"But why would anyone do that?" asked the dwelf.

"All a gebling has to do is-"

"Silence!" whispered Ruin.

"No," said Reck. "No, let her tell."

"All a gebling has to do," said Heffiji, "is swallow it. The gebling body can break the crystal into its tiniest pieces, and it will form again exactly where it ought to be in the gebling's brain."

"How could that happen?" asked Patience. "Why can geblings use it so easily, when humans-"

"Because we're born with mindstones," said Ruin, scornfully. "We all have them. And we eat our parents' mindstones when they die, to carry on the memories that mattered most to them in their lives." He looked at Reck with bitter triumph, as if to say, Well, you said to tell her, and now I have.

Patience looked from one to the other in growing understanding. "So all those stories that geblings eat their dead-"

Reck nodded. "If a human saw it, though it's hard to believe a gebling would ever let them see-"

"Dwelfs too," said Heffiji. "And gaunts."

"There are mindstones of some sort, much smaller than ours, too small to see, in all the animals of this world," said Ruin. "Except humans. Crippled, fleshbound humans, whose souls die with them."

Our souls die, thought Patience, except those whose heads are taken. It was a question she had thought of more than once. How did the taking of heads begin?

Why did human scientists every try to keep a head alive?

Because they knew, hundreds of generations ago, they knew that the native species had a kind of eternal life, a part of their brain that lived on after death. They were jealous. Taking heads was the human substitute for the mindstones of the geblings, dwelfs, and gaunts. Instead of the crystal globe of the mindstone, for us it was gools, headworms, and eviscerated rats dropped by a hawk into a glass jar.

"Only the Heptarchs, among all humans, have taken their parents into themselves," said Reck. "And that was only by stealing our noblest parents from us. Your ancestor killed the seventh king and stole his mindstone, so that the kings of the geblings have no memory now of how the kingdom began. Ruin is of the foolish opinion that it would be of some advantage to us to have it now.

I, however, understand that it would only have been to our advantage if we had had it all along."

"I must have it," said Ruin. "If I'm to know what I must know-"

"Unwyrm wants you to do it, Ruin." Reck seemed to enjoy forcing her brother to bow before her superior understanding. "It would please him, to have half the gebling king a babbling lunatic. Fool. If it drove humans insane, with their incomplete coupling with the stone, what do you think it will do to you, to be utterly and perfectly bonded to more than three hundred human minds?

No gebling is strong enough to endure that."

Patience could see that Ruin was not pretending now; he was yielding to his sister's arguments. If she said nothing, it was clear the dispute would be settled with the scepter left peacefully in her possession, perhaps even implanted in her brain. Yet if it was so dangerous that Ruin would not use it, she had to know more of what it would do to her.

"Are human and gebling minds so alien to each other?" she asked. "We speak each other's languages, we-"

"You don't understand the beginning of the gebling mind-" began Ruin.

"It's our strength," said Reck, "and our weakness.

We're never alone from the moment of our birth. Isolation is a meaningless word to us. We can feel other geblings on the fringes of our consciousness, awake and asleep. When we swallow a mindstone, we become the person whose stone we swallowed, for days, sometimes weeks and months, until we can sort out all the memories and put them in their place. If Ruin had to become human that way, three hundred times over, the isolation would probably be unbearable, like the death of half himself. You, though, a human being-you're used to loneliness because you never know anything else. And the mindstone doesn't bond so perfectly with you. A strong human-like you-"

"You want me to implant it in her, don't you," Ruin said.

"I think so, yes," said Reck.

"It may make her even more subject to Unwyrm's will," he said.

"But what does that matter? At worst, it would make her a helpless pawn to Unwyrm. Since that's how she'll probably end up anyway, what difference does it make?"

Patience shuddered inwardly at their utter lack of sympathy for her. Even she, a sometime assassin, still felt some understanding, some elementary kinship with the people that she killed. Now, for the first time, she realized that they regarded her as a beast, not a person. They assessed her as a man might assess a good horse, speaking of its strengths and weaknesses candidly, in the horse's presence. The difference was that Patience could understand.

Ruin, still angry despite having to admit that his sister was right, turned to Patience. "I'll implant the mindstone, on two conditions. First, that you give it back to me or Reck or our children when you die."

"Why, when you can never use it?" asked Patience.

"When all this is over," Ruin said, "and my work is; done, then I can use it. If it mads me, then it's no worse than death, and I'm not afraid to die. But if I succeed in mastering it, then all we lost will be restored to us, and I can pass it to my heir."

"I'll make you a different oath," said Patience. "Implant it, and if I die in the presence of the king of the geblings, I'll make no effort to stop them from taking it, whoever they are."

Ruin smiled. "It amounts to the same thing. Only you must promise to make every effort to die in the presence of the king of the geblings."

"If you promise to make no effort to hasten that day."

"I hate politics," said Heffiji. "You don't need any oaths. You'll implant it in her because it's no use to you, and you'll get it back when she's dead if you can." She snorted. "Even a dwelt with less than half a brain can tell you that."

"What is the second condition?" asked Patience.

"The first gebling king," said Reck. "He was Unwyrm's brother. His memories of Unwyrm are in the stone. You must tell us what Unwyrm is. You must tell us everything about him that you can remember, when the mindstone is in place."

"So the Heptarchs remember Unwyrm," she whispered.

"They have known who the enemy is, all these years."

"Only the ones with courage enough to put it in their brains," said Reck.

"And strength enough to keep their sanity when they did," said Ruin.

Reck asked again, "Will you tell us?"

Patience nodded. "Yes." And then, deciding not to be the careful diplomat, she let Reck and Ruin see her fear.

"Do you believe that I'm truly strong enough to bear it?"

Ruin shrugged. "If you aren't, we're no worse off than before." She was still an animal to him.

But Reck noticed her vulnerability this time, and answered with sympathy. "How many times has this been done in the history of the world? How can we know how strong a human has to be, to hold geblings in her mind, and still remain human? But I'll tell you what I know of you. Many humans, most humans, cringe in their solitude, frightened and weak, struggling to bring into themselves as many things and people as they can. To own so much that they can feel large and believe, falsely, that they are not alone. But you. You are not afraid of your own voice in the dark."

Patience put the loop back in her hair, and slid the tube into its wooden sheath. The geblings visibly relaxed.

"You said your name was Heffiji?" asked Patience.

"Yes. A scholar gave it to me once, long ago. I forget what my name was before that. If you ask me, I'll tell, you." I

"A gaunt, wasn't he? The scholar who named you?;

Heffiji is a Gauntish word."

"Yes, she was. Do you know what it means?"