Anything. And in that moment, he meant it. This was a man whose impossible needs had pressed down on Ferras Vansen’s childhood like the lid of the stone coffin he was prattling about, but the love was still stronger than any fear, any comfort. To do what his Tati asked he would break even those fading commandments, Eat no food, Accept no gifts, Remember your name! He would flaunt the gods themselves before their thrones.

But the gods are asleep, too, he remembered, or thought he did. Who told me that?

Come, he told the faded ghost of his father. Come. I’ll take you where you need to go.

Beyond the city they passed into a shadowy wood and then walked down a hillside covered with black ivy and gray birches into a silent valley. They crossed a blood-colored river at the bottom of the valley on rocks that stood up through the flood like teeth. They walked on, the sky as bleak as stone, the light never brighter than a faint reddish glow in the far west, like a bloodstain that would not wash out of an old shirt.

Time passed, or would have in a different place. Vansen’s father sang as he walked, senseless ritual ditties about dividing his body in pieces, endless loving verses that described the divestiture of flesh and memory, but otherwise the old man said little and seemed to recall nothing of his former life. There were moments Vansen thought he had been terribly wrong, that he had seized some old man who was not his father, but then an angle of his companion’s insubstantial face, an expression flitting across the thin mouth like a fish in a shallow pool, would convince him he had been right after all.

They crossed four more streams, one of moving ice, one of water that boiled and bubbled with heat, one so full of green growing things that it seemed motionless, although the streambed squirmed between the roots with tiny, chittering, splashing shapes, and last a torrent of which they could see nothing but moving fog in a deep crevasse, although they heard sounds coming up from it that no fog ever made, and across which they had to leap, Vansen clutching at the misty shape that marked where the old man’s hand should have been.

Eventually all distinctions became one, each step the same step, each song the old man sang the same song. Shadows approached them, some of them fearful to look at, but Vansen told them his name and the old man’s name and they retreated into the twilight once more. Other times the shadows came in fairer shapes with offers of hospitality—sumptuous meals, soft beds, or even more intimate comforts—but Vansen learned to refuse these just as firmly, and those shapes retreated, too.

Finally they came to a wide, empty land where the dust blew always and the wind was fierce, a place where they could walk no faster than a dying man could crawl. At times in that place his father faltered and Vansen had to pull him along through the stinging, smothering dust. Once, when even the twilight was blotted out by thick clouds and they trudged forward in complete darkness, the old man fell and could not get up. As he lay, croaking a song about white bracelets and hearts of smoke, Ferras Vansen crouched beside him in despair. He knew that he could rise and walk away and the old man would not see him go, would never even realize he was gone. Instead he staggered to his feet, then bent and lifted the old man onto his back. Pedar Vansen’s body had no more substance than a woman’s veil, but somehow he was also heavier than a great stone, and Vansen could walk only a few steps each time before he had to stop to catch his breath.