Fallows saw him recoil, and the faintest smile twitched at his lips. “I had to shatter my own ankles—smash and reset them, you know. When I first came to your world. Later I had them broken and rebuilt again, by a doctor who was offered a million dollars to keep my secret and was paid in lead to confirm his silence.” Fallows brushed back his curly hair and touched the tip of one pink ear. “Thank goodness I am not a Mountain Faun but only a mere faun of the plains! The Mountain Faun have ears just like the deer of your world, whereas we simple country faun have the ears of men. Though I would have gladly cut my ears off for her if it had been necessary. I would have cut my heart out and offered it to her slippery and red and beating in my own hands.”

Fallows rose and took a step toward him. The torch, which he had never set aside, shifted from blue to a lurid, polluted emerald. Sparks began to fall from the flames.

“I don’t need my torch,” Fallows said, “to know what you are. And I didn’t need to see your sketches to know your heart.”

He tossed the sketchbook at Christian’s feet.

Christian looked down at a drawing of severed heads on sticks: a lion, a zebra, a girl, a man, a child. The breeze caught the pages and leafed through them idly. Drawings of guns. Drawings of slaughter. Christian’s stunned, frightened gaze shifted to the torch.

“Why is it changing color? I’m not a menace!”

“Charn doesn’t know much about devil-thorn. It doesn’t change color in the presence of menace but of wickedness.”

“I never killed anything!” Christian said.

“No. You only laughed while other men killed. Who is worse, Christian, the sadist who serves his true nature honestly or the ordinary man who does nothing to stop him?”

“You killed! You went to Africa to kill a lion!”

“I went to Africa to free as many of my empress’s friends as I could, and so I did, after putting a little money in the right hands. A dozen elephants and two dozen giraffes. The lions I infected with one of your unclean world’s many diseases, to give them their dignity and release. As for the grandfather I shot, he was ready to walk the tall grass in the savanna of ghosts. I asked his forgiveness the day before the hunt, and he gave it. You spoke to him, too—after I shot him. Do you remember what you said as he bled out?”

Christian’s face shriveled with emotion, and his eyes stung terribly.

“You asked him how it felt to die. He tried to show you, Christian, and he almost did it. How I wish you hadn’t escaped him. It would’ve saved me an ugly bit of work here.”

“I’m sorry!” Christian cried.

“Aye,” Fallows said. “Aren’t we both?”

He lowered the barrel of the gun. The steel kissed Christian’s right temple.