She shuddered. And she imagined that Unwyrm whispered to her with the desires of her body. Come to me, come and bear my children, my children, my changelings, we'll steal into every house in the world, you and I, and creep to the children's beds. We'll lay our little wyrmling into the cradle, and watch as it changes shapes to look just like the human baby lying there. Then we'll take the human baby, carry it outside, slit its throat and toss it in my bag.
A thousand bags, each emptied into a garden, where the leering oaks suck the last dregs of life from the desiccated flesh. Patience thought she walked through the garden, brittle bones crackling under her feet, watching where her husband emptied another bag, then looked at her with his tiny wyrm's head and said, "The last. That's the last of them. There's only one human child left in all the world." He took a living baby out of his bag, its terrified eyes looking hopelessly up at her, and graciously offered to let her dine.
Instead, she ran away, to a place where the ground was soft and forgiving to her feet; to a small hut in the forest, where she could hear a mother crooning to her child. Here is a place we missed, she thought. A child that lives on. I'll protect it, I'll hide it from Unwyrm, and he'll grow up and thrive and kill the changelings-
She peered into the window and saw the baby, and he was beautiful, his delicate fingers wrapped around his mother's thumb, his mouth making sweet sucking motions.
Live, she said silently to the child. Live and be strong, for you are the last.
Then the child winked at her and leered.
Angel shook her awake. "You screamed," he said.
"Sorry," she whispered. She held to the gunnel and looked across the water at the trees. None of them seemed any different. Her dream had been nonsense. If it looks like an oak, if it cuts like an oak, if you can build with it like an oak, what does it matter that it has one immense genetic molecule, instead of many small ones? What does it matter if the deer is only half deer, and the other half of its bloodline is some strange creature of Imakulata?
Life is life, form is form.
Except my life. My form. That must be preserved.
Unwyrm's improved version of humanity is the death of the old, flawed, lonely, but beautiful Earthborn people.
My people.
Come, hurry, hurry, come, spoke Unwyrm's passion.
"Look," said Angel. "River sent Ruin up the mast, and he saw it at the last bend of the river. Skyfoot. For a few minutes, we can see it even from the deck."
Patience got up. Despite what she'd been through on this journey, her body still responded quickly. She was alert and strong in a moment. My body doesn't know I'm three hundred generations old, she thought. My body thinks that I'm a young woman. My body still thinks I have a future of my own.
Skyfoot was a shadow just topping the distant trees on a long, straight stretch of river.
"If the forest weren't so tall," said Angel, "we would have seen it a week before we reached Heffiji's house, instead of three days after leaving it."
"It's very close," said Patience.
"Not really. Just very high. Seven kilometers from base to ridge."
"And now hidden again."
It was too brief a glimpse, and too far away to make out any features. But each sight of it seemed longer than the one before. Two days later they dropped anchor in another bend, and as the dusk hid the mountain itself, the lights of Cranning began to dot the sky like a low-hung galaxy.
The lights went as far from east to west as they could see through their alley between the shores of tall timber.
That night Reck and Ruin climbed the rigging in the darkness, to perch together on the mast and watch their patrimony come alive with light.
River grew surly. Cranning meant nothing to him but the end of the voyage. It was the journey that he lived for, and each arrival was like a little death.
The next day the river began to break up into many wide and slow-flowing streams passing among wooded islands. "What we have here," said Angel, "is an ancient tectonic collision of massive proportions. We are on a plate that once was sliding down under the huge upthrust of Skyfoot. Now the two have joined, and the ground is stable, but once there must have been terrible earthquakes. From here on, the land actually falls toward the base of Skyfoot. The water from the melting glaciers atop the mountain piles up in the sunken area, making a lake that runs along the entire base of the mountain. The original colonists saw it and wrote that there was nothing like it on any habitable planet in the universe."
"So far," said Patience.
"Well, one assumes that anything that can happen once, can and will happen again, eventually, on some other world."
They could make out clusters of buildings on the mountain's face now. All day Ruin clung to the mast or sat in the bow, rapt, watching the face of the mountain as though it were a beloved supplicant coming to him.
"He's useless to anyone," Sken complained. "We ought to tie a rope on him and throw him overboard as an anchor."
Reek's reaction to the mountain was the opposite of Ruin's. While he grew silent, she became talkative.
"I've heard the stories since I was little," she said.
"The soil and water of the ten thousand cavern mouths of Cranning are so rich that never a stick of wood or morsel of food has ever been imported here. The foot of Cranning is a moist and humid rain forest. The mountain rises through all the weathers of the world. Anything that can live and grow anywhere in the world grows here."
She told of the kingdoms of men that had risen and fallen on the mountain's face, some of them only three kilometers wide, fifty meters deep, and twenty meters high, yet with their own dialects, armies, cultures. "And behind them all, in the deepest caverns, in utter darkness, we geblings carry on our lives. Ten million geblings, more than half the geblings in the world. While men and dwelfs and gaunts have their wars and intrigues on the face of Skyfoot, we hold its heart. They build their boundaries and walls, so that none can pass-but the geblings pass, because we know all the hidden ways."
"Don't you rule on the surface, too?" asked Patience.
"When we want to," she said, smiling. "When we decide to rule, then we rule. Everyone there knows that.
We don't have to be officious about it."
Patience felt no rapture at the sight of the mountain.
Somewhere near the top he was waiting for her, sensing her coming closer, getting more eager for her arrival. She found herself longing to turn the boat around, drift downstream and never think of Cranning or the Heptarchy or anything else again. She dreamed more often, and woke up sweating in the night, trembling from the desire that ruled her sleep.
One such night she got up from her bed and left the cabin. Ruin was keeping his watch toward the bow, but she moved quietly and if he noticed her, he did not show any sign of it. He faced the mountain lights, now dying out one by one as the hour grew later. She went to the stern of the boat and curled up beside a thick rope coiled on the deck. River was asleep in his jar, swaying gently as the current rocked the boat. The air was cold, but she liked the discomfort; it distracted her from the Cranning call.
She wasn't aware of having been asleep, but when she opened her eyes, Ruin was not at the bow. Someone else's watch, then. Whose turn was it? There was no light yet in the sky. Sken? Will?
She heard splashing in the water near the boat. Immediately she became alert. She knew all about the river pirates on the lower reaches of Cranwater; she had never heard of any this near Skyfoot, but it was possible. She silently withdrew the glass blowgun from her cross and eased herself to a sitting position. The splashing moved along the port side of the boat, and sure enough, a hand reached up onto the gunnel. As the other hand appeared, the boat dipped slightly, for now it was taking the weight of a very large man.