"I didn't do it at all. Not consciously at least."

"But you've been there? Is that what you call the jungle? What we saw and smelled and felt?"

"Yes, it is. I have not said so."

"At dinner yesterday you got inside Fava's story and changed things around. Did it really happen?"

"I suppose it did. I didn't do it consciously."

"Good Silk!"

For half a minute or longer, Mora studied me, her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. At last she said, "I meant what Fava told about. Did that really happen? Did you try to use an inhuma to fool your son?"

"No."

"It was just made up?"

I nodded. "I've told you I don't know how I did those things, if I did them. That was the truth, but I've been thinking a lot about them, as you can imagine. Would you like to hear my theory? Telling someone else may make it clearer in my own mind."

"Go ahead."

"Suppose that the Duko were to build a road to facilitate the passage of his horde to the border. Might not troopers from Blanko use that same road to besiege Soldo?"

"I don't think I understand this."

"Neither do I, but I'm trying to. Have you ever seen a dead inhumu? One who had been personating a human being?"

"You told me that I hadn't seen one at all. I still haven't, not close up."

"I have, and more often than I like."

Those were magic words, although I had been ignorant of their power when I pronounced them. As a small boy I had heard the stories all children hear, and used to imagine that if only I could stumble upon the correct syllables a garden would spring up where our neighbors' houses stood, a place of mystery and beauty in which the trees bore emeralds that turned to diamonds as they ripened, and fountains ran with milk or wine. Eventually I came to realize that the immortal gods were the only spirits who granted the wishes of men, and that prayers were the magic words I had sought. It thrilled me, as it still does; but when I told my friends my discovery, they only sneered and turned away.

Now – very far from those friends, men and women I will never see again – I had stumbled upon words that were magic indeed. No sooner had I pronounced them than I found myself back in Green's jungles, squatting beside the young man who had joined us and fought beside us, as he writhed and bled beneath the arching roots.

"Tell me again why you hate the inhumi, " he asked, as if we two were sitting at ease in my bedroom in Inclito's house, and had all the time in the whorl.

"I've never told you anything of the kind, " I said, "or talked to you at all until this moment."

"You'll know me when I'm gone."

"They drink our blood. Isn't that enough?"

"No." His face was a mask of pain.

"Incanto?" Mora was concerned for me.

"What is it?"

"Are you all right?"

I nodded. "His mother – Krait's mother – she was the one, you see. We were as poor… You've been rich all your short life. You can't imagine how poor we were."

"I could try."

"We had shared out everything when we landed, we who had come from Old Viron and the new people, the sleepers, the ones who had slept three hundred years in the caverns of the Whorl. Do you know about them, Mora? Their memories had been tampered with, like Mamelta's, so they were confused in strange ways."

No doubt she thought I was one of them, for which I cannot blame her; but she nodded politely.

"The tools and the seeds and the frozen embryos, though there weren't many of those. No human embryos at all. They'd been taken, every one of them. Special talents, you see – untamed and unpredictable abilities that were supposed to help us; but they had been taken by those who had broken the seals. Taken and sold, long ago."

"No cut, " Oreb advised me. "Good Silk!"

"Silk had been one of them. Silk had been our leader. That was his talent, leadership. People trusted and followed him, and he tried-I tried very hard, Mora, not to mislead them, not to lead them astray and betray them. But Silk had remained behind in the Whorl with Hyacinth, and it almost destroyed us."

"I see, " Mora said, although clearly she did not.

"Our women were supposed to bear the animals, exactly as Maytera Marble's granddaughter had, bear horses and sheep and cattle and donkeys. Nettle couldn't, because she was carrying Sinew, and so we gave ours to a woman she had known all her life who promised to give it back to us when it was born. But she didn't, she wouldn't. She said it had been stillborn. Many of them were, but that one was not. She hid it from us until she thought we wouldn't know, and it was only a little, long-necked animal, like a little camel without a hump, after all. It wouldn't plow, and she and the man who lived with her killed it trying to make it plow, and so we were so poor – Nettle and I were so poor – because Silk had not come.

"We sold part of the land they had given us, and bought a donkey, but the donkey died. Eventually we sold the rest of our land and ate what little we got for it, and bought milk for Sinew when Nettle's dried up, and lived in a tent on the Lizard, a little tent I made for us from the skins of the rock goats I hunted. That was when she came, Krait's mother, and Sinew nearly died.

"My son's name was Krait, did I tell you?"

Poor Mora shook her head. "You said your son's name was Sinew."

"Yes. Yes, it was. But when he died – when Krait died there in the jungle – the illusion was last to die. I think it always is. The illusion of humanity. It is a thing of the spirit, you see, and so partakes of immortality. The spirit is the breath, Mora."

She nodded again, hesitantly; I could not tell whether she understood everything or nothing.

"They reshape themselves. That is the animal. That was how they lived and how they reproduced until the Neighbors came and found them, and were themselves found by them. It is the animal, as I said.

A chemical woman like Maytera Marble carries within her half the plans necessary to build a new chem, and a chemical man like Hammerstone, the other half, did you know that? It was how they began to build Olivine. You've probably never seen a chem."

I showed her the eye I am bringing to Maytera Marble.

"The animal part is easy. We had lizards at home that could change their skins to look like human skin, and there are bugs that shape themselves to look like other bugs, or like sticks, or the heads of deadly snakes. When an inhumu dies, it seems to be a human being – Krait seemed to be a young man there to the end, there in Green's jungles. A young man when he died and for some time afterward. When it was too late, I saw him as I had seen him on the sloop."

There was a mirror above the bureau; I went to it and stood before it trembling. "Do you see this face, Mora? Of course you do. It is the only face you can see. It is not my face, however. Come and look."

"I won't!"

"Poor girl!" Oreb flew to her, and would have comforted her if he could.

"Suppose that Fava were to die, Mora, and that you waited at her deathbed as I waited beside Krait. I had stayed behind, you see, because he had fought for us. I had been wounded too, but I tried to get some of the others to carry him. They would not, Mora. I ordered them to, but they only shook their heads and turned away, even Sinew; and in the end they would not carry me either. They left me just as they had left him, and I made myself stand and go back to him.

"You would hear Fava's last words, just as I heard his. Perhaps she would tell you the secret, the great secret they fear so much that we will learn. You would hear the rattle of Hierax in her throat, the rattle that he kept and would not allow his younger sisters to play with. In a second or two, she would cease to breathe. Do you understand, Mora? Am I making myself clear?"