He heard a truck draw up outside the window, where it was not supposed to. He sat still, suddenly thinking; a massive bomb, just out there… and was suddenly terrified. He heard a sergeant barking, some talk, and then the truck moved a little way off, though he could still hear its engine.

After a while, he heard raised voices in the hall stair-well. There was something about the tone of the voices that chilled him. He tried to tell himself he was being foolish, and turned all the lights back on, but he could still hear them. Then there was something like a scream, cut-off abruptly. He shook. He unholstered his pistol, wishing he had something more lethal than this slim little dress-uniform gun. He went to the door. The voices sounded odd; some were raised, while some people were apparently trying to keep theirs quiet. He opened the door a crack, then went through; his ADC was at the far door, onto the stairs, looking down.

He put the pistol back in his holster. He walked out to join the ADC, and followed his gaze, down into the hall. He saw Livueta, staring wide-eyed back up at him; there were a few other soldiers, one of the other commanders. They stood round a small white chair. He frowned; Livueta looked upset.He went quickly down the steps; Livueta suddenly came bounding up to meet him, skirt hem flying. She pushed into him, both hands against his chest. He staggered back, amazed.

"No," she said. Her eyes were bright and staring; her face looked more pale than he'd ever seen before. "Go back," she said. Her voice sounded thick, like it was not her own.

"Livueta…" he said, annoyed, and pushed himself away from the wall, trying to glance round her at whatever was happening in the hall round the little white chair.

She pushed him again. "Go back," the thick, strange voice said.

He took her wrists in his hands, " Livueta," he said, voice low, eyes flicking to indicate the people standing beneath in the hall.

"Go back," the strange, terrifying voice said.

He pushed her away, annoyed at her, tried to go past her. She attempted to grab him from behind. "Back!" she gasped.

"Livueta, stop this!" he shook her off, embarrassed now. He clattered quickly down the steps before she could grab him again.

Still she threw herself down after him, clutched at his waist. "Go back!" she wailed.

He turned round. "Get off me! I want to see what's going on!" He was stronger than her; he tore her arms free, threw her down on the stairs. He went down, walked across the flagstones to where the silent group of men stood round the little white chair.

It was very small; it looked so delicate that an adult might have broken it. It was small and white, and as he took a couple of more paces forwards, as the rest of the people and the hall and the castle and the world and the universe disappeared into the darkness and the silence and he came closer and slowly closer to the chair, he saw that it had been made out of the bones of Darckense Zakalwe.

Femora formed the back legs, tibiae and some other bones the front. Arm bones made the seat frame; the ribs were the back. Beneath them was the pelvis; the pelvis that had been shattered years earlier, in the stone boat, its bone fragments rejoined; the darker material the surgeons had used quite visible too. Above the ribs, there was the collar bone, also broken and healed, memoir of a riding accident.

They had tanned her skin and made a little cushion out of it; a tiny plain button in her navel, and at one corner, just the hint, the start of some dark but slightly red-tinged hair.

There were stairs, and Livueta, and the ADC, and the ADC's office, between there and here, he found himself thinking, as he stood at his desk again.

He tasted blood in his mouth, looked down at his right hand. He seemed to recall having punched Livueta on his way up the stairs. What a terrible thing to do to one's own sister.

He looked about, distracted, for a moment. Everything looked blurred.

Intending to rub his eyes, he raised one hand and found the pistol in it.

He put it to his right temple.

This was, of course, he realised, exactly what Elethiomel wanted him to do, but then, what chance did one have against such a monster? There was only so much a man could take, after all.

He smiled at the doors (somebody was thumping on them, calling out a word that might have been his name; he couldn't remember now). So silly. Doing the Right Thing; the Only Way Out. The Honourable Exit. What a load of nonsense. Just despair, just the last laugh to have, opening a mouth through the bone to confront the world direct; here.

But such consummate skill, such ability, such adaptability, such numbing ruthlessness, such a use of weapons when anything could become weapon…

His hand was shaking. He could see the doors starting to give way; somebody must be hitting them very hard. He supposed he must have locked them; there was nobody else in the room. He ought to have chosen a bigger gun, he realised; this one might not be big enough to do the job.

His mouth was very dry.

He pressed the gun hard against his temple and pulled the trigger.

The besieged forces round the Staberinde broke out within the hour, while the surgeons were still fighting for his life. It was a good battle, and they nearly won.

Fourteen

"Zakalwe…"

"No."

Still the same refusal. They stood in a park, at the edge of a large, neatly mown lawn, under some tall, pollarded trees. The warm breeze carried the ocean scent and a hint of flowers, whispering through the copse. The clearing morning mist still veiled two suns. Sma shook her head in exasperation, and walked off a little way.

He leant against a tree, clutching at his chest, breathing with difficulty. Skaffen-Amtiskaw hovered nearby, keeping a watch on the man, but playing with an insect on the trunk of another tree.

Skaffen-Amtiskaw thought the man was mad; certainly he was weird. He had never really explained why he'd gone wandering through the mayhem of the citadel-storming. When Sma and the drone had finally found him and picked him up, bullet-riddled, half-dead and raving from the top of the curtain wall, he had insisted they stabilise his condition; no more. He did not want to be made well. He would not listen to sense, and still the Xenophobe — when it had picked them all up — had refused to pronounce the man insane and incapable of making up his own mind, and so had dutifully put him into a low-metabolism sleep for the fifteen day journey to the planet where the women called Livueta Zakalwe now lived.

He'd come out of his slow-sleep as ill as he'd gone into it. The man was a walking mess and there were still two bullets inside him, but he refused to accept any treatment until he'd seen this woman. Bizarre, Skaffen-Amtiskaw thought, using an extended field to block the path of a small insect as it felt and picked its way up the trunk of the tree. The insect changed direction, feelers waving. There was another type of insect further up the trunk, and Skaffen-Amtiskaw was trying to get them to meet, to see what would happen.

Bizarre, and even — indeed — perverse.

"Okay." He coughed (one lung, the drone knew, filling up with blood). "Let's go." He pushed himself away from the tree. Skaffen-Amtiskaw abandoned its game with the two insects regretfully. The drone felt odd, being here; the planet was known about but had not yet been fully investigated by Contact. It had been discovered through research rather than physical exploration, and — while there was nothing obviously outlandish about the place, and a very rudimentary survey had been carried out — technically it was still terra incognita, and Skaffen-Amtiskaw was on a relatively high state of alert, just in case the place held any nasty surprises.