The winds of autumn came and made the dry leaves whirl about. He sensed it would be a good thing to have the power of such movement and so he altered his form, adding another pair of appendages, somewhat leaflike in their shape. These had the power of catching the wind and gave him the freedom to rise up off the ground and join the leaves in their whirling and their careering through the air. As he did so, he sensed that others were around him, whirling about just like the dry leaves did, caught up helplessly in the dry cold wind, unable to master their own movements as he was able to do.

He understood then why the whirling of the dry leaves had held such fascination for him since the first time he had beheld it: this was what others of his kind did when they lacked the power to do otherwise.

When they had only just come to this place.

When they had only just died.

He was dead.

Chapter 27

Chapter 27

To mathematicians, Zelrijk-Aalberg might have been famous because of the fractal crack in the tavern floor, but to lawyers it was interesting because of its legal status and sovereignty. To make an extremely long story short, Z-A was different from the surrounding principalities because of certain peculiarities in how its ownership had changed hands at a few pivotal moments during the last thousand or so years. It had ended up being one of those places like Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man that was neither one thing or the other. It had never formally and explicitly become part of either the Netherlands or Belgium. This had been more of an oversight than a political statement. It hadn’t made its way onto a treaty because the scribes had run out of vellum and decided to just leave it off. No one had noticed or cared until quite recently. During a conversation with Enoch Root, who apparently had some kind of old family link to the place and knew all of the details, El Shepherd had somehow become aware of its special status, and put a building full of medievalists and lawyers to work sorting out the details. He’d purchased all of the property inside the boundary and consolidated his position to the point where he’d felt comfortable minting his own currency (digital only) and issuing passports.

Ten years ago, he’d been sitting in a corner booth in that tavern, on the Zelrijk-Aalberg side of the crack, when Belgian police, acting in coordination with Interpol, had come to arrest him on suspicion of having masterminded the Moab hoax.