Glass and Shadows

The last of the glass was still coming down when the floor emptied.

It came down onto nothing. A pair of the dead women had Emily pinned on her back by both arms, her gold-and-pink hair spread across the blackwood, and then they had the blackwood and the glass and no Emily at all. Across the whole Hall it was the same, in the same instant. Hands that had been full were not. The howling went up in a ragged chord, broke in the middle, and fell away, and for the first time since the bell the Dance Hall was quiet—the kind of quiet that lets a glass be heard settling three tables away.

It was not silent. The wind still came in through the torn dome. Under all of it, low enough that it might have been the wind, the whispering went on—a great many people talking in the next room with the door shut. None of it came through as words.

The fourteen came back to him. They drifted in off the tables and the floor in their matched pairs, rags trailing, feet a hand’s breadth above the glass, and took up their slow circle around him again, as though they had only been sent across the room to fetch something and had come back without it.

Nergal did not watch them come. He had begun to walk.

He went down the length of the family tables at the pace he had used for everything else, a mourner’s pace. Glass crunched beneath his sandaled feet. A chair lay on its back in his path and he stepped over it. A place card had fallen face down among the glass. He turned it over with the side of his foot, read the name on it, and left it lying. At the Coopers’ table a camera sat on the cloth beside a plate with one bite gone from the cake. He looked at that for a while too.

The long blade of glass still stood upright in the wreck of the cake table. He stopped beside it.

“They never finish the cake,” Nergal said.

He said it to the room at large, not as a threat but as a man remarks on the weather in a stranger’s kitchen.

Arabella had not moved from the garden doors. “There was a second one in the kitchens. There always is.”

Her right hand was closed at her side, in the folds of her dress. A step behind her, Anna stood where Arabella had left her when the fighting began. Her throat was bare where the scarf had been. She was not looking at Nergal. She was looking at the circle.

Nergal nodded as if that were useful to know, and went on to the edge of the dance floor, where the blackwood had been scored white and ran empty all the way to the windows. He stood and looked at it for some time.

“When I came through that door,” he said, in exactly the voice he had used for the cake, “there were sixteen women on this floor. The one written on my tablet was among them. I counted her once, and I counted her three times, and I was pleased with the count.” He turned his head—not his body. “There are none. Not in this room, and not in this house. There is but one pair of hands on this island that could lift sixteen women off a floor between one breath and the next.” He let that lie. “It is standing by the garden door.”

Arabella inclined her head. “Yes. Every one of them.”

The lights along the east wall went out.

They went one after another, from the far end toward him, each light pinched out in its sconce like the lanterns on the garden path. Six went, and seven, and the running dark stopped a yard short of where he stood. His right hand had closed at his side. It was the only part of him that had moved.

He did not turn around to give the order, and he did not raise his voice. “Go down after them. All of you. Bring me the one on my tablet.”

The circle broke its rhythm. The fourteen rose off the floor together, pair by matched pair, up into the dark under the open dome, and hung there turning. The whispering thickened under the wind until it sounded like a crowd.

“Some of those women were touched, up here,” Nergal went on, and it was not the circle he was talking to. He was looking at the garden doors. “Whoever put a hand on one of them will not need to look for her. She could shut her eyes and go straight there, the way water goes downhill.”

Anna spoke to him for the first time since he had come through the doors. “They were never yours to send anywhere.”

Her voice was hoarse, as though it had come a long way up. She did not step forward.

Nergal smiled at her. It was the first time his face had done anything warm, and it was worse than anything it had done cold. “They go where I send them, little half,” he said. “They always have. You would know that, if you had stayed.”

Anna’s eyes went back to the women turning under the dome.

Arabella did not raise her voice. “You are managing it very well. I would hardly have known you were angry. Only the lights. You were not so easily capable of self-control, back then.”

Nergal looked at the dark sconces. Then he looked down at his own closed hand, as if he had not known it was there. He opened it in front of her, one finger at a time, as a man shuts a drawer he never meant to leave open. When he looked up again there was nothing in his face at all.

Above him the fourteen broke their circle. The howl went up again all at once, out through the empty frames of the long windows, and down, until there was nothing left in the windows to see.

Nergal turned from the windows and walked to the only wall the night had not touched.

It was the inner wall, the long one across from the windows, pale stucco and gold filigree, and it carried photographs from one end to the other, from the baseboard to higher than a tall man could reach. Someone had put them up by hand, snapshots and Polaroids, pinned and taped in rows that wandered as they went.

They began at the left-hand end with a baby hanging on to a teddy bear and went on from there in order, through a small boy frowning at a birthday cake, a gap-toothed schoolboy with a black eye, a young man in a paper crown at someone else’s party, until they reached a man in the wrong clothes squinting into the sun as if it had done something to him personally. The same man with one woman at his elbow, then two, then more than the frame could hold. The same man asleep in a chair with his mouth open. The same man soaked to the skin and laughing at whoever had the camera. Nobody had left out the bad ones—they hung in among the good. Every row of it bent in toward the middle of the wall, where one picture, larger than the rest, hung alone with a clear space around it.

Nergal read it. He went along it from the left, slowly, not skipping, his hands clasped behind his back, and did not touch any of it. It took him a long time.

“One man,” he said at last. “His whole life, from the cradle to this house, hung up in its order. They kept the ugly ones in.” He tilted his head at the man asleep in the chair. “Somebody wanted it true more than they wanted it kind. And all of it hung around that one.”

Arabella said nothing at all. Her face stayed the Host’s face. Her hand stayed closed.

Nergal looked back at the picture in the middle. It was a Polaroid, its colors gone soft. A boy and a girl of about thirteen sat on the hood of a sun-bleached car somewhere a long way from any island. The girl was laughing straight into the camera, her dark hair blown across her face. The boy had both arms around her and was holding on tighter than any photograph needed.

“That is the boy,” Nergal said. “Before. He looks as though he thought he would get to keep her.” He considered it. “He came at me tonight with everything he had. I felt it. And tonight he is farther from his wall than he has ever been in his life, and there is nothing where he has gone to walk back along.”

“Leave that,” Anna said.

Nergal took it down first.

He did it carefully, working the pin out of the stucco with two fingers so the white margin would not tear, and held it up close to his face in the storm-light. He looked at it for much longer than it took to see what it was. His thumb rested along one edge of it, on the girl’s side, and did not move.

He opened his fingers and let it fall face down at the foot of the wall, and set his palm flat on the empty place where it had hung.

The stucco went under his hand. Cracks ran out from his palm through the plaster, slowly, and wherever they reached, the photographs came loose and slid, a few at a time, then a whole run of them, down into a pale drift on top of the one he had dropped. He moved his hand to the left and the wall came apart under it, a piece at a time, the gilt peeling away like bark. Then he moved to the right. It was not a blast. It was a decision, made again at every foot of wall.

When the wall was down he took the rest of the Hall apart the same way, in pieces, under his hands. The pillars went one by one, each where it stood. The long bar came down in sections. He reached up to the gilt ledge where the dome had sprung from the wall and drew his hand along it, and it followed his hand down in a long slow fold. The last of the lights went out as he passed them. He did not once come near the garden doors.

Anna made a sound. It was barely a sound, and it was the only one.

When he stopped, the Dance Hall stood open to the sky on every side—a floor of blackwood and rubble with the storm going over it, and the two women standing on it beside a pair of doors that no longer had a wall to hang in.

Nergal stood in the middle of the wreck and brushed the plaster dust from his palms. “None of that was necessary. The Law did not ask me for a single stone of it. I did it because the room was yours, Geshtinanna, and because there is nothing in the terms that says I may not.”

“I know what is in the terms,” Arabella said. “It was still my room.”

Then his voice changed. Nothing else in him did, and it went all the way down.

“You know what the recital’s for, don’t you?” he said. “The seal, and the Queen, and the tablet standing open—it’s a courtesy. People stand still for a recital. They listen to the end of it, because it sounds like something that has to be finished before anything else can happen. They don’t stand still for a man. So I give them the recital, and they stand there and listen, and the collecting lasts longer.”

Arabella’s face did not change. “I know what a performance is for. I have given more of them than you have.”

He smiled at that, and let it go by. When he spoke again he was looking toward the windows, where the howling had gone down.

“She came to me in three,” he said. “Do you know how long it is since anyone sent me anything new? I’ve had pairs. I’ve made pairs. Nobody ever sent me three.” He let the word sit. “One of her is a debt. Three of her is an appetite.”

“You’ll choke on her,” Anna said.

“Then I’ll choke,” Nergal said, pleasantly, “and I’ll take my time about it.”

Arabella took one step away from the doors, and stopped there. “I cannot raise a hand to you. Not while you stand inside the Law. I would rather say so than leave you to wonder about it.”

“I never wondered.” He smiled wider. “It’s the part of the evening I like best.”

“Then here is the rest of it.” Arabella did not raise her voice. “The Law protects the actions you take in order to collect. It does not protect what you do for your own amusement on the way. Break one more thing of mine on this island, one more stone of it, and I will stop caring about its protection.”

Nergal looked at her. It was a long look, and a careful one—a man at the edge of deep water, deciding whether he feels like finding out how deep. Then he held up both hands to her, empty, palms out, plaster dust in the creases.

“Then I’ll keep my counsel,” he said. “I’ll not wait in anything else you’ve made pretty. I’ll wait at the Ring of Fate, in the hollow.”

“Nobody calls it that, anymore,” Arabella said.

“I do,” Nergal said. “Come along. Both of you.” He did not make it a request. Anna had already crossed the step between them and taken Arabella by the wrist, the way Arabella had held hers earlier that night.

“Ara,” Anna said. “I’m with you.”

The wrecked Hall was empty of the three of them between one breath and the next.

---

The hollow came up around them rather than the other way about.

There was no step between. There was the wrecked Hall with the storm going over it, and then there was long grass to the knee and a ring of old stone arches standing up out of it, and the same sky above, still turning over on itself, lit from the inside and gone dark again. The ring sat in a shallow hollow among the trees on the high ground above the Hotel. The lightning showed it to them in pieces. Great weathered uprights, each one taller than Nergal, joined overhead in heavy spans. Moss in the joints. Roots gone down into the stone as though they had been invited. And over every span, so thick that the stone barely showed through, the wisteria hung down in long pale ropes, with jasmine threaded in among it, and the smell of the two of them together lay in the hollow as heavy as water. Erin had called them the Verdant Arches.

The storm did not come in. Thunder broke overhead and reached the ring muffled, as if it had crossed a great deal of wool to get there. The air inside the arches was cooler than the air outside them, and heavier, and it held the scent close, like heat in a shut room.

Nergal had arrived standing exactly as he had stood in the Hall, with the plaster dust still in the creases of his palms. A few yards from him Arabella stood in the grass with Anna at her side. Anna still had her by the wrist. She did not let go.

For a moment none of them moved.

Far off, somewhere below the trees, the howl was still going down. It came up through the ground more than through the air, thin and bent in the middle, and then the heavy quiet of the ring closed over it and there was nothing.

Arabella was looking at the arches. She looked at them longer than she had looked at anything in the Hall, the wisteria and the jasmine and the pale ropes of it moving a little in no wind at all.

Nergal walked a few paces into the ring and stopped. He turned slowly on the spot to take in every arch, and the lightning came and went across his face, and he did not hurry any of it. At the nearest upright he bent to look at the foot of the stone. There was a row of small marks pressed into it at the height of his knee, the same mark over and over, worn nearly smooth. He held his hand an inch off the stone, following the row along without touching it, and straightened again.

“It’s smaller than I remember it,” he said. “And someone has been taking care of it.”

He sounded pleased about both, and neither woman had expected that.

“Everything is smaller when you come back to it,” Arabella said. “Even people.” Her eyes were burning.

Anna was not listening to either of them. She had been silent since the doors, and now it came out of her all at once and in the wrong order, like water out of a jar that has been knocked over.

“Twenty minutes ago there were fiddles,” Anna said. “There were fiddles, and I had a glass of something, I don’t know what, something with fruit in it, and I was standing with you by the doors, and everybody was dancing, and the lights were—you know what the lights were like, you made them. Andy was dancing with the three of her, all three at once, and they were laughing about something. The cellist had her bow up. And then Ninbanda. Puabi. Sabit. Silili. All of them.” Her grip had tightened on Arabella’s wrist without her seeming to notice. “Nisaba came through the doors. She went right past me. She went past me as if I were a post in a field.”

Arabella turned away from Nergal to face her, and it was the first time since the doors that she had put her back to him. “I saw. I was there, Anna. Slower.”

Anna shut her eyes. When she opened them again she let go of Arabella’s wrist and stood on her own in the grass, and this time it came out in order.

“They’re ours,” Anna said. “All fourteen. They’re the women of my season. My sisters. Every one of them stood in the ring with me.” She looked at the arches as she said it, and then away. “I knew two of their faces before I ever knew everyone else’s names. Ninbanda and Ninki. And those two were in that Hall with me tonight.” Her voice caught and she made it go on. “Ninbanda’s face was the same, Ara. It was exactly the same face. She went past me with it, and it didn’t know me.”

Arabella did not look away from her. “Yes. I know.”

She did not reach for her, or soften anything in her face. She stood in the long grass with her closed hand at her side and gave Anna the rest of it, all at once and plainly, as if plainness were the only thing she had left that was worth giving.

“You are owed it straight, so here it is straight,” Arabella said. “Your sister could not break a harem bond of a first-generation Host. Nobody could. Nobody ever has—not a Host, not a Queen, not anyone who has ever tried. It’s nearly as strong as the bond between Andy and Laura.” She did not look toward Nergal, and she did not lower her voice for him either. “A harem bond does not care what becomes of the man it is anchored to. Crowned or damned—it is all the same to the bond. Had he simply died, nothing would have come of it. But when Alla claimed him as her thrall, the bond went down with him, and it took the other fourteen down with it. It has held them there ever since. It holds them because it is still a bond, and because he still exists.”

Anna sat down. She did not fall. Her knees simply stopped holding her. She went down into the long grass in her blue dress and sat there with her hands open in her lap. The lapis at her throat caught the lightning and let it go. She was breathing through her mouth. In, and out. In again, as if she had been running.

Arabella did not kneel. She did not reach down. She stood over her, close enough to touch, and kept her hands at her sides.

“All that time,” Anna whispered, eyes wet. “All of it. They were there all that time.”

Nobody answered her. Nergal had stopped turning. He stood with his back half to them, looking up at the nearest span, and if he was listening, nothing in the set of his shoulders said so.

Anna lifted her face to Arabella. Her voice had gone small and almost steady, the voice of a woman asking a thing she has already guessed the answer to, so that she can at least hear it said. “Could Alla let them go? Now. If she wanted to. If she chose it.”

“Not while he exists.” Arabella said it at once, without any of the pauses she usually put in front of hard things. “She wrote him out of the tablets of death before she realized the true nature of the bond, and cannot simply write him back in them. And it is not their freedom she wants for them. Freedom is not on offer. There is nowhere for them to be free to. What she wants for them is an end. A true death, and a quiet one. It would be a mercy, and it is the one thing she cannot give them.”

The lightning went over. In the ring it made no sound at all.

Anna took that in. Some of the color that had gone out of her face in the Hall came back into it—not relief, but something harder, the kind of flush that comes up in a woman who has just learned something good about a person she has not forgiven.

“That sounds like her,” Anna said.

Arabella looked down at her for a long moment.

From a long way below the trees, the howl came up through the ground again. It was fainter than before, and it had stopped moving. In the grass, Anna lifted her face toward the trees. Arabella’s head turned toward it, and stayed turned, and for as long as it went on she did not seem to be in the ring at all. Nergal did not turn. He smiled at the arch in front of him, a little, as a man smiles at a clock when it strikes the hour he was waiting for.

The heavy quiet closed over the sound. Arabella looked back down at Anna, and this time she did kneel, all at once, in the long grass in her Host’s dress, so that her face was level with Anna’s. When she spoke it was lower, and it was only for Anna, though there was no way in that hollow to keep anything only for Anna.

“Of every season I have ever run,” Arabella said, “there are two I would undo, if I were ever allowed to undo any. That was the first of them.” She did not look toward the arches. “Not for what it cost then. For what it is still costing. Dun is still where he is. You and Alla still do not speak. And he”—she did not look at him either—“is still hers.”

Anna did not answer. She reached out, after a moment, and took hold of Arabella’s sleeve, just the cloth of it between two fingers, and held on. The two of them stayed like that in the grass, the one kneeling and the one sitting, while the wisteria moved over their heads in no wind.

Nergal turned around. “You’re talking across me,” he said, “as though I were a table.”

Arabella did not get up. “We were not talking to you. That is generally what it sounds like.”

He laughed. It was a short sound and not an unpleasant one. He came a little way back toward them through the grass, unhurried, and stopped at an easy distance, looking down at the two of them—a guest at the edge of someone else’s conversation who has decided to join it.

“Then let me say something you can talk to,” Nergal said. “They were mine. They are still mine. I didn’t ask to have them back, but I would have. The bond sent them down after me, and I’m not sorry I have them.” He tipped his head toward the hollow’s edge, toward the dark trees and the Hotel somewhere below them, where the howl had gone. “I matched every pair of them myself, you remember. Took me the best part of a season to get it right. Two of everything. And now? Send a pair into a house and you’ve got the door and the window both. Twice the reach. Nothing wasted. I’ve never made anything better.” A slow smile crept on his face, but he didn’t continue. He did not say it like a boast. He said it the way a man talks about a set of tools he made himself, laid out in their case, each one in the shape cut for it.

Anna let go of Arabella’s sleeve and got up.

It took her two tries. The second time she came up all the way and stood, and brushed nothing off her dress, and looked at him.

“They had names.” Anna took a step toward him through the grass, and then another. “Every one of them had her own name before you ever laid a hand on her. They had mothers who gave them those names. They had their own faces.”

Arabella did not move to stop her. She stayed on her knees in the grass. She did not say Anna’s name, or put out a hand, or get up to stand between them. She let Anna go as far as she meant to go.

Anna stopped three paces short of him. Her hands had closed at her sides.

Nergal looked down at her from his full height, pleasantly, as though she had told him the time. He turned away from her and walked the ring.

He went round it at a mourner’s pace. At every arch he passed he put out one great hand and laid it flat against the stone where the vine grew thickest. He did not push. He only set his palm there, as a man lays a hand on a horse’s neck in passing, and took it away again and went on.

The wisteria went ahead of his hand.

The flowers went first. They lost their color from the top of each long rope downward, pale purple to paper to nothing. Then they were not flowers at all but little gray husks, and they let go of the vine and came down through the air as slowly as ash. The leaves went next. They curled on their stems and darkened and dried, all of them together, with a sound like a page being turned in another room. Then the vine itself went, the old wood and the new, gray and brittle all the way down to the root. It came away from the stone in sheets. For a moment it hung there, still holding the shape of the arch it had grown over. Then it fell in on itself and lay in a heap at the foot of the stone, as ash, and the stone stood up out of it bare.

The jasmine went with it. So did the moss in the joints. The roots that had gone down into the uprights shrank back out of them and crumbled where they hung.

He went on to the next arch, and the next. He did not look back at what was behind him.

Arabella had come up off her knees at the first touch. She stood in the grass with her closed hand at her side and watched him go round, and she did not take her eyes off his hand once. Two of the arches stood a little straighter than the rest, their feet sunk in earth that had been turned not long ago, where someone had set them upright again after a long time lying down. When his hand went flat on the first of those, Arabella took a single step after him. Then she stopped where she was, and did not take another.

Anna had backed up until her shoulder was against Arabella’s. She was watching Arabella’s face.

The grass began to go under his feet.

It started where he walked and spread out from his heels, a gray stain going through the green. Wherever it reached, the grass bent over and dried and crumbled into ash and dust. By the time he had come halfway round, the stain had met itself in the middle of the ring. By the time he was back where he had started, the whole of the long grass was gone, as a field goes when a hard frost comes down on it overnight—only there had been no night, and no frost. What was left was bare ground and ashes. It cracked as it dried, and went on cracking, a web of fine lines running out under the dead stalks, until the two women were standing on it with the ash lying round their feet like something spilled.

Nothing in the ring smelled of anything anymore.

Then the storm came in.

It came in over the tops of the naked arches as if it had been waiting outside a door someone had finally opened. The thunder that had reached them muffled a minute before broke right over the ring now, full. The wind came down after it into the hollow and went through the heaps of ash and dust and lifted them and turned them over, and scattered the gray husks of the flowers across the cracked ground. The lightning showed them the arches the way they had been before anybody cared for them. Bare uprights. Heavy spans. Stone that had been cut for weight and nothing else.

Nergal stood in the middle of it and brushed his palms together once, as if he had been working with flour.

“There,” he said. “That’s what this was before somebody decided it wanted flowers on it. The stone was never cut to be looked at kindly.”

Arabella’s voice had not risen, but it had gone exact. “You have not broken a stone of it. I was watching.” She spoke as if there were a second piece to it, one she chose not to say.

“I know you were.” He looked round at the bare arches with something that might have been affection. “I wanted you to see I hadn’t.”

He walked out a little way from her, toward the middle of the ring, pacing it off like a room he meant to furnish. He stopped at the center. Then he turned back, and spread one hand to take in all of it—the bare stone, the cracked ground, the storm going over.

“Niĝin-namtar-ak,” he said. “That’s its name. It had it long before anybody here thought to put a garden on it. This is where you held the ceremonies. Every one of them. Right there, where you’re standing.” He let the rest of it come slowly. “Geshtinanna.”

He said it the way he had said it in the Hall, like the name of a house he had once burned to the ground, and remembered burning. Arabella did not move. Only her closed hand tightened, until the knuckles stood out white against the dark of her dress.

Anna did not step out from Arabella’s shoulder. “That isn’t yours to say. It never was.”

He smiled at her and did not answer. He turned once where he stood, slowly, all the way round, to take the whole of the bare circle in—every arch, every heap of dead vine, the cracked ground running away from his feet in every direction. When he came back round to face them he looked, for the first time all night, entirely at ease.

“This was the first ground I’d stood on in, longer than I can remember, that nobody had made comfortable for anybody,” he said. “Not a cushion on it. Not a flower. Nobody had tried to make it kind.” He breathed out, long and slow. “You cannot understand how tiring it gets. Every room somebody’s tried to make kind.”

“Nobody was ever comfortable here,” Arabella said. “That was what it was for.”

Nergal nodded slowly, as though she had given him the right answer to something. He looked down at the ground under his feet, and scuffed at it once with the side of his foot, the way he had turned over the place card in the Hall, and looked at what he had turned up.

“Dilmun,” he said. “Hard all the way down, and nothing growing on it you hadn’t put there yourself. I haven’t stood on ground like this since the last time I stood on it there.”

Anna’s hand found Arabella’s arm and closed on it. “He’s going to want his chair.” It was low, and it was for Arabella, not for him.

Nergal crouched.

He went down on his heels in the middle of the ring, in the funeral robes, and put one hand flat on the cracked ground. Then he pushed his fingers down into it, through the dry crust and into the dirt beneath, as easily as into water. He stayed like that. For a long moment nothing happened at all, and the wind went round the bare ring and the dead vine skittered along the ground in front of it.

Then the ground in front of him began to lift.

It came up slowly. The cracked earth bulged and split along its lines and fell away, and something pale shouldered up through it, patient as a root—a block of sandstone the color of old bone, rising a finger’s breadth at a time, with the dirt pouring off its shoulders. Then more of it. A square seat. A high flat back, straight as a wall. Two plain arms. There was no carving on it anywhere, no cushion, no curve made to fit a body. It was the kind of seat that makes whoever stands in front of it feel they have been kept waiting. It came up until it stood at its full height in the middle of the Ring of Fate, and the last of the dirt ran off it, and it stopped.

Nergal took his hand out of the ground and stood. He dusted his fingers off. He turned his back to the seat and began to lower himself into it.

“It’s the Master’s Throne.” Anna’s fingers had gone white on Arabella’s arm. “The Throne of Dilmun.”

“I remember,” Arabella said.

Anna’s eyes had gone to the foot of the throne, to the bare ground just in front of it, and they stayed there. She did not lift them to the seat, or to the man settling into it. She looked at the ground in front of the throne as if that were where she had been taught to look, a long time ago, and had never quite been untaught.

Nergal settled. He sat back into the sandstone with his great hands along the flat arms of it, and his robes fell around his feet. He let his whole weight go into the seat, and it held him the way it had been built to hold him—straight-backed, square, and without any kindness at all. Because it had been built for him, the first Master of Dilmun. He looked more comfortable than he had looked anywhere in the Hotel.

“Now,” he said. “Now I’ll wait for my women. They’ll bring her up this hill to me, the one written on my tablet. All three of her. I’ve waited a good deal longer than one night for a good deal less. I’m content to sit here until they do.”

Arabella slipped her arm out of Anna’s grip. She stepped out from beside her and stood alone on the cracked ground between the throne and Anna, straight as its back, her closed hand at her side. “The Law will be watched the whole way up. Every step of that hill, every hand laid on her, every word said to her. And I will be the one watching it.”

Nergal smiled.

“Watch all you like,” he said.

He said it to her. He was not looking at her. He was looking past her shoulder, at Anna, and he went on looking at Anna after the words were finished, steadily and without hurry, the way he had looked at the photograph in the Hall.

Anna did not lift her eyes from the ground in front of the throne. She did not move at all. She stood where Arabella had left her, on the bare ground with the ash round her feet, in her blue dress with the lapis at her throat, as still as she had stood in the Hall, where none of the fourteen had come near her.

Arabella did not move from between them. She could not raise a hand to him. She stood there anyway.

The storm went on over the Niĝin-namtar-ak. The wind worried at the dust along the foot of the arches, and the lightning came and went across the bare stone, and across the sandstone throne, and across the man in it. Nergal settled a little deeper into the seat, and folded his hands, and kept looking.

He had all night.