The helicopter lighted in the glade, and from the house walked out the figures of the ones who were going away. As the dark filled the common and the lights of the house were unlit, they were like shadows she could only guess to be Malach, Kei, Althene. A white shine on Malach's hair. He moved stiffly, old now, as she had seen him last. And the two ghosts of the dogs, unsure perhaps at departure. Kei carried a bundle in his arms—the mysterious black dog, maybe. And Michael and Cheta followed with the few bags.

Althene's shadow moved strongly ahead. From the bikers' camp someone whistled. And another dog barked, and was hushed.

In a moment they would be gone.

The trees swallowed them, and then, presumably, the helicopter, which rose again like a chariot of fire.

I feel nothing, Rachaela thought. Nothing.

She thought of her mother's body lying in its box, all wrong, a stuffed doll of flesh.

Juliet started earnestly to wash Jacob.

How strange. I feel nothing. And my eyes are wet.

CHAPTER 46

IN THE SCENTED PALACE, WITH ITS pagodas of plants and rose-petal lighting, Stella was remade. Recreated, as something which Nobbi would never have recognized. An alien. Which was as it had to be.

There was so much money it was beyond belief, and Stella did not believe in it. She had let the solicitor, and then the bank manager, and then the financial consultant, deal with it. They seemed to enjoy this, their faces glowing with greed. And she sat quietly and gazed at them, from the valley of the Shadow.

And when it was all over, she came here, to this place which promised a kind of beauty that Stella knew to be also unreal.

With her she brought a small overnight bag. There were only a limited number of items in it, one of them the lion Nobbi had left for her, her true inheritance.

First there was a sauna, and then a Jacuzzi. Then the sunbed, the massage, the facial. Then they came upon her hair, her face, her hands. They were like flocks of pretty birds settling on a worm to make it into an angel with their beaks. But they were tactful too. Trying her to see if she wanted chatter, and when they found she did not, silent and soothing as nurses at a deathbed.

It was a deathbed. The old Stella had been killed, and now the new Stella was fashioned on her bones.

She saw it coming, bit by bit. She was not amazed.

In the end, they pulled a sort of diaphanous analogous dustsheet off her, and there she was.

Not beautiful, for Stella could not be made into a beauty even by such clever birds. But no longer a worm of the earth. Winged, now.