By the light of the major moons, both hovering over the eastern horizon, Morlock was busy polishing the skis of his odd standing boat when the island gave birth to a god.

Morlock became aware of this when he saw the shadow of his mortal body lying on the ground beside his unfinished work. He looked up with the fleshless eyes of vision to see the luminous face of a god rising out of the island—a hump of undistinguished matter, turretted and spiralled with blazing talic force.

The god rose higher and higher—more distant from the material plane. But he saw Morlock. He reached down with one of his many unformed arms toward Morlock.

Rage uncoiled within Morlock like a snake. Another god trying to take him over, land hooks in him. Morlock clung to the knowledge that his body bore a talisman, that his psyche was protected. And he cried out to the god of love he had half-imagined with Aloê, in whom he could not quite believe. Aloê was gone; he had to find her. He had a life that mattered to him and others; it was more important than being the first acolyte of some former Kaenish heresiarch now calling himself a god.

The god continued to rise upward and reach down—but, suddenly, was gone. Some wave of talic force, high above the material plain, had driven him westward, like a wind driving a butterfly.

Morlock watched him go with fierce satisfaction, then turned to contemplate that wave of talic force. His maker’s mind decided it was artificial, the product of some inconceivably powerful immaterial artifact. More to the point, it would affect his immediate plans to travel eastward.

Eastward. Where Aloê had gone. The thought anchored him, dragged him back down into the entanglements of matter. He opened his eyes to find himself lying in the midst of a cloud of disassembled skeletons. He rolled to his feet and got back to it.

It took him a day and a half more work to finish the thing, working without rest. A good deal of the time was spent moving a forge, piece by piece, from the empty city at the top of the island down to the beach, so that he could use the sparse beach sand as a sealant and cement on his odd craft. He needed small but significant amounts of glass as well to anchor a web of talic mirrors and manifolds that would amplify the impulse-force applied to the propellers.

He supposed he should go down to the Apotheosis Wheel and continue Aloê’s interrupted investigation. He should continue on his mission to discover more about the Two Powers. He should do a great number of things. But he never wavered in his intention: he would go after his beloved; he would find her; if she had been hurt, he would have vengeance.

In the end, his work was done. It was an ugly thing: a narrow coffinlike hull mounted on a pair of bone-bright gleaming skis. A pair of propellers deep beneath the water would drive the craft. There was almost no room within the hull to move, and none for provisions or water. That was just by design: he had no provisions and would not need them for this trip. He would make it in visionary withdrawal. If it worked at all, it would get him to the eastern shore of the Sea of Stones relatively swiftly. If it did not work, he would think of something else.

He said no good-byes to Old Azh, but he did feel he should name his boat. He wasn’t superstitious, but he always had terrible luck at sea, and riding an unnamed boat was supposed to make bad luck worse.

“I’m calling you Boneglider,” he told the craft as it lay on the beach of broken bones and burned sand.

Morlock half pushed, half carried the Boneglider into the deep water just off the floating island. He climbed aboard, unsheathed his blade and laid it in the hull, and then laid himself down beside it. He elbowed the hatch shut and closed his eyes in the sudden darkness of the coffinlike shell.

Vision came on him swiftly, and with it a sense of menace from the east: the wave of talic force striking him, even as it had struck the god. But there were two differences. One was that the god was not anchored in matter, as Morlock’s talic self was. The other: Morlock did not ascend to the higher levels of vision but hovered low above the plane of matter and energy. He could resist the talic wave from the east for a while, but he feared it would get worse as he moved eastward, nearer the source (whatever it was).

Well, each trouble had its hour. That trouble was not yet; he’d worry about it when he had to.

He applied talic force to the impulse-multipliers at the base of the propellers. They began to spin, and the Boneglider lurched away from the island, slowly at first. Morlock touched the steering arc with his mind, and the boat’s course was now directly east.

The Boneglider was still lumbering through the waves slowly, very slowly, too slowly to use her skis. Morlock spread his talic awareness a little farther, mingling it with the waters around him. He funnelled the impulse energy of their motion into the impulse-multipliers driving the Boneglider’s propellers.

Faster now.

Morlock experimented with different geometries of thought-funnel, finally settling on a fifth-dimensional shape that drew in a maximum of impulse energy with a minimum of talic extension. He wove his talic self into a crown of such funnels wound about each talic multiplier.

Now the Boneglider was running through the water faster. Soon she was standing on top of the waves, running along the surface of the water with her skis, holding the narrow hull away from the water. Only the propellers and the steering oar were actually in the water.

Morlock coldly estimated that the boat was moving five or six times as fast as a horse might trot. Speed was hard to gauge, as he could not exactly see the water with his talic vision, only the talic presence of living things and motive impulses in it.

Time was hard to gauge as well. Once he felt the presence of the sun over him, and a moment later (it seemed) two moons were peering at him: Trumpeter rising in the west, Chariot lowering into the east.

But time did pass, and soon he could trace its passage in pain, a pain that must be intense indeed in his body if he felt echoes of it in his vision. The pain increased as he went eastward. The talic wave, the force in the east, became like a wedge, prying his overextended talic awareness away from its anchor in his material body. If it succeeded in doing that, he would die. The thought of death carried no terrors in the visionary state. But if he died, he could not help Aloê, could never see her again. That was a terror worse than the fear of death.

Reluctantly, he veered his course northward, to ride the edge of the zone of hostile talic force. He would beach the Boneglider on the shore as near as he could to the eastern shore and then search out Aloê by foot from there.

For a while, he was running almost due north. Then the sense of dread, of threat and pain, subsided in the east. He turned the steering arc with his mind to a northeast course.

For all the pain, and dread, and sense of loss, this was the least unpleasant sea voyage Morlock had ever experienced. His body was seasick, as usual, but those sensations hardly echoed in Morlock’s talic self. He saw, for the first time, something of the wonder of the sea: its power and depth, the intensity of its life, the beauty no longer masked by nausea.

A shark passed nearby, its talic presence like a single musical note: hunger. He steered around a set of submerged rocks—the rocks themselves invisible to him, but for the sessile fish whose souls like single eyes looked out at the Boneglider as it passed above them. The plants too had a slow slumbrous talic life: one rope of sea-ivy as broad as an oak tree, rooted deep under the sea, throbbed with life that was almost at the level of awareness. What thoughts would it think if it ever woke?

But he became aware that there were other talic presences in the sea—as alien as himself. Two voices, their incomprehensible words edged with hate like gusts of winter wind laden with ice crystals, spoke to each other, answering hate with hate, but bound with common purpose. They were heading past him. Toward Old Azh?

He had sensed their presence before, through his own vision and from memories he had accidentally acquired from his ruthen father. They were the Two Powers, Torlan and Zahkaar, Fate and Chaos. Morlock kept his motion steady, on the premise that they might notice any change.

Possibly he should follow them. That would be more in line with his mission: to find out what he could about the hostile Powers. Or maybe he should have stayed in Old Azh to investigate the Apotheosis Wheel. If the Two Powers were interested in it, maybe it was a threat to them.

But that would mean abandoning the task of finding Aloê. He would not do that: not for the Wardlands, or his oath to the Graith, or any other reason.

When the chill inhuman presence of the Two Powers had long passed, he felt others. A choir of demons, wearing stolen bodies, rowing a galley with inhuman speed, trailing after the Two Powers.

Who in this world or any other would recruit a crew of demons and follow the Two Powers across the Sea of Stones?

But that was not his trouble, at least not in this hour. The menace in the east was receding again, and he shifted his course again.

Everything was going as well as it could. His body was growing weak, its connection to life more tenuous through prolonged absence of his talic awareness. But the journey was nearing its end.

He was just about to congratulate himself when he saw that he was steering into a storm.

The storm strode out of the south on crooked fiery legs of lightning. Morlock felt the surge of waters long before the thunderbolts came within striking range. Their force, passed on to the Boneglider’s propellers, drove the boat faster than ever through the water. He drove eastward as fast as he could. In his talic eye he could see the edge of the sea, the dense gold-green of sea-life fading into the colder sparser tal of land-life.

But the storm caught him before he came to shore. Lightning began to fall like hail around him. He couldn’t direct it away from himself and also drive the propellers with his mind.

With sluggish, half-aware hands, his picked up his blade Armageddon and held it over himself. If thunder was going to fall on him, or the Boneglider, perhaps he could absorb it into the talic matrices of the glass blade.

A bolt fell, straight on him. It shattered the lid of the Boneglider’s coffinlike hull, but the aether of the bolt was drawn into Armageddon before it could do any further damage. Three more bolts fell toward the boat, and Morlock drew them with his mind into the blade he now held straight out into the open air.

The waves were now high and steep, with narrow deep troughs between them. He had to choose between driving on eastward as fast as he could, or turning into the wind.

Inexperience betrayed him. He thought that, with the speed he had gained from the storm’s own power, he could ride through the troughs between the waves all the way to shore, or at least to calmer waters.

Soon he was driving the Boneglider along the side of a wave that was rising, rising, rising, and curling at the top as it rose. He realized his mistake by then, that there was no stable course through the waves with the storm-wind on the shoulder of his craft. But it was too late. The wave curled over, and the water like the fist of a giant crushed the Boneglider.

Morlock shook loose from his vision and found himself floating, deep in dark water, amid the fragments of his dead craft. He kept his grip on Armageddon: it still blazed with implicit thunder and the hot aether would be more buoyant than wood or waterlogged flesh.

He drove his body upward through the bitterly cold surge of waters. When he came to the surface he was nearly deafened with the roar of the wind, the crash of the waters, the high hissing shriek of the rain.

He had no notion of west or east or north or south. He had no plan, other than to stay afloat as long as he could.

How he hated the water, so inimical to the fire in his blood! But that fire sustained him, when many another would have died. In time the wind grew less; the surge subsided; the rain and lightning passed northward. Morlock was left, dog-paddling grimly, toward the black border of the land.

In the end he crawled onto a long muddy beach, exhausted, waterlogged, and bone-chilled, but with his sword still in hand.

Awaiting him was a group of tall gray people. They also had swords. He thought they were armored, too . . . but when he looked up at them in the dim gray light, he saw that the flat gray plates on their faces and arms, the row of spikes running down their spines—these were growing directly out of their skins.

“Mandrakes,” he whispered.

“We don’t call ourselves that,” said one of them, in the language shared by dragons and dwarves. He swung the mace in his hand, and Morlock fell down into darkness.