"And... are you expecting me to teach him some compassion?"

"If you can."

She looked away. First to the star-watcher, then up to the stars. "I was having such a time out here. It was almost as though I'd never left-"

"He wants me to bring you to him."

She looked towards Raul, who was standing on the back doorstep. "is my Coker here?" Raul nodded. "So he knows?" Again, Raul nodded. "And what does he think?"

Raul listened for the dead man to speak. "He says be careful; the boy was always wicked." "Not always," Maeve said quickly, moving back towards the house. "He wasn't wicked in my belly. We taught him, Coker. Lord knows how, but we taught him."

She stepped inside, her face stony, and refusing Harry's aid made her way back through the kitchen and the parlor towards the front door.

It was still open. Mssoon was at the threshold, and by the stare on his face it was clear he'd been watching his mother for some time, through the veils of the whorehouse. The monkish face he'd worn was tainted now. He looked pinched and bitter.

"Look at you," he said, as Maeve approached the door.

"Clayton?" she said, halting to study him.

"How sick you look," the sight of her frailty apparently giving him courage. He stepped inside. "You should be dead, Mama," he said.

"So should you."

"Oh," he cooed, "I am, Mama. All that's left alive is the hate in me." He was picking up his speed, raising his left hand as he closed on her. In it, the rod he'd wielded twice before, the murderous rod.

Yelling a warning, Harry raced to intercept the blow, but Kissoon was too quick. He struck his mother's head with the rod, and down she went, an arc of blood splashing on the carpeted ground.

In the bright grave below, Tesla felt the murder like a second death. Her spirit shaken, she looked up to see a stain spreading across her sky, while a woman's voice unleashed a sob of agony....

Harry caught hold of Kissoon's arm, and @ to pull him away from his mother, but the man was too strong. With a simple shrug he flung Harry off him, sending him stumbling through the gossamer walls to land on his back beneath the kitchen table. As he got to his feet he saw Raul throw himself upon Mssoon, but his assault was of such little consequence Kissoon didn't bother to dislodge his attacker. He simply fell to his knees beside Maeve, his rod raised to finish his matricide. Once, twice, three, four times the weapon fell, the house shaking with each blow as the mind that had conjured it was snuffed out By the time Harry reached Kissoon it was over. Spattered with Maeve's blood, his eyes spilling tears, he hauled himself to his feet. He wiped his nose like any backstreet thug, and said to Harry, "Thank you. I enjoyed that."

Tesla didn't want to hear. Didn't want to move. Didn't want anything but to float here as long as this limbo would have her.

But the cruelty came down from above, loud and clear, and try as she might she couldn't keep the anger from burgeoning in her. Her agitation informed the ground around her, and its motion drove her back towards her floating body. The closer she came to it the more frenzied the energies surrounding her became. they were eager for this reunion, she realized; they wanted her returned into her flesh.

And why? She had the answer the moment she slid back into the space behind her eyes. It wanted to make her heart leap. It wanted to make her lungs draw breath. And most of all, it wanted to come into her living body, and let that body be the crux of all that flowed here. A place where the mind could make sense of the flesh's confusions. A place where beasts and divinities could be dissolved, and get about the work of oneness.

In short, it wanted to give her the Art.

And there was no refusing it. She knew the moment it passed into her that the gift was also a possession. That she would be changed in ways that were presently unimaginable to her, changes that made the difference between life and death look like a nuance.

There was perhaps a moment between the first heartbeat and the second, when she might have rejected the gift, and fled her body. Let it die again, and wither. But before she quite realized the choice was hers, she'd chosen.

And the Art had her.

"What is this?" Kissoon said, watching as the ground on which his mother's body lay was pierced and a thousand pinprick shafts of light broke from it.

Harry had no answers. All he could do was watch while the spectacle escalated, the old woman's corpse withering where it lay, as if the light-which gave off no discernible heat-was cremating it. If so, it was as adept a creator as destroyer, for even as Maeve O'Connell's corpse went to ash, another form, another woman, was resurrected in the midst of her pyre.

"Tesla?"

She looked like a tapestry sewn from fire, but it was her. God in Heaven, it was her!

Harry heard the drone of the lad in his skull turn to the lowing of a fretful animal. Vissoon was retreating towards the front door, clearly as spooked as his faceless ally, but before he could reach the threshold Tesla called to him by name. Her voice was no more mellifluous for her transfiguration.

"This is unforgivable," she said, the fire threads embers. now; her body almost her own. "Here, of all places, where both of us were born.11

"Both of us?" said Kissoon. "I am born here and now," she said. "And you are a witness to that, which is no little honor."

The troubled din of the lad was continuing to escalate through this exchange, and now, staring past Kissoon into the darkness beyond the faltering walls, Harry saw its abstractions unknitting, its wheel fragmenting.

"Are you doing that?" Harry said to'Tesia.

"Maybe," she said, looking down at her body, which was more solid by the moment. She seemed particularly interested in her hands. It took Harry only an instant to work out why. She was remembering the Jaff, whose hands had blazed with the Art. Blazed, then broken.

"Buddenbaum was right," Harry said.

"About what?"

"You and the all."

"I didn't plan it this way," she said, her tone a mingling of puzzlement and distress. "If he hadn't shed blow-"

She looked up from her hands, back at Kissoon, who lead retreated to the place where the door had once stood. its conjured memory was barely visible now. As for the lad, its lornis turned in the air behind him, drawing the darkness into their loops as they circled, sealing themselves in shadow. Soon, they were just places where the stars failed to shine. Then not even that.

"This is the beginning of the end," Kissoon said,

"I know," Tesia replied, with a ghost of a smile on her I'-,ice,

"You should be afraid," Kissoon told her.

"Why? Because you're a man capable of killing his own mother?" She shook her head. "The world's been full of scum like you from the beginning," she said quietly. "And if the end means there's no more to come, then that's not going to be much of a loss, is it?"

He stared at her for a few seconds, as if searching for some riposte. Finding none, he simply said, "We'll see... " and turning into the same darkness that had taken the Iad, he was gone. There was another silence then, longer than the one before, while the walls of the whorehouse grew ever more insubstantial. Harry went down on his haunches, his eyes pricking with tears of relief, while the last dreg of the lad's drone faded and disappeared from the bones of his head. Tesia, meanwhile, wandered a few yards from the place where she'd appeared-which now looked like any other spot in the street-and stared towards the fires. There were sirens whooping in the distance. The saviors were on their way with hoses, lights, and words of reason.

"How does it feel?" Harry asked her. "I'm... trying to pretend nothing's happened to me," Tesla replied, her voice a gravelly whisper.