THIS WAY, HEADING SOUTH into the wind, they could already see the Northern Mountains. A fine red dust blew into the cabin, sticking to their skin, settling into their clothes, gathering somehow even beneath the fingers of John’s gloved hands. On the van’s backseat, along with their bags and clothing, were water purifiers, transmitters, security buffers, protective suits, and masks, a radiation counter. Outside, amid the tarpools, the wreckage of prehistoric trucks, and the wind-picked bones of mules, there were other travelers along the broken concrete slabs of the twentieth-century Sadiir Highway. Foline-powered twenty-wheelers lumbering between the phosphate mines and the chemical plants on the coast. Vans like their own. Panniered mules ambling beside stooped figures with djellabas drawn tight across their faces. Individuals and families stumbling in from the mountains and the desert beyond, drawn by the promise of the coast.

What little open-sky agriculture there was in the Magulf was clustered over the first few inland kilometers, where the autumn rains still fell. At first, John and Laurie had passed farms and plantations, stunted orangegroves protected by ferocious pony-sized dogs. Then flocks of skinny sheep picking over slopes of withered grass. Farther on, there was nothing.

They stopped at noon by a roadside foline vendor, and John waited near the van as Laurie haggled for fuel. Reddish brown sandstone hills shimmered in the east. The air was filled with the droning hiss of the wind. The old woman who operated the handpump was half hidden in flapping rags, and her arms made incomprehensible circling gestures as she spoke to Laurie. Blinking in the wind, stretching his limbs, feeling his sweat-sodden clothing unstick and slide over his flesh like sandpaper, he waited for them to agree on a price. Was this how he’d imagined it—a world beyond the Endless City, a rim beyond the rim? Yet for all the heat, the wind, the discomfort, the bittersweet smell of foline, and the wary scowl on the old woman’s face as she caught the silver of his eyes, it remained somehow distant.

They reached Sadiir as the light died. Climbing out of the van into purple night, feeling mosquitoes and nightflies bump seekingly into his face, hearing the clank of unoiled wind generators, breathing the ammoniac reek of humanity, John almost regretted leaving the dead plains.

Ahead through the rubble lay the lights of a hotel. Like the rest of Sadiir, it was ancient, half abandoned, tumbling in scraps of Moorish arch and colonial pillars. Dogs barked. Shutters creaked and turned. Music thrummed from doorways. Ulcerated children scurried out of the darkness as he and Laurie carried their bags up the broken steps of the hotel. Seeing the glowing arcs of his hands and the silver of his eyes, the children backed away.

Next morning, John was awakened by the crowing of cocks in the suddenly still air. He sat up, brushing off a layer of dead insects, and looked over to where Laurie lay asleep on her mattress beneath the shuttered window, stripes of morning light glittering in the quartz dust in her hair. He climbed out onto the gravelly floor and began to peel off his underclothes. He was in the process of picking dead bugs out of his pubic hair when he saw that Laurie’s eyes were open.

“Good morning.”

“Gunahana,” she said. “These private arrangements were something we didn’t talk about.”

He stopped, his shoulders hunched. “It hardly matters, does it?”

She gestured a shrug.

He turned away, using a rag and the bowl of disinfectant-clouded water to clean himself. Last night, tiredness and this filthy room had made him postpone any efforts at washing. He sat on the bed and grabbed fresh underpants and socks out of his bag. He found that he didn’t feel particularly self-conscious.

“We’ll have to pay off the local elder here,” Laurie said, sitting up and pulling her teeshirt off over her head.

“How much?”

“I’ll sort something out.”

She began to gather up her clothes. He saw that she’d been bitten by bugs in the night, although she didn’t seem to notice or care. Laurie had pale-brown skin, narrow shoulders, flattish breasts, a deep pit of a navel. Opening the seal on her bag and pulling on a fresh shirt, she pushed back the shutters from the window and took in a breath of the warm morning air.

John came over and rested his elbows beside hers, gazing out. Blue-gray near the peaks, with shreds of cloud and hints of green, the Northern Mountains seemed to lie just beyond the angular sprawl of Sadiir’s corrugated roofs, almost close enough for him to touch.

They passed a sandy Christian graveyard filled with leaning crosses and angels as they drove out of Sadiir. Soon after, the jagged remains of a castle crowned the top of a hill to the east. As he looked west across the dead foothills, John wondered if he should ask Laurie how she got hold of the expensive cube of Halcycon nerve tissue that she’d used to pay off the village elder. But the moment never seemed quite right, and he guessed he knew what the answer was anyway: it was stolen. But why should Laurie’s behavior be any different from that of the rest of the people who worked in the Zone?

He wound down his window and blinked in the scalding dust. It seemed that all history was buried and forgotten in sand drifts over abandoned villages, in the ruins of checkpoints marking forgotten frontiers, in the bleached carcasses of vehicles and animals.

At twilight, the highway gave out and became a pitted track. After hovering tantalizingly all day, the mountains had at last begun to draw closer. Bending forward to see more of their lavender peaks, John hooked the van around the next curve in the hillside, then braked hard as the fans kicked into mounds of ash. He punched on the headlights. The cabin filled with the carbony reek of dead bonfires. Everywhere there were blackened trunks and jagged charcoal branches. He pushed on, anxious to get out of this dead place, but they were still within the burnt-out forest when storms of ash and the gathering night made it impossible for them to continue. John pulled off the track into a clearing. The van’s engines stilled. The flurries of ash settled. Clawing black trees encircled them.

They heated packs of stew inside the van. Laurie dropped a wine tablet into their water flask, then added two more. The cold deepened. Banging elbows, they climbed into their sleeping bags, reclining the seats and setting the keys for maximum heat. The scratchy darkness thickened, and the wind made the dead treetops click and rattle.

“I wonder how far you have to go,” Laurie said, “until there’s really nothing.”

John shifted in the fragile warmth of his bag. He heard a pop as she opened a tube. In here, with the windows up, he guessed that he’d have to share whatever mood it created. “I mean, John, do you really believe there’s something out there beyond what you can see and feel? Look at this place—you go so far and find it’s just us. And after that, nothing…What else is there to believe in?”

“What about the witchwomen, the rituals, the moonrocks, the carnivals?”

“That’s like a dance, John—something you let take over for a while. That’s about the thrill of this world, not the hope of some other. It’s a madness, too. The witchwomen take a burden from us. That’s why we give them gifts and accept their strangeness. If you really think about the way things are, maybe madness is the only sane response.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry—you don’t find this easy, do you, talking about what everything means?”

“It’s my job.”

“I mean your own faith. What you feel, what you are.”

“Believing in God is like being in love, Laurie. You can’t rationalize it. It has nothing to do with what’s in your head.”

“I don’t see what’s wrong with emptiness.” Laurie ground out her tube and snuggled deeper into her seat, closing her eyes. “This world, and nothing else. Think about it. Is that really so bad?”

At one point, he awoke, hearing some other sound. Strange, half musical. He shifted and opened his eyes, gazing out at the witchy trees. Then he realized that it was Laurie. She was singing to the net, humming in her sleep.

They were back on the road before the light next morning and reached the walled town of Tiir at midday. The cold that had come in the night remained, and the wind still blew at them from the south. But it was different here. The air was scented with mountain sap and the tang of rain.

Tiir would have seemed a desolate place to anyone who hadn’t crossed the plains. The houses were the same gray as the cliffs and outcrops they were built on. Flapping sheets covered the doorways of the stony houses; washed-out jelt alternated with mossy thatch as a roof covering. The smoke that wafted from stubby chimneys smelled of grass and donkey dung and charcoal from the burnt-out forest below. Faces peered at them from narrow unglazed windows, and small crowds hovered around corners. The people here wore brown capes woven with threads of indigo, crimson, chrome yellow. The women had beads in their hair, the colors vibrant in the gray light beneath the mountains.

Tiir was a place of transition, a buffer between the Endless City and the desert wastes beyond. The squat walls that surrounded the town were well maintained, and the guards who stopped and questioned John and Laurie at the gateway carried ancient rifles that obviously weren’t for show. People from the coast, the koiyl merchants, the hawkers and dealers—John and Laurie, even—were admitted because they brought the trade on which the town depended. But the skulls in niches in the cliffs and outer walls declared that the others, the starving wanderers who still drifted in from beyond the Last Hammada, were as likely to be killed as sent away.

There was a market in the main square, overshadowed by the walls of an ancient castle keep. Wandering along the aisles, Laurie caused as much disruption as John: a Borderer walking close to a European! But the vendors shouted after them both and cheerily offered their wares. John was surprised not to find more hostility towards him from these people living on the fringe of Europe.

There were strung lines of cooking pans clanging in the wind, the wormy carcasses of lambs and hares, brilliant orange gourds, and scraps of European technology—screens, night-sights, transmitters, and sexual aids. They found a stall of the woven capes that they saw worn all around them. The cloth was stiff, warm, smelling richly of sheep oil. Watched by giggling, disbelieving children, they bought one each and pulled the capes over their dusty clothes. But they found no koiyl. The crop, Laurie was told by the stallkeeper, hadn’t been harvested yet. But, yes, it would be gathered soon and sold here before it was taken down to the Endless City.

They already knew that Tiir would be the end of the line for the van, and had left it parked on a patch of ground outside the walls with a barrier field humming around it. From now on, they would have to go on foot—and would need a guide to show them the way.

It was hard to make sense of what was happening in the shadow of the keep where witchwomen had gathered. Bells were clanging, smoke was trailing. The air reeked of old sweat. The witchwomen, squatting under tented rugs, chattered, thumped goatskin drums, fanned the smoke from chalices. A few moaned and swayed, apparently in a trance. Others looked simply drunk. Laurie spat on a Magulf dollar and tossed it into a, brass bowl. Then she began to pick her way between their nests of possessions.

“How do we know which one to choose?” John shouted after her.

She continued walking. “They’ll choose us.”

Glancing around him, John saw that a nearby witchwoman was tending a sore on a young man’s thigh. He winced as he watched her prod at the open flesh with grubby fingernails and then, using a twig as a spool, begin to extract a long white length of worm. He hurried to catch up with Laurie.

She was asking questions in an unfamiliar dialect of Borderer. Whenever they paused by a ring of chemlights or a row of dried chickenheads, people pointed them on towards the far corner of the keep. There, a little apart at the end of the line, the last witchwoman sat. She was squatting alone, not under a tented rug but under a large black umbrella hung with rodent skulls.

Seeing John and Laurie, she beckoned for them to sit down on the paving. She leaned across the usual litter of figurines and glowing incense cones to peer closely at them. Although she must have registered the color of John’s eyes, she looked at him in a way that was uncommon among Borderers; she actually seemed to study his features. Her own eyes were moist in the depths of a cracked face, and even the whites were brown. Then she nodded slowly to herself, muttering something.

John sat back as Laurie and the witchwoman began to talk, wishing he hadn’t decided not to bring his translat on this journey. He couldn’t make out a word of it: the accent here was strange, softer and quicker than the one he’d grown used to hearing in the Magulf, and he guessed from Laurie’s expression that even she was occasionally struggling.

After a while, she said to him, “Her name’s Hettie. She says you’re a strange kind of baraka.”

He smiled and nodded to the witchwoman, and her mouth broke into a one-toothed smile. From what he could make out in the gloom of the keep and the shade of her umbrella, he guessed that Hettie was no more than middle-aged, and that exposure to the elements probably explained the ancient leather of her skin. Whatever color her clothes had started out, they were now mostly black, and she gave off the dull, salty aroma that Borderers who never changed or washed eventually acquired.

“Well?” he asked when she and Laurie slapped hands in some sort of agreement. “Will she do it? Will she take us?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

Laurie said something more to Hettie, then leaned back. “She says we must go right away.”

“We’ve only got two or three hours of daylight left.”

“She says, exactly.”

“Does she want payment?”

“Not yet. I think she wants to get a better idea of how much we’re worth.”

Hettie licked her lips, turned slowly towards John.

She swallowed, wiped her mouth, licked her lips again.

“That right, Fatoo,” she said.

Pausing on the steep track, John looked back one last time at the lights of Tiir in the bowl of the hills below. Where the path hooked around the ravine ahead, he could just make out Laurie as she clambered over a rock and, more faintly, the shape of Hettie still holding her umbrella aloft. Shifting the straps of his backpack until they bit into a different place on his shoulders, he forced his legs to continue on and up the dim path.

Hettie had managed to cram her entire belongings into an old carpetbag, but John and Laurie were more heavily burdened. After much agonizing at the van, they’d dumped the second barrier-field generator and a large portion of their spare clothing and replaced the food and water purifier with a tube of fizzy tablets they’d bought in the market. That still left a satellite transmitter for emergencies, a filter mask each, the radiation counter, and endless seemingly vital odds and ends. And after the cold of the dead forest the night before, neither of them wanted to leave their heated sleeping bags behind.

It was growing darker by the minute, and John’s unease at stumbling along the brink of shadowed drops was tempered only by the thought that they would soon have to stop. But he was wrong; skipping ahead, waving her umbrella through the dusk, Hettie obviously knew the way blindfold. He increased his pace to catch up with Laurie, then fought for his breath.

“What’s the problem?” Laurie’s eyes glittered at him. “Come on!”

She turned and headed quickly up the path. His legs aching, John trudged on behind her.

Hettie lit a fire when they finally camped. By then their breath was making clouds, and the sweat that had drenched John’s clothing seemed about to freeze. They all crouched around the flames, their arms outstretched, shadows and smoke twining up over the rocks surrounding them.

Hettie wandered off, peering under stones. When she came back, she was swinging a bundle. As she stooped into the firelight and finally put down her umbrella, John saw that the bundle consisted of a bunch of lizards gripped by their tails, and that they were all still alive. One by one, Hettie tossed them onto the fire. He imagined that she was indulging in some kind of ritual until she found a stick to fish one out, lopped off its head and tail with a knife, ripped out the steaming guts, and began to eat. Her mouth full, blood and grease running down her wattled chin, she gestured for John and Laurie to do the same.

The thin sticks on the fire didn’t last; cold darkness soon closed in. John climbed without much expectation into his sleeping bag, feeling queasiness in his belly and the rocky ground prodding his shoulders. He gazed up at a sky that, even in this darkness, churned with wind and movement, and felt himself falling up into it, as if, one by one, the strings of doubt, discomfort, and tiredness that bound him to the earth were snapping away. Sleep came easily.

He woke only once and saw Hettie sitting there, her umbrella swaying as she sang to herself, gently rocking to and fro. Closing his eyes, feeling the chill prickle of frost settling on his face, he tumbled back into a seamless dream.

Next morning, in exchange for the roast lizards of the night before, Laurie offered Hettie one of her foodpacks of sweet porridge. Hettie nodded eagerly. She obviously had no compunctions about sharing food. And once or twice she had even poked at John with a bare, bony finger. Remembering the witchwoman who’d confronted him in Banori’s room, he wondered if this absence of fear, this willingness to come close, wasn’t a part of their madness.

Puncturing the heat catalyst, Laurie handed the foodpack to Hettie and demonstrated how to slit it open. Hettie did so, sniffed the contents, and scooped out a blob on the tip of her finger. She studied the steaming oatmeal, put it into her mouth for a moment, spat it out into her palm, stirred the mash with her finger, and then began to eat in her usual lip-smacking way.

They packed their bags and began to climb. The ravine widened to a high valley floor where a small stream ran amid rocks, disappearing underground, reemerging, disappearing again. There were stunted conifers, meadows of tufted grass, and small bell-shaped flowers that shivered silver in the wind. The swift clouds were big-bellied with moisture. Far above, a hawk rode the thermals.

These living mountains seemed almost unchanged, but in truth they were a fluke, an unsought consequence of European climate control. The air that the satellites pulled across Africa contained little moisture, and much of that was used as a vast filter for the northeasterly flow of the Gulf Stream across the River Ocean. But the satellites and the millions of absorption panels couldn’t rewrite the laws of nature entirely. Air cooled as it rose over these mountains, causing rain to fall, and the rain brought life, and the life held moisture, darkened the slopes, stabilized the temperature, and in turn encouraged more rain. Still, the cycle was as artificial as the wind from the south that brought it. Even to John’s untrained eyes, there was a sameness about the vegetation here.

They were able to walk three abreast along the valley floor and talk, Laurie acting as intermediary between John and Hettie. Hettie explained that the village they were heading towards was called Lall. Her own dwelling lay a few kilometers beyond, and not far beyond that, where the pass began to dip down to the desert, the Last Hammada, was a site of special fear and significance. It was called Ifri Gotal, the place of fury.

John and Laurie exchanged glances. Had Hettie been to Ifri Gotal? Of course, but only once—nobody went there more than once. It was a terrible place. And would she show them the way? Hettie shrugged, and the skulls and bells of her umbrella jingled; from where she was going to take them, any fool could find Ifri Gotal. Even an Outer, a European.

They walked on, across an old stone bridge. A stream raced beneath. John began to see greenish purple clumps on the valley sides, which he guessed were koiyl.

By mid-morning, there were signs of habitation. Climbing a stairway of rock beside a waterfall, they reached a higher sweep of the valley. Here, where mountain peaks surrounded them through drifts of cloud, the lower, greener slopes were roughly walled into fields containing long-haired sheep. A figure stood watching them pass from the top of a high mesa, carrying a rifle. Hettie waved and shouted something. The figure waved back.

Patches of koiyl were common now, although John was careful not to show too obvious an interest. The koiyl bush grew semiwild, but it was still a crop; on the coast, one leaf would be worth a quarter of a day’s wage. Undried, the leaves of this mutant succulent were plump, each a little larger than his thumb, bisected by a thick stem, covered with faint purple fuzz. The bushes were just coming into flower, and the blooms were tiny and off-white. They had a pleasant, musty odor.

The village of Lall lay over a final ridge. Cooking smoke rose, dogs barked, babies cried, and the tearing sound of a powersaw came from the open doors of a barn as they picked their way down the slope. Adults and young children emerged to watch. There was no sense of surprise in their stance; word of the approach of the three had obviously gone ahead.

“What do we do now?” John asked.

“Hettie says we should be amikay—accept their hospitality.”

A large black dog ran up to him. Planting its paws on his thighs and nearly knocking him over, it tried to lick at his strange hands. An old woman in a shawl gave a whistle, and the dog ran back, its tail spiraling. As she leaned down and rubbed the creature behind its ears, John wondered whether the reports reaching Lall had omitted the fact that an Outer was coming. But when he drew nearer the muddy circle of low stone buildings, he saw that the villagers shuffled back from him, discreetly making the sign against the evil eye even before they could see the silver of his irises.

Laurie, Hettie, and John were seated out-of-doors around a large, flat-topped rock that served as a communal table. Soon, most of the village was sitting there too, and plates of food were being passed. In the circle there was a gap between John and Hettie. She ate voraciously, talking at the same time. He presumed that she was regaling the villagers with news from Tiir. There was certainly a fair amount of laughter. He glanced around. Whenever he met someone’s eye, the person would nod politely, raise a beaker, try to smile.

The meal consisted of fatty lumps of lamb. The beer that came with it was better, but all of it weighed heavily in his stomach. What could these people possibly have to do with Daudi and Martínez, the river of death that flowed down into the Magulf? He thought of Tim, the blossoms falling from the cherry trees along the Zone’s Main Avenue as Tim sat eating a mountainous dessert at Thrials, saying, John, just what do you expect to do with the truth if you find it?

Laurie was saying something to him. He turned.

“They say they’ve heard you’re a baraka.”

He raised his beaker and nodded.

“They want you to offer a prayer to your god.”

“A prayer for what?”

“This year’s harvest.”

He gazed around at the expectant faces. Women nursing babies, men with faces scarred from disease, the old, the young, the frail.

“Go on, John. You must have something suitable.” Bringing his hands together, he recited:

The lord is my shepherd:

I shall not want…

When the food was finished and the goatskin of beer had been emptied, a large red-glazed bowl was produced, offered first to Hettie, then to Laurie. It contained fresh koiyl leaves. Nodding thanks, Laurie took two.

“Here’s your big chance to try.” She handed John a leaf.

The dried koiyl leaves sold in the Endless City were often small enough to be chewed entire, but a fresh one was too big. He watched Laurie bite off an end and drag it back over her teeth to remove the inedible stem, rather as if she were eating the leaf of an artichoke. He did the same. He knew that even for her there was no risk from one koiyl leaf—a harmful buildup of isotopes took years. But still he felt an odd frisson. The koiyl tasted…briefly strong, almost like nutmeg, and then a little like coal-tar soap. Then the flavor disappeared as the sap released some kind of anesthetic. His mouth went numb. He imagined that at least part of the skill of chewing koiyl involved learning not to bite your tongue. He swallowed and wiped his lips, certain that he was drooling. By now, he was beginning to experience the full effect of the leaf. The pain from his blistered feet and shoulders dissolved. The many aches in his limbs vanished. He felt both cool-headed and drunk. It was as when he had lain down the night before, looked up at the racing sky, and felt the ties of the earth snapping. Perhaps the influence was strong because the leaves were fresh, or because the drug was new to his system. Either way, if this was the effect that koiyl produced, it was easy to understand its popularity.

Laurie said, “They want to know what you think.”

“Tell them bona—it works.”

Laurie relayed the comment. There was general, red-toothed laughter. He looked around. In the flush of the koiyl, these villagers of Lall truly did seem to be a happy people. He saw a mother nursing a child, the dogs who were scolded as they hung around for scraps at the table, the old people, their faces lined with smiles. He looked up the hill at the unmistakable mounds where the dead were buried, at the well and the cooking houses, at the piled bricks and bloodied stones of a shrine, the tinkling foil and skulls, the ancient gauntlet of a spacesuit. The baby that the mother had been nursing was wailing now, opening the round red toothless O of its mouth, kicking and waving the smooth handless sausages of its arms.

The clouds that had obscured the mountains were now rolling down into the valley, bringing flurries of rain. John and Laurie were in no hurry to go on that day, but as usual Hettie was insistent. Didn’t the Fatoo want to see her home? It was only a short way. She prodded her dripping umbrella in the direction of swirling mist, a steep hillside. Unsure that the villagers of Lall would welcome their continued presence, Laurie and John were in no position to argue.

Before they left, the village elder presented John with a bag of koiyl leaves. As they plodded up the valley behind Hettie, Lall and its waving villagers were soon lost in the mist. This time, even Laurie seemed to have little appetite for the climb.

The rain increased. Night came. They were still ascending. Once, skidding on the wet rubble that fringed some unguessable drop, John’s feet went out from under him and he began a sickening slide until Laurie grabbed his flailing hand. He walked on, trying to still the shaking in his legs.

It hadn’t occurred to him to ask Hettie what kind of home she kept in the mountains. It would probably have been impolite, anyway, but up here it was hard to imagine finding anything that resembled a roof and walls.

They entered a gorge. Even in the darkness, glistening rock was visible on either side. Finally, when it seemed as though night would soon turn into morning, Hettie began to climb a loose stairway in the cliffs. Every now and then there were handholds, but sometimes it was like scaling a sheet of wet ice. They passed a hole in the rock. Another hole. The mouth of a cave. John’s questing hands touched odd outlines and depressions in the stone: carvings of some kind.

Hettie shouted something, then disappeared into the cliff face. Laurie followed, then John. Blissfully out of the rain.

Hettie poked along a fissure with the ferrule of her umbrella. Finding a pack of chemlights, she broke one open. The catalysts fizzed against the damp, then slowly brightened. The cave they stood in had been fashioned into walls, a floor, a stairway. There were friezes of men and animals, birds and lions and baboons, trees and flowers; scenes from a time when these mountains had been a vast forest of cedar and pine.

Hettie held the chemlight aloft. Gesturing to John and Laurie to follow, she went up stone steps intricately carved with ropes and whorls. The breath of the three smoked ahead of them, and the sound and the smell of the rain faded. They reached another chamber in the cliff. It was obvious from the smell alone that this was where Hettie lived. Crouching on a rug, she lit a foline lamp with the heat from her chemlight, pumping up the pressure until a sphere of light filled the chamber.

Most of the bare rock was covered with carpets and hangings. There were sagging tables and heaped cushions, corners filled with clean white deadfalls of bone, niches crammed with jars and oddments, dried and stuffed animals, broken mirrors, faded paper flowers, figurines, books, and bells. There were also bowls and spoons and neatly stacked tins of food, looking both reassuringly homely and oddly out of place amid all this witchwoman paraphernalia, and several small receivers, screens, and cameras in various states of disrepair. Peeling off the sodden top layers of her clothing, oily rivulets rolling down her surprisingly muscular arms, Hettie started a fire in a soot-blackened alcove. A natural chimney led up through the rock, drawing off the worst of the smoke.

John offered a blisterpack of tablets that swelled into biscuits when immersed in water, and Laurie produced a plump freeze-dried pack of processed steak. Soaking the steak and cooking it in an iron pan hooked over the fire, Hettie stirred various nuts and vegetables into the spitting juices. The firelight pulsed, briefly filling more corners of the chamber. John glimpsed a wooden crucifix about half a meter long hanging from the bare rock, nailed with the skeleton of a lizard.

After the food and the warmth of the fire had pushed out the cold, the three of them settled down in the smoky light, still steaming, smelling like wet dogs. Laurie dropped a handful of wine tablets into a jug of water. She offered it to Hettie to taste. Taking a sip, the witchwoman beamed.

“She says she has something similar that we should try.”

“What does similar mean?”

“You’ll see—it’ll be fun.”

Hettie produced a plastic jug. Filling it from a goatskin, she carefully dunked into it a fibrous lump on the end of a string, then tipped the contents into three crackle-glazed mugs, passing two to Laurie.

“Ghea!”

“Thanks—bona.” In the darkness, John couldn’t even guess at the color of the liquid that Laurie had passed to him, and his sense of smell had departed in the aromatic smoke from the fire and in the steam that came off their bodies. “Ghea…”

He drank. The fire spat and rose, pouring out more smoke and light, revealing a shelf filled with poisonous jars of red Martian soil, lumps of moonrock, comet juice.

“Hettie wants to know what you’re doing here.”

John swayed forward, his eyes stinging, his vision blurred. Up here in the Northern Mountains, he’d sometimes actually felt that he was drifting closer to God. “The thing is, Hettie,” he said, half convinced that the two of them would be able to understand each other if he spoke slowly enough, “it’s a question of finding the truth. Do you think you’re closer to it here? That place called”—he turned to Laurie—“what was it?”

“Ifri Gotal.”

“Right. Ifri Gotal.”

Hettie nodded vigorously and said something incomprehensible. Laurie shrugged. John smiled and shook his head, wondering whether it was some stray draft or a fluke in his own perception that made the tapestries around the walls belly in and out.

“I think she means her question more broadly.”

“You mean, why are any of us here?”

“No, no.” As Laurie tipped up her mug and drank, John gazed at the stray rivulets that ran down the soft geometries of her neck and shoulders. She banged the mug down. Hettie quickly refilled it. “What Hettie means is—why are you here in the Magulf?”

He placed his own mug on a tray, well out reach of Hettie’s bottomless jug. “I’m here,” he said, “because the bishop sent me here.”

“No, it’s a serious question.”

Suddenly the only sound was the fire, the breathing of the two women, his own racing heartbeat.

“Why?”

Laurie’s hair was a snake’s nest—as wild as Hettie’s—and somewhere in the last hours she’d thrown several necklaces of bells and skulls around her neck. The faces of the two women danced with soot and shadows, as if they were the same person caught at different ages.

“Why? Why did you come here?”

Hettie bent towards John, closer than she’d ever been, closer than any Borderer. He could feel her warmth. Her flesh. Her smell. They were breathing the same air. When she spoke, her spittle misted his face. “Tell truth,” she said. “Fatoo is here for the truth.”

Slowly, John nodded. “The truth. That’s right. The truth.”

“Let Hettie show.”

He felt fingers tugging at the glove that enclosed his right hand. Sliding the sheath of plastic away, snapping each of the spines. Warm flesh closed around his own. The motion was so smooth, so deep, that it was a long moment before he shuddered and tried to jerk his hand out of reach.

“It’s all right, John.” Laurie smiled, her lips and her voice close to his ear. Her fingers were twined with his, squeezing gently. “Coming this far, how can you be afraid of the truth?”

There was a curtained alcove. It gave off a stingingly strong aroma of earth and decay. When Hettie hooked back the cloth, he saw that it contained the blackened carcass of a goat. A few white growths sprouted from what had once been skin and fur—the fruiting bodies of some fungus.

Hettie plucked one, slicing off its tangle of roots with a knife. She pressed the white knob of fungus to her lips and inhaled. Her eyelids fluttered.

“What is it?”

“Trust.”

“Memory.”

“Memory?”

“The truth.”

He discovered that he was sitting again before the fire and that Laurie was beside him. The fungus nesting in Hettie’s outstretched palm was dimpled, innocuous. A puffball, little different from those that grew in the leafmold of Hemhill’s woods.

But as she leaned forward, the cracked nails of her dirt-marbled hands pressing, breaking open the flesh to liberate the cloudy spores, the puffball swelled and changed. Grew larger and smoother, flattened at the top where it had been left to cool on greased paper, speared lopsidedly by a candy-spiraled stick. It was an apple dipped in toffee, gleaming with all the colors of carnival light.

He took it, and began to eat.