The far side of Mount Phyrith was so unlike the regions of Niyas that Carred Selenas was familiar with that it might just as well have been another world. A world of steaming jungle and maddening humidity.

Sweat pooled in her boots, stinging her feet where blisters had burst. Hair was plastered across her face. Her heartbeat was erratic and way too fast, and every breath burned her throat as she sucked in snatches of scalding air.

Taloc and Orix weren’t faring any better, one or the other lagging behind until Carred called a halt to wait for them to catch up.

Noni was oblivious, but Noni was always oblivious. The young Niyandrian woman stumbled along, muttering to herself, occasionally blurting out her side of a conversation that no one else could hear. Her mind might have been elsewhere, but her body was suffering along with the rest of them, and not just from the walk and the humidity. Her skin was near-translucent, webbed with blue veins, her madly sparkling eyes set deep in black pits.

The necromancer Tain, on the other hand, was loving every minute of it. A head without a body, he had no lungs to fill, and for some inexplicable reason, the heat didn’t appear to affect him, even encased as he was within his helm of divine alloy.

And he wouldn’t shut up. By the thousand mouths of Theltek, was he ever going to stop talking?

“You are my legs propelling me back to greatness,” he told Taloc, who had been tasked with carrying the head. “You are my hands, my strong right arm. Temporarily, mind, until I am reunited with my body. Serve me well and you will be rewarded beyond your wildest imaginings.” Tain chuckled at some private joke. “Hah, if I could slap you on the back, I would. I’m sure you have some pretty wild imaginings, am I right? I’ve seen the way you look at our delectable Carred.”

“I do not,” Taloc said. He caught Carred’s eye. “I don’t!”

“Shove something in his gob to shut him up,” Orix suggested.

“What’s that?” Tain said. “What’d he say?”

Carred translated the Nan-Rhouric for him, though she’d hardly describe herself as fluent. “He suggested shoving something in your mouth…”

“Oh, he’d like that, wouldn’t he? But he’s not my type. Too much meat on his pudgy little Traguh-raj frame. Oh, and the stench!”

“I think he meant food,” Carred said.

“I neither need food nor can digest it in my current state. The curse or blessing of life beyond death.”

Noni giggled, and everyone looked at her—even Tain, whose head just happened to be facing the right way. A moment’s anticipation, and then whatever had made Noni laugh passed, and she was back to being vacant, dumb as a child’s doll.

Carred’s hand flexed, as if she were clutching her childhood doll, Nally. For a second, she was four again, back in the forest, screaming for her mother.

She’d seen a helm that day—a helm that floated through the trees. Had it been Tain? Had she really glimpsed her own future? More likely, the helm had been a later interpolation in her dreams, though she had to wonder what might have caused it.

“Hold me higher so I can see the view,” the necromancer’s head told Taloc. “Magnificent! Just look at those trees, those creepers! By Theltek’s several dicks, the sky! Oh, how I’ve missed it.”

“Theltek has more than one dick?” Carred asked.

“I bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Shame you lost yours,” Taloc said.

Carred rolled her eyes. “Don’t encourage him.”

“What’s lost will be found,” Tain said, “and then, my darling Carred, I’ll give you what you’ve been craving.”

“A head with a dick,” Carred said. “Let me see, what would that make you?”

“Oh ho! A wit as well as a hard-bodied, succulent piece of—”

Taloc slammed the face plate shut. From within the helm came a torrent of muffled abuse.

“Thank the Five for that,” Orix said in Nan-Rhouric. “I thought he’d never shut up.”

The trees began to thin out, and the ground fell away into a deep depression. Carred went first, slipping and sliding over wet ground—it was so hot, even the vegetation sweated. Her boots squelched in mud at the bottom.

Ahead of her, reeds marked the edge of a swamp, the waters brown and thick with twigs and leaves. Lilies bunched together in islands, and it made her nervous thinking about what might lurk beneath. Something plopped into the water, but she couldn’t see what it was.

“Frog,” Orix said. Surreptitiously, his hand came to rest on her ass. She brushed it off.

“We say cyllif in Niyandrian,” she said.

“Frog,” he repeated, and Carred sighed.

Orix had proven both unwilling and incapable of learning. “You really should make more effort.”

“I will.” Orix looked hurt that she’d rejected his touch. He masked it with a grin and a raised eyebrow. “I remember the word for—”

“Grow up,” Carred said.

“Sorry,” he said—in Niyandrian.

“Good boy.” Carred patted him on the head. “Well done.”

“Sorry,” he said again, then switched back to Nan-Rhouric. “That’s the only word I know.”

“Then please be quiet. All this Nan-Rhouric is like a spear through the center of my brain.”

What had possessed her to bring Orix along? He’d been a novelty for a few nights, but… Theltek, she missed Marith.

“Now where?” Taloc asked, coming alongside.

“Ask the head,” she said, rapping on the helm Taloc was carrying.

“Ouch!” came the muffled yelp from within.

Taloc pried open the face plate.

“Never do that again!” Tain said. “And don’t shut me in like that! I’ve had an aeon in the dark, and I don’t cherish the idea of going back to it.”

“Directions,” Carred said.

“Well, there’s up, down, left, right…” Tain said. “And up again, up your—”

“Taloc, shut the face plate.”

“No, wait! Hold me aloft once more,” Tain said. “Now, start a slow turn to your left—no, right. There. I think. That way. Keep clear of the water’s edge. There are things in there, things with sharp teeth and slimy tentacles.”

Orix must have picked up on the mock fear in Tain’s voice. “What was that he said?”

Carred pressed a finger to her lips. “Speak Niyandrian or be silent. The choice is yours. And if you pout, no more fun at night. Understood?”

As far as she was concerned, there would be no more fun whatever he did, Niyandrian or no Niyandrian.

Taloc took the lead, holding Tain’s head in front of him as they kept to the lip of relatively dry ground that ran around the edge of the swamp. Under Tain’s direction, they veered farther from the water and tramped through ferns until they emerged at the foot of a valley. Mist curled over the valley walls, wreathing everything up top in hazy gray.

“Yes, this is the way,” Tain crowed, eyes fixed on the heights. “Look! See!”

Massive shapes loomed out of the mist above, on both sides of the valley.

Orix drew his sword.

“Put it away,” Carred said. “It’ll rust in this humidity.”

He gave her a belligerent look, but his lips remained sealed.

“You have permission to speak Nan-Rhouric,” she said.

“No it won’t,” Orix said, running his thumb along the edge of the blade, then wincing as the skin popped. He re-sheathed the sword and sucked blood from his thumb. “We added astrumium to the blades when we made the swords, along with a sorcerous cant. Not only will it never rust, neither will it blunt.”

“So, you’re a genius blacksmith as well as a master in the bedroom,” she said.

Orix flushed. “I had help.”

Under her breath, Carred said, “You need it.”

“They look like giants,” Taloc said.

The figures above the valley had no arms or legs to speak of, but Carred had to admit they did appear to have heads atop long bodies.

“What are they?” she asked. “The fossils of some long-dead race?”

Noni sniggered. “We see patterns where there are none.”

“Who told you that?” Carred asked. “Talia?”

“My father was a thinker.”

“But not a right thinker,” Tain said. “Although, to be fair, I doubt he ever ventured here. We see patterns here because that is what we are intended to see. They are statues, whittled from sandstone monoliths by the prehistoric people of Niyas.”

“Statues of what?” Taloc asked.

“Those who became gods.”

“It must have been common, back in the day,” Carred said. “I bet they were disappointed.”

“Oh?” Tain said. “And why’s that, then?”

“An eternity as a pillar of sandstone. Not exactly what you’d call inspiring.”

Tain sighed. “They are monuments, symbols of the individuals concerned, not the gods themselves.”

“You don’t say.”

“So,” Taloc said, “there’s a real god somewhere for each of these statues?”

“That depends on what you mean by a god,” Noni said. Everyone looked at her, but she was still lost in her own world. Carred wasn’t even sure that it was Noni who had spoken. The voice was hers, but not necessarily the words.

“The gods are just frustrated immortals who ascended and have grown bored of fucking each other,” Tain said. “Which is why they need me among them to freshen things up.”

“You’ve seen the gods?” Taloc asked.

“I’d be among them right now if I’d not been separated from my body. I was this close, I tell you! And do you know what really grates? The fact that my body is probably copulating its way through eternity right this very moment.”

“That’s stupid,” Taloc said. “Your body can’t function without a brain.”

“Doesn’t seem to have stopped you. Besides, my head was still attached when I first ascended. I glimpsed paradise, in all its naked glory!”

“Or you’d been smoking too much cravv,” Carred said.

“Go ahead, ridicule me. Isn’t that what the unremarkable always do when confronted with a superior mind? Let us be honest, Carred, you’re resentful.”

“I am?”

“Of how I make you feel.”

“And how is that?”

“Wet.”

“Oh, please! You’re a disembodied head, for Theltek’s sake.”

“I have a tongue…”

“Not for much longer,” Carred said, half-drawing her sword.

Taloc chose that moment to trip on a root—literally chose, Carred suspected. Tain wailed as his head flew from Taloc’s hands to land face first in the mud.

“Oops,” Taloc said as he stooped to pick Tain up, one hand on either side of the great helm.

“Stop!” Tain yelled. “You’ll make me fall out, you stupid oaf!”

Taloc had proven an expert in dumb looks. He gave Carred one now.

“Why should we care if you fall out?” Carred slid her hand under Tain, gripped his nose to hold him in place, and lifted the helm.

The necromancer spat mud. “That is none of your business.”

Carred threw the head to Taloc, who deftly caught it.

“Be careful!” Tain shrieked. “For pity’s sake!”

“Back to me,” Carred said.

“Stop!” Tain yelled as Taloc prepared to throw.

“Then answer my question.”

Silence.

“Ready when you are,” Carred said, holding out her hands. “They used to call me butterfingers as a child.”

“I have no existence outside of this helm!” Tain said. “Satisfied?”

“You what?” Taloc said.

“Without the divine alloy protecting you, you would simply vanish?” Carred asked.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“If it meant you’d shut up.”

“I’m going off you,” Tain said. “Never did like a woman with scars.”

“Explain why you’d cease to exist if we removed the helm,” Carred said. This might be important. Queen Talia’s plan to return from the dead involved the Armor of Divinity. Was that the kind of existence her former lover could expect—an eternity encased in metal? Did Talia know?

“The armor translated me to a higher realm,” Tain said.

“How do you know it was higher?” Noni again. She smirked, no longer vacant. She was fiercely attentive.

Tain scowled, but otherwise chose to ignore her. “It also transformed me. Flesh and blood as we know it cannot exist among the gods. It must be remade. Transfigured.”

“And you didn’t work out a way to change it back?” Carred asked.

“I didn’t plan on returning.”

“But there is a way?”

“There might be. But if there is, it’s my secret. Rip me from the helm, and it dies with me.”

“So,” Noni said, her gait predatory as she approached, “what do you want in exchange for this secret?”

“Talia?” Carred asked.

“What’s going on?” Orix asked.

“Niyandrian or nothing,” Carred reminded him.

“If it is Queen Talia,” Tain said, “get her away from me. I’ll not speak again in her presence.”

Noni stumbled and dropped to her knees. A sliver of drool slid from her chin, and her eyes were once more focused someplace else.

“If it was Talia,” Carred said—and who else would it have been?—“she’s gone.”

“Or she’s pretending to be. Close my face plate,” Tain said.

Taloc gave Carred a bemused look.

“Do it,” she said. “Until we get where we’re going.”

She continued along the foot of the valley, while the statues of forgotten gods looked on.