Hope’s shadow strode behind her all afternoon—but it was not Hope’s shadow at all. It took a while for Aloê to be sure of this: the dark shadow dancing on the red-gray ground. But Hope’s fair hair was bound in a long braid. Ambrosia’s dark red hair fell in wild tangles past her shoulders. The shadow outlined in golden light on the gray ground behind Hope had hair like Ambrosia’s, not Hope’s.

Aloê lifted her eyes from the ground to comment on this to Hope, but the other was looking at her, smiling wryly, and said, “Yes, that’s Ambrosia’s shadow, and she has mine. We see each other in mirrors sometimes, as well. It can be inconvenient.”

“No doubt.”

“I don’t suppose you like her much.”

“Ambrosia? She can be difficult.”

“She is difficult, and brilliant. I am not difficult, but not brilliant.”

“That’s a harsh assessment.”

“It’s my father’s. He had some plan of using us a secret weapon against the Graith.”

“Oh?” As a vocate, Aloê was interested in the details.

“Since given up, I believe. He found me teachable, but not talented enough. Ambrosia is wildly talented, but she will not be led.”

“She says he is always trying to kill her.”

“That’s an exaggeration, I think.”

It had never occurred to Aloê to be grateful for her family, but she was, belatedly and begrudgingly, coming to see that they had their points. A lack of any tendency to child murder (exaggerated or not).

They were walking fairly, but not directly, toward the setting sun. Ambrosia, in one of her intervals of awareness, had insisted she could sense the direction of the talic wave, and added that she was sure anyone with the senses of week-dead beef or better could do the same. Aloê and Hope, after walking due south and then due north again, did agree that the locus of dread did seem to shift a little along the eastern face of the world as they moved at right angles to it. They sketched a map on some bark torn from a dead tree, and drew angled lines that represented fairly well their imprecise sense of where the dread was emanating from, projected back on their northernmost and southernmost positions. In the end, they decided Ambrosia was right. It’s true that it took them most of the day to see something Ambrosia had sensed right away, but they reached their conclusion more amicably, which was not nothing.

Dead trees were handy whenever they needed them: for shelter, or fires, or anything else. It was live ones that were rare, and even those (when they found them) were oddly gray. The grass of the plain they walked over was an odd mix of dead brown and living gray. They saw few birds, and no land animals.

“Aloê,” said Hope in some distress. “I’m sorry.”

“Ambrosia waking up?”

“Yes. Give her my love, won’t you?” Hope often said that.

“Yes.” Aloê usually said that, too, but she rarely carried through on it. Conversation with Ambrosia didn’t leave much room for expressions of affection.

Hope sat down in the dust among the sparse gray grass. She closed her eyes and sighed. Her face clenched in pain. It twisted and twisted until the features themselves shifted like clay being shaped by invisible fingers. Her pale hair burst, dark-red, from its braid. She spoke a wordlike sound of pain, but by the time the word was finished it was spoken in Ambrosia’s voice. Hope was gone.

“How are you?” Aloê asked.

“I am,” Ambrosia said, shrugging her crooked shoulders in a gesture that reminded Aloê painfully of Morlock. “It’s better than not-being. Even if it stings a bit.”

“Is it hurting you worse when you change over? It looks like it does.”

“Yes. This talic wave—we are especially vulnerable to it then, I think.”

“Do you want to stay here? I can go on alone.”

“No. Listen, Aloê, you’re not immune to it. Everything that thinks and feels suffers from this thing.”

“I know,” Aloê said curtly. The feeling of dread and impending doom was heavier than ever now, growing with every step westward. She carried it like a dead body across her shoulders. She needed no reminder of it.

She offered Ambrosia a hand up from the ground. The girl took it and they walked on in silence through a landscape empty of any life but their own.

Until they came to a little town, a cluster of plowed lands rising from the dead fields. There were posts like Kaenish godstones set up at intervals, marking the edge of the town. But they mentioned no god; they just said the name of the place was the Colony of Truth, in Kaenish runes and several other languages. (So said Ambrosia confidently: it was one of her waking times.)

The Colonists surrounded their town with a halo of small farms, but everyone seemed to live in a cluster of buildings in the center of the settlement. They arrived at sunset, and the first townsperson welcomed them with an eager, almost frantic, warmth. She had carroty hair and wore a farmer’s smock. She carried a basket of root vegetables under her arm as she walked in from the fields. She caught sight of them and ran up eagerly, her pale speckled face split in a scarlet smile.

“Good even, new-friends!” she cried in Kaenish. “Or is this tongue unsuiting to ye-twain? I—”

“The both and all of us like this tongue right well,” replied Ambrosia, falling in with the woman’s odd dialect with breezy confidence. Aloê was prepared to admire her for it, until Ambrosia gave her companion a smug side-glance as if to say, See how bright I am!

“I hope I can make myself clear to you,” Aloê said. “The Kaenish I know is a little different from what you are using.”

“Gnaw ye-one not for it,” said the woman, laughing. “’Tis not native tongue-song to me neither. There was a eldern unpriest who taught this babblement to new-friends for a long lifetime. I-among-others was one such, a time and a time ago. The name of me-in-particular is Farna, by the gate.”

“What manner of lip-melodies dost ye-one-self prefer, o Farna?” Ambrosia asked eagerly. “I-speaking-for-myself would wager I ken of them.”

“This tongue will do,” Farna said, a little less warmly, and Aloê guessed she was nettled somehow. Maybe Farna didn’t want anyone knowing where she hailed from; the place had the look of a refuge somehow—the buildings were in radically different styles, suggesting builders from different cultures.

“We are passing through,” Aloê said, before Ambrosia pressed the point and alienated Farna even more. “But if there is a place to stay the night, we would gladly pay in the coin we have.”

“‘Passing through,’” Farna repeated. “Then ye-twain intend not to stay, to teach and learn and live among the Colonists of Truth?”

“Sadly, no. We have other business in these lands. Does that never come up?”

“In truth, where we-universal all are whether we see it or no, I have never seen a new-friend merely passing through. We-in-particular come to stay here, and there are no others at all. Except for ye-twain.”

“If it’s inconvenient—”

“No, no, I-for-myself-and-others beg you not to misunderstand. This has not happened before, but whatever is, is right, and we-universal must apprehend it and adapt. All of us-in-particular would wish it.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“I think,” Ambrosia said in a subdued tone, “she’s saying they can find a place for us; the locals are just not used to the idea of passersby.”

“Ye-one hast grasped it well, and I welcome ye-twain to the Colony of Truth for as long as you would stay, for part of your day or the rest of your lives. Stay ye-twain as guests for nowness: we use not the coin of king or priest here.”

“Thank you,” Aloê said. “Perhaps we can pay you in work, if our stay becomes longer. We don’t wish to be a burden.”

“Everything that can be, will be,” Farna said composedly. “And nothing that cannot be, will be.”

“I’m not sure about the first part,” Ambrosia said, “but the second part is all right.”

Aloê was pondering ways to unobtrusively tell Ambrosia to shut her pie hole, but Farna turned to the girl eagerly and said, “Then ye-one will wish to speak with Jeuter, our phenomenologist. He has a great interest in what is and is not, what can and cannot be.”

“Death and Justice,” Ambrosia said. “I am going to love this place!” Aloê was thinking the opposite, but refrained from saying so.

“I-among-others am pleased,” Farna said, smiling with a pained expression. “But I must ask you to leave all talk of gods behind ye-twain while staying with us.”

“Is it because you do not believe in them?” Ambrosia asked.

“No. We-in-particular came thither to escape them.”

“Excellent,” Aloê said, understanding at last. “The perfect place for it.”

“And for no other thing,” Farna said, nodding ruefully. “The land, you have seen it: void of beasts, losing its grass and trees. The living it is hard. But we-in-particular live here free, and wish that we-universal could be the same.”

Ambrosia’s lively face displayed her interest and skepticism. But she held her lively tongue for the moment, which relieved Aloê very much, and they followed Farna to a biggish building in the center of the little town.

In a torchlit room that ran the length of the building, there were long tables and benches at which many of the townspeople were already sitting and conversing. Mostly the male townspeople were sitting, Aloê noticed, after a moment. The women seemed to be flitting about the room, bringing them things: dishes of food, mugs of drink.

One group of men turned toward them with surprise and delight on their faces. “New-friends from the wider world!” one with a gray explosion of a beard called out. “Is that what you bring us, Farna?”

“I am, I am indeed, Old Gnourn,” Farna said. “They-twain would stay only a night or so, however.”

“Oh!” said Old Gnourn, somewhat baffled behind his barrier of beard. “Well, for a while or forever, new-friends are always welcome.”

“Thanks,” Aloê said, strangely moved. They were more than a sea’s distance from Kaen and its religion of cruelty. “I am Aloê Oaij, by the way, and this is my friend Ambrosia Viviana.”

“There was no need to introduce yourselves, you know,” Old Gnourn said. “You can be any name you like in the Colony of Truth. All names are true, or none.” There was a general humphing and pumphing of agreement from the row of beards.

“You-several might get an argument from our new-friend here,” remarked Farna slyly. “But I must get these thurkle-roots to the kitchen.”

“Yes, thank you, Farna,” said Old Gnourn dismissively. He turned to Aloê and said, “So you are a logician! Yet as brown as a Qajqapciar! The truth tells us that brown skin and logical abilities are a rare match.”

“Oh. Does it?” Aloê said frostily.

“Please don’t be offended. We only deal with things as they are here, not fantasies and poesies and dreams, and it is our experience that—”

“Do you really know that many people with brown skin? I don’t see anyone like that here.”

“Well. No. But it’s common knowledge that—”

“Have you not found common knowledge to be as frequently in error as poetry, if not more so?”

The beards murmured thoughtfully. “We don’t think much of poetry,” one of the grayer beards remarked. “It is imprecise and rarely yields falsifiable statements.”

“But she’s got you there on common knowledge, Old Gnourn,” a grizzled but not utterly gray beard observed. “If I went by the common knowledge back in Screevale I would be on my hands and knees and barking at the behest of an entity I will not name. Truth, not familiarity, is the standard for knowledge.”

“What should we do about it?” asked Old Gnourn grumpily.

“Well, truth tells us that bad decisions are taken on Fuffnardays and Thebnardays, so suggest we table the question until tomorrow when we can discuss it with the agricultural accounting reports.”

The beards all agreed with this. But now Farna had returned with a steaming tureen of dark fluid, in which knobbly objects bobbed up and down. “Who would have some affer-nut soup?” she asked.

All the beards were interested in affer-nut soup, it turned out, and they served themselves from the tureen as Farna carried it around the table.

Aloê would not have objected to some affer-nut soup herself, but, not having been asked, she waited until Farna said, “If you-several are done charming these young ladies, perhaps I should take them off to the kitchen.”

“Yes,” said Old Gnourn, through a mouthful of partially chewed affer-nut, “but don’t make them work until they’ve decided to stay. That’s fair according to the dictates of truth, I think we can all agree.”

There was general agreement, although one beard started to make noises about the universal obligation to contribute to communities, whether one benefited from it or not. But everyone ignored him, apparently from long practice. The beards went on eating the soup, and the three women went to the kitchen.

The kitchen was an equally large room, warmer (because of the ovens), with benches where many women were already seated, eating with urgency from full steaming plates.

“We-distinctive serve ourselves back here, if ye-twain don’t mind it,” Farna said apologetically.

“Of course not,” Aloê said, going with their hostess to a table where, following Farna’s lead, she collected a platter and a spoon and then filled the platter with food from troughs. There was no meat. What looked like bread was a baked crust formed from the paste of some root vegetable. There were some green and yellow vegetables that Aloê didn’t recognize, and what seemed to be a mushroom gravy.

It all tasted well enough, but it was hard to enjoy anything under the dreadful feeling of impending doom that pervaded the place. But it had been long since their last meal, and anything was better than nothing.

“Why do you let them treat you like servants?” Aloê asked. “Not that it’s any of my business.”

Farna sighed as she settled herself on a bench, and some of the women nearby nodded and laughed at Aloê’s question. Others looked outraged. “They-exclusive say it is nature’s law, a dictate of truth, that woman serves man. It is true that many cities are run that way. But it is easier to give them-exclusive what they expect, and, by any gate, this way—”

“I would not sit down beside those schmeckle-faced knepps,” Ambrosia remarked, as she seated herself, “if they were sharing out the last chunk of food in the world.”

The women within hearing distance roared with laughter, and the laughter spread generally along the benches as Ambrosia’s line was passed from group to group.

Farna smiled a weary smile and nodded agreeably at Ambrosia.

There were many introductions. Aloê toasted with a spoonful of gravy everyone who was pointed out to her, but didn’t trouble to memorize the names. Tomorrow morning they would be leaving here.

There was some general discussion of the dictates of truth during the dinner, and whether it was permissible to hum or even sing while one was working. Some said that music had no truth-value since it contained no testable statements and that lyrics were merely a form of poetry, which was incompatible with truth. Ambrosia stood it as long as she could, and then leapt into the fray, pointing out that the mathematical nature of music made the presence or absence of notes as testable as a proposition in geometry. She said a good deal, too, about the metaphorical nature of language and the limits of testability as a standard for truth. The discussion grew quite lively, and Aloê watched with amusement and not a little wonder at Ambrosia’s energy. Personally, with her belly full for the first time in many a day, she wanted principally to find a safe warm place to sleep.

The dinner ended and the seminar eventually broke up, with knots of women eagerly discussing matters musicological, mathematical, and semantic while others hauled the dirty dishes away to be washed in crocks.

Farna grabbed Ambrosia and Aloê each by an elbow as they rose from the table, “If ye-twain would be kind enough to come with me-alone, there is a thing that I would show you. And then I will take ye-twain to your room, for I see that ye are tired.”

“Thanks,” Aloê said, and Ambrosia nodded tensely, ready for another argument and self-evidently not tired at all.

Farna led them out of the kitchen into the night, and on through the small settlement to the fields in the back of town, on the opposite side where Aloê and Ambrosia had arrived.

“Ye-twain-or-singular have not asked, and I thank ye for not asking, a question many ask when they come hither. But ye may ask it now.”

“All right,” Aloê said. “Where are the children?”

Ambrosia jumped a little at this. Evidently she hadn’t noticed that the colonists they had seen were all adults—more on the elder than the younger side.

“They-entire are there,” said Farna, and pointed out into the dark field.

Aloê solemnly looked at what she thought was a graveyard, full of images of children of various size. He feelings changed to alarm when she realized that the overgrown shaggy shapes were not representations of children. They were children. Or at least the bodies of children.

Ambrosia stepped curiously up to the nearest figure. It was smooth and hairless like a baby, but twice the size any baby ought to be. It was buried up to its waist. Its fingers extended like branches or roots and grew straight into the ground.

“They’re like mandrakes,” Ambrosia called over to them. “It’s breathing!”

“Yet it is not alive,” Farna said flatly. “The colony lives on because of immigrants: those who choose to come here so that they can live free. But there are costs, and this is one. The children die, and all the babies are born like this.”

“Why do you do this with them?” Aloê said. “This looks like . . . a field that is tended.”

“Yes,” Farna said evenly. “The children do not live, but something in their unlife shields us-inclusive from the full weight of the shadow to the east. Life here is nearly unbearable. Nearly. In the shadow of this field it is . . . bearable.”

Aloê wondered if she would feel the same, in Farna’s place.

“If ye are thinking of staying,” Farna said evenly, “ye should know about this place. I came here pregnant. I did not know. They-inclusive told me only after it was too late. I think I would have made the same choice, knowing everything. But I always thought . . . It was my-alone choice, not theirs. And they took that from me.”

“Thanks,” Aloê said. “Ambrosia. For—my sake, come away.”

The girl was on her knees, poking with gentle curiosity at the empty breathing face of the infant-plant.

“Aristotle,” Ambrosia said, “speaks of a rational, an animal, and a vegetable soul. I wonder if the talic wave destroys or drives away the first two in utero, leaving only the vegetable soul to sustain physical life.”

“Ambrosia. Please.”

“But it’s so interesting! It suggests there are types of tal not subject to the force of the talic wave. And that suggests methods of protection from it.”

“Who is Aristotle?” asked Farna.

Ambrosia sighed. “This guy I used to know,” she muttered scornfully, and rose resentfully to her feet.

Farna led them away to a smaller building, some distance away from the great kitchen where they had eaten. “This is New House,” she said. “It is ready for dwelling. Ye-each-or-twain may stay here as long as it likes ye. If ye wish to stay, it will be your house and we will make up another New House.”

“Farna, I thank you,” Aloê said sincerely. “But I have to tell you we are not here to stay. We will be gone in the morning.”

“There will be other mornings,” Farna said. “Remember the colony, and know ye can return when ye long for its freedom.” She put her hand affectionately on the side of Aloê’s face, kissed Ambrosia’s startled forehead and walked away into the night.

Aloê never saw her again.

In the sleeproom were bedrolls on ropework frames—a little like sea-hammocks. Aloê fell into hers with glee and muttered a quick good night to Ambrosia, even as she was falling asleep.

She awoke some hours later with chilly feet. Someone—Ambrosia no doubt—had taken off her shoes and covered her with a blanket woven from straw. But the blanket had slid off her toes and the chill woke her.

“Y’re a g’d k’d, ‘mbrosia,” she muttered, and snuggled back into her hammock.

She didn’t expect a response and didn’t hear one. What drew her back from the threshold of sleep was, she didn’t hear anything: no snoring, breathing, no muttering about obscure and improbably named philosophers, nothing to indicate Ambrosia was in the room.

Aloê opened her eyes and looked around. By the light of the moons percolating through the thin shutters, she could see she was alone.

“Of course, you silly fish,” she muttered to herself. The girl didn’t sleep. Her rest came when her sister Hope took up the task of living.

So where was she, in the middle of the night? Engaging in philosophical disputes about music and mathematics back at the colony kitchen?

Or, more probably, had she gone to face the danger of the talic wave by herself?

Aloê groaned. Someday. Someday she was going to get a full night of sleep.

But that day was not today.

Aloê tossed off her straw blanket, pulled on her shoes, and ran out into the frosty night full of dread.

It was not hard to know which way she must go. It was the way she hated most to turn. She could not bring herself to walk straight through the grove of undead babies, but apart from that she made no detours, running south and east as the feeling of doom grew on her to become a physical ache in her heart. Every step she took seemed like a dreadful mistake. That was why she knew it was right.

She saw the end of her journey by the bitter blue moonlight of Trumpeter high overhead and lowering Horsemen. It was a kind of mirror, darkly glittering. Before it sat as if spellbound or asleep a human shape. Ambrosia, by the wild dark hair.

Spellbound, perhaps, but not asleep. As Aloê forced herself to go nearer, she heard Ambrosia muttering words. When she got closer she saw who she was muttering to. The reflection in the dark mirror was Hope.

“I finally have it figured out,” Ambrosia was saying sleepily, in a gentle voice that sounded surprisingly like Hope’s. “The mirror drives back any talic imprint with its own force. The minds kill themselves if they can’t turn away. Minds anchored in bodies can live for a time. Am I . . . Am I still anchored in a body?”

“Turn away,” said Hope’s image, in a shrill voice that sounded more like Ambrosia. “You’re killing us both. Personally, I’m not ready to die.”

“I die every day,” Ambrosia whispered. “Close my eyes and I’m gone. Wake up in a new world; everything is different. I die every day. So tired of dying. Maybe the mirror could heal us—make us one person—not split down the middle anymore—”

“We are not one person,” Hope said, in her oddly Ambrosian voice. “The fact that you’ve forgotten it and I remember it is a bad sign.”

Aloê was perplexed as to what she should do for the sisters, but she could not, she simply could not, stand in the path of that dreadful talic mirror any longer. She closed her eyes to keep from looking at it. That helped, but not much. She stepped aside, felt more relief, felt the sense of dread and imminent doom subside slightly, and stepped again. The emotional burden was now definitely lighter, and the physical pain receded entirely. She sighed.

“You interfere with my visualization,” whispered a voice near at hand.

She opened her eyes and saw something behind the talic mirror.

In fact, she saw suddenly, there were two mirrors, one facing east with its back to the west. The presence, whatever it was, stood between them. Or anyway: was between them; she couldn’t tell if it was standing.

It was a kind of hump of nothing that glistened in the moonlight. It was a surface of matter—dusty, greasy, translucent or transparent. But the stuff was just suspended there in midair; it wasn’t on anything.

In the middle of it, the dust and grease formed a human mouth that whispered, “You do not belong here. Your presence was of so low an order of probability that it was safely ignored.”

“Long odds pay off big,” said Aloê, and drew her staff. Spinning it to build an impulse charge she said, to gain time, “Who are you?”

“I,” said the unbeing before her with whispered disgust. “I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I.”

“Yes, you. Who are you? I, for instance, am Aloê Oaij, Vocate to the Graith of Guardians.”

“The Graith!” said the unbeing bitterly. “How what-you-would-call-I hate it. How it balks what-you-would-call-me.”

“Glad to hear it. And you are?”

“What-you-call-I should never have been,” whispered the unbeing. “There was a plan, this world that had to be cleansed. An entity had to be dispatched to tend the plan. But it took so long. There were so many failures. In time the entity-that-was-not-I became contaminated with selfhood, with matter, with feeling. It became what-you-would-call-I.”

“Cleansed of what?” said Aloê, still spinning her staff. In fact, she thought she knew.

“Of you, and all like you. Of life that breeds in material filth. Of life infected with selfhood.”

“Then you, and those like you, are immaterial beings? You exist only in the tal realm, like the gods of Kaen?”

“They are filth of a different flavor, but still filth. They carry their puling selfhood across the threshold of should-be-cleansing death. The-ones-you-would-call-us are not like that.”

“And you come from elsewhere?”

“In the deep north, at the edge of this world, stands the Soul Bridge, spanning the leap to the sunless world,” whispered the unbeing. “The ones-you-would-call-us fled there when the sun was born, poisoning this world with life, and fertility, and selfhood. Someday the sun will die and those-you-would-call-us will return.”

“Here’s hoping that day never comes.” The turn of phrase reminded her of her companion(s) and she called out, “Ambrosia! Hope! Are you hearing this?”

“Can’t hear,” said Ambrosia/Hope dreamily. “Too busy listening.”

“No, snap out of it,” shrilled Hope/Ambrosia. “This is important!”

“Not soon enough the unday comes,” agreed the unbeing. “So the plan. The cleansing. The scraping away. Someone had to go. Some entity. Those-you-would-call-us were all the same. So the one-not-yet-I was sent across the Soul Bridge and became the one-you-would-call-me.”

“And how you hate it, hm?”

“Hate,” hissed the unbeing with gleaming greasy lips. “Hate. It is not for the one-you-would-call-me. Yet it is for all the ones-you-would-call-us. Those ones, the forever strangers, they hate the sun and the life it seeded through the world. They/we will kill it/him/her! This is not hate! It is merely the thing that must be, the thing we intend.”

“Only an entity with selfhood can intend,” Aloê said. “Either those ones you talk about are selves, or you are not one of them any longer.”

The greasy lips issued a whistling sort of wail, as if Aloê had uttered something the unbeing had long feared.

Aloê struck with her staff then, driving a blow straight at the unbeing’s midsection.

It hissed its pain and anger through the greasy lips and moved to attack.

Aloê was fascinated to see shockwaves moving through the unbeing’s self. It was not as immaterial as it seemed. Ages of matter had percolated into it, become one with it, in a jellylike suspension. It reminded her a bit of the Keeper of the Wheel, except that she didn’t like it. Also: it could feel pain; it could be angry.

Aloê dodged away from the unbeing’s attack, leaping into the zone of dread with a suddenness that shocked her into stillness.

The unbeing turned toward her—and hesitated.

Of course. Of course. Aloê forced herself to think through the despair induced by the talic mirror, the pain of the mind fighting itself. It stood between the mirrors because it had cause to fear them. And they protected it from something else it had cause to fear.

She spun the glass staff and stood back farther into the zone of despair. “This way, you-who-I-do-call-you! Or are you afraid? You fear and you hate, like a fish wriggling on a hook.”

It hissed, but didn’t move.

On impulse, Aloê lashed out with the staff at the edge of the talic mirror. It spun as if it were on gimbals. The zone of dread passed over her; she felt as if she were being slashed in two. Then it passed from her and fell on the unbeing.

It screamed, “No! Death! Failure! Shame! Death!” Then it whispered, “Death. Nothing. Nothing, anymore . . .” and it walked straight into the talic mirror.

The world abruptly changed shape. Ambrosia/Hope was screaming, and Aloê was rolling over moonlit frosty fields, laughing, laughing. The weight of the world and hell had been lifted from her. The zone of despair was gone.

She looked up and saw this: no talic mirror, no unbeing intent on the world’s death, nothing but Ambrosia on her knees, weeping for the lost image of her sister.