A torrent of spells whipped the dwarfish vanguard. The blackest bolts killed outright. Husks of skin and bone tumbled to the ground. Other strands, laced with blue radiance, were even more pernicious. They lashed the arms and legs of the slaves and attached themselves like the strings of a marionette. Dwarves and goblins turned, screaming resistance even as their limbs attacked their comrades.

A hundred slaves had fallen in those first moments. Nine hundred more remained. Each taskmaster would have to kill ten even to survive.

"Attack!" shouted Phage, hand held high.

They did. Taskmasters with whips and swords laid into slaves. Slaves with mauls and spikes fought back.

Braids ran atop them all, belching beasts into the fray.

Phage meanwhile strode in the midst of the fight. No one wished to attack her, whether because of her brutal reputation or because she was in some ways the great ruler they all revered. Slave and taskmaster both recoiled. They would rather ram into each other than confront their mistress. Phage walked, queerly calm in the midst of the horrors. Wherever she stepped, bodies rotted rapidly to nothing. Most had not been dead but only maimed, writhing until she touched them.

The crowd chanted something. Over the wild roar of the melee, it sounded merely like a great heartbeat-lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub. Phage lifted herself on tiptoes to listen. At last, the sound came clear:

"Death-touch. Death-touch. Death-touch…"

That's what she would do. Her taskmasters were only butchers. She was the one who brought quietus. These had been good workers, and they deserved a rapid death. The crowd deserved it too.

After all, the world was watching, and so was the First.

Phage began the dance of death. Her hands floated out in gentle, flashing flourishes. She grazed the neck of a goblin… A step, a leap, and she caressed the cheek of a bloodied dwarf… She pirouetted, brushing a gigantipithicus…

"DEATH-TOUCH! DEATH TOUCH! DEATH-TOUCH!"-a staccato accompaniment to staccato death.

Phage swept forward, trailing her hands along the flanks of folk who parted before her… On she danced, death untouched in the midst of battle.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: STRONG RIGHT ARM

Amid a forest of easels, Ixidor sat upon his broadest balcony. Its white sweep of stone jutted above a lake where dolphins sported and leviathans sang. The platform hung beneath a sky draped in giant jellyfish and teeming with flying fish.

This was his world, Topos. It had been born from his mind through his hand, borne on canvas into truth. This was his palace, Locus, huge in dimension and infinite in recursion. He should have been in ecstacy here, but instead he was fretted, rattled, panicked.

"I'm tired," he said to no one-in fact, six no ones.

They surrounded him, six shadows cast upright in the air. He had created these guardians in his own image. They remained always around him, only a leap away. Each unman was a living portal to somewhere in the palace. Should a threat arise, Ixidor need merely dive through one of the unmen as through a doorway. The other unmen would follow, and then the portal man would close forever. Ixidor could elude six separate assassination attempts before running out of unmen. He should have felt safe, but he felt fear instead.

Ixidor stared critically at the living portals. They kept him safe, yes, but their lurking silence was unnerving. They were like animate pits gaping around him always. Any moment, he might fall through one. His own creations terrified him.

"I'm tired."

A caravan had happened upon Topos. They had drunk its waters and hunted its game, thinking themselves saved from death by sun. They had been welcome until they approached the palace. They called out, promising a grand show. Ixidor had not responded, but aerial jellyfish had. They swarmed, their tentacles long and lethal. They had only been following their instinct: Defend Locus. It was an unfortunate encounter.

Afterward, Ixidor posted warnings in the sand: STAY Our OR DIE.

Yes, the needless deaths distressed Ixidor. He was done with death, dealing it and being dealt it. Sadly, it wasn't done with him. Someone would come looking for the caravan. It waited, intact but for the drivers. Ixidor had left more warnings, which would of course be ignored. Where words failed, jellyfish, griffons, and air sharks would not. It was inevitable: All kingdoms had border disputes.

Topos's borders separated fantasy from reality.

Was that the reason for this gnawing dread? Armies would come to Topos and try to take it… and die trying. Ixidor was confident his defenses would stand.

No, his discontent lay within the creation itself. Locus was as haunting as it was huge. Its grand vistas were so immense that peering into them was like peering into the Void. Infinite rooms held mute furniture and blind portraits and brooding tapestries, most of which would never be seen by their creator. The thought of all those dark corners in his home made him shiver.

Ixidor rose. He turned his back on the easels and strode into his palace. The unmen went with him-one before, one behind, and two to either side. He didn't know where he was going. It didn't matter.

All of Topos was fearsome. The lake was fed by a cascade that appeared in midair a mile above the ground. The waters emptied into a grotto that plunged, cavern by cavern, to hot magma a hundred miles below. Sand dunes formed spirals in space that turned one's feet ever inward. Forests reached roots down to become branches in underworld groves. Ixidor had populated these terrible places with terrible creatures: mayfly men who were born at dawn and died by dusk; plants that wept and pled not to be eaten; stones that thought great thoughts but had no mouths with which to speak them; dirt that ached with implacable desire.

He could have created anything. Why had he created terrors?

He reached a garden, one of hundreds. He had to walk across air to get there. The bridge that led to the garden was a transparent fold in time, impenetrable. It led to a hovering disk of stone that held hundreds of tons of topsoil. Fruit trees thrived above berms of flowers, and paths led among green shrubs and white statues. Ixidor shambled along one such route, his living shadows accompanying him. He approached a stone bench and sat.

Before him stood three statues-a girl kneeling to feed a bird; a berobed woman summoning magic from the grass; and an angel leaping with sudden power out of the jealous ground. They were three statues but one likeness: Each had the face of Nivea.

She was the reason for this haunted place. AH of Topos was meant for her, yet she would never see it. He had plumbed the depths of the world and set sentinels in the sky, looking for a creature who was in neither. He had made empty shells for companions because no companion could be her.

"You haunt me," he said to the staring face of the angel. "You have given me this power but have forbidden me yourself."

The unmen leaned toward him, their empty heads cocked, listening.

Ixidor ignored them. He stared at the angel statue, her limestone robes rippling in resurrection. Up from the grave she surged, throwing aside the black ground in her quest for white skies. She was perfect, incorruptible. No grave could hold her.

Ixidor's heart flailed, as if packed in mud.

The truth was that Nivea was not the incorruptible angel, but rather the corrupted dirt. She had fallen apart in the arms of Phage.

The best Ixidor could do was surround himself with everything that was not her and then stare unseeing at it all, hoping to glimpse her in absence.