That night it rained. The storm came on suddenly, but it was the kind of long soaking rain that promised to last all night (if not longer)—cold rain with the first faint flavor of winter in it.

Morlock levelled several trees growing by the river: as narrow as saplings, as tall as oaks. He cut them up and rapidly built a shelter, roofing it with their cloaks and sleeping blankets.

Aloê helped as much as she could, but she could hardly keep from laughing at the grim determination on Morlock’s face.

“We won’t die, you know,” she said at one point, “just because we get a little wet.”

He shook his head and said something inaudible over the voice of the rain.

In the end they were inside, damp but not soaked, huddling together for warmth, and she had to admit it was better than being outside.

Noticing that Morlock was suffering from an erection, she said, “Hey! You know what we haven’t done in a while?”

He brushed away her questing hand and said, “No.”

“Your mouth says, no, but your penis says—”

“I saw something in you.”

She stopped what she was doing and looked him in the eye. “What do you mean?”

“When I was in vision. I had to make you see . . . see those others.”

“The Strange Gods. Yes.”

He was silent for a while and said, “Is that who they were?”

“I think so.”

“Interesting.”

“But irrelevant, partner. You were talking about something much more interesting: me.”

“I saw something in you. I’m sorry, but—”

“You said all that before. What did you see?”

“It was about me.” He paused.

She smiled at him, and felt a little sad. Had he seen something of her feelings for him? Had he been offended? She couldn’t help it if he wasn’t Naevros syr Tol. She wished it was enough for him that he was what he was—that they had what they had.

“I didn’t understand it,” Morlock said. “But there was a halo of guilt, and fear, and pain. I don’t. I don’t want. I don’t want you to hurt like that. Not for me. Not for anyone.”

“You’d rather do without me than cause me any pain?” Aloê reflected wryly on her limited experience with men. This Morlock was an odd one, all right. “Don’t worry, partner. It was all my fault. I should have told you something. Because I didn’t, you came in danger from that god. I hated the thought of it.”

She waited for him to ask, but he just lay there and looked at her with those damn eyes of his.

“It’s like this,” she began heavily, and told him everything about her conversation with Wisdom.

When she was done he said, “So that was Wisdom we saw.”

“And Death and Justice, yes. They seem to have something against the Kaenish gods—maybe this was a new Kaenish god of Death.”

He nodded.

“You don’t seem surprised by any of this,” she observed.

“Well. We had passed over much of the country in one night. I knew something had happened.”

“But you didn’t ask.”

“I knew you would tell me when you thought the time right.”

“But—” She glared at him. “How did you live so long, trusting people like that?”

Now he was surprised. “I know who to trust.”

She looked away from his eyes, those luminous eyes. “So this,” she said, touching the talisman around her neck, “is a charm against binding spells.”

He nodded.

“I wear one because—Anyway, they seem to give some protection to me from the influence of these gods or whatever we are to call them.”

“‘Gods’ will do.”

“‘Gods’ with a hesitation. ‘Gods’ with a note in the margin.”

He smiled and opened his hands, which apparently was supposed to mean something.

“Do you know how to make one?” she said, a little sullenly. “A charm against binding spells, I mean.”

“No.”

“I’ll show you.”

She used some of the long grass lying about and made the long winding symbol at the heart of the talisman. She explained that the material didn’t matter, only the shape of the symbol and the intention woven into it. Teaching him how to weave the intention with the matter was the hardest thing, but it wasn’t particularly hard to teach him that or anything else, except how to speak in something other than grunts.

“So,” she said, putting it around his neck, “there you go. Don’t say I never gave you anything.”

He didn’t say that, or anything else. Just smiled and touched her face.

“There’s something Thyläkotröx said that’s bothering me,” she said.

He looked his question and waited.

“It’s about you—not believing, or disbelieving, in any god. Apparently it’s not safe.”

“If he wasn’t lying.”

“Maybe. But maybe you should—decide, one way or the other.”

His gray eyes looked at her now out of two dark wells of doubt. “I was raised to believe in Those-Who-Watch and in God the Creator, Sustainer, Avenger. I like to think that my harven father’s ghost stands beyond the rim of the world in the west, watching and protecting me.”

“But you can’t.”

“No. But, sometimes, in vision, I feel . . . a kind of immanence, a soul within the world. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a reflection of my own mind; that’s what some seers say.”

It was her turn to say something, and she wasn’t as comfortable as he was with silence, and anyway part of her wanted to tell him. She had always wanted to tell somebody, but she never had.

“God did a miracle for me once,” she said.

“So that’s why you believe in him?” he said, clearly surprised.

“Her. Yes. I was—I was—I was . . . God Avenger, I sound like you.”

“Not that bad,” he offered with a smile.

“Well, no one could be. All right. All right. Since you ask. I—there was this older man on my family’s estate. Some rich cousin of my father’s. This was when I was a little girl.”

“Yes,” he said, and there was iron in his voice.

“Don’t get upset. It was a long time ago, and the good guys won. Nothos was this old bastard’s name. Cousin Nothos. He was always bothering me. I hated his stupid face and everything about him, but he was always putting his face on me and bothering me when I was five. He even tried to sneak into my room sometimes at night. But no one would believe me except Fnarklo.”

Morlock eased up a little. “Who is Fnarklo?”

“Fnarklo was my pet fish-hound. He slept in my room, and he would never let this old bastard in. When I was almost six, somebody killed him, killed Fnarklo, I mean—cut his throat right through to the bone. I tried to tell people it was Cousin Nothos, but no one would listen. How I hated them all. I hate them still. They let it happen.”

She stopped speaking, and he didn’t say anything.

“Well!” she said. “Do I have to paint you a picture? Do I have to go over every disgusting detail?”

He opened his hands, said nothing, and waited.

“He raped me most nights for about a. About a. For about a year, I guess. It started in summer and it ended in summer. I remember that part.”

He nodded, watched, waited.

“When I realized no one was ever going to listen to me, I tried lots of different crazy things. I tried a few times to kill Cousin Nothos, but he just thought it was funny. I guess he’d been through it before, seen it all before. I could never outsmart him. So then I figured, maybe I’d kill myself. So I went to the island where old Fnarklo died. Hard to explain why. Thought maybe they’d believe me after I was dead, though I don’t know now why I thought that. I was going to drown myself. Go under the water, breathe in through my mouth not my gills and just go down, down down in the dark, till I was dead.”

Morlock nodded as if this was a very reasonable plan and said nothing.

“I was going to do it. I was, I swear I was. But”—she balled up her fists and pounded her knees—“but it wasn’t fair. He was the one who should be dead. There was this philosopher who lived on the estate, and he said that it wasn’t right to pray for harm to others and we had to put up with Cousin Nothos’ little ways and someday I would grow up and understand things better. But I thought that old philosopher was a lying sack of snot. What about people who are doing bad things? Is God Avenger just supposed to sit by and do nothing?”

If Morlock had any solution to the Problem of Evil, he didn’t offer it at that time. He didn’t offer anything, but waited for Aloê to continue.

Eventually she did. “So I. So I said. I said to God. I said, ‘You do something about it. It’s your job. You do something.’ And that was when I found it. It was a book. It was half-buried in the mud. Most of the pages were destroyed. But it was a book of binding spells. It was Cousin Nothos’ book: he put his name on the flyleaf. You know, ‘Please return to; reward offered.’ And I knew then how he fooled everybody, why everyone was so blind to what anyone ought to be able to see. It had to be magic; he was binding them with magic. People don’t act that way. They don’t turn away, and let someone get hurt, and do nothing when they could stop it. They just don’t act that way without a reason. Anyway, I was sure of it then. Less so now.”

Morlock didn’t venture an opinion. He waited.

Aloê went on. “He must’a—He. Must. Have. Dropped. It. That night, when he was killing Fnarklo, he dropped it and lost it in the dark and the mud. And then a year later I found it. It was a kind of miracle, wasn’t it?”

Morlock shrugged and waited.

“There wasn’t a complete spell in the book. It was almost entirely ruined. But there were parts of spells I thought I could fit together. And I knew that people who use binding spells are subject to them in turn. So I. So I made a spell up out of the different spells I could read part of in the book. That was dangerous. Wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Morlock quietly. “It was.”

“But it worked! Whenever he got aroused, his penis hurt. Like fire, he said. Kept on trying to dip it in cold liquid. My grandma found him dipping his erection in some cold soup in the pantry. That’s when they decided that Cousin Nothos was crazy and his little ways couldn’t be tolerated anymore. Ruin a granddaughter, so what. Ruin the evening soup, that’s different. I hate that old woman. So anyway they locked him up until he died.”

“He’s dead then,” said Morlock, with unmistakable satisfaction.

Somehow, after everything she’d said and remembered, that was what made her break down and start weeping like the little girl she’d had to give up being long ago. He held her and waited and waited. God Sustainer, how the man could wait.

“I was so glad when Nothos died,” she said, when she could talk again through the tears and snot, though she was still weeping. “I knew I was all screwed up inside, broken, ruined. It was because of the magic. You have to use part of yourself to make it.

“And I never could . . . I never. Not once. It was like. Like with you, before, that first time. It hurt so bad whenever anyone was inside me, sometimes when I only thought maybe someone wanted to be.

“But when he died I figured. I figured. Well! He’s dead; spell’s gone; I’d be all right. But I’m not. It’s always been the same. Always will be, I guess. Still. I can live with it. And maybe me finding that book was a coincidence. But I got what I needed when I prayed for it. I have to be loyal to that. I have to stand by that girl no one else would stand by. So I believe in the God she believed in, and screw anyone who doesn’t like it.”

She sat up and wiped the tears from her eyes. “So! That’s the story of my religious conversion. I hope you enjoyed it.”

Morlock had a thoughtful look on his face. “I saw the spell-anchor, I think.”

She looked askance at him. “You saw it.”

“In your talic self. During my vision. It was like the hooks the gods had set in me, at least a little.”

“Well. Good for you.”

“Aloê, I broke them.”

“What?”

“I broke the anchors in introspection.”

She thought about this through a silence that was nearly Morlockian in length. “Are you saying you can do the same for me?” she asked finally.

“No. Maybe you can.”

Visionary rapture was slow in coming; she was soaked through with words—words she remembered, words she had said, words she had thought of saying, words. Their logic was hostile to the visionary state.

Morlock fell asleep, but she stayed awake, and listened to the rain, and thought things without words. In the hour before dawn she ascended into vision without thinking about it, and found herself floating some distance above her own body.

Instead of turning her awareness outward to the living world, she turned it inward to her living self. She saw nothing like the anchor that Morlock had described . . . but then he hadn’t said much. She summoned memories she normally suppressed: about Cousin Nothos, about the time she had tried to have sex with Navigator Stynsos (the first of many failures, until she learned to not even try, not even care).

The pain lanced through her talic self, and she saw its source, deep within her: like a fishhook, perhaps, but one stuck in an old trout who’d run away with the bait, the hook still in him, the flesh growing around the evil bitter thing until it seemed like part of the fish.

She inserted long fiery fingers of intention into herself, drew the hook from her, willed it out of herself, drove it into nothingness.

The pain was not gone, but it had changed, lost its focus, its bitter corrosive heat. She passed from vision to sleep without ever touching consciousness.

Aloê awoke in midmorning. There was a gray light filtering through the thoroughly damp walls of the shack, and the rain was still drumming its fingers on the roof. Morlock was peering through a break in the wall with a mopey expression on his face.

“Still raining,” he said to her somberly. “Looks like it’s not stopping soon.”

“Well,” she said, sitting up. “We may get a bit wet then.”

Morlock’s face became even more somber, even grim. He nodded.

“Morlock,” she said, “you do realize we are going to an island? Islands are surrounded by water on nearly every side. It’s sort of a tradition, I think.”

He grunted and looked so sad that she had to laugh.

“It’ll be all right,” she said, patting his hand. “I suppose we should eat before we get started. Have we got any of that dried meat you’re so fond of?”