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CHAPTER 16

CIRCLES


Weeks passed. Months. Valeriev began work excavating the collapsed shaft that linked the pantheon deep below the Mensa with the surface. Great boulders and chunks of plascrete were hammered to rubble and carried by hand from the depths. Always when I entered the city, I would pass lines of men bearing laden sacks, each bowed by the weight of the gravel they carried on their backs.

A great slag heap grew beyond the dunes made by the sand displaced from the surface dig. The water was traced to its source: a chamber high above the pantheon. There were rooms there whence the water had never drained. In one such cavern, Gaston’s men made a discovery: a colony of many-legged, snakelike fish that must have survived from antiquity, feeding on the microbiota that dwelt in the water.

I returned to the pantheon many times, and spent long hours studying the hand and the inscriptions on the slab it lay upon, relying on my vision to peer across time. Always the hand was there, never moving, though the ruins shifted about it in infinite array.

Rassam and Carter holographed and studied every corner of every gallery in that hideous place, and began the long but steady work of translation. The walls on every level were covered in drab friezes that at the height of Vaiartu power must have been a wonder to behold. There were portions still painted, recalling the Hulle Frieze in the hypostyle. The bottommost layer depicted the crabbed forms of the Vaiartu battling one another with primitive weapons, with blade and club and claw. Four-legged ones fought with six-legged, and six-legged with eight. Beneath them were mounded the cracked carapaces of their brothers. The level above showed those same armies prostrated, kneeling before a creature that seemed a formless cluster of feathered wings whose pinions bent to place a star upon the crown of one.

I asked Rassam if this was Aravte-Teäplu, the Wide-Conquering.

“No,” the scholiast explained, and showed me an inscription written beneath the star-crowned creature. He traced the sineoform with a gloved finger. “And Su Na Ma Su Ra Te Ha Nu received the su ja ra ka si te te u ma, the right to rule, from Ma Su Te Mu, becoming Su Na Ma Su Ra Te Ap U Lu, the First-Binding, the All-Binding.”

“Their first king?” I asked.

“Sunamasra-Tehanu, or Sunamasra-Teäplu,” Rassam said, rendering the harsh cadence of the Vaiartu syllabary into something like human speech. “United the warring factions of the Vaiartu: the Vaiartu, the Sujaru, the Sibaru, and the Onharru.

“The Watchers made him king,” I said, and thought, Like they made Elu king.

History had repeated itself, but how many times? How many champions had the Watchers anointed for their own? How many times had the black gods turned a people against creation itself?

Rassam led me to the next inscription, a great block of text alongside the winged creature—which could only be the Watcher Masutemu. “It says here how the god ordered his people to burn the stars, to purge all life from the universe, lest the O Ba Da Mu bring forth demons to destroy them.”

“The Obadam?” I asked.

“The Liar.”

Here at least was confirmation of one thing at least: Whatever the link between the Quiet and the Watchers might be—whether or not the Quiet was one of them—they were enemies.

The levels above all told of the adventure-wars of the Vaiartu. How they shattered worlds, and tore suns to pieces, how they hounded life from the least protoplasm to the lost races whose kingdoms stretched across our stars. All to find and cut that thread that anchored the Quiet to his creation.

Mankind.

Almost I felt I saw the black ships of the Vaiartu questing in the black seas of night, searching, always searching.

Earth had been spared the fire only by chance, and now the Cielcin were sent against us—and against the Quiet. In place of this Sunamasra-Teäplu there came Elu, King of Eue, and after him Dorayaica, its heir . . . 

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When I was not in the ruins with the scholiasts, I flew with the spotters. Excavations had begun upon the mountaintop, carving away at a million years of sediment and sand. Seen from the air, the ramparts of the surface city stretched from the western face of the Mountain of Whales like the fingers of an enormous hand. Cranes had been erected atop the plateau to lift supplies to the diggers toiling there, and I could see the vast box-holes of the Wheeler grid where Valeriev’s workmen labored.

A whole flock of our Irchtani wheeled and dove against the pale heavens. Now and again one would let out a piercing cry—not a word, but a piece of coded music that carried on the wind.

“I wish I understood them,” Cassandra said, riding in the spotter’s turret just behind.

“It’s just a drill,” I said. “Annaz wants them sharp. He runs a tight ship.”

“I know it’s a drill!” she said. “I just wish I understood the calls.”

I pulled back on the yoke, yawed ninety degrees to starboard as we leveled off into a smooth hover. One of the bird men screeched then, a noise so fearsome it penetrated even the hull of our flier. “Ai! Ai! Ai!”

“That one means they’ve sighted the enemy,” I said, watching the Irchtani fall past us. One slammed fully into another, and for a moment they were falling, tumbling over one another in midair. An instant later they broke apart, each going his respective way.

“Do you understand them?” Cassandra asked.

“Not well,” I said. “But I know that one well enough.”

“I wish I could fly,” she said.

“We’re flying now.”

“I mean really fly,” she said.

Taking the yoke in both hands, I drove us forward, scudding across the upper airs out away from the mountain, over the rim of the desert. Far below the camp was a cluster of white buildings, like pebbles in the limitless sand. “The smaller you build a repulsor, the weaker the thrust. You can build them small enough to float a pallet, but you can’t make a suit fly. Not unless they find a way to boost the power.”

“But you can jump with them, can’t you?”

She was thinking of the harnesses stowed in the emergency compartment by the hatch. “You can fall. I used them to drop from orbit a time or two during the war.”

“From orbit?” she asked, leaning down from the turret. “What was that like?”

“There was never time to think about it,” I said. “We just went. We just did it.” I so rarely spoke to her of the war. On Jadd, it had seemed part of another world—which in a sense it was—and I had wanted to keep it that way, to keep my daughter in peace and safety. “We dropped into Ganelon—your mother and I. And the Dragonslayers, the ones who brought me to Jadd. It was at Ganelon the Extrasolarians designed the Red Sleep.”

I could hear the wideness in her eyes. “The Lethovirus? You were at the lab that made it?”

“I burned the lab that made it,” I said. “Too late to save the galaxy.” I took us round in an arc that showed off the dig in all its splendor, the green arms of the Enar city rising from the sand, its ramparts beginning to emerge from the rock of the Mount of Whales. “I wonder how many of them lived here.”

“Tiber said it must be millions,” she said.

“It’s Tiber, is it?”

“We’ve been here almost two years, Abba,” she said. “I can’t hardly keep calling him Doctor Valeriev, can I?”

I let it go. “This must have been a lesser outpost,” I said. “Akterumu was vast. Miles across, Anaryan. Miles. You could scarcely see one side from the other.”

“It sounds beautiful,” she said, not knowing what Akterumu had meant for me.

A breath passed me by. Two. Three. “I guess it was,” I said, thinking of Gibson’s final lesson to me on Delos long ago. “Terrible, but beautiful, too.”

“Tiber says the Vaiartu lived in common, save their rulers. All crammed in those halls. Like crabs.” She paused, “Why do they look like crabs, Abba?”

I laughed. “You’ve touched on one of the great questions, girl. Do you know how many lifeforms there are in the galaxy that look like crabs?” She was silent. Ahead of us and on our left, the tether of one of the camp’s balloons swayed, red warning flags tied to its length. We were right above the camp then. “More or less everywhere there’s water, life finds a way to make itself crablike. Even on old Earth, life evolved crab shapes at least four or five different times. As we got out among the stars, we kept finding more of them, even in life not based on the same nucleic acids as you and me. The galaxy is full of imitation crabs! It was only a matter of time before one turned out smart enough to build an empire.”

“Why do you know this?”

“I’ve done a lot of reading,” I said. “When you’re my age, girl, you’ll find you’ve taken in a lot of stuff you’ve little use for.”

She laughed at me. “But why do you think it is?”

“There must be some utility to the shape.” I signaled the camp we were ready to land. “After all, the Cielcin look like us. Two arms, two legs. Perhaps there’s some template out there, one we’re all just . . . reflecting.” I broke off a moment to listen to the garbled transmission from below.

“Aftern—Spotter N3. This— . . . —s Ground Con . . . trol. You—clear to lan . . . and on Pa—ix . . . ver.”

“Repeat that, Ground Control,” I said. “Pad Six? Over.”

“Six . . . ver.”

“Understood, Control,” I said, and glancing back over my shoulder, said, “I will not miss the comms on this planet when we’re done here.”

“Can’t they do anything about it?”

I adjusted the altitude controls. The spotters were lifted entirely by repulsors, and so did not generate lift by the actions of rocket or wing. It did not bank or slide through the air like a skiff or one of our Irchtani, but translated itself, moving in jagged lines like a ship in vacuum. Lowering us in a straight line was simply a matter of gradually diminishing power to vertical thrust. As I did so, sliding the yoke back toward me, the whine of the repulsor’s counter-gravity steadily diminished, and the sands grew ever nearer.

“Not likely,” I said. “Not unless they want to outfit every spotter and every suit with a quantum telegraph.”

“Why don’t they?” Cassandra asked.

“Too expensive and too heavy,” I said. “We’ve got a telegraph on the Ascalon if we need to call out. And Gaston has one in the command pod. I suspect Vedi has one on the Rhea as well.”

“Do you really think there’s some . . . plan?” she asked. “For life? For evolution, like you said?”

I thought about that for a long moment, watching the sand begin to rise, kicked up by the action of our repulsors. “I wish I knew,” I said. “But if you ask your friend, Edouard, he’d say we were made in the image of his god.”

“The Cielcin, too?”

“I don’t know what he’d say to that.”

“But Abba,” Cassandra asked, unbuckling herself as the spotter made land. “If there are so many crabs in the universe, wouldn’t that suggest Edouard’s god is a crab?”

I snorted, and Cassandra laughed along with me.

“Maybe,” I said, powering the spotter down. “Or maybe Edouard’s god is not the only thing out there shaping life in its image.”

I unfastened my own crash webbing and made for the hatch. Cassandra was smiling at me, one eyebrow raised in a fashion so like her mother it smote my heart. “What?” I asked, stopping suddenly.

“You called him Edouard,” she said.

“I did not.”

“You did!” she grinned. “Not A2. He’s growing on you!”

“Let’s get back to the ship,” I said, opening the hatch. “Neema will be looking for us.”

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Life at Phanamhara continued in this vein for all our second year. I would pore every waking hour into study with Valeriev, with Rassam and Carter, or alone, poring over the carvings in the pantheon—or else studying the hand itself, each bone having been revealed to be a stable crystal of tetraquark hadrons, making each carpal and metacarpal and phalange its own single, massive atom. From a certain point on the floor of the pantheon—with Valeriev’s crew working up the slanting shaft at my back—I could look up and see the polychrome bas relief of the winged cluster placing its coronet upon the head of Sunamasra-Teäplu. Vaiartu entering the pantheon via the now caved-in ramp would have seen their god resplendent there, peering down with countless eyes hid among its feathers.

Often I would remain in the pantheon late into the night, with only Edouard or Cassandra for company. I copied out the inscription on the slab again and again, sitting with my folio on my lap upon the edge of the first gallery, so that I might see it entire.

On Annica, the Quiet had revealed the nature of the markings to me. They were not letters, but the visible part of some incomprehensible machine—the slots of invisible gears. But knowing that, I still could not understand them.

When I could bear the damp and oppressive weight of the stone sky of the pantheon and the cramped tunnels leading to it no longer, I would go out into the desert, walk among the ribs of the Cetoscolides like the columns of some long-rotted sanctum, or fly deep into the desert to be alone.

Or nearly alone.

But Oberlin and his minions—Gaston and Vedi—would not let me be alone. Many are the times I would land my spotter on white sands, or upon the sanded ridge of an escarpment, only to spy another flier far off, or the winged shapes of our Irchtani.

I knew what I was doing, flying farther and farther from Phanamhara and the camp every time: I was testing the bounds of my cage, gnawing at the bars as a tiger might trapped in a box.

We had hit a dead end. Nothing beyond the ordinary had happened since the death of Alexander of Alba. A few of the diggers claimed to have heard voices in the tunnels, and now and again it was said equipment had been moved in the night.

From time to time, Cassandra would accompany me into the desert, or—at Vedi’s insistence—Edouard or the Chiliarch, Annaz, or one of his men. When Cassandra came with me, we would find a likely spot—eventually settling on a shallow cave in the leeward face of a cliff rising from the pale sands—and I would continue her training. She had little to learn, but much to polish, and though I was no Maeskolos—as she—I was Al Brutan still, and there remained strength enough in my limbs to challenge her. Annaz and I would talk of Udax, of Barda and the Irchtani I had known, and of Judecca.

It was on one of the occasions I flew with Cassandra that we saw the crash.

The sands must have buried it in the intervening months, and the chance action of the wind had exposed it again, for we had flown that way many times to reach the place we called the Cave of Fishes—for the fossils that lined its walls.

Cassandra saw it first. She sat as always in the spotter’s turret, her seat above mine in the blister of alumglass that rose from the crown of the spheroid craft.

“What is that?” She’d climbed down to lean over the back of my seat and point at a patch of black against the blinding white.

I’d seen it, too, and brought us lower until we were perhaps half a hundred yards above the surface. “It looks like a skiff,” I said, with a sudden sense of foreboding. I thought I knew who the wreck belonged to. Presently, I keyed the comms and said, “Phanamhara Ground Control, this is Spotter N . . . ” I checked the plate on the console, forgetting which of the aircraft we’d commandeered for the day’s adventure. “N7. We’ve found what looks like a skiff crash northwest of the camp. Bearing thirty-eight point two-two south, seventeen point nine-one-eight west. Do you copy?”

There was a pause.

“Copy that, N7. This— . . . —ound Control. Did you sss-say crash? Over.”

“It’s definitely a crash,” Cassandra said, leaning fully over the console where it arced before me.

A burst of static flooded the comm, and I cursed again. “Yes, a crash. Might be our missing one. I’m taking Cassandra down to check it out. Over.”

A pause.

“Belay that . . . N7.” Another hiss. “Commandant  . . . ston says hold. Over”

“Understood!” I said, beginning our descent with a grin up at Cassandra. “We’ll hold. Over.”

There was nothing to fear in the deep desert, save sun and storm, and so I set the spottercraft on the sands, and Cassandra opened the hatch, first lifting the hood of her colorless sagum and tucking the baffle across her face. She had taken to the native dress as I had not, having spent far more time out on the surface than I. I only raised my collar, and produced from a pocket of my Jaddian coat the antique smoked spectacles, red lensed and silver framed, that I had stolen from a man on Emesh the day I met the sailor called Crow. I had replaced the lenses several times, and once had the silver frames—they were titanium, in truth—melted down and reshaped when I’d crushed them in some fall or other, and since coming to Sabratha, Neema had fashioned blinders of black leather to fill in the sides to help with the desert glare.

They were not the same glasses.

I was not the same man.

We had a short walk to the crash site. The sand shifted as we went, our boots carving little divots. The wrecked flier lay almost completely immersed in sand, its hull a smooth, black arc cresting like the back of some mighty fish. There was black in the white of the sand about it, the remains of some chemical fire.

“What happened to it?”

“Looks like a blown fuel-cell reservoir,” I said, eying the gaping hole in the side of the overturned flier. “See the hole there? That’s about where the tank used to be.”

Crack.

Something had broken under my feet, and I stopped, wary of some trap, hand flitting to the thumb-catch that would have engaged my belt’s shield pack.

But nothing happened.

Crouching, I examined the ground at my feet, found what it was I’d stepped on. “Cassandra, look!” I lifted what I’d found for her to see. “Do you know what this is?”

She looked at me quizzically, holding the baffle to her face as the wind gusted. “A rock?”

“Most amusing!” I shook my head. “It’s glass, girl.” I turned the fragment for her to see. I’d never found one myself, but I had seen a whole case of them in the museum-house of Kharn Sagara. The thing in my fingers was a hollow tube of glass, mottled and faintly green. “Catch!” I tossed it to her, and she cupped her hands to receive it. “It’s what happens when lightning strikes sand. See how it’s hollow?”

She turned the thing over in her fingers, head bowed. “Do you think lightning struck the flier?”

“It’s possible,” I said, though privately I thought if that were so, it was strange to find the fulgurite so near the crash—surely it would have been struck in the air, far off. “I only hope our two fugitives died quickly.”

“Our two . . . ?” Realization dawned across Cassandra’s face. “Robyne Kel and the legionnaire? But they’ve been gone for months!”

“Evidently they did not make it very far,” I said, regaining my feet and moving toward the crashed flier.

Crack.

I’d hardly made it three paces before my heel found what could only be another fulgurite. I shook my foot clear of glass and continued my advance.

Crack.

Crack.

With every step, our feet seemed to be finding fulgurite.

“—lowe, this is Pha—ound Contol. Standb— . . . —inforcements inbound, over.”

I set a finger to the patch behind my ear. “Read you loud and clear, Control,” I said, crouching before the gaping hole. “We’re standing by, over.”

“Do you enjoy lying, Abba?” Cassandra asked, joining me.

“Only to our gaolers,” I said, and pointing at the blackened, twisted metal within, forged on. “It looks like the fuel cell. You may be right about the lightning. Dumb bastards must have flown right into a storm. There should be a hatch just over—”

“Here!” Cassandra kicked a fall of sand with one heel, clutched the rim of the opening she revealed as sand ran down and into the wreck. “I think I can get in.”

“Best not,” I said. I had planned on trying to find a way in myself, but something in seeing my daughter and all that rushing sand forced me to reevaluate. “We don’t want you getting caught.”

She narrowed her emerald eyes. “Are you scared, Abba?”

“For your safety? Always,” I replied.

“There’s a rope in the spotter,” she countered. “I could just climb in and look. You could pull me out if too much sand gets in.”

I looked back to the spotter, a silvered sphere balanced on three peds, considering. “It’s not the sand that concerns me. I don’t want the hull caving in.”

In answer, Cassandra scrambled atop the upturned ventral hull, stomped on it hard as she could, then jumped up and down. Her Jaddian eugenics and Sabratha’s lower gravity collaborated, and she leapt nearly ten feet into the air before coming down with a clang. When nothing happened, she spread her hands, as if to say See?

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I kept the rope wound about my right arm. Cassandra’s feet had just vanished under the lip of the open hatch. Bracing one foot against the curve of the hull, I said, “They must have survived the crash. Someone had to open the hatch.”

Cassandra was quiet.

“Did you find anything?”

A hand emerged from the skiff’s interior, followed by the rest of the girl. Her eyes were shining, and she shook her head. “They’re still here,” she said, and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “Curled up together. In the back.” She jerked her head in the direction of the stern. “I think she died in the crash—she looked pretty bad. He must have cut her out of the chair and just . . . stayed.” A sob escaped her, and I crossed the space between us to take her in my arms.

“I should have been the one to go in,” I said.

“No!” She shook her head to clear it. “No, I—I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

“He was probably in no fit state himself,” I said, withdrawing to arm’s length, my hands on her shoulders. “I hope for his sake he didn’t last long.” Too clearly I could picture the legionnaire, huddled beside the body of his lover, clutching his pocket terminal. Had he tried to radio for help? Had Sabratha’s cruel magnetosphere left him to his solitary fate? Or had he refused to call and face justice for his theft and desertion?

A burst of static filled my ears. “Muz . . . anam?”

Pressing the comms patch behind my ear, I said, “Say again, Control?”

A moment later, a piercing cry filled the air, long and ululating, followed by a shorter one, and looking up I saw the black-feathered shapes of three Irchtani descending like carrion eaters upon us. I recognized Annaz himself among them, and raised a hand in greeting.

Static hissed through the conduction patch again. More gibberish.

“We found our deserters!” I said, conscious of Cassandra’s distress, and realizing as I spoke that she had never come so close to death before, save for Doctor Mann. But the poor planetologist had been long dead and cold, his bodies cleaned and cared for, and twisted by the thing that had killed him until the strangeness of his death half-covered the fact of it.

This was something else, more raw, more real.

When she had been perhaps half her age, one of her friends—an older neophyte called Sofia—had thrown herself into the Grand Canal above Volcano House and so destroyed herself. Cassandra and Sofia had been close, had slept together often in their dormitory, and whispered late into the night. But there had been no body.

Annaz alighted in a billowing of dark wings. “Truly, Bashandani punishes those who betray his justice.”

“The Emperor did not do this,” I said, not sure the Irchtani could get inside the grounded craft, with their limbs so unused to bending. “Are more coming?”

“Camp control sends two fliers. Cutters come.” He cocked his beaked head. “They are dead, then?”

“They are dead,” I said. “You’re welcome to take a look, it’s safe enough.” Another burst of static filled the bones of my skull. “Damn thing!” I fixed my collar against the wind, squinted up the rippling slope of the dune that loomed over the crash. “Watch your step, kithuun,” I said, marking the Irchtani’s bare, clawed feet. “There’s lightning glass in the sand, all over.” I gestured at the ground.

“You think a storm did for them?” the bird man inquired.

“Very possibly,” I said, and bending, fished out a piece of fulgurite to show the colonus. What I drew out was a piece nearly three cubits long, mottled and gnarled as a tree limb afflicted by mistletoe. It curved slightly, bending to the right. Laying it down, I moved to the other end, acting on a sudden hunch, and found another piece of fused sand. This was shorter than the last, but continued the rightward bend.

Annaz hopped to stand at my side, croaked. “What is it?”

I dropped the second piece then, and stood, following where I guessed the bend in the glass must follow. “It’s a circle,” I said, and taking two steps to my right—nearer the wreckage, I found another fulgurite with my heel.

Crack.

Lifting the ruined fragment, I found that same rightward bend. The arc of this, second fulgurite would have crossed the first, their circles not concentric, but overlapping. My mind ran to the burn marks in the hall of record, the ripple pattern where the Watcher’s energistic form had left its fingerprints upon our mortal plane.

“Cassandra!”

The girl had wandered back atop the ruined skiff, was shielding her eyes from the sun with both hands and staring away south. She turned at the sound of her name. “The bodies! Were they disturbed at all?”

She leaped down, landed awkwardly on the sand. “Disturbed?”

“Like Doctor Mann’s!” I said.

Cassandra shook her head. “Not that I could see.”

Another burst of static flooded the comms, more nonsense. “ . . . light . . . bearing thirty-eight point . . . ” It was my own voice, signal echoing back off the planet’s ionosphere. Then more static, followed by a hollow warbling that sounded as if it came from deep underwater.

What was it the men liked to say? The air was full of ghosts.

“We need to call this in,” I said to Annaz, to Cassandra—who had reached us.

“Cutters come already, bashanda,” the Irchtani said.

“Not just the cutters,” I said. “Cassandra and I will head back to camp. I need to telegraph the Troglita. Oberlin should know.”

Cassandra’s eyes widened. “Oberlin? But why?”

“The glass,” I said, still holding a foot-long fragment. “It makes circles around the wreck. Do you see?”

“Circles?” Cassandra was a second catching up.

“The Watcher did this,” I said.

“The Watcher?” Cassandra looked round at the sand. Here and there the glassy, brown ridge of a fulgurite crested. Broken and jagged, yes—and branching in places, forking.

Circles.

A shadow passed between the earth and sun, or perhaps fell only on me, and looking up the slope of the dune, I saw a dark figure standing, black against the lowering sun.

Unthinking, I let out a cry and hurried up the slope. The figure stood there, cloaked and veiled in tremulous black. Cassandra called after me, but I did not look back.

The figure stood like a statue shrouded against time, covered head to toe in a veil without gauze or eye slit. Yet as I approached, it turned away, and I fancied that I saw the shimmer of a white foot emerge from the hem as it took a step.

“Wait!” I cried, thumbing my shield-catch.

“Zae namen!” the figure cried out, unmoving. “Muzu anaam?”

“Wait!” I shouted once more.

The figure turned and began to vanish down the far side of the dune.

“Bashanda!” The sound of Annaz’s voice was joined by that of his wings, and I looked back to see the chiliarch lift himself from beside the blasted ruin of the flier.

When I turned back, the figure was gone.

There was no trace of a footprint upon the crest of the dune, nor any sign of a descent. Upon the dune top, the margins of Sabratha shimmered white and almost blue, a mirage-echo of the seas that once had dominated that world. For an instant, a fata morgana glowed above the horizon in the afternoon sun, a black lozenge like an airship rising into the heavens.

A mirage.

“Come back!” I called. “Come back, damn you!”

“Abba!” Cassandra had reached me, and seized my wrist, as if I were her child.

“There was someone here,” I said, pointing at the ground beneath our feet. “Right here. Did you see her?”

“Her?” Cassandra cocked her head.

I paused, unsure why I thought it was a woman. And yet I felt certain that I was right. “I was so sure . . . ” I shook my head, as though I might clear it of some haze. The sweat was getting into my eyes, more from the sun and my exertions than from the temperature—it was never very hot at that latitude.

“Was it mirage?” the Irchtani leader inquired, landing not three paces from us both.

“No!” I almost shouted. “I don’t know! Maybe.”

But in my heart, I was certain that I had seen the beast we’d come to Sabratha to find.

I was certain I had just seen the Watcher.


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