Of course, there was her relationship with the man who bore the black staff. She was important to him, even if she claimed otherwise. Nor was he dead, as she also claimed. That was just a ploy to throw him off, and a bad one at that. He would have known if the bearer of the staff were dead; he would have sensed it in the same way he had sensed the other’s presence all those weeks ago when he had first come looking for him. No, the bearer was alive, and the girl knew where he was.

But he didn’t think it was the bearer who had saved her. Possession of one of the Word’s talismans created a formidable opponent, but it did not invest the user with magic capable of transporting another human from one place to another. No human whom he had ever encountered or even heard about possessed magic that strong. Not even the legends told of anyone with that sort of power. This was something else, he believed. This was a Faerie creature, an ancient one in service to the Word.

Yet why had it bothered with this girl?

He thought about it at length as he walked away from the fortress toward the mountains, climbed the foothills to the lower slopes and then the slopes toward places where he would likely find passage through to whatever valleys lay beyond. He considered the possibilities, but nothing helpful suggested itself. The problem was that he didn’t know enough to make an educated guess. There was a background to all of this to which he was not privy. Not yet, anyway. That would change once he found the girl again.

And he would find her. He would find her as surely as the sun rose at the beginning and set at the end of the day. He would find her as surely as he would find the bearer of the black staff. However long it took, whatever he had to do to make it happen, he would find them both.

So he walked for several days, taking his time, singing his songs and humming his tunes, at peace with the wasteland around him. He passed through stretches of ruined earth, decimated forests, blackened hills, and scorched grasslands, and he was pleased. This was what he had worked so hard for, what all those who had shed their humanity had sought—a landscape devoid of living things, barren and blasted, empty of nature’s troublesome creatures. He could control this sort of world, and control was paramount to his reworked personality. Control was power, and power was sustenance. All the things he had once thought so important—things he could no longer even remember in the specific, but only in the general—had been left by the wayside in favor of the one absolute—power over life and death.