“This”—he expanded his ribbands until they seemed to include the whole hollow and all that had occurred within it—“is truly unprecedented. Nor will it ever recur. And my presence within it is unprecedented, unrepeatable, ecstatically unique. I speak for the Insequent as a people. Those powers which they are able to invest in me, I possess. Ere now, such a confluence has never transpired. Come what may, it will never transpire again. And no other living being will ever know its fraught joys.

“Behold me, lady, at the crown and culmination of my greed.” Bright bands of color wove around him as if he and they formed a tapestry of exaltation. “Never will I be deemed the greatest of the Insequent. Nor will my deeds determine the outcome of the Earth. Yet I do not scruple to proclaim that no Insequent has achieved the fruition which I attain here. No other Insequent will attain it. Even the Harrow in his vainglory will not.”

Linden stared at him, trying to grasp the implications of his peroration. Although his human aura remained partially concealed by his raiment, she discerned that he was telling the truth. But how would such a man react in a crisis? A crisis was certain: she knew the Despiser too well to believe otherwise. What would a man who prized unique sensations above all else do when he faced butchery and was threatened with death?

He had threatened to reveal the Harrow’s true name—the most fatal act an Insequent could commit—but he may have been bluffing.

While she pondered that question, looking for ways to examine the Ardent further, the Harrow said to him in a black voice, “Yet you know naught of the deep places of the Earth.”

The plump Insequent raised his eyebrows as though the Harrow’s statement touched a sore place in him. “That is sooth,” he conceded in a more subdued manner. “I fear them. They are hazardous beyond estimation. Indeed, some few among the Insequent have perished in their search for knowledge of those depths. I need only name the Auriference.

“In a distant age,” he explained to Linden, “a time that far preceded that of the Theomach, she delved deeply, seeking a knowledge both ancient and immeasurable. Desiring as did the Theomach to be named the greatest of the Insequent, she found only the loss of use and mind and life. Yet her end was by no act of the Insequent. Rather she was unmade by evils too vicious to be contemplated. For that reason, our kind has largely eschewed the Land, deeming that its perils exceed its grandeur and mystery. The exceptions are infrequent and secret—though it is surely plain to all that the Harrow stands among them.

“By my own deeds,” he concluded, “my doom is bound to yours, and to the Harrow’s. I do not aspire to end my days in terror.”