Nomi closed her eyes, but she saw something bloody and slick being pierced, strung up and hung on that fetus tree. And it belonged to her. “No,” she moaned, shaking her head against the wooden support behind her.

“Perhaps they've sought such release for generations,” Sordon said. “I try to comfort myself with that idea—that they're not mad, but regressed to how they were when the Sleeping Gods gave them such responsibility. But it's no real comfort. What happened to them is my fault.”

“So throw yourself from the cliff!”

“I can't,” he said.

“How are you so old?”

“I don't know. Maybe the food they eat, the drinks they make. The steam from the ground . . . I don't know.”

Steam? Nomi wondered. But every time this old man spoke it made things worse, expanding her nightmare and driving her deeper into a despair she already believed had found its deepest parts. She wanted to hear no more. She hated him, Noreela's First Voyager and one of its heroes, sitting before her feeling sorry for himself yet refusing to cut her down. She hated him.

“Go away,” she said.

“No.”

“Leave me alone.”

“No. I believe I'll stay. Until they come, at least.”

“Why?”

“Because talking to you is making me feel better.”

She opened her eyes, and the bastard was smiling. “My name is—”

“It won't change anything,” Sordon said. “I'm far too old to care.”

SHE HAD TO hang there and listen. She shouted at first, trying to drown out his hoarse voice with her own, but he pummeled her legs with his walking stick until she fell silent.

He told her that he'd known others would eventually come, lured by the Fallen God, and they had. But the Sentinels had always caught them. At first they killed them up here, but as the Sentinels regressed, they started throwing them back down. Even as the guardians of the Fallen God were changing—venting their knowledge, reverting to a far older state—so, ironically, their purpose became more entrenched in their minds than ever. They fought several long, terrible wars, projecting their confusion and chaos into violent confrontation, and their numbers reduced.

“I don't care!” Nomi shouted, and Sordon probed the wound in her leg. She screamed, she cried. He cleaned it afterward, conscious of infection, and chewed a herb and root before pressing it into the flesh. Her screams seemed to draw him on.

He told her how the Sentinels that won the wars started slaughtering the unborn. They feared the sleeper, and when they moved out of their villages and returned to the land, the trees bearing the mummified fetuses became their shrines.

“Leave me,” Nomi said, appealing to his pity. But he had pity only for himself. He cried as he spoke but did not look at her, and Nomi knew that Sordon Perlenni was seeing only his own desolate past.