“Wait, I—” Christian shrieked.

His voice was lost to the rolling sound of thunder.

The Sleeper Awakes

After, Fallows sat by the girl to wait. For a long time, nothing happened. Fauns crept close to the dolmen but stayed respectfully outside the circle, looking in. The oldest of them, Forgiveknot, an elderly faun with a rippling scar across his leathern face, began to sing. He sang Fallows’s old name, the name he had left behind in this world when he fled through the little door with the last of the empress’s treasures, to find the breath of kings and return her to life.

The light had taken on a faint, pearly glow when the girl yawned and rubbed one fist in a sleepy eye. She looked up, her eyes fogged with drowsiness, and her gaze found Fallows. For a moment she didn’t recognize him, her brow creased with puzzlement. Then she did, and she laughed.

“Oh, Slowfoot,” she said. “You’ve gone and grown up without me! And you have lost your proud horns! Oh, my darling. Oh, my old playmate!”

By the time Fallows had shed his human clothes and Forgiveknot was cutting his hair with a wide-bladed knife, she was sitting on the edge of the stone altar, swinging her feet above the grass, as the fauns formed a line to kneel before her, and bow their heads, and receive her blessing.

A World Awakes with Her

For the third time, Charn gritted his teeth to keep from passing out. When the woozy feeling passed, he went on, crawling arm over arm, staying down. He went slowly, crossing no more than ten yards in a single hour. His left ankle was broken—badly. It shattered when he fell from the blind, and it had been a narrow thing giving Fallows the slip.

There were six fauns in the circle of worship, set there to cut off any escape through the little door. But Charn still had a gun. He had methodically worked his way higher, avoiding the murder-weed that would whisper if it saw him—“poison! poison!”—moving so slowly that the crackle of dead leaves beneath him was all but imperceptible, even to the sharp ears of the fauns. There was a shelf of rock, jutting out over the clearing. It was accessible only from one side, as the slope on the other side was too steep and the earth too loose. Nor could it easily be approached from the crag above. For an armed man on this outcropping, though, firing into the clearing would be like shooting faun in a barrel.

Whether he ought to open fire . . . well, that was another question. The faun war party might yet be led away. The boy Christian could still make a convenient appearance and draw them off. On the other hand, if the numbers below swelled, perhaps it was best to simply slink away. He had survived in this world for nine months once before, and he knew a golem who would make a deal. General Gorm the Obese always had work for a bad man with a gun.