Now that fatherly role was destroyed. It seemed so dim and distant a possibility that Rialus gave himself over to grief. He did not know what was to happen to him, but he knew nothing would ever be the same. He cried, sobbed. He writhed on the floor in physical and emotional anguish, spitting out the blood that pooled in his mouth.

He was in just such throes of self-pity when Calrach found him. The Numrek crouched beneath the low door frame and entered the room. His bulk immediately made the space seem tiny, uncomfortably cramped. He stood a moment, taking Rialus in, and then asked, "What's wrong with you?"

Rialus focused on him and, despite his misery, tried to find a way to answer the question. Nothing he could come up with seemed the right thing to say to the Numrek. Calrach righted a stool that Rialus had overturned and lowered himself onto it. He swept back his black hair with both hands, squeezed it into a tail, and wrapped a leather band around it.

After tying it, he set his big-knuckled hands on his knees and said, "You have a decision to make. In store for you, if you displease the Auldek"-the Numrek rolled back his eyes as he considered the possibilities-"oh, a poker shoved up your ass; that's likely. Also, I've seen times when they bend your shoulder back. Bend it hard, hard like, so you feel the bone is going to jump out of the socket. That's pain. Then they pull a knife red-hot from the fire. A thin, thin, thin sliver of a blade. With it, they just touch your flesh. Tiny touch, no more weight behind it than a feather. But the blade is so red-hot sharp and your skin so taut that that feather touch splits the surface and you'll want to avoid that, too, I think."

"I did nothing."

"You are big stuff now," Calrach said. "Only Acacian they got."

"Dariel?"

"Dead, I suppose. Haven't found his body yet, though. Messy in there, you know. They think you're a leagueman, but no matter. They have questions for you. Just answer them. You'll betray nobody who hasn't already betrayed you. Mein, Akarans, the league: piss on them all. Play it right, Neptos, and you may outlive them."

Rialus stared at him, hating him and completely mystified by him. Piss on them all? Did this imbecile really think Rialus would betray everything in the Known World? Not that he even could, but… "What have you done?" His voice was just barely more than a whimper. "And why? Why? Why did you… The queen gave you privileges. You lived just as you wanted, servants and cooks and-"

Calrach raised a hand and made a chattering motion with his fingers. "Blah, Blah. Neptos, stop blathering. Those things don't matter! To you maybe, but to us? No. That's no way to live. Not for us. But you won't understand. Why waste words? Enjoy your last days, yeah? Enjoy them, and know that you died for a good cause: the Numrek cause!" He guffawed, crouched forward, and smacked Rialus on the shoulder with a surfeit of force.

Rialus pulled his knees to his chest and lay like an infant on his side. "Vile," he said. "Vile, vile, vile. I hate you."

"Shame. We liked you, Neptos. Remember when we used to make you run and throw spears at you? Oh, you were quick when you needed to be." Again Calrach could barely contain his mirth.

"Vile."

"You think so? Why, because we don't speak like you? Don't eat what you eat? You think you know us, but deceiving you was like telling tales to children. Simple. Boring. Easy. And it was misery; that's what it was, but you never knew us true. Some land? Some servants? Working for that bitch queen? You think we wanted that? Took pride in that? You-who know us better than most Acacians-should have known better. Those years in Acacia: exile, disgrace. You don't care about disgrace, do you? To a Numrek honor is all. That and belonging. We need to belong, understand? Belong." He drew this last word out, making sure Rialus acknowledged it before he would move past it. "We didn't over there in your lands, not without our totem and our people."

Rialus, noting what sounded like melancholy in Calrach's voice-an unfathomably strange emotion for him-looked up. He had thought Numrek faces capable of only a few crude expressions of anger. But he realized he had been wrong. Perhaps he had never looked closely enough, never wanted to settle his eyes on their craggy features for longer than he had to. Right now, though, staring at Calrach, he saw shades of melancholy and regret and shame and ambition all betrayed in the lines of his eyes and forehead and lips and jagged teeth.

"What are you talking about?"

"We could not live as exiles forever. They stripped us of our totem. They made us beasts instead of men and kicked us to the north in shame."

"Who did?" Rialus asked.

"The Auldek, you fool! They are chief among the clans. They-and the others-drove us from Ushen Brae. They called us filth and took our slaves and burned our totem." Calrach seemed at the verge of one of his cursing tirades, but he blew it out of the side of his mouth and kept on. "Did we tell you these things? No. Why should we? The Mein didn't care about the truth when they bought our blades. The Akarans hate the truth, so we gave them lies instead. We let them all think they buy us and order us around. What does it matter what they think?" Tilting his head, Calrach exhaled a long breath. "We have lived wrong for years. Now we wish to live right again."

"What terrible thing did you do to be driven from here in the first place?"

Calrach shot him a dangerous glance. "I'll get the torturer now."

He began to rise, but Rialus blurted, "No, no, don't! Ahh-" He had spoken too forcefully. The pain of it reverberated through him for a few closed-eyed seconds. When he opened his eyes again, Calrach sat watching him. "Don't leave," he said. "You came to tell me things. Please do so."

"I will," Calrach said, after a moment. "Hear these things. I won't tell you twice. In Ushen Brae, no Auldek or Numrek or any other clan-none of us-had given birth to a child in hundreds of years. Not a single birth. No children. You hear? That's right. I am not the youthful man I look. I don't remember my birth year anymore, but believe me, I have lived long, long."

"But, you do have children. I've seen-"

"Don't rush it! Now, I will keep this simple for you. The Lothan Aklun arrived here in their boats. They looked weak. They wanted to lay claim to our barrier isles. They were not warriors, but they were powerful with magic. They trapped us with that magic. They showed us tricks, made flames erupt in the sky, made the ground shake. They even killed with nothing more than whispered words. They said they would pay for the isles with a great gift. They would give us eternal life. You hear me, Rialus? They promised to make us immortal. And they did."

Rialus said, "But you are not immortal. I've seen Numrek die in battle. You fear death like any man."

"More than any man, perhaps. Don't interrupt what I am telling you. They create immortality by taking souls out of one body and putting them inside another. We could contain two, three,… ten lives within us. This they had the magic to do."

The image of the Auldek leader with an arrow in his chest, twisting and shaking like a thing possessed, popped into Rialus's head. "Devoth-"

"Yeah, you saw that, yeah? You thought Devoth dead from that arrow. Good shot, true, but only one of his souls died because of it. That's why he rose again and-" With the blade of his hand, Calrach imitated a sword slicing through his neck. "No, he has many souls within him. I used to as well. You could call it sorcery. Lothan Aklun sorcery. It's kept us alive all these years, but it came at a price. At the same time as they made us immortal they took away our fertility. We could live forever, but, we learned, we could no longer have children. Quite a trick-giving one kind of immortality, taking another at the same time. They did this to the slaves as well. None of them grow to birth their own young in Ushen Brae. None of them. This is a childless land. All these years we've been childless, except for the souls inside us and for the quota.