It stretched out its head above them and leaned down, bringing the great red Eyes close to Finn's face, making his skin scarlet, his shaking hands look as if they were red with blood.

"Finn,'' it said, in a voice of deep pleasure, a throaty treacle of huskiness. "At last."

He stepped back, into Gildas. The Sapient's hand gripped his elbow. "You know my name."

"I gave you your name." Its tongue flickered in the dark cavern of its mouth. "Gave it long ago, when you were born in my cells. When you became my son."

He was shuddering. He wanted to deny it, shout Out, but no words would come.

The creature tipped its head, studying him. The long muzzle, dripping bees and scales, fragmented into a cloud of dragonflies and re-formed again. "I knew you'd come," it said.

"I've been watching you, Finn, because you are so special. In all the entrails and veins of my body, in all the millions of beings I enclose, there is no one quite like you."

The head zoomed closer. Something like a smile formed and broke. "Do you really think you can escape from me? Do you forget that I could kill you, shut down light and air, incinerate you in seconds?"

"I don't forget," he managed to say.

"Most men do. Most men are content to live in their prison and think it is the world, but not you, Finn. You remember about me. You look around and see my Eyes watching you, in those nights of darkness you called out to me and I heard you ..."

"You didn't answer," he whispered.

"But you knew I was there. You are a Starseer, Finn. How interesting that is."

Gildas pushed forward. He was white, his sparse hair wet with sweat. "Who are you?" he growled.

"I am Incarceron, old man. You should know. It was the Sapienti who created me. Your great, towering, overreaching endless failure. Your nemesis." I zigzagged closer, its mouth wide so that they could see the rags of cloth that hung there, smell the oily, oddly sweet stench of k. "Ah, the pride of the Wise. And now you dare to seek a way free of your own folly."

It slid back, the red Eyes narrowing to slits. "Pay me, Finn. Pay me as Sapphique paid.

Give me your flesh, your blood. Give me the old man and his terrible desire for death.

Then perhaps your Key may open doors you do not dream of"

Finn's mouth was dry as ash. "This isn't a game."

"No?" The Beast's laugh was soft and slithering. "Are you not pieces on a board?"

"People." His anger was rising. "People that suffer. People you torment."

For a moment the creature dissolved to clouds of insects. Then they clotted in abrupt gargoyles, a new face, serpentine and sinuous. "I'm afraid not. They torment each other.

There is no system that can stop that, no place that can wall out evil, because men bring it in with them, even in the children. Such men are beyond correction, and it is my task only to contain them. I bold them inside myself. I swallow them whole."

A tentacle lashed out and around his wrist. "Pay me, Finn."

Finn jerked back, glanced at Gildas. The Sapient looked shrunken, his face drawn as if all his dread had fallen on him at once, but he said slowly, "Let it take me, boy. There's nothing for me now."

"No." Finn stared up at the Beast, its reptilian smile inches from him. "I've already given you one life."

"Ah. The woman." The smile lengthened. "How her death tears at you. Conscience and shame are so rare. They interest me."

Something in its smirk made him catch his breath. A jolt of hope hurt him; he gasped, "She's not dead! You caught her, you stopped her fall! Didn't you? You saved her."

The red spiral winked at him. "Nothing is wasted here," it murmured.

Finn stared, but Gildas's voice was a growl in his ear. "It's lying, boy."

"Maybe not. Maybe ..."

"It's playing with you." Sour with disgust, the old man stared at the swirling confusion of the Eye. "If it is true we made such a thing as you, then I'm ready to pay for our folly."

"No." Finn grabbed him tight. He slid a dull circle of silver from his thumb and held it up, a glittering spark. "Take this for your Tribute instead, Father?'

It was the skull-ring. And he was beyond caring. 

21

The Queen rose graciously.

In the porcelain whiteness of her face her strange eyes were clear and cold. "My dear, dear, Claudia."

Claudia dropped a curtsy, felt the whisper of a kiss on each cheek, and in the tight grip of the embrace sensed the thin bones of the woman, the small frame inside the boned corset and huge hooped skirts.

No one knew Queen Sia's age. After all, she was a sorceress. Older than the Warden perhaps, though beside her he was grave and dark, his silvered beard meticulous.

Brittle or not, her youth was convincing; she looked barely older than her son.

Turning, she led Claudia in, sweeping past Caspar's sullen stare. "You look so pretty, my sweet. That dress is wonderful. And your hair! Now tell me, is that natural or do you have it colored?"

Claudia breathed out, already irritated, but there was no need to answer. The Queen was already talking about something else. "... and I hope you won't consider that too forward of me."

"No," Claudia said blankly into a second of silence.

The Queen smiled. "Excellent. This way."

It was a double wooden door and was flung open by two footmen, but when Claudia was inside, the doors closed and the whole tiny chamber moved soundlessly upward.

"Yes I know," the Queen murmured, holding her close. "Such a breach of Protocol. But it's only for me, so who's to know?"

The small white hands were so tight on her arm, she could feel the nails digging in. She was breathless, as if she had been kidnapped. Even her father and Caspar were left behind.

When the doors opened, the corridor that stretched before her was a vision of gilt and mirrors; it had to be three times the size of the house at home. The Queen led her along it by the hand, between vast painted maps that showed every country in the Realm, adorned in their corners with fantasies of curling waves and mermaids and sea monsters.

"That's the library. I know you love books. Caspar, unfortunately, is not so studious. Really, I don't know if he can read at all. We won't go in."

Escorted firmly past, she looked back. Between each map stood a blue and white china urn that could have hidden a man, and the mirrors reflected each other in such sunlit confusion that she suddenly had no idea where the corridor ended or if it ever did. And the small white figure of the Queen seemed repeated before her and behind and to the side, so that the dread Claudia had felt in the coach seemed to be concentrated in that swift, unnaturally young stride, that sharp, confiding voice.

"And this is your suite. Your father is next door."

Immense.

A carpet her feet sank into, a bed so canopied with saffron silk, she felt it would drown her.