissa lifted Anna’s head out of her lap with both hands, carefully, and laid it in Chloe’s, and kept her palm against Anna’s cheek for a second after it was done. Eden stayed where she was, kneeling at Anna’s side. Katherine let go of Anna’s hand, set it down on the ash as gently as if it might wake, and crossed to Emily at the far end of the rim, and knelt beside Emi, where Claire and Liesa were already kneeling.

Marissa got up. She came across the ash with her chin up and stopped beside Riley, who had Sandra’s hand in hers and her hair loose all round both their shoulders. Laura stood a step away from them inside her mother’s arm. Myra stood with Marie’s. They faced the woman with the crown together, and Andy, a pace off with the sword still in his hand, found that he was facing her too.

“When we came up to the Ring,” Marissa said, “he was waiting for us.”

She said it in her near-whisper. Andy had heard that voice make a whole room lean toward it without knowing it was leaning. Ereshkigal didn’t lean. She stood exactly as she had stood, and listened, and Marissa’s voice went into her and did nothing at all.

“He had his women lay us down. The Fourteen, all of them that were left.” Marissa’s hands were shut at her sides. “They put us on our backs on the ash, two by two, and held us there with their hands, and when their hands came away the cold stayed. You couldn’t lift anything more than an inch off the ground, and you could turn your head, and that was all. And Laura and Myra and Riley—” She looked along at them, and back. “He put them on their knees in the middle, in chains he made out of fog.”

Ereshkigal said nothing. She didn’t look at the three of them. She looked at Marissa, and the horror in her eyes didn’t move.

“He turned his face on us,” Riley said. “On the three of us. He didn’t touch us. He just— looked. And it hurt.” She swallowed. “All three of us at once. Everywhere. From nowhere. It didn’t leave a mark. Not one.” Her hand tightened on Sandra’s. “And the voices. His women’s voices. They went at each of us for the thing we were most— for what we were most scared of. They told me—” Her breath went in and didn’t come back out right. “They told me J— JJ would grow up. In a house that—”

Her voice caught on his name and broke on what came after it, and she stood with her mouth open on the rest and couldn’t get it out. Chloe’s arm went around Riley’s waist.

“Riley.” Myra’s voice was barely there, meant for one person. She didn’t turn her head. “You’re coral again, right at the edges, and it’s coming back.”

Riley nodded, once, hard. “In a house that doesn’t miss me,” she finished, and her voice held for it.

“He gave them an order.” That was Sam. She had come across from the fight while Riley spoke and stood a little apart from the rest with Thrustworthy point-down in the ash and both hands on the pommel. Her jaw was tight.

“I was on the rim. Flat on my back, with their cold on me. I heard every word.” She said the next part carefully, as if she were reading it back off a page. “‘Drain them. Any one on that line who is a trouble to you.’ That was it. Drain her. Not kill her. Just make sure she didn’t wake up.” Sam’s mouth twisted. “So they did. Chloe. Katherine. Marissa. Liesa. Eden. Over and over. Through them. Like they were doors.” Behind her, a line of fire ran along the edges of Sumiku’s wings, gold going to red, and Sumiku didn’t put it out.

“Then Anna walked out,” Marissa said.

“The Law.” Abi-Eshu’s voice came up from the ash, low and broken. “The Law was silent there. Where it is silent, my Queen, the one who carries it… the one who carries it decides. They tried to impede collection. You said so. You—”

Ereshkigal kept her eyes on Marissa.

Andy stood in the ash with Caledfwlch in his hand and didn’t move. He had seen the chains when he came. He had seen the women on the ground, and Anna not moving, and Emily shaking in Emi’s arms, and Laura on her knees with fog at her throat. He had broken the chains with his hands. How any of it had got there, he was hearing now, for the first time, standing a pace from the man who had done it.

“He came down off his throne,” Laura said. She said it last, from all three of her mouths at once, in her one voice, and it shook. “After that. After Anna. He got up, and he came down, and he walked over to me. He didn’t even say my name.” Every one of her was looking at Ereshkigal. “He put out his hand and closed it. On me. All of me. And he pulled.” Her voice went thin. “He was trying to tear my soul apart. To get it in pieces. Out of me. He kept pulling. He kept—”

The fear came up in her as she said it. It came up the bond into Andy all at once, and he knew it. It was the fear that had sat at the very top of the bond all night while he was below, pinned there, with nothing else riding on it. No location he could use. No reason. Only how frightened she was, as high as the bond would carry it. This was what it had been.

I’m here, he sent. I’m right here.

I know. It came back to him small and unsteady, but it came back. I love you.

Sarah bent her head close to her daughter’s. “I’ve got you, Laura,” she said, low, and drew her in tighter, as much of her as one arm would hold. Her eyes, on Abi-Eshu, were as hard as sapphires. “I’ve got you. He’s not touching you, not ever again.”

Andy looked at Abi-Eshu on his knees, with his hand pressed to his belly and his face turned up toward his Queen. He held himself still. It took everything he had, and he did it. Ereshkigal’s eyes went to Laura. To the three faces, one after another, and then to all of them, and they rested there.

Then she turned to the man at her feet. “You were sent to collect a debt,” Ereshkigal said. “The Law protects what is taken in order to collect it. Only that.”

Abi-Eshu looked up at her.

“You struck down my sister,” she said. “You struck down the girl beside her. That was not collecting. You put your hand into Laura Cooper and tried to tear her soul apart. That was not collecting.”

“My Queen.” His voice cracked straight across. “My Queen, I— it was for the debt, it was all— I had her, I had the one on your tablet, I—” And then it changed. It wasn’t an agent’s voice any longer. It was older, and it had an edge in it Andy hadn’t heard all night, the edge of a man speaking down to someone who belonged to him. “Alla. Alla, you owe me this. You owe me—”

He didn’t seem to hear himself say it. Ereshkigal looked at him.

“Abi-Eshu,” she said. He stopped. “I take back my protection. I take back my favor.” Her voice didn’t rise. “You are no longer mine.”

Abi-Eshu stared up at her. His mouth was open. Nothing came out of it. Ereshkigal turned away from him. “Alla.” He said it to her back. He said it as if he had said it ten thousand times before, to a girl on a reed mat who had to come when he called. “Alla. You were mine before you were anything. Look at me.”

She didn’t. She stood where she was, as straight as she had sat on the stone seat in Irkalla, with her bare back to him and the crown of bone-white gold on her black hair, and her eyes had gone across the ash to Anna, lying with her head in Chloe’s lap. She didn’t go to her. She didn’t take a step.

Abi-Eshu knelt in the ash with his hand pressed to the wound and Erin’s vine round his ankle, and no one over him now.

Andy stood in the ash a few paces from him and slid Caledfwlch into the scabbard at his hip. It went home with a small, final sound. The circlet sat on his brow with Laura’s blue rose set into it, cool against his skin, and the mantle hung wet and heavy from his shoulders.

Abi-Eshu hadn’t stirred since she turned away. He was looking at her back, at the bare pale skin and the black hair over it, at the crown of bone-white gold, as if he could make her turn around by looking. She didn’t turn around.

The rest of the Ring had hardly moved. Sam stood with both hands on Thrustworthy’s pommel and its point in the ash, and her eyes on Ereshkigal now, not on the man at her feet. Norah had let her sticks drop to her sides. Sumiku had folded her wings. At the rim Erin still held the vine, though her arms had begun to shake in long, slow waves, and she didn’t let it go. Over by the edge of the ash Chloe and Dawn knelt on either side of Anna with Eden beside them, and at the far end of the rim Katherine had her hand on Emi’s back while Emi rocked. Arabella stood at the edge of the Ring, her bloodied palm open at her side, looking at Ereshkigal and at nothing else.

---

Since the First Gate, there had been something in Andy that he was holding back.

He had felt it the moment his foot came down on the far side of the glass. It sat behind his ribs and pressed at them from the inside, all the time, steadily, like a breath he had taken and not let go. Herman had looked at him in the Amber Pastures and told him what he was doing before he knew it himself. You’re holding it at bay, for now. I don’t think you know you’re doing it. He hadn’t known. He still didn’t know how. It had pushed at him when Marie told him what had come through the walls of the Gentle Hearth, and he had held it. It had gone quiet when Sarah looked up at him and spoke, as if it were listening. It was pressing now, while he stood in the ash and looked at the man on his knees.

He looked at Abi-Eshu. A dead man. A Master, seven thousand years dead, who had been claimed as a thrall the night he died and carried down, and had walked up out of the ground tonight in the Queen’s name with nothing able to cut him. And now he wasn’t the Queen’s. He wasn’t anyone’s. He was a dead Master on his knees in the ash with nobody’s protection over him at all.

Something in Andy’s head clicked.

It was a small thing, almost a sound, the kind of click a latch makes in another room of a quiet house. He knew what it had clicked against. When the bond had opened all the way, a few minutes ago, with Laura’s three faces looking up at him and Sarah’s arm round her, something had come to rest in him that he hadn’t been able to see the bottom of. He had been carrying it since, not looking at it. Now a piece had come and fitted against the edge of it. Only a piece. The rest was there somewhere, he could feel the shape of where it went, and he didn’t have it.

He didn’t chase it.

At the foot of the Gate, with the lantern held up in his right hand and the gold of it lying on the glass, Herman had told him how it worked. Andy had every word of it. It gives you the potential. That’s what the crossing does. It puts it in you. It doesn’t finish it. It completes when you believe in it, Andy. All the way. And Andy had stood there in his wet wedding clothes with the river of stars going by under the glass and given him the only answer he had.

I need to see Laura first.

He turned away from Abi-Eshu. Nobody stopped him. Sam watched him go, her hands still on her sword. Ereshkigal didn’t look round. Riley did, from inside Sandra’s arm, her hair lifting off her shoulders as he passed; Myra’s face turned after him before he was level with her, and he wondered what color he was. Marie had both arms round her daughter and didn’t let go. He went back across the ash the way he had come, at the same ordinary pace, and every step of it the thing behind his ribs pressed at him and he let it press.

Laura was standing where he had left her, all three of her, inside her mother’s arm. Every one of her faces was turned toward him as he came. He could feel her through the bond before he reached her, the whole of her, frightened and waiting and holding herself still because he had asked her to. Sarah was looking at him too, over her daughter’s shoulder, with those clear blue eyes that had looked at a window for sixteen years.

“Is it over?” Laura said, from all three of her mouths. “Andy. Is he— is it done?”

“Not yet,” he said.

He stopped in front of her. He took the hands of the one of her nearest him, both of them, and turned them in his. Her fingers closed on his at once.

He had her leave. He’d had it since the day before the wedding. She had come looking for him at the wedding site with Myra walking between her two bodies, while he stood at the little bridge over the stream with the arbor already draped in ribbons at the far end of the dell, and she had told him with both her voices. If you see the way through—if you know what to do to save us, to save everyone—you go. Don’t wait for us to catch up. And then, before she let him go: Take the door, even if I’m not standing there. Myra had told him the same, in the end. He had carried both of them down into the dark with him and back up again. He didn’t need her leave. He needed something else.

“Laura,” he said. He said it out loud, because it mattered, and because he wanted her mother to hear it too. “I need you to trust me. Whatever I do next, whatever it— whatever it looks like. I need you to believe in me.”

She looked at him with all three of her faces. Sarah’s arm tightened round her. Her mother didn’t say anything. She looked from Andy’s face to her daughter’s, and back, and waited with her.

“Always,” Laura said.

It came from all three of her at once, in her one voice, and it didn’t shake. Down the bond, he felt her mean it. He felt it go all the way to the bottom of her, with nothing under it holding back. And he felt something else in her, behind it, that he had never once felt there, not in all the years he had known her: she had let herself believe in a happy ending. Not for the others, this time. Not for him. For her.

Happy endings, she sent. It came to him quietly, as if she were telling him a secret she had only just been told herself. They’re for me too.

“They always were,” Andy said.

All three of her faces did the same thing at once. They crumpled, and then they didn’t; she held them, and looked at him, and he felt her let go, down the bond, of a fear so old he had never known it was there. Her mother’s chin came down on the top of the nearest head and stayed there. With her belief under his own, he believed too.

He had thought it would be harder than that. It wasn’t. It was the easiest thing he had ever done. He stopped holding his breath.

It rose in him slowly.

There was no hurry in it. It came up from behind his ribs and out through the rest of him at its own pace, steady, filling him from the inside. It was vast. It was far larger than he was, so much larger that he couldn’t find an edge to it anywhere, and it was calm, all the way through, without a single ripple in it. He had no name for it. He didn’t reach for one. He was as certain of it as he was of the ground under his feet.

Laura’s hands tightened in his.

He felt her feel it. She couldn’t have said what it was; he couldn’t have said himself. It went down the bond to her as calm, a stillness in him so deep and so sure of itself that he felt it reach the floor of her, and felt her hands close on his to hold on to it.

Nobody else had noticed anything. Sarah was still looking at her daughter. Behind him, on the ash, nothing had changed: Abi-Eshu on his knees, the Queen with her back to him, Sam with her sword. His hands were the same hands. He was standing where he had been standing. Only everything in him had changed, and gone quiet, and was certain.

Andy stood in the ash and let it fill him.

At the edge of his sight, Mildred was moving.

She had left the place where she had stood apart all night. Andy saw it without turning his head: Mildred, her hands no longer folded in front of her, walking across the ash at an even pace toward the man on his knees. She didn’t hurry. She didn’t look at anyone else. Nobody stopped her, because nobody on the island had ever thought to stop a Mildred going anywhere. There had been Mildred in every room he had walked into since the day he came, and this one was walking as any of them walked down a corridor of the Hotel, with somewhere to be.

She was the one who had stood in a field in the wasteland and drawn a thread of light back into herself, and told him something had been added to her, and gone home through the Forest with Emi and Claire and Dawn. I keep all the warm things. He had never asked her what she meant to do with them.

His eyes followed her, and the rest came back to him, not as thinking, but in pieces, each one whole, each one exactly as it had been, because that was how his memory had always kept things, whether he wanted them kept or not.

A beach on this island, under a hard white sun, in the years when Arabella had been Seshat. The sand blasted down to black glass in long gouges, and holes in the light that his eyes kept sliding off. Arabella in a linen sheath with a leopard’s pelt knotted at her shoulder and a seven-pointed star on her black wig, very straight, putting her arm out in a direction he had no name for and bringing it back with something closed in her hand. She had thrown it down on the sand. It had lain there larger than the beach and small at the same time, curled in on itself, with more eyes in it than it had room for, and most of them shut. The Deep Behind the Stars. Mildred.

And a tall man wrapped close in white linen, with a narrow straight beard, who had looked at what lay on the sand for a long time and then stepped back half a pace and bowed his head to her. Ptah, he had been called there. It had been Horun, under another name and another face.

Mildred was halfway across the ash. She made no sound on it.

Horun had told him the terms right there, at the edge of the memory, with the black figure standing on the sand where it had been made. Andy had every word.

That the Deep would stay bound until my sister chose to release her. Or until the Forbidden Resolution. Then Horun’s eyes had come to him. If the Deep ever eats a Master’s animus, after his death, the binding falls away. That was written into it.

Then the ward. Horun had gone on before Andy could answer, in the same plain voice. And my sister warded the island. If the Deep ever breaks loose, by that road or any other, the ward goes up. Nothing on the island leaves it, and nothing on it reaches past it with any power it has, until the power of a first-generation Host chooses otherwise. And the ward goes on wounding her until there’s nothing left of her but her core. And last, after he had let a breath go by: It’s still there. Under all of it. Neither gods nor anything like her could get through it.

Abi-Eshu hadn’t seen her coming. He knelt with his hand pressed to his belly and his face turned up toward the Queen’s back, and his lips were moving, and whatever he was saying to her, she didn’t answer it.

Andy’s eyes went past Mildred, to Ereshkigal. She was standing where she had been standing, straight-backed in the ash, with her face set and her back to the man she had cast off. The crown sat level on her black hair. Her hands hung at her sides, quite still, and the cold-stone smell of her lay over that whole side of the Ring, under the cut grass drifting from where Emi knelt. She was looking at Anna, not at Mildred, and the face she was looking with was the face from the bottom of the Irkalla stair.

A low hall, very wide, its roof hanging just above a woman’s head. A gray that was hardly light at all, lying on the floor and the walls. And the walls lined from the floor to the roof with clay tablets standing on their edges, row on row of them, hundreds, thousands, every one crowded with marks. Ereshkigal had called them the Book of the Dead. Andy hadn’t been able to read a single wedge of any of them.

One tablet had stood apart, on a ledge of its own at the height of her seat. It was smaller than the rest, and newer, the clay dried paler, the marks on it few and large and pressed in too hard, by a hand that had never held a stylus before. Dumuzid’s name, in Dumuzid’s own hand. But Dumuzid had already written his own name in the Book of the Dead, she had said. And then, with the regret plain in her face and not a word of it in her voice: His name is written. He is dead. He is mine to keep.

Horun had said one more thing about it, later, walking on through the corridor at his side. Every afterlife I know of keeps a book of its dead. One kind or another. And then, with the corner of his mouth moving, And bureaucracy plagues every one of them. Andy had laughed. He wasn’t laughing now. He stood with it.

Laura’s hands were still in his. He felt them there, warm, and her grip hadn’t loosened at all. And the last piece came back to him through his own hands.

The morning after Laura’s first night back. They had been sitting on the couch in the Suite under a blanket, after pancakes, and the door had slid open and Arabella had come in barefoot, in a robe the white of morning mist, with her hair down nearly to the small of her back and nothing on her lips at all. It had taken him a second to know her. She had sat down across from them and folded her hands in her lap and told them.

Under his hands Laura’s fingers moved, once, and settled again. She had been there that morning, on the couch, with her hand going desperate in his while Arabella talked. She was here now. He held on.

Later, in the Inner Gardens, at the old wooden table near the wisteria, she had told him the rest of it alone. With Laura, there was no marker. No echo. It was as if the moment she died, she slipped out the side door and vanished. Souls could be traced, she had said. She went back and tagged the last of them, and brought them back by it. Laura had left nothing to tag. I had to bring her back through you. Through the bond you share. It was the only anchor left.

Mildred was a few steps from Abi-Eshu now.

The pieces came together in Andy’s head all at once.

They were simply together, as the bond had simply been open: the click from before and the settled thing in him and every one of the pieces in their places, and the vast calm thing that had risen in him holding all of it up. And Andy knew how to save everyone.

Everyone.

He couldn’t be sure of it. There was no way to be sure, and he knew that too, as clearly as he knew the rest. If he was wrong about any one piece of it, he didn’t know what would happen, or who would pay for it.

Mildred was still walking. Abi-Eshu hadn’t seen her yet. He was still looking at Ereshkigal’s back.

Sam had seen her. Sam’s head came around, and Thrustworthy’s point came up an inch off the ash, and her eyes went from Mildred to the man on his knees and then across the ash to Andy, and stayed on him, asking. Andy met them. He shook his head, barely. After a moment Sam set the point back down in the ash and let it rest there, and didn’t move again.

Something low and blue and white went out across the ash from beside Andy’s feet, after Mildred.

Samson Drei. He had been at Andy’s own heel since the fight broke off, through the sword and the Queen and the walk back across the ash. The corgi had ash to his belly and a burned thread of the funeral robe caught in his ruff, and he trotted straight to Mildred with his ears up and put his nose to the hem of her uniform.

Mildred stopped. She looked down at him, and let him.

He went over her hem, and her shoes, and her ankles, slowly and thoroughly, as he went over every new pair of shoes that came through the door of the Suite. Then his tail went. His whole body went with it, wobbling from his ears back, and he circled her once and butted his head against her ankle, as he butted Andy’s hand whenever he saw Andy, and looked up at her with his tongue out.

Andy had lived with that dog since his birthday. Samson always knew who in a room was frightened, and who was hurt, and went to them before anybody else had noticed. He had just gone over the Deep Behind the Stars from hem to ankle, and wagged.

Mildred stood looking down at him. Her eyes softened, and she waited until he was done.

Samson turned away from her, satisfied, and trotted back across the ash to where Riley stood inside Sandra’s arm. Meatball lifted her head as he came. He turned around twice beside her and lay down against her side, with his chin on his paws.

Laura was looking up at Andy with all three of her faces. Through the bond he could feel her trust, steady as a floor, and under it, quietly, the belief she had only just let herself have.

Andy ran his thumb across the back of her hand. He kept hold of her.

Mildred hesitated for a moment, and looked at Andy. He nodded, a small gesture. He let Mildred walk on.