"I'm not great," I replied. "I've been having some twisted nightmares ever since I arrived in this system, and some of them even while I'm awake."

She gazed at me for a long moment, her expression giving away nothing, then said, "But you did not experience them on Brumal?"

I thought about it. A lot had happened to me on Brumal, but nothing like that. It struck me now that it had been my only normal time here in this system. "No, not on Brumal."

"I told you it was an oasis of sanity," she said. "That's where I finally found mine—and the change I've since undergone has helped me hold onto it," she frowned, "though sometimes my anger at Sudoria returns, and I wish I could raise the rest of the Brumallian ships to attack whatever will remain when Fleet and Combine have finished with each other." She paused speculatively. "I think the Consensus blocks the cause of those nightmares. Shared sanity?" She shrugged. "I don't know."

I absorbed that information then revealed, "Sometimes there's a dark figure. It tried to be my father, but that facade did not last. I feel it's trying to say something to me, but just doesn't know how."

"So the Shadowman is not the Sudorian conscience," she stated obscurely.

"That went right over my head, Rhodane."

The ship juddered violently. She tilted her head for a moment, then gestured towards the corridor beyond the door and led the way out.

"What would you say is the average incidence of mental illness among any normal human population?" she asked.

"Define 'normal human'."

She gave me an annoyed look. "On Sudoria, three out of four people end up having treatment for some kind of mental illness. Most Sudorians are meanwhile on some kind of drugs regimen to control one mental malady or another. There are more asylums on Sudoria now than there are schools."

This was complete news to me, yet something Geronamid and Tigger had to know about. So why hadn't I been told? Probably because by knowing I would not necessarily respond as Geronamid required me to.

Rhodane went on, "The Shadowman is a common hallucination of some of those conditions. Since Uskaron's book came along our rate of mental illness has been attributed to societal guilt, and the Shadowman is considered the manifestation of the Sudorian conscience. But quite evidently you're not guilty of involvement in a genocidal war, nor are you even Sudorian, so why then are you seeing him?"

We reached the ladder leading up out of the spin section, and Rhodane climbed it ahead of me. I felt a resurgence of nausea as soon as we reached the nil-gee part of the ship. As we propelled ourselves along one of the intestinal corridors corkscrewing into the bowels of the vessel, I asked her, "What was the explanation for the Shadowman, before Uskaron's book appeared?"

She glanced back at me. "There were so many of them. To some he was the manifestation of the War dead, to others he was some dark angel who had somehow brought about the War. The explanations given by the Churches varied from complete denial of his existence to the claim that he was evil incarnate and only when all Sudorians bow to their doctrine will he be driven away."

"Do you see the Shadowman, Rhodane?"

"Only in paintings."

"Do your three siblings see him?"

"No more than I do."

"Perhaps he is not required by you?" I suggested.

Her reply was a blank look, no more.

The corridor opened out into an oblate chamber in which the Combine shuttle rested like an ingot inside something's gut. The vessel's airlock was open and Yishna floated beside it gripping one rung of the steps curving round the shuttle's outer skin. She was clad in an insulated suit similar to Rhodane's, gloved and hooded but with no mask across her face. On seeing us, she pushed herself free, drifted over to the chamber wall, then propelled herself from there towards us. She was smiling at first, but the moment she caught hold of a nearby organic protuberance to halt herself, the smile faded and her eyes dulled as their nictitating membranes closed.

"Rhodane," she studied her sister, "like Harald you have mutilated yourself." Her face had suddenly turned ugly with anger.

"Perhaps I am merely expressing my inner self, Yishna."

"You make no sense," Yishna snapped. "Am I to believe the supposed reason for your presence here when you deliberately make no sense?"

Why was she so angry? She had already seen Rhodane on the display when we arranged for her to come here, and she had been smiling at us but a moment ago. Now she turned towards me.

"Consul Assessor," she said tightly, "you have been unwell?"

I could see the shape of things now, but there were still some details I needed to slot into place. I said to her, "The Shadowman doesn't need to reveal himself to you, Yishna."

With her gloved hands Yishna fumbled a control baton from her belt. The nictitating membranes had lifted from her eyes, and now they glistened with tears. My shoulder slammed into her chest, flinging those tears free to glitter alone. As we tumbled through the air I managed to wrest the baton away from her.

I think she let me take it.

Orduval

With a hand pressed against the comlink in his ear, Reyshank skidded the car to a halt, raising a cloud of dust. "Damn, madmen," he growled. Leaning over and searching through the pack at Trausheim's feet, he pulled out a coms helmet, stepped out of the car and walked a little distance away while fitting it on. Following the others from the car, Orduval gazed up and took a shaky breath of the cool night air.

Scarves of glowing gas spread across the firmament and bright explosions lit high up in orbit. Shooting stars cut across almost perpetually, and occasionally something would take longer to burn up in atmosphere as it descended, echoing distant sonic booms through the darkness and leaving a glowing trail. It was a stunning and awesome sight, but Orduval found difficulty connecting it with suffering and death, and he felt ashamed.

They were parked next to an abandoned desert farm, around which an underground network of water pipes supported a small oasis. Reyshank muttered and exclaimed in the background, while Trausheim and the two other wardens took their packs from the car and began delving after flasks of cold tea or bars of biltong and dried fruit. Finally the Chief removed the coms helmet and returned to them, looking pale and ill. He gazed around at his men, focused on Orduval for a moment, then addressed them all.

"We nearly lost the capital," he said. "In fact we have effectively lost the city centre and an entire outlying district."

"My apartment is in Gaskell Street," said one of the men, almost in a whisper. That street was somewhere in the mid-city, Orduval recollected, though he wasn't exactly sure where. "What happened?" the shocked man finished.

"They're not sure who did it yet," said Reyshank, "but someone tried to detonate a nuclear warhead from a wartime defensive missile. Luckily, being over twenty years old, it didn't go fissile, but the chemical explosive brought down the administration tower and has spread radioactives all across the city. The estimate is of a thousand dead, though we probably won't know the real cost for some time yet."

"What happened to Parliament?" asked Orduval.

Reyshank held up a hand to silence him, then continued to address the warden whose home was in the stricken capital. "You've a wife and children back there, haven't you?" The man nodded tightly. "Take the car," said Reyshank, "but stay out of the other cities. It's getting bad." The warden hesitated and seemed about to say something else, but Reyshank just gestured sharply towards the vehicle. After a moment the man nodded then hurried over and climbed in. When the car had disappeared in its own cloud of dust, Reyshank turned back to Orduval. "Fifteen parliamentary members were killed, the rest have been evacuated. Just as most of the population there who are still listening to instructions are being evacuated."