That night a winter storm fell on the dead lands like an avalanche.

Aloê had spent one memorable winter in the Northhold; she was not the proverbial Southholder gaping in amazement at her first flake of snow. But she was sure she would have died that night if she had been on her own.

It was Ambrosia who saved them.

They were walking westward toward the Sea of Stones when Ambrosia arbitrarily stopped the march.

“Snow coming,” she said curtly. “Got to get ready.”

“Maybe we should try to reach the Colony of Truth?” suggested Aloê.

“No time. Smell the snow on that wind! Besides, they won’t be glad to see us. They’ll be finding gods under every mushroom in the fields before too long.”

Ambrosia brusquely set Aloê to collecting deadwood, and then turned to weaving a sort of hut out of the dry field grass.

“At least the wood’s dry,” was the girl’s only comment after Aloê had brought a third armload. “I wonder how long it’s been dead?”

“How much more wood do you think we need?” Aloê asked.

“Depends,” Ambrosia replied. “How badly do you want to live?”

“That’s no answer.”

“Just keep bringing it until the snow is getting too deep to walk in.”

Aloê stolidly returned to collecting wood. Ambrosia lit a fire and went back to weaving her hut.

Aloê watched the hut grow in installments, catching a glimpse whenever she brought in a load of wood. It was looking like a dome or bubble of dry grass at one point. Then Ambrosia started covering the outside of the dome with clay she had excavated from the ground nearby.

The wind by now was pretty fierce, and edged with stinging ice crystals. Aloê was collecting wood at a run, now, piling it on the north side of the hut so as to form a windbreak for their shelter.

“Good,” said Ambrosia tersely when she saw what Aloê was doing.

Then the snow fell on them like a wall of white. Aloê barely made it back to the hut with a last armload of wood, guiding her way by the last guttering light of the fire.

Ambrosia was standing by the tunnel-like entrance of the hut. “Come on!” she shouted. “Bring it in here!”

Aloê ducked down and entered the shelter on her knees, still cradling the firewood in her arms.

Ambrosia came crawling in behind her, and fastened the door when she was in.

The inside of the shelter was also lined with clay. The bare ground was lined with grass, except in the center where Ambrosia had built a clay-lined fire pit, complete with fire. There were cunningly placed breeze-holes to bring in a maximum of fresh air and let out the smoke while losing the minimum of heat.

“Amazing!” Aloê said, dropping the firewood on a heap already bolstering the northern wall.

“Thanks,” said Ambrosia. “Where would you be without me, eh?”

“Dead.”

“Maybe. Maybe. You’re no creampuff, though. I’d’a stayed looking at that mirror till it ripped my soul in half if it weren’t for you.”

“Well, I enjoy hitting things. It’s nice to put the habit to some productive use.”

Ambrosia laughed sleepily. Her eyes closed for a moment, then jerked open again. “I’m a. I’m snoozy. I.”

She fell over on the hut floor, her face and hair rippling like water. Presently she was gone, and it was Hope who opened her eyes, nodded amiably at Aloê, and glanced around her bemusedly.

“I take it we are narrowly escaping death again,” she said presently.

“Thanks to Ambrosia, yes.”

“I’m glad you’re warming up to her,” Hope said.

Aloê wasn’t sure this was entirely true. “Well,” she temporized, “the girl’s had an odd life.”

“Yes. Yes. Although I’m always annoyed by people who want special consideration because of their sad life-stories. The thing is, Ambrosia doesn’t want special consideration. She simply wants to rule the world.”

“Or the interesting parts, at least,” Aloê offered.

Hope smiled quietly and nodded. “This would be almost cozy,” she said, looking around the hut. “If only we had some food. And blankets.”

“While you’re wishing, don’t forget a bottle of wine and mead. And a storybook and a handsome fellow to read it to us. Well, failing any of that, I’m going to sleep.”

Hope said something in response, but Aloê’s world was already getting dim and fuzzy. She crawled into a heap of dead grass and escaped from the world for a while.

Her dreams were luminous and mostly untroubled: she seemed to be swimming through warm waters alongside someone she trusted. The dreams ended as a shockingly bright cold current dragged her and that shadowy other apart.

She opened her eyes with a sense of loss and relief. Ambrosia was crawling through the tunnel-like entrance to the hut, pushing a bundle of wood ahead of her.

“Ah!” said Ambrosia. “You’re up again.”

“Urm.”

“If that means, ‘What’s for breakfast?’ I don’t have anything for you. Otherwise this setup would be rather cozy.”

“Your sister was saying the same thing last night.”

“Oh. Well, I tell you what.”

“What?”

“Storm’s over. We’re several feet deep in snow. Not much chance at digging for roots, or whatever could grow around here before you destroyed that god-shield. Let’s hit the road and find a town or a farm or something to buy some food and a place out of the cold.”

“It might be a long walk,” Aloê reflected.

“Right!”

“Ah. I see what you mean,” said Aloê, and crawled shivering out from her grassy blanket.

“It’s not too bad out there—a little breezy, maybe,” Ambrosia said. “Hope wove us some grass cloaks last night. At least I assume it was her.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“Then. Let’s leave the shelter here with the fire burning. If travel is too difficult, we can come back here.”

“To starve.”

“It might take months to starve. Cold can kill you in hours or less.”

Aloê shuddered, and accepted the grass cloak from the imperious girl. She led the way out of the hut.

The tunnel-like entrance now opened into a trench of snow. Aloê stood up and surveyed a blinding white wilderness of hellish cold. The shelter was almost entirely buried in snow: only the crown of the roof was clear, due to the fire within, no doubt: the surface of the snow about it was splayed with a glittering crown of ice.

The sky above was a clear glorious blue, like warm seawater on a summer day, not too far from shore. But there was nothing warm about the air, with its cruel wind toothed like a saw-edge with crystals of blowing snow.

“Like I said,” Ambrosia said, standing up beside her. “Not too bad.”

“God Avenger,” Aloê said, through chattering teeth. “What could be worse?”

“Freezing rain,” Ambrosia said. “Or—hey, you’re serious? Is it too cold for you to travel?”

“We can’t wait for spring. Let’s go.”

“I grew up in the northern foothills of the Blackthorn Range,” Ambrosia said, like an old woman reflecting on her long and varied life, “so this isn’t so bad.”

“I grew up in the Southhold of the Wardlands. I was twenty years old before I first saw snow.”

“No! Really?” Ambrosia looked at Aloê with wild surmise. “What’s that like?”

“I’ll tell you on the way. Let’s go.”

“Take these, first,” said Ambrosia, reaching into a nearby trench, containing their (almost depleted) stock of firewood. What Ambrosia handed her was a pair of screens made of sticks and grass on light wooden frames. “Snowshoes. Ever used them?”

“A couple of times, when I was fighting dragons in Northhold.”

“Oh. Oh, yes?” Ambrosia pondered this while Aloê tied the snowshoes to her feet with twine wound from dry grass. When Aloê was about half-done, Ambrosia reached into the trench and drew out a pair of snowshoes for herself and was done securing them on her feet before Aloê took her first tentative steps.

“Where to, do you think?” Aloê asked the unwontedly quiet girl. “Should we scout for a town in visionary flight?”

“Maybe not,” Ambrosia said. “With that god-shield down, whatever the whatever-it-was was worried about might be snooping around.” She shrugged crooked shoulders and said, “I say south. Somewhere along the coast there should be something.”

“If nothing else, we can fish.”

They turned south and started slogging along the wind-packed surface of the snowdrifts.

They had not been walking long before the heard the merry sound of sleigh bells.

“Death and Justice,” muttered Ambrosia.

“What is it?” Aloê asked.

“Worse. Who is it?” the girl said glumly.

Presently the sleigh came into sight over a ridge of snow. It was drawn by a team of eight fat men, wearing furry coats that made them look like bears. In the driver’s bench of the sleigh was a tall man wearing a heavy white mantle and a warm red hood against the bitter wind. Instead of a whip he held a carillon of bells, and he played on it to drive the team forward.

The sleigh came up alongside them, and the old man sang a long sleepy word in a tongue Aloê did not know. The team drew to a halt and stood in the snow without shivering. The fur-lined hoods of their coats were so deep that their faces could hardly be seen, but Aloê caught sight of a few empty or malevolent expressions.

“Io, Saturnalia, father!” said Ambrosia. “Did you bring me any presents?”

“Life,” said the old man, “or death. Get into the sleigh or I’ll have to dispose of you.”

“You’ll face my brother if you do!” shouted the girl furiously. “His harven-father taught him what to do with a kinslayer!”

“Your brother, who knows so very little, will not even know the location of your exsanguinated corpse. There is danger for us on every side, Ambrosia, and I will take what risks I must. Choose now, Ambrosia: life or death.”

“What about my friend?” demanded the girl. “Can you at least give her a ride to the coast?”

“Your friend,” said the horrible kindly looking old man, and turned his bright blue eyes on Aloê. “Is this the young woman who sprang my trap under Old Azh?”

“I am Aloê Oaij, Vocate to the Graith of Guardians.”

“I take that for a yes. You must get in, too, my dear. You are in this as deeply as we are, I’m afraid. I am Merlin Ambrosius, by the way, if you have not guessed.”

“I have. What happens if we don’t go along with you?”

“I will set my team upon you both. They are other than they seem. Your death will be dreadful and its aftermath more unpleasant still, possibly. On the other hand, I have food and blankets and hot tea in my sleigh.”

“You might have mentioned that to start with,” Aloê said, and climbed into the sleigh. Ambrosia followed, grumbling.

“Excellent,” said the old man. He gave the bells a shake and shouted at the team, “Now, Legio! Now, Carnifex! Now Illspell and Malice! On, Zavuv! On, Ornias! On, Ephippas! On, Andhrakar!”

The furry figures leapt forward and began to run through the snow, dragging the sleigh after them.

Aloê was not unhappy with the turn of events. The sides of the sleigh protected them from the worst of the wind; the blankets were warmer than the grass cloaks. She shucked off both her snowshoes and her shoes proper and tucked her frozen feet into the relative warmth of her kneepits.

“There was some talk of food and tea,” she pointed out.

Merlin laughed. “You really adapt yourself to circumstances, don’t you?”

“What else should I adapt myself to? Is the food in this basket here?”

“Yes, help yourself. You might hand me a mug of tea when you have a moment.”

In the wicker basket on the floor of the sleigh was a clay jar of hot tea and three mugs. The food was a dish of spicy sausages and a packet of crisp dried vegetables. Aloê shared the food and drink with the glum-faced girl beside her, then handed the old man a mug of tea.

“Thanks,” he said. “Seriously, how could it happen between you and Morlock? I don’t understand it.”

“Is it necessary that you do?”

“I am the boy’s father, after all. I have a natural interest.”

“Natural!” Ambrosia laughed bitterly.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, girl. You’ll choke.”

“Save you the trouble.”

“I don’t mind taking the trouble, if it proves absolutely necessary,” Merlin said, with a smile frostier than the bitter wind.

“Are you going to kill me, too, if I don’t answer you?” Aloê said, matching his coldness.

He looked at her with some surprise. “I think you’re misreading our family banter, my dear. But don’t let it worry you. In our way, Ambrosia and I are very fond of each other.”

“Stupid old fool!”

“Ambrosia, behave. We don’t want Vocate Aloê to get the wrong impression of the family she’s become attached to.”

“Attached to?” Aloê said with some dismay. She had no desire to be attached to any family, particularly not this one. “How’s that?”

“Because you have attached yourself to my son, my dear. A reckless choice, and one I’d have tried to talk you out of, had I been present for you to consult. But the thing is as it is.”

“You’re wrong about that, Merlin,” Ambrosia said crossly. “Your cage caught her because they’d just been copulating.”

“Don’t be vulgar, Ambrosia.”

“I said ‘copulating,’ didn’t I? Is there a more polite word?”

“In any case, you’re quite mistaken. Your brother is this woman’s life-mate, and vice versa. I’ve seen couples married for centuries who weren’t as talically intertwined as those two.”

“Oh.” Ambrosia looked dubiously at Aloê. “Really?”

“Really. Hence my natural curiosity, but that’s all it is.”

“Where are we headed, if you don’t mind satisfying my natural curiosity?” Aloê intervened, to change the subject.

“A town not too far from here, on the edge of the dead zone that once prevailed over these parts. We should be safe there, for the time being, until I come up with a new plan to protect myself from the Two Powers. I confess that you, my dear, fatally wounded my original plan, once and twice.”

“Nothing personal.”

“I don’t agree at all. Anything that affects my safety, I consider very personal indeed. But I recognize that your blundering intrusion in Old Azh was quite accidental, and I am willing to recognize your defeat of the Balancer and his god-mirror as something heroic.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t be too flattered. I tend to find heroes a nuisance.”

“Then I’m even more flattered.”

“All right. Repay my kind words by telling me the tale. How were you captured? What happened after?”

Whatever his vices as a father, Merlin was a good listener. He heard Aloê through and then said, “I had planned to visit the Balancer after my blood was secured. The site may still be worth a visit, though it will be a tad more dangerous now.”

“More dangerous?”

“Of course. The god-mirror was a defense against the Two Powers. That much is clear. Why the Balancer needed one is an interesting question, though perhaps less than urgent. How the mirror was constructed and how I can use its principles most effectively for our defense: those are the pressing issues.”

“It’s a defense that might be dangerous to those in its path, though,” Aloê observed.

Merlin laughed as if she’d made a joke.

“You think he cares?” Ambrosia called out. “Hey, Merlin, where’d you get your sleigh team? Was the harthrang-dealer having a sale—buy seven and get the eighth for free?”

“What nonsense!” the genial old man said. “One never does business with a demonolater. They simply can’t be relied on. One makes one’s own harthrangs, or one does without.”

“What’s a harthrang?” asked Aloê.

“A demon inhabiting a human body,” Ambrosia answered, before Merlin could speak. “These corpses seem surprisingly undecayed, Father.”

“Thank you, my dear. The cold may have a preservative effect.”

“Or maybe it’s due to the fact that those bodies are still alive. You fed living people to those sceathes so that you could have your little team of reindeer.”

“It was necessary,” the necromancer said patiently, as if he were teaching his daughter the spelling of a difficult word that was very important to know. “The flaring and extrusive talic imprint of the harthrangs will successfully mask our own presence from the Two Powers. I have put this to the test, Ambrosia; I know that it works.”

“And the people who died for your experiment?”

“They would have died sooner or later anyway,” said the kindly looking old man.

“You old fool! If you can’t trust a demonolater, how can you trust a half-dozen demons? Where do you think demonolaters learn their dishonesty?”

“I don’t trust the demons; I master them.” Merlin shook the carillon of bells, and the furry team of dybbuks frantically redoubled their efforts to draw the sleigh forward. “They obey me because they fear me. I am the master of the arts of all makers and seers in all the worlds we know, Ambrosia. You should fear me, too.”

“Old fool,” the girl muttered stubbornly.

“You said you tested them,” Aloê observed, to distract the old man.

“Yes, indeed,” Merlin said, ready to be distracted. “I have been trailing the Two Powers for a month or so. Or their avatars, anyway.”

“What’s the difference between the god and the avatar?”

“Sometimes not much,” Merlin said. “The god’s being has at least two anchors: one in the border of the talic and material planes, the other in the border between talic and spirit realms. Or so the old seers say. The avatar is the material echo of the god’s nearer anchor. Its appearance is a function of the god’s intentions as complicated by his identity.”

“Or her identity.”

“If you insist. I followed the avatars of Torlan and Zahkaar through the wreck of Old Azh. There was something they wanted to destroy there—”

“The Apotheosis Wheel, I think.”

“Possibly. There was once much in Old Azh to learn, but there is not now. The Two Powers went through the island like fire through a prairie.”

“Did they kill the last Watcher?”

“Eh? The mechanism, you mean? Kill is not the correct nomenclature, my dear. You can only kill something that is alive. But certainly the talic mechanism that once ran the island was inactive when I arrived, after the departure of the Powers (or their avatars). Most of those empty dog-people are dead; the rest will not survive long.”

“Probably they did not pay attention to their daughters.”

“Oh, do be quiet, Ambrosia; the grownups are talking.” Merlin looked sideways at Aloê. ‘‘A strange ship passed my galley while I was on the Sea of Stones. It moved very fast, and not with the wind, but it had no oars. It strode across the waves on a pair of long legs—”

Aloê laughed. “That crazy bastard. Yes, yes. I can see it. The reduced friction would make very high speeds possible. But it might be a very fragile craft. I hope he didn’t run into a storm.”

“If you are referring to my son—”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“I confess I suspected it even at the time, even though I thought Morlock was safely in the bag.” He looked darkly upon her. “Is that the attraction? You design ships together? Because otherwise I can’t see it.”

“Have you ever met your son?”

“Not since the day he was born. But we do have nonphysical communication from time to time. And I have seen pictures of him.”

“Hm.” Aloê found this remark distressing, but tried not to show it. Even such tenuous contact with an exile might be held against Morlock as a violation of the First Decree. But there was always the possibility that Merlin was lying.

“You don’t intend to enlighten me, I see,” Merlin remarked. “Possibly the explanation would involve unsavory details—”

“Or savory ones.”

“Gross!”

“Ambrosia, enough.”

Abruptly tumbling about their heads was a flock of chellnor birds, their gray wings flecked with white winter-feathers. The flock ran squawking westward.

Merlin and Aloê laughed in surprise.

“Where did they come from?” Aloê wondered.

“They nest in snow sometimes,” Merlin observed. “I wonder if the team kicked up their nest. Life is returning to these dead lands, certainly. What you did was extremely inconvenient for me, my dear, but no doubt—”

Ambrosia leapt up from the back of the sleigh and snatched Aloê’s glass staff. As Merlin and Aloê gaped, Ambrosia spun the staff, glittering in the sun, and smashed the skull of a harthrang who was climbing up the side of the sleigh. The skull shed its brains in the bitter white breeze, but the hands tried to hold on to the side of the sleigh. Ambrosia methodically pounded on the fingers until they could grip no longer, and the headless harthrang fell by the wayside as the sleigh ran on.

“The bells!” shouted Ambrosia at the gaping Merlin.

Aloê turned to see that the seven remaining harthrangs pulling the sleigh were looking backward, and three were fumbling at their harnesses. She seized the carillon from Merlin’s nerveless fingers and shook it fiercely.

The harthrangs quailed at the shrill steely voices of the bells and turned away again, intent on the road ahead.

“Thank you, my dear,” said Merlin frostily to Aloê, as if he were offering to cut her throat, and seized the carillon back. “And thank you, Ambrosia,” he said as his daughter silently handed the staff back to Aloê. “I can’t think of what drove the harthrang to it. It will have to abandon that body, and when I get around to activating its oath, it will begin a very unpleasant spiral to the final death.”

“Maybe it was desperate,” Ambrosia suggested.

“What does it have to fear more than me? I ask you.”

“I’m telling and telling you. But you never listen.” The girl sat down again in the back of the sleigh.

They rode on in silence, except for when Merlin gave the carillon an occasional imperious shake, to keep the harthrangs at their task.

Finally they came to a small town. The sea was near enough that Aloê could smell it, and the air was milder there than any she had felt all day; the snow was melting in the town’s single street.

The snow was unmarked by footprints. There was one chimney in the middle of town that was issuing a dim thread of smoke from its black mouth; the houses were reasonably well-kept. But there was no other sign that the town was still occupied.

“Who lives here?” Aloê asked.

“For the time being,” Merlin said, “we do. I will ask you ladies to unharness my team and draw the sleigh into yonder barn. Then I will stake the harthrangs to their posts as a perimeter guard, and we can rest from our travels.”

Aloê and Ambrosia dismounted and approached the harthrangs gingerly. The harthrangs watched, enigmatic in their furred hoods, but did not otherwise move as the women unhooked them from the bar of the sleigh.

“Ambrosia,” Aloê whispered.

“Hm?”

“I think this body is dead.”

“This one, too. How recently is yours gone?”

“Sometime today, I think.”

“This one, too.”

“What does it mean?”

“Tell you later.”

“Is it good or bad?”

“Really bad.”

They finished releasing the harthrangs without incident. Merlin dismounted the sleigh and began speaking to the harthrangs in a language Aloê did not know. It sounded like a mudshark crunching bear-bones.

The two women unpacked the sleigh and dragged it into the barn Merlin had pointed out. It was next door to the one building that seemed to be occupied.

Inside the barn were several horses, about five cows, and a large number of chickens. The chickens were all dead, but the larger animals were alive.

They wouldn’t be much longer without help, though. They had plenty of fodder, but their water troughs were bone dry.

“What happened here?” Aloê asked Ambrosia. “Did the people just walk away?”

“Hope so,” Ambrosia said. “Don’t think so, though,” she added, after a moment. She was reminding Aloê more of her brother all the time, and not in a good way.

Once they had the sleigh in the middle of the barn and the great doors closed, Aloê dragged one of the water troughs out of a side door and started filling it with wet snow and slush.

She dragged it back into the barn with rather more difficulty. By then Ambrosia had disappeared somewhere. Aloê found a pair of water buckets and used them to carry snow into the barn until all the water-troughs were full to the brim with slush.

She did all this with a sense of mingled obligation and futility. “Don’t know who’s going to take care of you when we’re gone,” she told a horse who was taking tentative licks at a pool of melting snow. “But maybe we can let you loose to fend for yourselves.” The horse made no reply.

She looked up to see Ambrosia standing nearby. The girl was looking more alarmed than ever.

“What is it, honey?” Aloê asked.

“Come see.”

Ambrosia led her out of the back of the barn. Not too far away was the town graveyard. One of the crypts was standing open, mysteriously free of the melting snow. There was room inside for two or three bodies, but there were none within. Many a runic imprecation and trap had been freshly carven into the weathered stone.

“This is for us, I think,” Ambrosia said. “Me, and Morlock, and maybe you, now, too. The spells would bar anyone from detecting what was inside, even something as acrid as the blood of Ambrose.”

“How could we live in there?”

“I don’t think we are meant to.”

“How did you find it?”

“I was looking for it. Come on; there’s something else.”

Ambrosia led Aloê into a house next to the graveyard. Inside the sole room were the bodies of an old man, and old woman, and a young man.

“So they didn’t walk away,” Aloê mused. “They were killed. No, wait!”

She knelt down by the side of the old man. His chest was rising and falling; the whites of his eyes were still clear, not darkened by the brown shadow of death. “They’re still alive!” she said. “At least some of them.”

“No,” Ambrosia said, with unusual somberness. “Some of the bodies may still live, but only their vegetative souls. The people aren’t here anymore. They have been killed, eaten.”

“By the harthrangs.”

“That’s what demons live on: the tal of living rational souls.”

“I take it you’re telling me we should get out of here.”

“Not yet,” Ambrosia said thoughtfully. “He’ll be expecting something like that, and will have prepared against it. But something is obviously going to happen that he doesn’t seem to expect. Maybe we can make a break then. Be sure to follow my lead,” said the imperious girl.

“What if you are Hope at the time? Should I follow her lead?”

Ambrosia thought in silence for a while. “Almost certainly not,” she said. “Hope’s first thought will be to help Merlin. There’s no way you can stop her from being a fool. Be sure to get away yourself; there won’t be anything you can do for us.”

“We’ll see.”

“Uh. Was I—?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

They returned to the front of the barn, where Merlin was waiting for them.

“All eight harthrangs have been anchored about the village,” he said, with a sly smile. “Their talic imprint should shield us from any unwanted attention from the Two Powers.”

Ambrosia nodded indifferently. “Eight, eh? So you gave one of the townspeople’s bodies to one of the demons. One of the harthrangs is a double. Is that it?”

“Yes,” said Merlin irritably. He had obviously wanted to explain this himself.

“Which one is it?” Ambrosia asked.

Merlin thought a while before answering, but finally admitted, “It is Andhrakar.”

“He’s the strongest, then?”

“Not necessarily. Perhaps he is merely the most reckless. Occupying two bodies at once puts him at a certain risk.”

“Only from you. And you can’t afford to harm him.”

“You’re talking nonsense, daughter. I will do what I must. Andhrakar knows that. So should you.”

“But others will do what they must. And that’s something you don’t really understand, father, not the way I do. That’s why I will be the greatest ruler in the history of this world, and you are a man whose home was burgled by a rogue godlet.”

He looked at her quizzically. “Trying to goad me into a rage? It won’t work, you know.”

“Only into thinking. That probably won’t work either.”

“Either way, we’ll be more comfortable inside.” He gestured for them to precede him, and they did.

The building was the smithy, and the smoke was coming from the big central furnace.

“We should set up some beds in here, my dears,” the old man said. “It may be inconvenient, but we should sleep in the same room for the time being.” He gestured with the carillon.

“In case his tame demons attack in the middle of the night, he means,” Ambrosia observed.

“I heard him,” Aloê said curtly.

They raided rooms in the rest of the house for beds, and then scavenged up food in the rest of the town to last them for a day or so.

“And now,” Merlin said, like a kindly schoolmaster dismissing his students to play, “you may amuse yourselves, my dears. I strongly suggest that you do not leave town; the harthrangs have been instructed to stop you. For myself, I must give some thought on how to lure my son into this zone of protection, and then what my next steps will be.”

Ambrosia muttered inaudibly and drew Aloê to the side. “He’s not telling you, so I’ll tell you. There are things you have to be aware of around demons, bound or not. Try not to pay too much attention to any voices you hear in your head. Certainly don’t accept any offers they make. If they won’t leave you alone, just scream for a while.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. It has a dispersing impact on ghosts and demons generally. That’s why the first thing a specter will do is paralyze your larynx. And don’t ascend into vision unless you absolutely have to. He probably doesn’t care if you get possessed by demons; it’d change your talic pattern, which is the only thing entangling you with the blood of Ambrose—i.e., him.”

Aloê smiled at the odd, intense, hatchet-faced girl. “But you would care, honey?”

“Sort of. Don’t get mushy on me. I have to go write a letter to my sister.”

It was a meditative afternoon all around. Aloê, too, gave a lot of thought to what would happen next. Because she was pretty sure something would happen that the other two (or three) weren’t counting on.

The long afternoon passed; they gathered to eat around sunset. Ambrosia had become Hope, by then. There was very little conversation through the meal, and afterward they settled down to sleep.

Merlin’s bed was next to the forge, with Aloê’s and Hope’s beds on either side, closer to the doors.

“Wait a moment,” Aloê said to Hope, after they said good night, “do you sleep?”

Hope laughed. “I used to. In fact, I’ve lived more of our life than Ambrosia has. But once she figured that out, she started fighting back, and now when I sleep she usually takes over. Tonight I think I will not sleep.”

“Happy waking, then,” Aloê said, and dragged herself to her bed. It wasn’t such a great bed, apart from the fact that it was a bed. She’d almost forgotten what it was like to sleep in one, but she caught the knack of it again pretty rapidly.

In a dark hour full of whispering, Aloê heard a voice call out, “Aloê. Merlin. Wake up. Wake up. They’re here.”

Aloê’s eyes gaped open. The great room was lit by the red light of the forge. All around the room, like sentinels, stood the harthrangs. They were not wearing their hooded jackets; symbols had been cut or clawed into many of their faces; and all their dead eyes stared at Merlin.

“Get back to your posts,” croaked Merlin furiously. He reached over by the furnace to grab the carillon of bells and gave it a vigorous shake.

Silence. In the dim light, Aloê saw the steel bells misshapen like wax, dripping molten metal that set Merlin’s bedding alight.

The harthrangs stepped forward.

Merlin’s throat issued more croaking sounds, but they didn’t rise to the level of words.

The dead faces of the harthrangs smiled. Their teeth had been filed needle-sharp.

Aloê jumped as someone touched her arm. It was Ambrosia. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “This is it.”

“What about your father?”

“What about him? He killed everyone in this town to feed that demon. Now it’s turning on him. He made his own bed; let him burn in it.”

The two women turned away, but there were harthrangs behind them too, and they were seized and held. Aloê kicked and elbowed her captors as much as she could, but it was useless. She could smell their rotting flesh. They weren’t alive: if the bodies felt pain, it didn’t matter to the beings that controlled them.

“Look, Andhrakar,” Ambrosia said. “You’re making a mistake. We aren’t parties to your filthy bargain and we have unlimited capacity to harm you. This is your last warning.”

The harthrangs did not respond in any way. They continued to smile their needle-toothed smiles at Merlin and stepped toward him again as the others did the same.

“How do you know which one it is?” Aloê asked.

“They’re all the same now,” Ambrosia said impatiently. “One of the demons ate all the others. Listen, you remember what I told you to do in a certain context.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Do it with me. Loud. Now.”

Ambrosia screamed and Aloê followed suit.

The girl’s scream was high-pitched, ululating, angry rather than frightened—a war-cry. Aloê matched it and bettered its volume.

It hit the harthrangs harder than a sledgehammer. They staggered and their hands slackened; the women dropped to the floor and ran.

Aloê was headed for an outer door, but Ambrosia grabbed her and led her to an inner room of the house—a guesting room, by the looks of it, with ornamental chairs of polished dark wood that looked relatively unused.

“This door looks solid enough to keep them out,” Ambrosia said. “And no windows or other doors. It’s perfect!”

“What if that fire spreads—the one Merlin started?”

“Even better! Demons hate fire, as a rule, and it’ll damage the corpses to uselessness. We can sit comfortably in the burning house until they’re all driven off. I wonder if he started the fire on purpose? He is pretty clever sometimes.”

“Um. Ambrosia. I can’t sit comfortably in a burning house.”

“What? Oh. Oh. Of course not. Sorry, Aloê; I was forgetting you’re not one of us.”

“Thanks.”

“Listen, I said I was sorry!”

“And I said, ‘Thanks’ and I meant it. Calm down, honey; we’ll think of something.”

They listened for sounds from the next room. There was a kind of wet crack, and Merlin made a kind of clucking sound.

“It got him,” Ambrosia said glumly. “I guess the fire didn’t work.”

“One bone, Ambrosius,” the dead throats chanted in the other room. “One bone I will break for every time your bells made me cower.”

Aloê speculated on how many times that had happened, over the months Merlin had been travelling with his bodyguard of demons. From the look in Ambrosia’s wide worried eyes, she was making the same calculation. Hundreds of times? How many bones were there in the human body? Would the demon double up when it ran out of bones to break?

Another crack, and a gargling sound from the old man’s throat.

Ambrosia’s expression was now getting frantic. As for Aloê, she was sickened . . . but she remembered the crypt in the graveyard, and the empty faces of the townfolk whose souls had fed the demons, and she was disinclined to risk her safety for the sake of Merlin’s.

Still, their turn might come next.

A door slammed open in the next room, and the winter wind howled through it.

Someone took a long single stride into the smithy.

“Put the old man down,” said the newcomer. “I would have words with him.”

“The old man has spoken his last words,” the eight dead throats of Andhrakar replied. “Leave him to the pain he has earned, and you will earn no pain for yourself.”

“Eh,” said the newcomer, and drew his sword.

Ambrosia was staring at Aloê in wild surmise. Aloê said, “Let’s go meet your brother, honey. He’ll need us in half a hot second, or I’m very much mistaken.”

“Right!” shouted Ambrosia.

Aloê seized the door handle and pushed on it.

It rattled but did not move. The harthrangs had barred it from the other side.

“We thought we locked them out,” Aloê observed wryly. “But we really locked ourselves in.”