"I'm so sorry," said Strings. "So sorry. He was so very very good. And he wants to kill Unwyrm, he truly does."

"Enough," said Will. "It's done."

"He's calling me," said Patience. "It's stronger than I can bear."

"You know," said Ruin, "when it comes down to the truth of it, Heptarch, you are the least reliable of us all."

"I'm going now," said Patience.

"He knows his way through your mind better than anyone's but Angel's, and he cares more about you. He can do what he wants with you. And yet you're the one who made our plan for us."

Patience walked to the door. "Now," she said. She opened the door and walked out into the moonlit snow.

The wind whipped a white dust behind her, like a cowardly shadow retreating into the warm room. Will snatched a lamp from the wall and followed right behind her, with Ruin, Reck, and Sken trotting close after.

Sken was enthusiastic. "Now I finally get to see what this Unwyrm looks like."

The others ignored her. Will was holding Patience's arm; she struggled against his grip, trying to run to Unwyrm. "Slowly, calmly," whispered Will. "I'll hold you back for now, Lady Patience. Remember that none of this is you. All of us face him in you. You aren't alone against him."

The mouth of the cave waited for them in the distance.

"I'm coming," whispered Patience.

Back in the House of the Wise, the old men awoke, yawning and stretching. One of them stumbled over to where Angel lay. "Nasty cut there," he said. He busied himself untying the knots that held Angel's arms together.

Angel opened his eyes. Then he sat up and gently touched his neck. "She cut it close, there. Cut it close."

"Why were we asleep?" asked the man who had untied him.

"It's time," said Angel. "And he has her now." He got up and tore open the lining of his cloak. Three throwing knives were hidden there.

"What happens now?" asked the man.

"You'll see," he said. "You'll see." And then he spoke quietly, to someone who could not hear his words. "Call me all you like. I'm coming."

Chapter 18. THE BIRTHING PLACE

IT WAS EARLIEST DAWN WHEN THEY PASSED INTO THE CAVE, the first light shimmering in the east. They did not wait for sunrise; the lantern was the light they'd live by now.

Patience led the way. Will's hand gripping her arm with the strength of a tree root. Their passage wound upward through the rock, with an icy stream of water coming down the tunnel. The walls were covered with ice, and so was the tunnel floor; they soon found that if they walked on the frozen ground, their feet slipped, and if they walked in the stream, their feet froze. After half an hour they came to the golden door.

It was just a wooden slab that had once been painted yellow. There was no lock. There was no handle. Dozens of names were scratched in it, and in the ice-slick rock beside it. The door could not have been more than a hundred years old. The names in the rock might have been there for millennia.

Patience was calmer now. Headed toward Unwyrm, she could feel the pressure ease, and she gained some control of herself. The door was the last barrier between them. Even as she longed to pass beyond it, she could feel, like a distant memory, a desperate wish for it to stay closed.

"Resist him as much as you can," said Ruin. "Go as slowly as you can."

Patience just nodded. She was gasping with the effort to stay and listen.

"I'll look at him, try to figure out where the arrow has to go. We know almost nothing about his body, and what parts are vital. We know he has no brain, though. Probably no heart. In the end, we may have to pierce him as often as we can, till he loses enough fluid to die. That's why you have to be as slow as possible. To give us time."

Again Patience nodded.

"All of you," said Will. "All of you listen. We don't know how many of us will be left alive at the end of this.

But whoever lives, if we're too late, and he fathers children on Patience-Angel told me that the children will grow quickly. They must be killed. There may be dozens of them, and they must all be killed because if any of them lives, we've lost."

"They'll be my children," whispered Patience. "Mine."

"God help us," said Sken. "Will they look like worms?"

"Human infants," said Will. "And killing them will feel like murder."

Reck saw how Patience was sweating, steam rising from her body in the bitterly cold tunnel. Reck remembered all too well the terrible need that Unwyrm had forced on her, how little she had been able to think, to remember that throwing herself from the mountain was certain death. When Unwyrm commanded with that much strength, there was no denying him. She spoke to Ruin.

"We're asking too much of her. She's sheltered us all this way, and had no shelter for herself. When she's with him, she'll have no thought for any plan."

Patience began to sob and struggle against Will's hold on her. Now that she was stopped again, the call began to build an unbearable pressure within her. "Let me go, Will," she begged.

"Patience!" The cry rang through the tunnel. Reck and Ruin whirled to look down the tunnel they had just traveled. "Patience! I'll go! I'll go first!"

Will handed the lantern to Sken and gripped Patience by the shoulders with both hands. "You didn't kill him!"

"Unwyrm wouldn't let me!" she sobbed.

Angel appeared in the dim light their lantern cast at the far end of the tunnel, where it curved down and out of sight. He brandished throwing knives in both hands. The clotted blood still made a ghastly pattern on his neck.

"Out of my way!" he shouted. "I'll kill him, I can do it!

Let me by! You can't, none of you can do it, let me by!"

He forced his way past them, knocking Will to one side, shoving the door open with his shoulder. Patience came free of Will's grasp then, and began to run after Angel. Ruin and Reck stumbled after her. But she had gone too far ahead. Almost immediately they began to move slowly, as if they were pushing through stone.

"Help us!" cried Ruin.

Will came after them, seized their clothing in bunches from behind, and shoved them brutally forward through the tunnel. Sken ran after with the lantern.

The birthing room was ablaze with light. Sunrise had come while they were in the tunnel. The icy ceiling was so thin in places that the light burst through. It showed them Angel dead on the ice in the middle of the floor.

His knives had slid away from him when he fell. A slender dart arose from the back of his head. Patience was still holding her blowgun. Then she cast it away. It skittered across the ice and slid into a swift-flowing stream that carried it away, out of the birthing room, down through one of the tunnels that led from here to the farthest reaches of Cranning.

"She's his now," said Will. "She'll do nothing to help us."

"Where is he?" whispered Reck.

As if in answer, the black wyrm slid rapidly down into the birthing room from a white tunnel near the ceiling.

Where is he weak, thought Reck desperately. Where can I put an arrow and end his life?

"My bow," said Reck. "Tell me where to shoot him."

His back was made of hard segments that formed an impenetrable wall. "I don't know where," said Ruin, "I don't know, there's no place."

"That's Unwyrm speaking."

"No place," he said.

Unwyrm came near to where Patience waited. Then he rose up, exposing his belly. It was not the soft, smooth belly Reck had hoped for. Instead it was alive with appendages that alternately thrust forward like soft swords, then went limp and receded. They were wet and dripping.

Unwyrm's feeble hands fanned out across his side, trembling.

"Look how he's shaking," whispered Reck. "He's old."