In his jar on the mantle piece. River slept. Away from Cranwater, the world did not exist for him.

Patience found herself trying to feel the geblings' silent communication, the speechless call of the othermind.

She remembered so clearly how it felt, when she was each of the first few gebling kings. Yet now she felt nothing. It was like reaching out with her hand, only to discover that her hand had been cut off. She watched them wistfully, grieving that she could never know them except in the vicarious memories that came to her through the scepter. And the geblings went about their business, not knowing who she was, not guessing that she was the one living human who knew what it was like to be a gebling, who could understand the constant fellowship that gave them their anchor in the world. How did I find the courage to live before, when I never knew what it was to know another person?

"Patience," whispered someone behind her/She knew the voice, knew that Reek's hand was reaching for her shoulder, and reached up her own hand to touch. And yes, it was there, the soft fur of the gebling hand. For a moment she thought that perhaps she had felt Reek's proximity through the othermind. But no; it could only be her instinct as an assassin, to know when a hand was reaching for her. She could not hope ever to take part in the gebling community.

"Reck," she said.

"We were afraid we'd carry a madwoman with us into Cranning."

"A madwoman should stay here. After all, this is a madhouse."

Reck laughed. "Not really. These geblings came to rebuild Heffiji's house, to keep the learning of humankind safe."

"How did you call them?"

"Oh, the gebling king is known. Not by face or name-no, when they see us here they think we're just two more geblings who were summoned and came. But in the othermind, they know the call of the gebling king."

"Do they come from Cranning?"

"I don't think so. We called, and the nearest geblings heard it and passed on the call. As more and more took it up, it got stronger, until we knew we had enough. We're not Unwyrm. Our own call, alone, could never reach from here to Cranning."

"It's good of you to keep this house alive."

"This house has done the impossible. It has humbled my beloved brother Ruin. All the ideas that Heffiji has saved here. Ruin's made a pest of himself, questioning her, dogging her heels from answer to answer. He's hardly known a human in his life, and for obvious reasons he's never known any of the Wise. Now, though, he's seen what human minds can do at their best."

"If he ever wants to know us at our worst, he has only to take the scepter," said Patience.

"Not likely," said Reck. "We used to pity you humans for your solitude. Well, I pitied you, and he despised you. But now, well, he keeps telling me that solitude is the foundation of true wisdom, that all the brilliant thoughts in this house come as the desperate cry of one human being to another, saying, Know me, live with me in the world of my mind."

"It's a very poetic thought."

"I told him he's lovesick-he's fallen in love with the human race. But you know how it is. I've never hated humans the way he has, and so I'm not quite so impressed when I find out that not all humans are worthless."

Reck walked to the chair on the other side of the fire.

"It's funny," said Patience. "I kept dreaming about houses. Different houses that I needed to take care of.

Sometimes Heffiji's house and sometimes my father's house, and sometimes Heptagon House. Sometimes the house where my mother was killed."

Reck looked thoughtful. There were footsteps on the stair. Ruin padded into the room. Patience noticed at once that he was no longer naked. He wore short trousers.

A step toward accepting human civilization.

"Why did you call me?" he asked.

Reck turned to him, beckoned him closer. There was no one else in the room, but still it was better not to talk too loudly, not when they were saying things that could reveal who they were before they wanted to. "She heard our call," said Reck.

Ruin looked at Patience, as if analyzing a strange new herb he had just noticed on the forest floor. "The need to come fix a very important house? And where it was?"

"I saw paths sometimes, I never knew where from or where to. But always in the distance I could see the house burning, and I knew I had to hurry-"

Reck shook her head. "There was nothing about fire in our call."

"We don't even see images," added Ruin. "The othermind isn't that precise."

But Patience was excited at the thought that she might have experienced the gebling othermind in her own body. E She wouldn't let these small objections disprove it. "I'm not a gebling, and my brain may translate things into images that I can understand. I may be more of a gebling than you think. I remember the othermind. I remember, feeling all the other geblings, and the map of Cranning.

And besides, I have the scepter now. Maybe that lets me feel your call."

Reck stroked her tongue with the long nail of her thumb. "No," she said. "Heptarchs have borne the mindstone before, but they have never heard the call of the king to the people."

Ruin cocked his head, studying Patience's face. "If it; isn't the mindstone, then perhaps Unwyrm's call has i made her more sensitive, so she hears what no human could hear before."

Reck raised a finger. "Remember, though. No Heptarch has ever worn the mindstone so close to Cranning. When the other geblings took up the call, to pass it on, perhaps it grew strong enough for her to hear."

"It was nothing like Unwyrm's call," said Patience.

"That is so clear and powerful."

"Unwyrm is much better at it than we are. Our human nature. It weakens us." Reck sounded a little resentful.

"Do you wish that you had no human parent?"

Reck laughed bitterly. "Do you think the wyrms look any prettier to us? Nobody gave us a choice of ancestors."

"I saw it," said Patience. And she told them of the birth of the first geblings. Ruin made her slow down, tell every detail. He listened with his eyes closed, as if by concentrating on the sound of her choice he could conjure up the memories that the geblings had lost forever when they lost the mindstone of the kings.

When Patience told how the infant Unwyrm killed his mother, Ruin nodded. "Yes, yes," he said. "It wasn't murder. He had to eat the crystal, you see. To know all that she knew."

"We're more discreet now," said Reck. "We're more human. We wait until our parents die naturally. It means we have more life on our own before becoming our parents. But there's nothing unnatural about a child eating its parent's memory, not on Imakulata."

Patience went on with the story, with all she could remember of the life of the first geblings. And ended when the last of the gebling kings to bear this mindstone found the corpse of the last living wyrm. Humans had burned it to death.

"Of course," said Reck. "If it's strange and frightening, kill it. The human credo."

"Humans do what they have to do," said Ruin. Reck grinned wickedly and winked at Patience, as if to say, See how my brother has become a humanophile! "The wyrms did what they had to do," said Ruin. "They knew the humans could and would kill them all, with their machines. What do you do when the enemy is too strong to destroy? You become the enemy."

"Oh, yes, everybody's doing what their genes tell them to do," said Patience.

"If they hadn't chosen to mate with humans," said Reck, "we wouldn't exist. We can hardly condemn the choice they made."

"But you see, Heptarch, we geblings are not what they decided to become," said Ruin. "We're the castoffs of the second generation, the failed experiments, the doomed hybrids, the pitiful grotesques. Dwelfs with no brain. Gaunts with no will. We geblings, we came close.