Cord came over and stood with her hands in her pockets taking inventory of my bandages.

“See what a small percentage of my body they actually cover,” I pointed out.

She was having none of it.

“Our plan didn’t work out so well,” I offered.

She looked off to the side and sniffled—the last emotional aftershock of a long day. “Not your fault. How could we have known?”

“I’m sorry to have put you through this. I don’t understand how things could have gone so wrong.”

She looked at me acutely and saw nothing, I guess, except for a stupid look on my face. “You don’t have any idea what’s going on, do you?”

“I guess not. Just that the military has been moving toward the pole.” A memory popped into my head. “And a magister on the ship made some weird comment about the Warden of Heaven being cast out in wrath.”

Even as I was saying this, an old rattletrap coach was pulling in off the road. At its controls was Magister Sark. It was one of those freakish coincidences that made some people believe in spirits and psychic phenomena. I explained it away by supposing that my unconscious mind had seen the coach out of the corner of my eye a few moments before I’d consciously recognized him.

“You still with me?” Cord asked.

“Yeah. Hey—what about Jesry? Is he okay?”

“We think so. We’ll get you caught up.”

We looked over at Yul, who had somehow managed to get the police captain laughing. Something had been decided between them. The official part of the conversation was over.

The captain came over and made a few appreciative remarks about how banged up I was and what a tough guy I must be, then asked if I wanted to pursue it—to press charges. Absolutely lying through my teeth, I said no. By doing so, I apparently closed a deal. The particulars were never explained to me, but the gist of it was that all of us were free to go. The leaders of that mob would get off free except for injuries and insults already suffered. And these constables would dodge a mountain of paperwork: paperwork that would have been ten times as bad as what they were used to simply because many of those concerned were avout and hence of tricky legal status.

Magister Sark had not been idle during all of these other goings-on. The coach belonged to his Kelx in Mahsht; it was painted all over with Triangle iconography. It was large enough to transport all of the Valers. Some other member of his Kelx had volunteered to drive them south to a bigger city, less chaotic than Mahsht at the moment, whence they could arrange transport to Tredegarh. This driver, he explained, was on his way, but because of the difficult conditions in town, we might have to wait for a little while.

The magister glanced at me as he was explaining these things, and for some reason I felt a thrill of resentment. I did not like being indebted to him, and did not relish the prospect of having to sit gratefully through another sales pitch for his faith while we waited for the driver to show up. But it seemed he was more interested in checking my status than starting a conversation, and as soon as he stopped looking my way I felt ashamed of the way I’d reacted. Was there really that much of a difference between the Kelx notion of having one’s story related to the Magistrate, and the Valers’ concept of emergence? They seemed to produce very similar behavior; I owed my life to the fact that Sark and Osa had been of one mind, earlier today in Mahsht.

I was on my feet by now; I limped over to him, held out my hand, and thanked him. He shook my hand firmly and said nothing.

“The Condemned Man had a good yarn to spin for the Magistrate today,” I said. I guess I was trying to humor him.

His face darkened. “But he could not tell it without speaking too of the ones who behaved evilly. Yes, it is the case that—thanks to the spirit of the Innocent—some good was achieved. But I can scarcely believe that the Magistrate’s ultimate judgment of this world was much shifted, either way, by what he heard from the Condemned Man today.”

Not for the first time I was astonished by Magister Sark’s ability to be intelligent and wise while spouting prehistoric nonsense. “For your own part, anyway,” I pointed out, “it seems you chose in a way that reflects well on you and your world.”

“The Innocent moved me,” he insisted. “Give all credit to her.”

“I give you my personal thanks,” I said, “and ask you to relay it to the Innocent the next time you hear from her.”

He shook his head in exasperation, then finally chuckled; though such a grim fellow was he that his chuckle was something between a gag and a cough. “You don’t understand at all.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “I am in no shape for Dialog right now, but perhaps some other time I can try to explain to you how I see all of these matters.”

His reaction was noncommittal, but he understood that the conversation was over. He wandered away. I collected some blank paper from Yul’s fetch and began to scribble out notes to my friends at the Convox. Magister Sark got into a long conversation with Yul and Cord, interrupted from time to time by Ganelial Crade, who of course belonged to a completely different faith, and who paced back and forth at a distance, fuming, then darted in from time to time to dispute some fine point of deology.

A mobe swung through, dropped off the driver who would take the Valers south, and picked up Magister Sark. The Valers began to find seats aboard the coach. Fraa Osa was the last to board. I handed him a stack of notes. “For my friends at Tredegarh,” I explained, “if you would not mind bearing them.”

He bowed.

“You’ve already done me plenty of favors, so it is okay to say no,” I went on.

“You did us a favor,” he countered, “by creating an emergence nested within the larger emergence, and giving us an opportunity to train.”

I said nothing. I was wondering what he meant by “the larger emergence,” and reckoned he must be talking about the Cousins. He was sifting through the letters I’d given him. “You have many friends at the Convox!” he remarked, and looked up at me quizzically. This was probably an indirect way of asking what the heck are you doing!? but I ignored it. “The long one, there, is for a girl named Ala. The others are for some other fraas and suurs of mine—”

“Aah!” exclaimed Fraa Osa, holding one up. “You know the famous Jesry!”

I didn’t even want to think about what was implied by Jesry’s being famous, so I glided past it and directed his attention to the last letter in the stack. “Lio,” I said, “Fraa Lio is a student of Vale-lore.”

“Ah!” he exclaimed. As if Lio were unique; as if the world, for thousands of years, at any given moment, had not contained millions of vlor students.

“Mostly self-taught. But it is important to him. If this letter were handed to him by even the most junior member of the Ringing Vale math, it would be the greatest honor of his life. Uh, don’t tell him I said that.”

Fraa Osa bowed again. “I shall comply with all of your instructions.” He put his foot on the coach’s running board. “Here I say farewell—unless—?” And he looked between me and the coach.

I fell for it hard. I imagined the long ride on the coach full of authentic Ringing Vale avout, maybe a night or two in a room at a casino down south, a journey—safe and well-organized—to Tredegarh, reunion with my friends there. If these people could somehow get their hands on a plane, it could even happen in a day. I imagined all of that long and hard enough to savor it, to look forward to it.

But I knew it was all a daydream. That I had to pull back. That the longer I kept on this way the harder it was going to be.

“I want to climb on board that thing and go to Tredegarh with you like that water wants to find the ocean,” I said, gesturing to the river. “But to quit in the middle”—just because I’m beat up and homesick and scared—“seems wrong. Fraa Jad—he’s the Millenarian who sent me—would never understand.”