Morlock was not eager to return to awareness, but when he did it was not so bad. Aloê and Merlin were talking in quiet voices of some place in the southern islands that they both knew. Ambrosia was playing a board game against herself, using scratches on a flat rock for a board and pebbles for pieces. He went and sat down across from her and they played the game for a while, speaking rarely, absorbed in the game.

Later he walked with Aloê around the island’s edge. They spoke in hushed voices of the last time they had made love, and the island of Old Azh. She told him of the strange dog people who lived under the island and the strange not-living thing that tended to them . . . or had done so, before the Two Powers destroyed all that. Evidently Merlin had witnessed the devastation, but Morlock did not wish to speak to the old man.

The gods were mostly silent, perhaps because they were listening. That was Aloê’s and Merlin’s thought, but Morlock was not so sure. It was more as if they were running down. . . .

In the quiet calm that comes from accepting failure, Morlock suddenly saw something he had not before. He took things he knew and fitted them together like the parts of a puzzle, of a machine, of a broken statue. The face was lost in splinters and atoms but still, it was there, if he could find the right pattern. And when he found it, he saw the solution smiling at him.

“I know what to do,” he said, loud enough so that the others could hear him.

They all looked at him: his father, his sister (who was Hope at the moment), and his beloved.

“What is it, honey?” said Aloê, her glorious golden eyes wet with pity.

He examined his solution and it was sound.

“I can’t tell you,” he said, and turned away from them all with some satisfaction. He had work to do. At last, he had work to do.

In Merlin’s often-expressed opinion, Morlock had gone mad. The younger maker used Aloê’s glass staff to break off pieces of rock from the island surface, and then he spent endless time using the rock to work on other pieces of rock.

“Madness and suicide are the two common afflictions of long-term prisoners,” Merlin remarked, and proceeded to tell stories of jails he had known.

Aloê was not sure he was wrong. But when she looked at Morlock, she saw none of the wild-eyed recklessness that had driven him into the lake of mist. He worked calmly, carefully, swiftly (given his materials).

What he made, in the end, was nothing extraordinary, although he displayed it to the others with a considerable amount of satisfaction. It was simply a perpetual motion machine—a small hand-sized version of the ones attached to impulse wheels all over the Wardlands.

There were two wheels of intermeshing gears on armatures. The one wheel drove the other, and the other drove the first. Given the materials he had to work with, the transfer of momentum was not perfect, and he occasionally had to tap one wheel or the other to keep the gears meshing.

“And this is your great solution?” Merlin burst out at last. “This is your weapon against the mightiest beings in Laent? Shall we make an army of these little things and send them on wheels to topple the two thrones—is that what you propose?”

“This is not a weapon, no,” Morlock said. “It is really a statement of the problem.” He tapped one of the gears and remarked, “Torlan is greater than Zahkaar. This much is clear.”

This doomful truth even Ambrosius sees, thundered Torlan, the symbols freighted with hate for Zahkaar.

A god who grovels for the opinion of mortals is no god, replied Zahkaar. It is because I am greater that they do not see it.

There is one thing to see in you: an inferior god.

You are inferior, as I shall prove at Time’s end.

The talic bolts of hate flew back and forth over the mortals’ heads for some time, and eventually stopped.

Morlock had ceased to tap the gears of his little machine, and they also ground to a halt.

The cold light of an unsuspected idea flooded Aloê’s mind.

Merlin stepped toward his son and faced him over the motionless stone toy. The old man’s hands were trembling. He flicked one of the gears and shouted, “Only Zahkaar is real! Fate and its idiot-child time are but the dreams of Chaos! Soon he will awake and sweep all away in his fury!”

Zahkaar roared on his throne. Vile Torlan, even Ambrosius sees my glory! Surrender your futile struggle and forget your useless hate! In the end as in the beginning, I must triumph!

You, raged Torlan, are inconsistent and inept! When Ambrosius spoke for me you were void of belief. Now you deign to sniff after the opinions of a mortal. No true god would do thus, and you have done it, therefore you are no true god. You are rebuked.

Zahkaar thundered snidely, You did it first, therefore you rebuke yourself by your own logic. Ha ha ha.

You did it first! You always do everything first!

Thank you. I accept your praise and surrender. I am First, and you are Nothing.

I am First and you are Nothing! I hate you! I hate you!

I hated you before you existed.

My hatred called your being into existence.

Meanwhile, Merlin was staring at Morlock, who bore it calmly. The younger maker looked at Aloê and Ambrosia.

It was clear that Morlock could not speak his idea aloud, lest it become part of the Powers’ knowledge. But Aloê was sure that she understood. Morlock was proposing that the Two Powers were not gods at all . . . or at least not living beings. There were machines—or, better, two gears of a single machine that drove each other into motion.

Who had made them? Why? The first was easy enough to guess: the Balancer. The why was harder to figure out. Perhaps it mattered less, just now.

She met Morlock’s eye and nodded pointedly. Ambrosia’s sudden laughter was also an obvious acknowledgement.

Merlin snapped his fingers under Morlock’s nose to get his attention. Then he took a corner of his ragged weather-stained cloak and dropped it down between the gears. They slowed, stopped.

Merlin glared at his son. Morlock shrugged and nodded.

The cloak, Aloê mused. What was the cloak?

Merlin’s cloak was . . . Merlin’s cloak. He had always claimed he had a method to hide from the Two Powers. Could it be used as a method to conceal the Two Powers from each other? And if it did would they simply . . . stop?

Aloê met Ambrosia’s eye. The girl was laughing so hard she was crying.

“And that is all?” Merlin was saying to his son. “No word of apology? No sign of respect for the old man you despise?”

“I am sorry,” said the younger man calmly, “and I do not despise you.”

Aloê looked at the father and son, so similar and so different. In this foggy hell, Merlin was concerned about his own ego. And Morlock—he never was. She almost wished he were. But she had to admit, in this deadly moment, his calm and self-control were a strength greater than the ability to throw a lightning bolt or two.

Merlin was staring at him, breathing heavily. “No,” he said theatrically. “No, that is not good enough. You, and your god of Fate, and all the world will be swept away when I give Zahkaar the victory!”

He sprang at Morlock, wrapping his long fingers around his son’s neck, screaming incoherent abuse. The two men fell struggling to the ground.

Ambrosia and Aloê ran over to separate them. Ambrosia was rolling her eyes as she did so, a cue Aloê hoped was opaque to the Two Powers. She herself thought Merlin was pretending too hard, but guessed that the Two Powers weren’t subtle enough to notice it.

Aloê dragged Morlock to one side of the island while Merlin and Ambrosia went to the other.

Aloê glared a question, asking him as hard as she could without speaking, Did you get it?

Morlock shrugged, a gesture that Aloê translated as, Eh. That was the best clue she could hope for, probably.

“Great Torlan!” she shouted. “We bring you a message from the Balancer. It is urgent that it comes to you alone. Bring us over to your throne, if you would.”

Abruptly, Morlock and Aloê were standing beside the black-and-white presence on the white-and-black throne.

“I was with the Balancer at the time he died,” Aloê said hurriedly, not allowing herself to be disoriented. “He told us that time would soon end and his purpose was gone. But he gave us a secret that will ensure your victory over the Other Power.”

Tell me, thundered the god.

“If I tell you, I tell him,” pointed out Aloê. “We must conceal ourselves from the Enemy Power. My colleague must weave a magic called the, uh, the—”

“Final Shroud,” suggested Morlock.

“—the Final Shroud about you. And then we can tell you what we have come to tell you.”

Do so, said Torlan, and emitted talic gusts of amusement at Zahkaar’s expense.

Morlock went into deep vision, and Aloê followed. As her coppery talic avatar stood beside his monochrome one, she watched him weave a talic pattern of reflection about the self-styled Power of Fate. It was like a talic mirror, where the Power could see nothing but itself. The Power’s own talic force was used to blind the Power to anything else.

Once Aloê caught the mental knack of what Morlock was doing, she joined in and helped him. Soon they had Torlan completely cocooned in the talic mirror.

So this is victory, mused Torlan, in talic symbols that reverberated and re-echoed like thunder in a narrow canyon. I see nothing but myself . . . except for you two.

Morlock dropped out of vision and was gone. Aloê found it more difficult to find her way back to her body, but the sense that Torlan’s entire malefic attention had focused on her was a great encouragement. Eventually, she opened her eyes to see Morlock’s concerned face hovering over her.

“Did we do it?” she asked.

For answer, he waved at the black-and-white throne. It was empty. Across a great gulf, she saw Ambrosia and Merlin dancing around a white-and-black throne that was equally empty.

It was true, then. The Two Powers were merely two parts of a talic machine. Without the driving hate of the other part, each became void.

And the glowing fog was gone.

Hand in hand, Morlock and Aloê ran down the black-and-white steps into the wide dead space where the killing mist had been. They met Merlin and Ambrosia at the stream and embraced, laughing.

“Well, Guardians,” said Merlin wryly. “When you tell this tale to the Graith, don’t forget to remind them that the Two Powers were defeated by old exiled Ambrosius.”

Aloê nearly replied furiously—she didn’t know what, exactly. But the old man’s amused look stopped her. If he said these things to be annoying, perhaps it was better to not be annoyed.

“They were right to fear us,” said Morlock, looking at the empty thrones.

The old man clapped him on the lower of his shoulders and didn’t speak.

“I guess you’ll be going back to the Wardlands, then,” Ambrosia said glumly.

They would be going back to the Wardlands, then . . . a fact that Aloê had only just begun to accept in her heart. They would not die, on that dark rock, in that prison without walls, while idiot-gods clamored above them. They could go home.

“Yes, honey,” Aloê said. “Right away, in fact.”

“I suppose it’s against the rules to hear from your exiled sisters sometimes,” Ambrosia went on, giving Morlock a sidelong look.

Aloê was trying to figure out a diplomatic way of saying yes when Morlock surprised her by saying, “No. There are no rules, except what maintains the Guard. Let me hear from you. From you both,” he added hesitantly. She gave him a brief glare, a longer grin.

“Well, good fortune to you, Guardians,” Merlin said. “I say it to you and no others of your Graith. For myself, I think I will see if I can take apart one or both of those talic devices we thought were gods. The remains should be instructive.” He nodded and turned away.

“I’d better stick around for that,” Ambrosia said. “If he knows something, we should know it.”

“Agreed,” said Morlock, and hugged her good-bye.

The angry girl, blinking back tears, waved at Aloê and ran to catch up with her father. They were quarrelling about something before the Guardians were out of earshot.

Aloê took Morlock’s hand, and they walked away together under the dark blue eaves of Tychar. They were alone, and weaponless, entering the deadliest place in the world in the jaws of winter.

But they were happy there, and all through the long bitter road home.