The moon filled from its crescent, and the sky darkened as lesser stars failed. The mountain, too, faded, and the camp below, and the forest, and the Drakspine ridge—everything but the rock on which Tara sat cross-legged with her briefcase.

“What’s happening here?” she said, out loud, to the moon. “I mean, really happening.”

Does it matter?

“Yes.”

We are all patterns after a fashion, though of different orders. I can usher you from your order into mine, and sustain you as you travel. Distance is one, here—the moon is the same everywhere.

“You’re wrapping me inside yourself.”

For a while.

“My briefcase, too?”

Do you always question miracles this much?

“Yes.”

Your belongings will remain intact.

“And my soul?”

If you wish, though it’s a bit bent. I could help you, long as you’re up here. Ease out some of the sharp turns and snarls.

“I’d rather walk.”

I care for my own.

“I am not yours,” Tara said. “Let’s get that clear. I crossed a continent to save you. I challenged gods and Deathless Kings and I left friends behind. I did all that for my own reasons—none of which were, because you told me to.”

The Goddess laughed, but her laughter hitched in the middle, as if She was in pain.

“You have priests and priestesses, and you use them. That’s not my path. I won’t command you, but I won’t be your servant either.”

What, then?

“Your partner. If you’ll have me.”

I love you, she said, strange as you are.

“Do we have a deal?”

Partners. Now, for Spider’s sake, Tara, get on the damn road. Cat won’t last much longer.

“There’s no road,” she started to say, but there was.

She stood. She took up her briefcase, and stepped onto the moonlit path.

67

67

Corbin Rafferty wandered through the shadows of his mind, down empty streets beneath the bloody blasted sky. He walked the road’s centerline, following moonsong.

Umar trailed him. He was shadow, presence, weight. Corbin did not need to look back anymore. He knew his role.

Near sunset he found himself home, at the apartment he shared with the girls. Lacking a key, he climbed the fire escape outside and pounded on the living room window—would have broken in, but the place was empty. The apartment looked as he left it the night he fell, the night the moon overwhelmed him. The girls had been gone for a long time.

Where?

The song bore him south to Market Square. He had expected the market to stand empty as the rest of the city, and was surprised to find a crowd. The stalls were closed, more than closed, they’d been cleared, pushed back to make room for an audience, hundreds of them, a thousand, even, on blankets and towels, on the filthy cobblestones Ray Capistano had wet with blood each morning for twenty years.