"Can you see these things?" Naamen asked.

"I can," Shen answered.

"Well, good that you have eyes to imagine it, for it did not last."

Naamen explained that Elenet, the first man, was born into this. For a time he shared in the rejoicing, but soon he learned enough of the Giver's tongue that he became vain. He tried to make his own creations, but because he was not the Giver, nothing he tried came out right. It was always twisted. Wanting to make warmth, he made the sun burn too strongly. Fleeing, he sang to cool himself and froze portions of the world in ice. To warm himself, he made fire, not noticing until later that fire consumes all it touches. To put out the fire, he lifted water from the rivers and created storms. To quell the storms, he blew the sky clean and found he had created deserts.

"You see?" Naamen asked. "Everything he did created chaos; nothing he intended came into being as he intended. Wanting to make himself immortal he opened the door to disease. He created death the moment he thought to fear it and to escape it."

"Nobody had died before that?" Shen asked.

"No," Naamen said, "this is the time of the first generation of everything. There was first nothing, and then there was life. It might always have been so, if Elenet had not acted so wrongly."

But he had acted wrongly, and the Giver lost faith in his creatures. He turned away and abandoned his creations, fearing that any of them might be the next to betray him. In no time at all the world changed. The goodness that was the Giver went with him, and the world was left a different place. Creatures who had been friends began to squabble. Strong ones took to bullying weak ones. And it was not long before some creatures began to feast on the flesh of others. Eagles pressed their talons into the mice that had been their friends. Snakes used their stealth to hunt. Lions ate anything they wished. Fearing that they would all vanish, the hunted creatures learned how to mate and make children, but then the hunters learned these things, too. Painful and dangerous as it was, they had their own young, whom they taught to hunt as well.

Elenet fled from this chaos, though nobody knows to where. In his absence the lions announced that they were supreme of the creatures of the land. The laryx, hearing this, cackled with laughter, for they disdained the lions and thought themselves supreme. That is why lions and laryx still shout at one another today. The lions roar their supremacy; the laryx shout back in hysterics at the lions' foolishness.

"Their blood feud goes on," Naamen said, "and perhaps always will. At least until the Giver returns and sets the world right again."

The storyteller bowed his head, indicating that his tale was concluded. Shen had lain with her head in the crook of her arm. For a moment Kelis suspected she had fallen asleep, but then she said, "I thought the Santoth made the laryx with the touch of their eyes-when they were angry, I mean, because of being banished."

"That is sometimes said," Kelis admitted.

"But Naamen said laryx were there in the first days."

Naamen said, "Sometimes two things are said that don't agree. Which is true? Or are both true? I cannot say. I just speak what was spoken to me."

The girl yawned. "I will have to ask the stones. They will tell me the truth."

Shen said this with childish matter-of-factness, with no hint that any might find the notion fantastic or unlikely or frightening. It returned Kelis to the whirl of his worried thoughts. This was no normal hunting trip or ramble or night camped under the stars to tell old tales. For the second time in his life he was going in search of the banished sorcerers, the God Talkers, the Santoth-the ones Shen referred to as the stones. They were beings he had seen only once, on one furious, horrible afternoon. It was a glorious event in that it marked Hanish Mein's military defeat, but it was wrapped in the emotion of Aliver's death and remembered in scenes so terrible he prayed he would never see their like again.

Even so, he was trying now to find these same sorcerers. Nobody could say why, save that a girl swore it had to be done. He was taking that child, a woman, and a youth with him; and he was doing so covertly, so that the queen he was sworn to serve would not know of the existence of a niece, one who might challenge her own child for the throne.

Benabe's voice interrupted his thoughts. "What do they want with my girl? Can you tell me?" She lay alongside her now-sleeping daughter, propped on an elbow and gazing at Kelis. Her face was lit more by the stars than by the weak glow of the dying fire. Seen thus, in highlight and shadow, she could have been either very old or very young. Either way, she had a beauty that artists would want to capture in stone.

"Me? Cousin, I don't have that wisdom."

Benabe exhaled and looked out at the dark expanse of the plains around them. The lion had stopped its roaring, but in its place a thousand tiny creatures chirped and whirred and rustled and yapped.

"Shen hasn't trembled since we left Bocoum," Benabe said. "Usually, she falls every couple of weeks. I have always hated those moments. It can strike her anywhere, anytime. One moment she is walking; the next she is flailing on the ground, eyes back in her head and mouth sucking, sucking the air. It happens more when she is agitated."

"She doesn't seem agitated," Naamen said.

"No, she doesn't," Benabe said, sounding almost bitter, almost resigned. "We're walking across a continent into a desert to meet sorcerers who should have died two hundred years ago and she's never seemed happier, never healthier. It's like when she wakes up from trembling. Her face goes so calm, peaceful. She smiles and is… happy. Me, each time my heart is pounding. Each time I think the fit has destroyed her, but each time it fills her with more joy than I ever have. I should love them for that, but sometimes I hate them instead." She brought her gaze to study Kelis, then Naamen, and then Kelis again. "I don't know if I am doing right to let her go. Kelis, you've seen them. Tell me that they are good."

In answer, he adjusted his cloak, snugging it tighter around his torso. He forced a yawn and held it long, and then adjusted his position as if on the verge of sleeping. "There is nothing to fear," he said, hoping the lie would be enough to end the conversation.

The next afternoon Kelis noticed something strange on the southern horizon. He said nothing about it, not that day or the next. But on the third day Naamen tried to make eye contact with him as they walked. He shot concerned glances that Kelis did not return. Kelis was glad that his companion did not voice his thoughts, for he still hoped he might awake the next morning and find the shapes had been but clouds, mirages, tricks the heated vapors played.

But in the clear air of the fourth morning he could no longer avoid the truth. Near, now, so suddenly near-as if they had crept on their toes forward during the night-stood a horizon-wide wall of mountain peaks. Foothills fronted slanting slabs of granite, behind which dark slopes ramped toward the sky, fading into the haze so that one could only guess their true heights. Rank upon rank of them, shouldering their way around the curve of the world. They were a range like nothing he had seen in the Known World, and they most certainly had not been here the last time he ventured into the far south.

Benabe asked, "I see those, and you see those. We each see those, right? So I ask, why are there mountains before us? Nobody said anything about climbing mountains."

"I do not know these mountains," was all Kelis could say in answer.

"What do you mean?" Benabe asked. "You have been this way before-"

"I have, but the mountains were not there before."