“What we need,” Aloê said, “is a map. Or a guide.”

“In a city where lies are prayers?” Morlock asked. “No.”

“I see what you mean,” Aloê conceded. “What do you suggest?”

“Go west into the mountains. Take the first path leading north or northeast.”

“Mountains,” Aloê said uncertainly. She’d spent some time among them in recent years, but never really got to like them. Morlock, on the other hand, had grown up in them, and under them. “You’re sure?”

“We’ll get there.”

“All right. You get to steer for this part of the journey, then. I hope you’re right.”

In the event, he wasn’t.

Klÿgnaru the Unshaven was the archpriest to Khÿmäroreibätu, the Goat-that-bestrides-the-Mountain, and tedious work he found it.

“I spend my days and nights wearing this goatskin cap,” he complained to his friend Gnörymu, as they sat drinking together in the roadhouse of the neutral village of Hoimëdmetheterön. “I have been an archpriest of this horrible little mountain for twenty years. Everyone is so faithful to the Goat that I can’t get a single heresy going, even to develop some decent persecution, much less threaten the town god and earn a chance to join the Court of Heresiarchs. I’ll die on the mountain, and my successor will feed my flesh to the Goat’s avatars, even as I did with my predecessor.”

His friend Gnörymu the Glabrous sympathized with him, none more so. Gnörymu was the archpriest of Öweioreibäto, the Sheep-that-bestrides-the-Mountain, and he had much the same set of problems. He was a little better off: he was physically unable to grow body hair, so he could go without shaving and not draw comment to himself (unlike bristly old Klÿgnaru). Also, he had already resigned himself to the thought that he would never join the Court of Heresiarchs. Still, at one time he had shared Klÿgnaru’s wild dreams, and he knew how hard a dream dies.

He tilted a beaker of fermented sheep-milk and filled up Klÿgnaru’s mug with the stinking intoxicating mess. “Content yourself, old friend!” he said. “Between us, we rule the Mountain. If anyone doesn’t like it, they can lick our elbows and die rabid. Maybe it’s not much, but there’s no one I’d rather share it with.”

But Klÿgnaru went on grumbling. “You think we can at least skip the war this year? I lost a lot of herdsman over the summer. The war will take more of them. A war is really stupid when we have other things to do, anyway.”

Gnörymu smiled and did not look at his friend. In fact, Klÿgnaru had stumbled across a persuasive heresy that might find many adherents among people on both sides of the Mountain: a peace movement. But Gnörymu was confident that, if he waited, Klÿgnaru would talk himself out of the idea.

And he was right: he knew his friend. After a few tense moments Klÿgnaru sighed and said, “I suppose you’re right. I just needed to complain a bit, old friend, to someone who could understand.”

“I do understand,” Gnörymu assured him sincerely.

“Well, where shall we send them to fight? The Crispy Field? No, we used that last year.”

“Two years since, and two years before that. What about the Ringlake Shore?”

“No. Definitely not. That’s my best winter grazing.”

This was why Gnörymu had proposed it. He nodded thoughtfully and waited.

“I’ll tell you what,” Klÿgnaru suggested at last. “What about the Long Curve? They can kill each other there to their heart’s content and it won’t bother my goats or your sheep. Except when their herdfolk don’t return, of course.”

“All right,” Gnörymu said, with feigned reluctance. The Long Curve was a mountain pass, partly artificial, which took a long path around the Mountain, from its southeast corner to its northeast corner. If he could not convince Klÿgnaru to fight on the Ringlake Shore, his preferred option was the Long Curve. And here poor Klÿgnaru was suggesting it.

“Same day as usual all right with you?” Klÿgnaru asked.

“It’s coming up fast,” Gnörymu complained. In fact, his preparations had been almost complete for months.

“Tradition, old friend! What’s the point of this silly war if we don’t keep to tradition?”

Gnörymu had his own ideas about what the war was for, but he gracefully conceded the date, since it was what he preferred anyway.

“Now: who should think up the pretext for the war?” Klÿgnaru asked. “I think I did it last year.”

“Do it again, if you don’t mind,” Gnörymu suggested. “You think up such good ones.”

“Thanks,” Klÿgnaru said, foolishly pleased. “Rather enjoy it.”

In fact, whenever they used Klÿgnaru’s rationalizations for the annual war between the Sheep and the Goat, his own people became discontented and Gnörymu’s people became enraged. Most people know that Klÿgnaru was not sincerely devoted to the annual war, and he never fought in the line himself. So his own fighters were demoralized and Gnörymu’s gained a touch of extra fervor. It was when Gnörymu had noticed this, a few years ago, that he began to reluctantly lay his plans for his friend’s downfall.

Klÿgnaru was a bad priest to his god—neither loyally orthodox nor boldly heretical. The power of his town and god were waning. Most of the goatherds whom Klÿgnaru had lost the last few summers had died from the poisonous bites of a breed of deadly snake-sheep that Öweioreibäto had sent in response to Gnörymu’s prayers. He had hopes that the war this year would decimate the herdsmen of the Goat and result in something like a final victory for Öweioreibäto.

And, of course, a victory for her archpriest. Gnörymu had not been lying when he’d said there was no one he would rather share the rule of the Mountain with than his old friend Klÿgnaru.

But if he could rule it by himself, that was obviously best of all.

So they laid their plans, together and separately, and the annual war began on the traditional date, the first of Bayring.

As Tekätestu had foreseen, this was the day after Aloê and Morlock entered the Long Curve on their ill-fated attempt to reach Thyläkotröx City.

Aloê and Morlock passed many-mouthed idols of Tekätestu all along the road for some considerable way outside of his city. Some were weathered, if well-maintained; some were brand-new, their edges sharp from the stonecutter. Often these newer images stood atop the ruins of older totems.

“The remains of Mädeio?” Aloê remarked to Morlock. He shrugged and nodded. That added up to I guess so from a normal person, or so Aloê guessed.

In the red dry hills above Tekästomädeien they finally stopped seeing idols of Tekästu. Others began to appear—at first sporadically, then more and more frequently. There were two that were most common: one showed a goat standing proudly atop a mountain peak; the other was a sheep doing the same.

“Khÿmäroreibätu,” Morlock read, for Aloê’s benefit. (She was still struggling a bit with written Kaenish, and there was a different set of characters used for inscriptions anyway.) “The other one is Öweioreibäto.”

“The Goat That Forever Stands Upon the Mountain,” she translated into Wardic. “And: The Ewe That Forever Stands Upon the Mountain.”

“Ewe?” Morlock said doubtfully. “I thought it was ‘sheep.’”

“An ewe is a female sheep, and that’s a feminine ending.”

“Oh.”

“You wouldn’t be much of a farmer, Morlock.”

“Thank you.”

Aloê wasn’t sure at first whether this was ironic or not. But, glancing at the man, she decided he had really taken her mild slam as a compliment. Maybe it was a northern thing. She continued, “I wonder if the gods are friends to each other or enemies? Wherever the sheep-people put up an idol the goat-folk followed suit.”

Morlock shrugged and said, “Friends?” in Kaenish. He seemed to be implying the word had another meaning hereabouts—as well it might.

She didn’t feel like discussing it. They were a long way from the sea, and the air was getting dry and thin. She could deal with it, but she didn’t like it.

The road they were walking was fairly well-maintained, but didn’t seem much-used. Occasionally they met people hurrying the other way, most of whom passed without speaking. The only exception was a panicky neatherd who was driving four solemn cows downhill toward the city just as fast as they would go.

Which was none too fast, in fact. The neatherd was nervous and sweating, but his cattle were cool as icicles, treading the road at their self-chosen pace and calmly ignoring the man’s heckling, shouts, and blows.

“It’s that time of year,” he said apologetically to Aloê and Morlock as he passed, to their complete mystification.

“Time to get them to market?” Aloê wondered after the man had gone by. “Time to get them to a butcher?”

Morlock shrugged. Not the man to go to with your farming questions, Aloê remembered.

“Or does something bad happen in the mountains this time of year?” she continued. “Maybe we should have asked him. Snowstorms?”

“No,” Morlock said. “South winds keep Kaen warm all winter long.”

“That’s the first good thing I’ve heard you say about the place.”

Morlock looked at her, mystified. For him, a warm winter was nothing to brag about, clearly.

“Rains, though,” he continued. “Maybe floods. They can be dangerous in narrow places.”

But water couldn’t scare Aloê. “If that’s the worst, we’ll be fine, then.”

The sandy road led steadily uphill to a cleft in the red rock of the dry mountains before them. It looked very narrow at first, but as they spent most of a day struggling toward it she realized how high the stone face of the cliff was. When they finally reached the entrance to the canyon they saw it was wide enough for a dozen men to walk down, side by side.

“If they don’t mind holding hands, that is,” she joked to Morlock, who nodded absently as he watched something off on the side of the road.

She followed his gaze and saw an idol of Öweioreibäto, that was the sheepy one, being beaten by a small boy in goatskins wielding a very large hammer. The idol finally fell to pieces, a large chunk of it landing on one of the boy’s feet. He screamed and dropped the hammer. He hopped away into the peach-colored scrub along the road, holding his injured foot in both hands and hopping on the other, sobbing out curses against Öweioreibäto and prayers to Khÿmäroreibätu.

“So: they’re not friends after all,” Aloê remarked. Morlock nodded thoughtfully.

“I hope we’re not walking into a religious war,” Aloê said, and at that even Morlock smiled.

It grew dark very soon after they entered the cleft and began walking up the canyon beyond. But they carried on as long as the sliver of sky above showed blue. The surface of the canyon was a little rougher than the road, but it was smoother than Aloê had expected. Morlock said he thought it had been worked some—that, in effect, they were still on a road, headed from somewhere to somewhere. That made Aloê feel a little better.

She almost felt—whatever the opposite of seasick was. She was land-sick. She was tired of brownish red dirt under her aching feet, and irregular clumps of red rock banging against her toes didn’t help. She felt like she was strangling as the steep walls of the canyon were pressed against her, and the thin air didn’t help. She wanted something, anything, to distract her from her hellish surroundings, and Morlock’s one-word replies to her conversational gambits didn’t help.

But she kept her whining to the indispensable minimum and tried to crack the occasional joke, and didn’t even shout in relief when Morlock decreed it was time to stop for the night.

Morlock dug their sleeping pit, made the fire, and pulled the provisions out of his knapsack while she sat and rubbed her feet. They ate dried sausage and passed a water bottle back and forth with a minimum of conversation.

“Wish it would rain,” was one of Morlock’s more surprising comments.

“What about floods?” Aloê asked, surprised.

Morlock shrugged. “Air’s too dry.”

She felt she could love this man.

“What did you find to make a fire with?” she said. “Do those scrub trees grow in the canyon?”

“Bones,” he said.

“Bones?”

“Bones. I found a lot of them when I dug our sleeping pit. I think this was a battlefield, years ago.”

In the course of digging their sleep pit, Morlock had come across enough dried bones to realize this was a battlefield. He’d finished digging the pit, and went on to use the bones as fuel for the campfire. And now he expected her to sleep in what was essentially an open grave. An open used grave.

She changed her mind about being able to love this man.

But she had to admit that the hole was quite comfortably free of bones, maggots and rats, lined with sand and leaves—better than some of the places they’d slept. They lay down together, and as usual he turned away from her without a word. Sometimes she slept back-to-back with him, but she had found she was actually warmer if she spooned up against his back and wrapped her blankets around them both. He didn’t seem to mind—rarely moved the whole night through, though she had to admit several mornings it appeared he had not slept.

She wondered, idly, as they were nestled for sleep, what Naevros was doing and whether it would be better, or at least sexier, if he were here. No doubt he was hate-sexing the Honorable Ulvana or her moral equivalent at that very moment. Never mind: she loathed thinking about him this way—loathed herself when she thought like this.

“Morlock,” she said sleepily, to distract herself. “Anyone waiting for you back home?”

“My harven-kin,” he said. “Some friends.”

“No girl?”

“No.” The answer was harsh, unequivocal, interesting.

“A boy, then?” she hazarded.

“No. It’s not like that. It’s just . . .”

She thought of the terms she’d used, and smiled. “You prefer adults.”

“Yes.”

“Sound fellow,” she said, still smiling, and went contentedly to sleep with her face pressed against his twisted spine.

Morning was a grayish reddish void, empty of sunlight. Aloê woke to find herself alone in the sleep pit. She crawled out of her sandy grave and found Morlock chewing dried meat with a marked lack of enthusiasm.

He saluted her with the water bottle and passed it to her as she sat beside him.

“Feel like an oily rag,” she remarked after a drink. “I don’t suppose we can spare any of this for washing.”

Morlock shook his head regretfully. But he added, “Water cut this canyon, before people made it into a road. There’s water here somewhere.”

“Where?”

“Wells. Or streams dammed up to make lakes. We’ll find it.”

“Mmm.” In her mind she was drifting under the surface of the mountain lake Morlock had created in her mind, shedding the filth from her skin like scales, renewing her life from the life-giving water.

She sighed, opened her eyes, and accepted the fibrous slab of dried meat that Morlock was offering her.

It was noon, by the gleam of gold in the blue sliver of sky over their heads, when they encountered the soldiers of the Goat.

They wore goatskin helmets and goatleather cuirasses shaped to fit their scrawny chests. Slats of pale varnished wood dangled from their belts, making a kind of protective skirt for their groins. They were armed with stone-tipped wooden spears, and rocks, and some had round wooden shields. There were about twenty of them.

“The enemy at last!” they screamed when they saw Morlock and Aloê. “Easy grazing for the Goat of War!”

“We are not your enemies,” Aloê called. “We are not opposed to, um Khÿmäroreibätu.”

There was some confusion at this, and then one goat-soldier cried, “All must die, so that their blood can slake the thirst of the Almighty Goat!”

“Yes!” cried another. “The Goat is great! Praise the Goat and kill the enemy!”

The others joined in with their own very similar opinions, and they smashed their weapons together and moved aggressively but not very rapidly forward.

There was obviously no reasoning with them, and they were pretty numerous. On the other hand, they were pretty undisciplined, and those spears were obviously not throwing weapons. Aloê met Morlock’s cold gray eye, and he seemed to be thinking the same thing she was.

They turned together and ran away back up the canyon. Morlock drew his glassy sword as he ran, and Aloê spun her glass staff like a baton, gathering impulse energy as she ran alongside.

The goat soldiers shouted in triumph and began to pursue them, each as fast as he could.

The thing is, most people don’t run at the same speed. As they all ran down the canyon, the goaty troop began to thin out—some running slower, some stumbling over rocks (or bones! Aloê thought), some running a little less enthusiastically.

“Now, I think,” Aloê said quietly to Morlock, after a quick glance over her shoulder.

They turned back together to face their foes. The three or four in front were joyous at the prospect of battle, not realizing or caring that their line was much less numerous than it had been.

Aloê spun her crystal staff one last time, then gripped it firmly below the center and struck at the nearest spearman. The staff passed through the spear, shattering it to splinters, and proceeded to do the same thing to the spearman’s arm. He fell screaming to his knees, screaming out curses in the name of his goaty god. She jumped over him and began laying into the next goat-soldier in the long straggling line.

Morlock’s sword was a flash of glassy light at her side. She was worried at first he was a sword-waver—the kind of person it was dangerous to stand next to in a fight. But he used the edge of his bright blade only to block attacks; at every chance he thrust the point home with deadly efficiency. The sharp end of the sword was already red with enemy blood.

The front of the straggling line broke, and the terrified goat-soldiers ran back, stumbling into their fellows who were running up from behind. The panic and confusion spread, and soon dozens of soldiers were fleeing from the two glass-weaponed Guardians.

Eventually the mass of soldiers to the rear forced the frightened vanguard to slow down and regroup. They rallied each other, shouted a few slogans about cloven hooves of courage, and lumbered forward to attack again.

“Same same?” Aloê suggested to Morlock.

“Won’t work again,” Morlock said.

But it did, and twice more after that. They ran until their attackers spread out behind them, turned to counterattack, and drove the broken vanguard fleeing back up the canyon.

The last time, though, they heard a loud chorus of triumphant shouting farther up the pass: hundreds, thousands of voices re-echoing down the stones.

The two vocates looked at each other without speaking and took the better course of valor, running off in the other direction.

But they had not gone far before they heard sounds coming toward them up the canyon—not the sounds of an army, exactly, but many strange footfalls and a kind of muttering.

“Cavalry with muffled hooves?” Aloê whispered to Morlock.

He shrugged. “Camels, maybe.”

“What’s a camel?”

Morlock looked at her to make sure she was serious, and then briefly described a camel.

“You’re making that up!” she accused him.

He didn’t have time to respond, if he was going to, before they rounded the bend and saw what was making the noise.

Filling the canyon before them, down to the next turn, was a herd of sheep. They had to be sheep. They were about waist-high to Aloê or Morlock, had long floppy ears, and round bodies covered with closely crimped wool. But the wool gleamed like polished steel; the eyes of the beasts were red as blood; instead of bleating they seemed to be gasping or groaning; and each sheep had a pair of long curling horns, pointed at the ends, from which dark venomous fluid was dripping. The sheep had long pointed teeth as if they were meat-eaters.

As soon as the sheep saw Morlock and Aloê the flock rushed forward, gnashing teeth and thrusting with their horns.

“Don’t get stuck by one of those horns,” Aloê said, just to make conversation while they waited for the onslaught.

Morlock nodded seriously, and added, “Strike for the face. That wool looks to be armor.”

They stood, in fighting stance, and waited. Aloê spun her staff a few times to build up impulse force. She wondered if she should say something mushy like It’s been nice knowing you or There’s no one I’d rather die fighting beside. But she decided that, even if the words were true, they might ring false . . . and they would probably be wasted on Morlock anyway.

Morlock stood like a stone until the beasts came within striking range. Then he stabbed and stabbed, the glass sword like lightning in his hand. Four bodies fell in a row, forming a low wall, and the beasts beyond milled about in confusion.

“A barrier! A barrier!” shouted Aloê joyously, and lashed out to smash two sheep-skulls, one with either end of her staff. “You beautiful son-of-a-brach’s-bastard!”

He gave her a gray astonished glance even as he continued to strike sheep dead. She did the same, and soon they were surrounded by a wall of dead sheep at least two sheep in height.

But by now the army of venomous, steely, red-eyed sheep had filled the whole canyon, as far as they could see from bend to bend. It’s true the army seemed mostly intent on marching past them now that they were hidden behind the army’s dead flock-mates. But the pressure of the marching sheep was pushing the wall back toward them. Soon Aloê and Morlock might be killed by dead sheep, impaled by the horns of the beasts they’d slain.

“Do we wait it out?” she asked Morlock, hoping that he would not shrug or grunt or something. “I suppose they will pass by eventually.”

“No,” said Morlock. “Can you keep the wall? I’ll get us out of here.”

“Yes,” Aloê said gratefully, and turned to keep wandering sheep from walking over the heap of dead ones.

Morlock said, “Noddegamra,” and his glass sword fell into separate shining spikes. He gathered them up from the ground and slipped them into the many pockets he had sewn into his jacket and shirt and did something with one of them against the wall of rock behind them. Then he stepped two feet in the air, drove another crystal spike into the cliff, and put his foot on it. He drove a third spike into the wall and stepped up to it. Then he turned back to Aloê and motioned for her to follow.

He expects me to climb that cliff, Aloê realized. She almost refused, almost shouted for him to come back off the rocks and fight the sheep like a man. Then she thought about how crazy that would sound. The venomous sheep were there, and so was the army of goat-soldiers; she had to get away. And: she remembered Morlock rowing his seasick sodden self away to fight the dragon on the sea. I’ll need a boat. Or is it a ship?

She groaned and sheathed her staff across her shoulders. One long step took her up to the first spike. His foot had left the second by then, and he was driving spikes up higher on the cliff and lifting himself up to them like a misshapen monkey.

“Have to go up straighter to reach the first shelf,” he called back.

Shelf? What shelf? To Aloê’s eye the cliff was a sheer mass rising up to the path of the sun.

“Shelf, schmelf, bite an elf,” she muttered through clenched teeth as she followed somewhat slower. She hated heights. Hated them. Even when there weren’t venomous sheep and clownish goat-warriors capering around at the height’s base.

“What?” he called back.

“’S a boat. Not a ship.”

He stopped what he was doing and looked down at her. She waved hurriedly at him to keep on going, clenched her teeth together, and kept going herself.

Presently she came to the thin irregularity in the cliff face that Morlock described so generously as a shelf. Morlock matter-of-factly pulled her up. She wedged her feet on the stone, with her back to the cliff, and tried to look down without obvious terror.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

It struck her as a very un-Morlocky sort of question. “Perfectly well,” she said with quiet dignity. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

If he shrugged she didn’t see it, God Creator be praised. He bent over the venom-stinking sheep-filled abyss and shouted, “Armageddon!”

Aloê’s vision was a little wavery, but she was pretty sure she saw the glassy shards of Morlock’s sword flying up toward them from the cliff face. She resisted the impulse to duck; it would have sent her tumbling off the narrow ledge.

In the event, there was no danger. The shards reassembled themselves into a sword, whose grip landed in Morlock’s outstretched hands.

“Nice trick,” she said in a level voice she was rather proud of.

“Eh,” he said, embarrassed and pleased. “Simple, really. Talic impulse woven into the shards holds them together, and makes them responsive to summoning. Got the idea from . . . from . . . from something I’m working on at home. I’ll. I’ll. I’ll show it to you sometime.”

“Love to see it,” she said, lying politely through her clenched teeth.

“I have to refresh the talic charge,” he said. He sat back and ascended into rapture: she saw the faint glow through his closed eyelids.

As she waited she looked down into the chasm below. The tide of sheep up the canyon had stopped for some reason. The sun, straight overhead now, painted a stripe of noon-light down the middle of the pass, making the steely wool of the deadly flock shine like gold. As she waited, the edge of light moved to the opposite side of the pass, climbed the red-black stones of the canyon wall, was gone.

Morlock awoke. Aloê smiled when he met her eye, and she repressed any light-hearted comments she may have thought of regarding noonday naps. She was very much afraid that, if she opened her mouth, vertigo would force her to vomit.

Morlock held a corner of his jacket under the pommel of the glass sword and said, conversationally, “Noddegamra.” The glass sword fell to shards again, which Morlock deftly caught in his jacket and afterward stowed efficiently in his myriad pockets. He met her eye again.

“Onward and upward,” she said gamely, managing not to puke, and he rose up with serpentine grace, using only his legs. She herself took three times as long to do the same thing, keeping one hand at all times on the stone wall behind her.

Morlock did not watch these ungraceful proceedings, but was occupied in driving spikes into the stone face of the cliff and climbing up them. He seemed to be doing nothing other than pushing them in with his fingers, as if the cliff wall were made of, say, a moist cheese. But when she came to them she found them as firmly placed as if they had been set in cement a week before. No doubt there were technical details involved that Morlock would be willing to share at great, if slightly incoherent detail, should she be able to call out a question.

But she didn’t actually give a damn how they worked at the moment, as long as they did, and her stomach was bouncing around inside her midriff anyway and she was finding it hard to breathe. She’d risk speech only if it seemed necessary.

The cliff face began to throb as she climbed from spike to spike. At first she thought it was just a new sign of her own vertigo, but the shaking became worse, was obviously part of the world outside herself. She heard a great stomping sound, in rhythm with the shaking stones, and a roaring sound that was something between a trumpet call and a forest fire. And along with all of that: the triumphant chanting of the goat-soldiers. Khÿmäroreibätu’s counter-attack against the venom-sheep was coming.

When it hove into sight, Aloê began to wonder if she was dreaming all this, or lying mad in a dark room somewhere. The details were feverishly bright, dense, and impossible to believe.

She saw a goat as large as a house, with steel plates protecting its long agile legs. It had a long flexible nose like a tube. A man was riding on its neck, and he held a goad or something in his hand. And when he stabbed the goad into the back of the giant goat’s head, the goat screamed in rage and fear, and fire sprayed out of its long nose.

The sheep were screaming, their steely wool red-hot with the monster-goat’s flames. The goat danced forward among them, crushing some sheep under its metal-clad legs. Behind the goat came companies of plate-armored pikemen, stabbing the burning sheep as if they were venomous sausages to be served on sticks.

“What in the nightmares of God Avenger is that?” Aloê demanded.

“Looks like a cross between a goat and an elephant,” Morlock remarked.

Aloê looked suspiciously at him, several spikes above her on the cliff face. “What’s an elephant?” She remembered someone else using the word to her once.

Morlock explained what an elephant was.

“Stop making things up!” she screamed at him.

He rolled his eyes, shook his head, and continued to plant crystal spikes in the wall.

They were already well above the goat-elephant, perhaps even out of the range of its fiery blasts. But the real danger proved to be the heavy impact of the creature’s iron-sheathed hooves. They shook the ground; they shook the stones of the cliff wall. More than once Aloê had to catch herself from falling off the glassy spike she was standing on—and one time she did not manage to catch herself. She fell a body length back down the cliff before she managed to grab on to one of the lower spikes.

Morlock, as soon as he saw, dove back down the cliff, swinging past the spikes without seeming to touch them until he reached Aloê.

“Are you all right?” he asked again.

“It’s that elephant-goat thing,” she said apologetically. “Threw me right off the cliff.”

They waited while it moved onward past them. Aloê was tired, so tired. But she didn’t want to risk another fall down the cliff due to a goat-quake. Morlock seemed to understand that without needing anything to be said.

She watched with weary interest as the goat-elephant’s rider drove the beast on, pitilessly plying his goad. His screams had Kaenish words in them, she realized belatedly.

“I am coming for you Gnörymu!” he screamed. “The Goat will have his vengeance!”

The Goat mentioned must have been the god, Khÿmäroreibätu, Aloê realized. The elephant-goat was female, with very full teats, as a matter of fact, that leaked the same sort of heavy burning fluid the beast sprayed from her nose.

The elephant-goat swung around the next twist in the mountain pass. The goat-quakes receded, fell still. Now, among the smoking corpses of the venomous sheep, there were wool-clad soldiers fighting against the goatskin-clad pikemen. Aloê had no idea where the sheep-soldiers had come from and what that implied about the war between Khÿmäroreibätu and Öweioreibäto. Nor did she care. She figured it was safe to climb again, so she started back up the cliff. Morlock kept one spike ahead of her all the way, climbing up without taking his eyes off her. She had the impression he was going to reach out and catch her (or try to) if she fell again. This struck her as somewhat patronizing, but also comforting, so she said nothing about it.

At one point she simply had to stop climbing and rest. She hung onto a spike and leaned against the cliff with her eyes closed, breathing heavily but getting little life from the thin, smoky, venom-laden air.

Morlock’s voice broke in on her awareness. “You’re surrounded by water.”

“What?” she said irritably, opening her eyes.

“You’re surrounded by water,” he suggested again. “You can’t fall, really; the water is holding you up.”

She was about to respond very severely indeed. He was obviously trying to reassure her because he thought she was paralyzed by the fear of falling. She was, of course, afraid of falling. Who wouldn’t be? But she wasn’t paralyzed by that fear or any other. She was afraid, weary, sick, and disgusted, but she could damn well do what was necessary.

She looked up to shout this in his face, but was stopped by his expression: open, concerned, patient, watchful—as if her state of mind was the most important thing in the world.

“I’m all right,” she said at last. “Thanks.”

He nodded and they climbed slowly, at her pace, up the cliff to the next ledge. Once Morlock was on it he reached down, lifted Aloê up, and set her down beside him. Then he summoned Armageddon to him by shouting down the cliff face again.

This ledge was wider than the last one, and deeper, too. Part of it receded into shadow, but she could hear the chuckling of water in those shadows, and the hard red rock was carpeted with green moss.

“I am not moving from here for a while,” she announced after she had surveyed the area and caught her breath.

Morlock nodded solemnly and remarked, “A rough climb.”

This might be more patronage, but she didn’t think so. Even he couldn’t have been used to climbing cliffs while venom-sheep and elephant-goats and goat-warriors and sheep-soldiers fought a chaotic battle below.

Thinking of the gigantic goat, she said, “You made up that elephant thing, didn’t you? Admit it.”

“No,” he said seriously. “They really exist, in the jungles somewhere east of Anhi. I read about them when I was staying at New Moorhope.”

“And they breathe fire?”

“Well. No. At least the books didn’t mention it.”

“I knew you were making them up.”

He threw up his hands in exasperation. She laced her arms in between his and embraced him. She kissed his ugly bloodstained face and whispered, “We made it! We made it! You crazy bastard!”

She felt the violence of his reaction, and mistook it at first for repugnance. Then she noticed his hard-to-miss erection.

“I can’t help it,” he said miserably, noticing that she had noticed, and tried to pull away.

“Maybe I can,” she said, feeling a little drunk, and kissed him on the mouth. He was in love with her, of course. It all made sense to her now, since that ridiculous you’re surrounded by water comment. He had avoided her because he thought it was hopeless. Maybe it was hopeless, for reasons he didn’t know, and maybe she was crazy for trying this. But it was a crazy world full of elephant-goats and death. Being crazy made her fit right in.

“I don’t expect anything,” he continued. “We’re too different.”

She bit his ear and whispered into it, “Fuck you. We’re the same in every way that matters, different in every way that’s good. And you love me. Tell me you don’t and I’ll call you a liar.”

He was telling her that he did love her, but not with words. His mouth was all over her face, his clever fingers entangled in the fastenings of her clothing.

The world contracted to a warm nest that contained only the two of them. She laughed a little unsteadily and undid his buttons as he was undressing her, tearing a few of them loose when they wouldn’t come free willingly.

The ugliness of his body (pale as a deep-ocean fish, hairy as a spider, that odd twist in his shoulders) did not distress her. It was so powerful, so strong, yet so skilled, patient, controlled. He didn’t tear any of her fastenings. His long clever fingers and his luminous gray eyes (the only things about him that could really be called beautiful) . . . they cherished her, moved over her, celebrated her, hungered for her.

It was deranged. It was not how she had imagined it would be at all. That was why it was right; that was why it would work this time. It would work this time; it would work this time. She wanted him and she was ready to have him.

The world tumbled around and around, and she found herself spread-eagled on the moss with him poised above her. She wrapped her limbs around him, drawing him closer.

He mounted her. The wet lips of her vagina kissed the taut silken head of his penis. He penetrated her, or she engulfed him.

Triumph. Triumph. This was what it was like. This was how it should be. Nothing would go wrong this time.

God Creator, she was so wet. It was almost as if she were urinating. It felt exactly the same.

Oh, God. Oh, God. What if she were? If she were . . . The shame of it. The stink of it. The shame summoned back all the other shames, all the other stinks, the stench of his semen, no she did not have to think of that, she was not going to think of that, her mind was her own; she could think what she wanted.

She could think what she wanted. But she couldn’t feel what she wanted. She felt the tightness in her vulva, the stretching feeling, the pain, the fear, the shame. The pain. The pain. The pain. She’d been stabbed. She’d been struck with staves. She’d been burned and clawed by a dragon. But it was nothing like this. Nothing should feel like this. She hated it. She hated herself. She hated the fear she couldn’t control. It was a ring of red-hot metal in her cunt, contracting, growing brighter, tighter, more painful, sending out thornlike protrusions of fiery pain. It would not work this time. It was just like all the other times. It would never work for her.

“Stop!” she screamed in agony and despair. “Stop! Stop! Get out—get out—I’m sorry—God, I’m sorry. Please get out.”

He was out, his face a mask of shock and fear. She had seen that mask before, other faces wearing that mask. Not for a long while, though. She had hoped she would never see it again.

The contractions of her vagina subsided; the pain cooled, receded, disappeared, leaving only the greasy residue of shame and frustrated desire.

“Did I . . .? Did I . . .?” Morlock stuttered.

She knew that mask, too: the mask of shame and fear. She’d seen it and worn it. She could spare him that, at least.

“Not your fault,” she said wearily. “It happens whenever . . . whenever I try to . . . to do that.”

“Always?” he asked, with a curiosity she thought in extremely poor taste.

“Every time. Sorry. I should have let you know.”

Now he wore the mask of pity. She’d seen that one, too, and hated it as much as all the others.

Now would come the long pointless conversation: Have you tried this? and Have you tried that? and all of the helpful suggestions that added up to: What the hell is wrong with you anyway? Why did I get stuck with this piece of damaged goods? Where can I return it for my money back?

Morlock, though, said nothing. She was shivering, and he picked her lightly up with one arm and drew her gown of leaves over them both with his free hand.

She lay atop him sullenly, silently, her back on his chest so that she would not have to look at him pitying her, being angry with her, despising her, shaming her. She could do all those things without his damn help.

His hands kept moving over her under the gown, and she almost snapped at him to stop. Didn’t he understand that it was over, that it had failed, that she was broken and could never be fixed? Or was he one of those types: the smug sexual healers. Oh, yes, my dear, I can cure your sad weeping vagina with my magic penis.

But now he was scratching the hair at the nape of her neck, and she had to admit that it felt good. She did admit it by making a little all right, do that some more sound which to a less perceptive person might have sounded like a moan.

But he was still cherishing her, worshipping her with his powerful beautiful skilled hands. She felt almost as sorry for him as she did for herself. It was no good. She was no good. It was obviously hopeless. It was so stupid. But it did feel good. It gave her a sad glimpse of the beauty that could have been if she weren’t so broken, so worthless.

His fingers touched her labia.

“Wait a moment,” she said.

He waited. Time passed.

“Never mind,” she said breathlessly at last. “Um. Go ahead and . . .”

He went ahead and.

And he gently stroked her labia with his cunning fingers till she began to be wet again.

And he spread her labia wide with two fingers. She gasped. The gown was still over them, but she felt utterly, gloriously exposed—had never felt so naked, so shamelessly open. He didn’t need to see her to know everything about her. He was deeper inside her now than any man had ever been.

And he pulled back the hood of her clitoris with his thumb. She knew what was coming next, and she whimpered gently, not in protest, arching her back because she could not be still. He was taking so long; he was being so gentle; he was playing on her nerve-ends like harp strings.

And he reached around with his other hand and began to flick her clitoris with his fingers. She found herself giggling a little because somehow . . . somehow she didn’t give a damn. If he didn’t give a damn, she wasn’t going to give a damn. If he wanted to bring her off with those glorious hands, who was she to argue?

When she herself masturbated she usually tugged at her nipples; the extra sensation was pleasing. She kept raising her hands to her nipples to do it now, but then dropped them, embarrassed. Then she realized how stupid that was. She had already embarrassed herself as much as she could; she might as well enjoy herself, too. Besides . . . she found herself pleased by the sense that she was exposed, known to him, that he was watching her, taking pleasure in her desire. Now he was biting her ear, and that was her gag, and she tried to tell him that, but all that came out of her mouth was a kind of cooing sound, and that sent a line of light straight down from her throat to her cunt, so she cooed louder and the line became brighter and hotter, and she arched her back higher and screamed as she rode a tide of shame and fear onto the hot golden shore of orgasm.

Orgasm. If the pain was like a red ring of iron tightening in her cunt, orgasm was like an explosion of golden light. It was the sun between her legs. It was freedom from every feeling except pleasure. It was pretty good. Pretty good. She wouldn’t mind doing that again.

She rolled over and straddled Morlock. “You’re breaking the rules,” she said, feeling rather drunk. “Is not how you’re supposed to act.”

“Sorry,” he said, smiling, not sorry at all.

Her mouth was all over his face. “Smug son-bitch,” she murmured between kisses. “Two can play game.”

“Eh?” he said wittily, a sound that apparently indicated alarm.

Now her hands were between his legs, stroking the shaft of his penis. His expression became transfixed, his eyes glazed. He looked a little bit like that when he was in the ecstasy of vision, but this was a very different ecstasy she was subjecting him to. She delighted in the sensation of power it gave her. She scooched down on his body and confronted the ugliness of his penis eye-to-eye, as it were. It was red and taut, like muscles that had been overworked, like flesh that was inflamed with infection. She wondered if it hurt, and if that’s why men were jerks so much of the time, combining their pleasures with pain, their pains with pleasures.

She kissed the red velvety head of his penis with wet lips. He gasped, so she did it again a couple of times, licking it a little as she did so. God, how his crotch stank: of sweat and maleness. It was horrible, but she had a kind of hunger for it. She moved her wet mouth up along the top of his shaft as she trailed her fingers along the more sensitive underside. He groaned or said something in a language she didn’t know and came, hot wet jism spraying on her throat and chest. It should have been one of the most disgusting things that had ever happened to her, and in a way it was. But she was so glad. It was strange. Sex was so strange.

“I’m sorry,” he said, lifting her up. God Avenger, he was strong.

“Thank you is the correct expression, if you need to say anything, you savage and uncivilized mushroom.”

“Thank you,” he breathed in her ear, while wiping his ejaculate off her with a corner of his discarded jacket.

They lay for some time in each other’s arms, wordless, basking in the moment, listening. There no longer any signs of battle from below, and the air was darker, much darker. How long had they been at it?

Not long enough, she decided.

“Sweetheart,” she whispered in Morlock’s ear. “Will you bring me off again?”