"Are you finished?" Harry said.

"A little closer@' Hess begged.

"What?" "Closer, I said." Harry approached the martyr. "That's better," Hess said. "I don't want this spread around." He dropped his voice to a growl. "It's all done with mirrors," he said, and suddenly his arms sprang from the fissure and seized hold of Harry's lapels. Harry wrestled to escape the illusion's grip, but it dragged him down, inch by inch, and as it did so the flesh of its face seemed to slide away in ribbons. There was no bone beneath. Just a brownish pulp.

"See?" it said, its mouth a lipless hole. "Mirror-men. Both of us."

"Fuck you!" Harry yelled, and pulling himself free of Hess's grip he stumbled backwards.

Hess shrugged and grinned. "You never did understand," he said again.

"I told you over and over and over and over-"

Harry turned his back on the pulpy face.

"And over and over-"

And looked back towards the door. He had a second, perhaps two, to realize that the lad, or some part of it, was no longer in that world but this. Then the ground around the Uroboros rose up in a solid wall and all that had gone before-the din, the tremors, the revulsion-seemed like a dream of perfect peace.

It was the ride of Phoebe's life: cocooned in a stony womb, and carried in the grip of the rock as it rose to block the lad's way. Texas had promised she'd be safe, and safe she was, her capsule home through the convulsing ground and up on fountains of liquid rock with such ease she could have threaded a needle had she wished to take her eyes off the sight he was showing her. The rock was a protean face, shaped and driven by his will. One moment she was plunged into grottoes where the Quiddity ran in icy darkness, the next the strata were dividing before her life so many veils, the next she seemed to he in the midst of a vital body, with liquid rock blazing in its veins, and the King's fossil heart beating like thunder all around.

Sometimes she heard his voice in the walls of her womb, telling her not to be afraid.

She wasn't. Not remotely. She was in the care of living power, and it had made her a promise she believed. The lad, on the other hand, for all its motion and its purpose, reminded her of death. Or rather, of its prelude: of the torments and the hopelessness she'd seen death bring. As it approached the door, and the earth rose up to block its passage, the rock pierced it and clusters of dark matter, almost like eggs, spilled from it, @-di the fouler for their glittering multiplicity. Even if they @vere eggs, Phoebe drought there was death in every gleaming one. When they struck the shore they burst and their gray fluids raced over the stones as if nosing out the darkness beneath.

Wounded though it was, its appetite for the Cosm was not dulled. Besieged by the rock, it continued to advance, thouah the very shore it was crossing had become a second sea, a surf of stone rising up to drive it back.

It was difficult for Phoebe to make out quite what was happening in the chaos, but it seemed that the lad had pressed @i portion of its body towards the threshold and was in the act of crossing over when Texas raised a wall of earth with such speed that he severed the questing limb from the main. The lad let out a sound the like of which Phoebe had never heard in her life, and as it was reeling in its anguish the whole landescape laid before her-highway, dunes, and shore-was Sim ply upended. She saw the lad topple, bursting in a thousand places, spilling its substance, as what had been horizontal moments before rose in a vertical mass above the enemy. It teetered there a long moment.

Then it descended upon the lad-a solid sky, failing and falling@ving the wounded mass into the pit where the shore had been. Even as this spectacle unfolded, Phoebe felt the cocoon shudder, and she was carried away from the maelstrom at speed, deposited at last close to the city limits, where the shore was still intact. She had no sooner come to rest than the cocoon cracked and deteriorated, leaving her exposed. Though she was perhaps two miles from the doorway, the ground was shaking violently and a hail of rock fragments was falling all around, some of the shards big enough to do her damage. Texas had exhausted all his strength, she assumed, to do what he'd done. She could not expect his protection any longer. She got to her feet, though it was difficult to stand upright and, shielding her head with her hands, she stumbled back in the direction of the city.

She returned her gaze along the shore once in a while, but the rain of dust and stones went on relentlessly, and she could see very little through the pall.

Nothing of the lad, certainly, nor of the door through which she'd stepped to come into this terrible world.

Both had disappeared, it seemed: enemy and door alike.

iv The first casualty on the Heights was Zury, who had been standing at the threshold when the shore on the other side k. erupted. Caught by a blast of frac@ rock he was thrown back into the liquefied ground. His acolytes went to dig him out while the lad's vanguard, severed from the main by the wall, thrashed in its fury, stining earth and air alike into chaos. Overturned in the dirt, the Blessedm'n's rescuers drowned along with their master. As for the lad, though it was but a small part of the invader, it was still immense: a ragged, roiling mass of forms, spilling its blood in the neirica's vestibule. The crack convulsed from end to end, as though the violence done in its midst was unmaking it. On the far side, earth and sky seemed to switch places. Then a storm of stones descended, the crack closed like a slammed door, and all that was left on the Heights was chaos on chaos.

Harty had been flung to the shuddering ground before the lad appeared and, certain he would be flung down again if he attempted to rise, stayed where he was. From this vantage point he saw Kissoon walk on the liquefied rock towards the wounded lad. He seemed indifferent to the tremors, and fearless, his head thrown back to study the invader in its frenzy. It seemed to be unraveling. Pieces of its substance, ten, fifteen feet in length were spiraling skyward, trailing sinew; other fragments, the smallest the size of a man, the largest ten times that, were circling in the air, as though hungry to devour themselves. Others still had dropped to the fluid ground, and were immersing themselves in the dirt.

Kissoon reached into his coat, and pulled from its folds the rod Harry had seen him wield in the Zyem Carasophia's chamber. It had been a weapon then. But now, when he raised it above his head, it seemed to offer a point of focus for the lad. they closed upon it from all directions, their torn bodies spilling their filth upon him. He raised his face to meet it as though it were a spring rain.

Harry could watch this no longer. His head was awash with images of the dead and death, his eyes stinging from the sight of Kissoon bathing in the lad's filth. If he didn't go now, despair would have him. He crawled away on his belly, barely aware of his direction, until the crosses came in sight, stark against the sky. He had not expected to see them again, and his aching eyes filled with tears.

"You came back," said a voice out of the darkness. It was Raul. "And

... you stayed," Harry said.

Raul came to his side and, crouching, gently coaxed Harry to his feet.

"I was cufious," he said.

"The door's closed."

"I saw."

"And the lad that's here-"

"Yes?"

Harry cleared the tears from his eyes, and stared up at the cross where he'd come so close to being nailed. "It bleeds," he said, and laughed.

in Evervflle, the denial had stopped, and so had the music. Not even those so drunk with liquor or love they'd forgotten their names could pretend all was well with the world. There was something happening on the mountain. It shook the sky. It shook the streets. it shook the heart.