A dark narrow ship—Sammark, out of the Wardlands—was sailing up the Kaenish coast when fiery stones fell out of the night to batter it. Sailors threw water on the flames, which splashed back at them, burning, and they ran away, screaming, and plunged over the rails and sank into the dark cold sea, still burning.

Morlock Ambrosius (turned out of his cabin by the noise) ran forward groggily, against the tide of burning sailors. He was hoping to quench the flames in some other way: he knew something about the magic of fire. But by then the hungry flames had gnawed deep into the vitals of the ship: it broke in half and sank. The shock of the craft’s death threw Morlock clear, and by the time he managed to get his spluttering head above water the broken Sammark could be seen, burning in several parts, deep beneath the surface of the sea.

Chance had saved Morlock, rather than any skill in swimming. He managed to keep afloat and keep moving and was therefore lucky enough to find himself, at dawn, crawling on his hands and knees along the rocky coast of Kaen, vomiting up an astonishing amount of seawater.

Of course, this was the upside (dead men do not vomit). But on the downside, there he was in Kaen: friendless, armorless, weaponless, shoeless (he had kicked off his early in the nocturnal swim). Kaen, where men and women of Morlock’s nation were routinely killed for sport in the arena. Kaen, land of dark magics where evil subterranean gods protected the people and demanded a fearful price in return. Kaen, where cruelty was a religion and intrafamilial murder was considered the highest form of art.

“Eh. I wonder what their shoes are like?” Morlock muttered. The downside would not have seemed so very depressing if he’d had some shoes: the ragged coast of Kaen was carpeted with bitterly sharp rocks. In the end, he took off his shirt, soaked it in seawater and tore it into strips to bind his feet with them like bandages. It wasn’t enough: blood was soaking through the makeshift pads as he walked. The blood caused the wet cloth to seethe with steam, a minor discomfort he was used to. His blood was dense with latent fire: that was part of the heritage of Ambrosius.

It was safer for him on the coast. Except for certain religious purposes, any use of the sea was illegal in Kaen. But, “I’ll never make it home this way,” Morlock observed to his bloody feet (who were telling him the same thing without words). He took one last hungry look at the western horizon. There lay the blue spiky line of the Grartan Mountains, the eastern edge of the Wardlands: home, for Morlock. But he couldn’t get there from here; he’d have to take the long way overland, northward through the Gap of Lone. And his feet could not stand any more of these stones. He turned his back on the west, the sea, the bitter black rocks and home, and walked into the hateful land of Kaen.

He found a track of smoothed stones that soon turned into a full-fledged road. There he came across something he had been expecting: a bloodstained shrine for one of the Kaenish gods. What he had not expected was that it would be desecrated: the ratlike face was split more or less in half so that one of its eyes stared up into the sky while another peered down at the earth, and the broken bloodstained mouth wore a crooked loser’s grin.

“Hah!” said Morlock, who had no love for any of the brutal blood-drinking gods of Kaen. It looked as if something had overturned their cruel worship in these parts. Morlock walked along more cheerfully, in spite of his wounded feet.

After a while Morlock came upon a woman walking along the road in the opposite direction. Sort of walking: she stumbled along blithely to the side of the road, tripped over that, laughed politely (as at a joke she didn’t understand), and stumbled away to the other side of the road where she did the same. The general trend of her walking was toward Morlock, though. When she was quite close, she saw him.

“You!” she cried in Kaenish. “You! You! You! You are happy, happy and bright?”

Kaenish was one of the seven languages which Morlock’s foster-father had made him learn, and he knew it pretty well. But he could hardly understand this woman’s slurring speech; she seemed to have something wrong with her mouth. And perhaps something wrong with her mind as well: her feverish eyes focused on him intently, as if it were a matter of life and death that he was happy, happy and bright.

Morlock had been shipwrecked, spent a large portion of the night swallowing seawater and a chunk of the morning vomiting it back up. His feet were lacerated sores bound in bloody rags, and if the Kaenish sun beat down on his pale shoulders much longer they would soon be bright indeed, but not happy.

“I’m well,” he said gruffly. “And you?”

“Well?” she said doubtfully. “Not happy? Not pretty? Not bright?”

“I’m as pretty as I’ll ever be,” Morlock replied (which was perfectly true, and nothing to brag about).

“You come with me,” she said, suddenly decisive. “Be happy. Be pretty and bright.”

Morlock was a young man. The woman was strangely attractive, if possibly insane, and she was offering him happiness, prettiness, and brightness. It seemed unlikely he would have a better offer that day.

“Then,” he said, and gestured at the road. When she didn’t seem to understand him he said, “I’ll come with you.”

“Oh!” she said, very excited. “Oh happy! Oh bright! Oh pretty pretty!” and reached out to touch him.

“Thanks,” he said, avoiding the touch of her hand and its curving clawlike nails. He had just realized why she talked so strangely—or at least why her speech was slurred. When she opened her mouth to cry oh he saw that there were thornlike protrusions growing from her tongue. It must have been agony for her to speak.

She took him to a nearby town. It was walled as most Kaenish towns were. (Civil war was also an art to the decadent Kaenish.) But the gates were wide open and the brutal images of the local god had been thrown down and smashed in the road. Above the open gateway was written, in the cuneiform that the Kaenish used, the name of the town and its fallen god: Thyläkotröx.

“No gate?” he asked, falling into her childish pattern of speech. “No god?”

“Bad god!” she said, scowling. “Not pretty or happy.”

“Or bright, I suppose.”

“No! And gate . . . why should not all be happy?”

“Eh,” said Morlock, who had always hoped that happiness was overrated.

They entered Thyläkotröx. The city showed signs of recent war: burned buildings, sections of the paved streets torn up, many dark brown patches on the pale street stones where blood had pooled. Whatever had overthrown the local god had not triumphed without a struggle: the citizens of Thyläkotröx (or some of them at least) had resisted. But peace had come to Thyläkotröx: stacks of notched weapons, axes especially, lay disused in the streets, dust settling down on them. People wandered the town, even more bemused than his guide. No shops were open; no business seemed to be taking place. The bitter internal war had been followed by an endless holiday in which everyone was happy and bright . . . if not exactly pretty. The smugly vacant look on their faces repelled Morlock.

The woman led Morlock to a public square where many people were milling about. A large branch was growing up out of a pale mound of shattered paving stones. The branch ended in a nimbus of long greenish-black thorns. People with anxious, troubled looks shouldered their way through the crowd and pressed their faces against the thorns. They stiffened suddenly and wandered off into the sunlit square, a dazed smile on their faces, no longer troubled but happy and bright.

The woman with thorns in her mouth smiled and gestured and made several sounds that might have been words. Morlock cautiously approached one of the thorns growing from the branch. The end was hollow and dripping some dark fluid. Morlock leaned in to examine the fluid, and a sharper needle-like thorn appeared in the hollow opening. Morlock leapt back just before it sprayed a cloud of dark mist at him.

“Happy now?” the woman behind him asked.

Morlock turned around and faced her. “As happy as I want to be,” he said soberly. If he hadn’t leapt back in time that muck might be running through his veins now.

The woman with the thorns in her mouth sighed, and Morlock thought she was about to say something about happy or bright. Instead, in seven syllables, she offered him his choice of three different sex acts, and she let him know it was a matter of some urgency.

Morlock was a young man, and he had been partnerless for some time; but as soon as he found himself considering the idea he reminded himself that her other orifices were also likely cluttered with thorns. He told her no, and continued telling her no until she wandered off, her face twisted with frustration. Her feelings were urgent, but she had no ability to concentrate. A few moments later he saw her asking a statue if it was happy and bright.

He walked back through the square, sightseeing in Thyläkotröx.

It was interesting, in a way. Clearly the local god had failed to protect its people. Perhaps something had come out of the sea, some plant that lived as a parasite on people. There were strange things in the ocean at the edge of the sky, swept in from the Sea of Worlds when the sun passed through the gate in the west each day. Or perhaps this plant parasite was the aftereffect of some disastrously miscalculated Kaenish magic, or a new form of Kaenish art, like killing your neighbor’s baby.

Morlock felt bad for the infected people. But they were, after all, Kaenish. If they were living their ordinary lives they would probably be engaged in plots to kill each other in various ostensibly esthetically pleasing ways, or planning raids on the east coast of the Wardlands, or just sitting around being Kaenish, which (in Morlock’s somewhat biased view) was bad enough. In any case, it was not his problem.

His first thought was to steal a shirt from someone too happy and bright to care. But then he realized that the clothing, perhaps the very air of the city, might be infected with spores of the parasite plants. Best to get out of town as quickly as he could, Morlock decided, and keep a close eye on his orifices for thornlike growths.

He was headed out of town at a brisk pace when he heard a buzzing voice call his name.

“Hey! You’re the one called Morlock, aren’t you? The vocate?”

Morlock halted and looked around. It was true he was a vocate, a full member of the Graith of Guardians who watched over the border of the Wardlands. It was also true that the Graith were hated in Kaen like nothing else. Fortunately the people standing near him seemed especially happy and bright, and also the voice had addressed him in the speech of the Wardlands, which the locals would be unlikely to understand. But he couldn’t see the speaker.

“Here I am. In front of you. Don’t you know me? I’m Zoyev. I was on board the Sammark with you.”

In front of Morlock was something he had taken for a badly trimmed ornamental thornbush. Looking closer, he saw that it was a man. Thorns were sprouting from all over his skin, and he appeared to be rooted to the ground. The final state of a man preyed on by the parasite plants?

“Zoyev,” Morlock replied, “if that’s who you are—”

“Why do you doubt it?”

“Your body is imprisoned by thorns, and there appears to be an abandoned wasp’s nest on your shoulder. These things did not happen overnight.”

The buzzing voice was silent for a while, and then it said, “I don’t know what body you mean. I seem to have many bodies. I—Oh, God Avenger, it must not have been a nightmare. It must have been true.”

“What?”

“I dreamed . . . I thought it was a dream. After the shipwreck . . . did the ship really burn underwater?”

“Yes. The Kaenish seem to have some sort of stuff which burns even when immersed.”

“Then it was true. It must have all been true. Morlock, when the ship broke up and sank, I was almost dragged down with it. Many of us were, struggling against the whirlpool pulling us down into the green orange murk. But I fought to the surface and swam away into the dark. I thought I was headed for the coast, but a current took me, dragging me . . . north I think. Up the coast. It was strong. I couldn’t fight it. In the end there was an undertow that dragged me under the surface. By the distant light of burning Sammark I saw . . . something there on the sea floor. A great mouth or womb with thorny lips. It . . . I think it ate me. And I’m a part of it now, and I see through the eyes of the other bodies it has taken over . . .”

“I would help you if I could, Zoyev,” Morlock said quietly.

“You pity me, I see. But I hate you for being alive while I’m dead . . . and I hate myself for being dead while you’re alive. I wonder if this is what every ghost feels?”

“Zoyev,” Morlock asked, “is there really just one plant in this city . . . one parasite infecting all these people?”

“Yes . . . I think . . . I think it’s thinking about me . . . I’m forgetting what I knew, but remembering what the One knows. Yes, we came here, not so long ago. From somewhere else, a long journey in the dark. When we eat enough, we’ll expel seed pods. Then we won’t be alone. The One will then be the First One—first of many.”

Morlock did not like the sound of this. One plant, the size of a city, and not yet full-grown . . .

“I just realized something,” the buzzing voice said brightly. “I’m not Zoyev. I’m just a part of the One that has some of his undigested memories. Hm. I don’t like what I remember about you, Morlock. I think you’re a danger to the One.”

There was a sound on the street behind Morlock, and he turned. The woman he had met earlier was standing there, her face no longer so happy and bright. Then the woman with the thorns in her mouth bit Morlock on the shoulder and he was happy.

“But now you’re all right,” the buzzing voice remarked brightly.

The wound glowed with a spectrum of warm greenish pleasures. The greatest pleasure of all was to be free from pain: from his bleeding feet, from weakness and hunger, from the join in his crooked shoulders, from memories he hated and could never escape.

The thorns in the woman’s mouth were bright and fuming—burning from the latent fire in his blood—but she seemed to suffer no more from this than from the thorns themselves. She had already torn her clothes off, and she was clawing at the fastening of his trousers with fingers made clumsy by long thornlike nails. He was eyeing her pudenda with interest . . . the sharp thornlike hair there reminded him of something he had seen or heard of . . . it didn’t seem important compared to the happiness he felt . . .

Then he remembered, and it was important. The womb or mouth that had eaten Zoyev, the mouth of the One underwater on the coast.

He came back to himself with an effort and knocked the woman’s hands away. She shrieked something about happy joy and brightness, her face twisted, unpleasant, marked with pain, smoke drifting from her mouth. He ran away past the thorn-bound man up the street as fast as he could go to the open gate with the broken ratlike god of Thyläkotröx.

“If you’d done your job this never would have happened,” Morlock snarled at the smashed idol as he passed.

There was a scrubby wood of black trees with orange-pink leaves off to the side of the road. Remembering how much trouble the thorny woman had had in simply walking down the road, he thought he was safe from the One and its minions in the woods.

Of course, he reflected grimly (the dark ship of his awareness still afloat on the green-gold tide of false euphoria) it was only a matter of time until he was one of those minions himself. He was almost certainly infected, a thornlike parasite taking shape even now in his wounded shoulder.

The thought maddened him: that soon he would be enslaved by the One, the extension of its will. He swore he would make the One pay for the harm it had done (and would do) to him—revenge himself on the thing that had infected him.

Getting word to the Graith was obviously out of the question, and he could think of no way to alert the Kaenish kingdom . . . and wasn’t sure the Kaenish rulers would even care. They might decide that the One was an avatar of the Kaenish god of death and incorporate it into the pantheon.

No, it was up to Morlock himself to act. And, as he lay there, dozing in the shade of orange leaves, he realized there was one thing he could do.

Fyor-tirgan Shollumech ruled the largest part of the west coast of Kaen, facing the Narrow Sea. Unlike most of the Kaenish nobility, Shollumech took his religious responsibilities seriously, especially the duty of harming the Wardlands whenever possible. He had mounted three different invasions of the Wardlands, each of which had been circumvented by the Graith of Guardians using various ignoble tricks.

Shollumech had then settled on piracy, attacking the ships sailing up the Narrow Sea to Glenport. But the problem with piracy was that it was profitable, and Shollumech was uneasy about that. The Court of Heresiarchs had long forbidden any useful or beneficial activity involving the sea. The gods of Kaen were earthy gods.

When Shollumech’s alchemists had invented an agent which would burn in water, the Fyor-tirgan was delighted. He designed a catapult of enormous range and settled down to destroying ships that passed near the Kaenish coast. This was clearly in accord with the religious teachings of the Heresiarchs, as it profited nobody. Also, the burning ships and sailors were pleasing to watch, satisfying Shollumech’s impulses as an aesthete.

It was really beneath his dignity as Fyor-tirgan, but Shollumech enjoyed supervising the catapult shots himself. It was exciting to give the orders personally, and the view from the catapult tower was better than that from his own residence (where the windows looked away from the sea, as religion required).

And it was quite safe on the tower, nothing like taking part in a battle (a pleasure denied to one of his high rank). His nearest ally-enemy was the Tirgan of Thyläkotröx City, some distance to the north. Thyläkotröx had no catapults or siege equipment, and Shollumech knew for a fact that his own walls were unscalable. He didn’t even bother to have his local gods place a protection on the tower: the human sacrifices required would be prohibitively expensive, and there was obviously no need for it.

Shollumech was quite surprised, therefore, to see a half-naked man climb over the rim of the tower and jump down beside the catapult.

Esthetically speaking, the intruder did not impress. He was shirtless; he had unruly dark hair and gray glaring eyes. There was a great dark wound at the base of his neck, which had bled all over his chest, and his feet were bound in bloody charred bandages. There was something wrong with his shoulders—one was rather higher than the other. So unsightly! Shollumech could not abide anything approaching a hunchback. And the man’s fingers (and the blunt toes emerging from the ragged ends of the bandages) were simply covered with mortar dust. Shollumech realized that the man must have clawed handholds for himself in the ancient mortar of the tower walls. Such a grubby way to make one’s entrance into a stronghold. Effective, of course, but utility and beauty were never quite the same thing.

The man’s behavior was of a piece with his unpleasant appearance. Besides Shollumech himself, there were three soldiers and an alchemist next to the catapult. It was clearly a quasi-battle situation, but the intruder indulged in none of the usual courtesies: introductions, boasts, insults, challenges, etc. He simply reached out with one of his horrible long-fingered hands and broke the neck of the armed man nearest him. He slipped the fallen soldier’s sword out of its scabbard as the corpse fell past him and raised the blade to guard.

The alchemist, quite properly, did not engage in any fighting: his caste did not permit it. And Shollumech, too, refrained. Indeed, he almost felt as if he had better leave: it was not customary for anyone higher than the rank of yr-tirgan to be present at a battle.

But while Shollumech pondered this important esthetic question, the battle—if that’s what it was—was over. Shollumech’s soldiers, with a regrettable lack of propriety, had drawn their swords and attacked the intruder using the barest preliminary of threat-barks. The stranger kicked one of them against the wall, leaving a bloody smoking footprint on the fellow’s shining breastplate, and then turned to face the other. The duel was so brief as to not merit the name: there were no flourishes, no ceremonial sidesteps, no drama. The intruder simply put several holes in the soldier until he fell motionless beside his comrade with the broken neck.

By then the last soldier had recovered and charged upon the intruder, who dodged the fellow’s rush and turned to stab him in the back of the neck. He fell across his peers and lay there. Three men dead, and to so little esthetic effect! Really, Shollumech was disgusted with the intruder.

Now Shollumech drew his sole weapon: a poison-tipped dagger. It was meant for suicide if the occasion seemed to demand it—as it did, but at the moment he had an even more important task. He threw the dagger into the throat of his alchemist. The fellow looked at him gratefully (at least, Shollumech hoped it was grateful; truth be told, the dying face seemed a little hostile) and slumped with a certain grace to the stones.

Shollumech was engaged in the opening steps of the Dance of Justification when the intruder approached and slapped him on the side of the head with the flat of the bloody sword.

“Stop that prancing,” the intruder said in fairly good Kaenish (with a Wardic, almost a Dwarvish, accent).

“My religion requires it,” Shollumech replied, with as much dignity as he could muster.

The intruder said something inaesthetic and, as far as Shollumech knew, untrue about the requirements of Kaenish religion. “I want you to tell me about this fire-under-water stuff,” the intruder continued. “I don’t have a lot of time, and I can’t afford to be gentle. Will you tell me?”

“The soldiers might have told you,” Shollumech explained. “And the other man was my alchemist; he would have been your property at the end of the battle, so I had to kill him. He would have told you.”

“You’re not answering my question.”

“I do not answer questions. I am the Fyor-tirgan Shollumech Kekklidas and I defy you to the death. Moreover, I have taken an oath by my right hand never to surrender the secret of my fire-in-water agent. May I know your name?”

The intruder stared at him for a few moments with his searing gray eyes and then said, “Why not? I am Morlock Ambrosius, vocate to the Graith of Guardians.”

“Ambrosius,” Shollumech repeated. “That would account for the . . . the, uh . . .”

Morlock was amused. “Yes, that accounts for my crooked shoulders.”

In fact, Shollumech had been warned by his gods to watch out for any of the Ambrosii who passed his way. They had gotten on the wrong side of the Two Powers somehow. If Shollumech were a shrewder, more businesslike man he might have been able to turn this situation to his advantage somehow. But he wasn’t sure what the religious implications would be if he did a favor for the Two Powers. They weren’t his gods . . .

But the intruder was saying something. “You are serious about this oath to your right hand?” he asked.

“No one,” Shollumech assured him, “below the rank of heresiarch takes oaths as seriously as I do. They bind me with the powers of the gods I feed.”

“All right,” said Morlock resignedly, and slashed off Shollumech’s right hand.

Shollumech passed out before he could even scream. But he awoke while Morlock was cauterizing the stump of his right wrist in the brazier the dead soldiers had used to light the catapult shots. Then he screamed. He screamed and screamed.

Morlock let him go on for a while, but then he stuck the fuming stump into a bucket of soldier’s wine and said, “Listen to me. Look at me.”

Shollumech did so. The bloodstained vocate held up Shollumech’s severed hand. “I now hold your right hand, and your oath,” said Morlock. “You will now tell me what you know about the fire-in-water agent.”

Shollumech’s mind, never very swift, was now slowed with pain and blood loss. Nonetheless, it seemed to him that Morlock’s demand was in accord with the dictates of religion.

“There are bottles of red fluid and bottles of blue fluid,” Shollumech said dully. “Next to the catapult in a sort of box. Either is inert by itself; when combined, they burn. In air, the fire will spread normally. In water, the fire will burn whatever it touches until the agent is consumed.”

“How is it made?”

“I don’t know. The alchemists discovered it. One killed the others to keep the secret for himself, and now I’ve killed him. He made up the agent, day by day, for my night attacks.”

Morlock went over to the catapult and found the bottles arranged in the alchemist’s maijarra wood case. He closed it and brought it with him back to Shollumech, sitting sprawled on the tower stones beside his fallen soldiers.

“Listen,” said Morlock, tossing the severed hand aside. “I don’t want to kill you if I don’t have to. Will you take an oath by your head that you won’t raise the alarm against me before dawn?”

Shollumech replied in the negative with the most inaesthetic thing he had ever said in his life. He was surprised at himself. Apparently some instincts ran even deeper than the esthetic impulse. He was still pondering the ramifications of this discovery when Morlock stabbed him through the heart.

Morlock armed and clothed himself from the fallen soldiers’ relatively unbloodied gear. One of them wore boots that were about his size, so he took those as well. But he tore Shollumech’s insignia, a dancing yellow boar, from everything he took. And he cut off Shollumech’s head and brought it with him as a passport. As he understood the customs of the country, the death of the Fyor-tirgan would absolve his followers of any obedience or loyalty. It didn’t mean that they wouldn’t want to kill him for other reasons, but he’d face that contingency when it arose.

In the event, he saw no one. Apparently Shollumech’s agonized screams had been enough to set off the frenzied looting of his quarters that was the traditional accompaniment of a Kaenish noble’s death. Morlock made it down through the unguarded tower unseen and left Shollumech’s head on the threshold for proper burial with the rest of his body.

Morlock’s shoulder was beginning to bother him, near where the woman had bitten him on the neck. It might have been his imagination, but he felt as if there was something long and thornlike there, deep under the skin. And his veins screamed in sick longing for the drug the woman’s bite had poisoned him with. He didn’t think that he had gotten the dose that the citizens of Thyläkotröx got straight from the One. If he had, he might not have been able to resist.

He suspected that the woman with the thorns in her mouth was designed by the One to lure people into the city by infecting them with the drug and making them want more. Or she might (with her alarming sexual urges) be part of the One’s peculiar reproductive setup. The two purposes weren’t necessarily at odds. In time the One would probably grow shrewder, learn from its mistakes, and make better lures. Morlock hoped it wouldn’t have time to do so . . . but he was achingly conscious that it was he who was running out of time.

Morlock walked along the bitter black beach northward from Shollumech’s tower. He really only had one line of attack open to him, and because the One knew that as well as he did, they were waiting for him.

Chariot, the major moon, was sullen as it sank toward the east. Horseman, the second moon, was high overhead, with Trumpeter, the third moon, fierce with renewed light as it rose in the west over the Grartan Range. By the combined light of the three moons he clearly saw his antagonists.

They were, or had been, citizens of Thyläkotröx, lining the way from the rocky beach to the city on the heights. But their silhouettes were distorted in the varied moonlight. They looked almost as if they were wearing armor, but on approaching them Morlock saw that their torsos were wrapped in tight cages of black shining branches. Their hands were entirely gone: the arms ended in long bladelike thorns. Clouds of thorns obscured their faces.

They were well protected, and there were many of them. But they walked with awkward stiffness, and Morlock, with a thorn growing in his shoulder, thought he understood why. This was his advantage, then: speed.

He used it. He’d looted two swords from Shollumech’s dead soldiers, and he drew them both now. (The maijarra box with the fire agent was strapped to his shoulders.) He charged the thorn-soldiers at the end of the line, striking off the hand-blades of the last thorn-soldier with a double stroke, then swung both his swords around to bring them back up without slowing and struck off the thorn-soldier’s head. It bounced off Morlock’s chest, piercing it at several places, and the body slumped down to the black stones of the beach.

The next soldier in the line was almost upon him. Morlock stabbed his enemy in the open area between the basket of thorns protecting his head and the breastplate of black branches. The man went down coughing up blood . . . of a sort. Blood would have been black in the moonlight; this stuff was transparent, yellowish or green.

He killed a few more, working his way up the line, but then they began to cluster around him, using their numbers to advantage. So he ran northward up the shoreline.

His thinking was this: it was the parasite thorns that slowed the soldiers’ movements. They would have been infected at different times. It was reasonable to assume that they would move at different speeds, with different amounts of the thorn-parasite cluttering up their insides.

Morlock looked back as he ran and saw with satisfaction that they were stringing out behind him on the black beach. He spun around without slowing and ran back at the straggling line of thorn-soldiers.

He killed the first one with a stab to the neck; the second he disabled with a leg cut and finished off with a thrust between the slats of the breastplate. From there he was in the thick of it, striking down thorn-soldiers as he went with a savage satisfaction he rarely felt in a fight. He felt he was not killing these men but ending their slavery to the One. The thorn in his shoulder glowed green-gold with pleasure but he was not aware of it.

His satisfaction ended when a long thorn stabbed him in the side from behind. He broke off from the thorn-soldier he had been fighting and put his wounded back to the sea.

There was another line of thorn-soldiers shuffling toward him; the nearest held a thorn-blade already afire from his Ambrosial blood. They must have been placed farther to the north. Morlock did not understand why the One had done that, and there was no time to think about it as several thorn-soldiers attacked.

Morlock slashed frantically with both his swords at the thorn-blades stabbing at him. When he could afford to move he ran northward up the beach, splashing sometimes through the shallows as the waves surged up among the rocks.

What had worked in his favor before was working against him now. It was the swiftest of the northern line of soldiers that had attacked him from behind. The other, slower ones were straggling behind northward in a rough line parallel with the water’s edge. Morlock was in real danger of being pinned against the water.

This is the end, said a voice in his mind, and the thorn in his shoulder throbbed with sudden agony. Only then did he realize it had been feeding him pleasure as he fought. It had done so for a reason, but he didn’t have time to think about it now.

Not normally a cursing man, Morlock damned the thorn—its pleasure, pain, and despair—and cast his eye as he ran, along the ragged column of thorn-soldiers. It had to be ragged; there had to be gaps.

He saw one: a single thorn-soldier shuffling by itself behind a cluster of faster ones and a clot of slower ones. Morlock charged him and struck him down as he passed, heading into the higher land, approaching the town (black on the horizon in Chariot’s red light).

Once he had a little height he stopped and turned back. The thorn in his shoulder punished him with a blaze of suffering, so he knew he was doing the right thing. There was something he didn’t understand here, and it was important. It was more than just the heat of battle clouding up his mind: something was trying to keep him from understanding, luring him with pleasure to fight the endless parades of thorn-soldiers, missing the real point.

The thornlike pain in his shoulder and neck was growing even more intense. He seemed to hear a blurry voice whispering to him that it was too late, that there was no point, that even if he did understand there was nothing he could do, that what he had to do was run now, far and fast, to save himself.

That was what the voice within him wanted him to do, so he didn’t. He planted himself on the slope and looked at the ragged groups of thorn-soldiers shuffling toward him and he thought.

Two lines of soldiers made a certain amount of sense, so the one could reinforce the other, but why so far apart? It had been long minutes before the northern column had staggered down to assist the southern column.

The answer came crashing in on him at last. There was something between the two lines that the One wanted to protect . . . almost certainly the same thing he wanted to attack: its underwater mouth.

Morlock sheathed his swords and unstrapped the maijarra box from his back. He knotted the straps into a single long tether and hooked it onto the box. He drew a sword with his free hand and ran down the slope, whirling the box over his head.

The clot of thorn-soldiers in his path seemed to stare for a moment at the whirling box, and then they suddenly separated, shuffling in different directions.

Morlock leapt toward one. As he whirled the box over his head the thorn-soldier did a dance of anxiety (strangely like the dance Shollumech had done when he had killed his alchemist) and ran back into the sea to escape. Morlock followed and, when the soldier was knee deep in the surf, he smashed the maijarra wood box on the thorn-soldier’s head. Some of the bottles inside broke, and fire agent splashed all over the thorn-soldier, setting him instantly alight. Morlock thrust with his drawn sword through the box as it fell past the thorn-soldier’s neck and left the sword in the wound, pinning the box in place. The flailing thorn-soldier gave a buzzing scream and jumped into the deep water to douse the flames. Morlock took a long breath and followed.

The Narrow Sea didn’t have the tremendous surging waves of the ocean that faced the edge of the sky. But it did shoal fairly rapidly; they were already deep in the dark water. The thorn-soldier was not flailing any longer; he appeared to be dead. But still he burned, tiger-bright in the night-dark sea, drifting slowly downward.

Then, by the light of the burning thorn-soldier, Morlock saw his target in the green-black gloom of the sea floor: a great pulsating mouth, rimmed with thornlike hair. This was the route that Zoyev had travelled after the Sammark was wrecked, the route he meant the burning corpse to follow now. There must be some sort of stalk or throat that ran under the ground to a belly beneath the town. Was the One really a plant, or some sort of animal?

The wounds in Morlock’s side and neck were burning from the salt water; the thorn in his shoulder was an agony brighter than the burning corpse he was shepherding downward with his remaining sword. His lungs were straining to hold their air. Perhaps this was not the best time to speculate on the genus of a monster he was trying to kill.

The burning body was drifting down toward the mouth, but too slowly to suit Morlock. He ran it through the chest with the second sword in his hand and left this sword also in the wound.

Then he let the burning corpse fall away and he arrowed upward through the night-dark water to the surface shimmering with the light of the three moons. He broke through the surface and trod water for a while, breathing life back into his lungs.

Presently he poked his head beneath the waves: he thought he saw a gleam of orange swallowed in the gloom below. He hoped that the One could no more refrain from drawing things into its sea-mouth than a tree could refrain from drinking through its roots or a man could refrain from breathing. If so, his little present to the One was well on its way.

It was. The burning corpse entered the thorny sea-mouth and travelled, submerged, down a pulsating tunnel. A trail of fire followed on its wake, down the floor of the pulsating tunnel. It surfaced at last alongside a heap of debris in an underground chamber, also covered with pulsating flesh. This was where the One absorbed the bodies and spirits of the things it swallowed through its sea-mouth. Zoyev’s half-consumed body was there, along with others from the Sammark and still others from other vessels lost at sea, and dead sea creatures, and other wrack.

The fire began to spread from the burning corpse to the drying matter in the great island of offal in the One’s belly. It began to be hot—hot enough to dry the pulsating walls. The pressure increased with the heat as the belly filled with smoke and steam.

In the end, the belly of the One exploded, sending flames shooting far up along its stem, showering them through the city of Thyläkotröx.

Morlock first guessed that his stratagem was working when the thorn in his shoulder burned its way out through the flesh.

He had been playing hide-and-seek with the thorn-soldiers for hours, it seemed, ever since he had waded to land. Annoyingly, they always seemed to know where he was: led by the parasite within him, no doubt.

When the thorn began to grow hot, Morlock first assumed that it was a trick by the One to make him cry out, so naturally he did not. But the pain grew even more intense and seemed to move outward through his flesh. And he heard the thorn-soldiers thrashing about and shrieking with suddenly clear voices down on the sharp-stoned beach. That was when Morlock understood what was happening.

Morlock gritted his teeth and clenched his fists as the thorn emerged, smoking, from his shoulder, burned its way through his shirt, and fell to the ground, wriggling like a snake made of embers on the dark stones.

The agony was intense, but even greater was the relief that it was out of his body. Somehow the sympathy that allowed the One to control this fragment of itself meant that the fragment was compelled to die along with the One.

And the One was dying, perhaps was already dead. Morlock raised his eyes to the dark battlements of Thyläkotröx and saw they were outlined in light: a fountain of fire and sparks rising up into the sky from the city center. Then he knew for certain that the seed of fire he had planted in the sea had flowered into the One’s blazing death.

The thorn-soldiers lay silent, bright as live coals scattered over the dark shore. Morlock looked at them and didn’t like to think of what it was like in the city now. Many of the people must be dying horrible deaths as the parasite thorns burned their way out of the host bodies. Perhaps some of the citizens would survive, but he doubted they would bless the man who took their happiness away with this deadly brightness.

He watched the fire rising over Thyläkotröx for a while, triumphant at the One’s death but still guilty over the suffering he had caused. While the One was alive, he had known exactly what to do: whatever the One opposed. Now he wondered if he had been right to be so single-minded, if his determination to oppose the One hadn’t made him into a distorted reflection of the One, the same image painted in more fiery colors. Maybe there had been some third way he could have taken, to oppose the One but save the people it had infected. . . . But, if there was, even now he couldn’t see it.

Morlock shrugged his crooked, wounded shoulders and turned away from the burning city, walking northward up the dark shoreline toward the Gap of Lone and home. For a long time, as he walked, his distorted shadow danced before him, outlined in fiery light.