Umar did not look. “I do not need you,” he said. “But you can aid me. And in return I will let you hurt her. No god is so great that small weapons cannot bring her low. I will make you mistletoe. Without me, you will rail for eons outside her temple and end trapped in nightmares. Be of use to me, or surrender yourself to her.”

Needs warred in him: safety, revenge, control.

Corbin would have done anything to turn from that bleeding, burning sky. If Umar, or the thing that rode him, told Corbin to tear his eyes from their sockets, he would have hooked his thumbs and gouged.

But this was better. This way, the moon would die, and he would own himself again.

Corbin followed Umar through empty streets. Concrete tore his bare soles.

60

60

Tara woke in an army-green fog. Two blinks, three, focused the world, added edges and depth and form to color. Words came next: tent, cot, sun. Shale. Once she worked past monosyllables: mission.

She sat up fast, blinking blood-motes away.

“Here,” someone said. She reached for the voice, found a glass of water, and drank until the water froze to ice and clicked against her teeth. Frost feathered from her grip on the glass.

She heard a man laugh, and swung round on the cot to face him. She was clothed—shirt untucked, slacks torn and wrinkled, and unshod, but dressed enough for modesty if not for armor. She set down the glass and glared across the tent at Altemoc. “What’s so funny?”

He sat in a folding chair, ankle crossed over knee, cane propped against his hip. His fingers trailed over the frog crouched on a silver globe that served for his cane’s handle. “You reminded me of someone,” he said. “How’s your head?”

“Outside of the tap-dancing elephants, I’m fine.” Exploring, her fingers found a scabbed cut beneath her hair. She asked the question she’d been dreading: “What day is it?”

“You’ve been asleep two hours.”

“I grayed out. I shouldn’t be up for days. If ever.”

“I gave you soulstuff. You’re fine.”

“What was the contract? What did you offer? What did you ask me for?”

“Nothing.” He raised his hand. Green fire danced down his scars and faded. “That’s not how we work.”

“You offer services free of charge.”

“Not exactly,” he said, and spun the cane. “Our beneficiaries aren’t the ones who pay. A Deathless Queen on a throne of melted swords asks us to heal a War-made plague in a border village. The plague poses her no threat, but she doesn’t want the people of that village dead.”

“Out of the goodness of her heart?”

“I used to think that,” he said, “but that’s a village of potential customers. Hard to rule if your instrument of rule breaks the land it touches. Craftwork destroys the world, so it must learn to heal.”