“Were you mortal by then?” Susannah asked. “It sounds as though maybe you were.”

“I was on my way,” she said. “It was a process Walter called becoming.”

“All right. Go on.”

But here Mia’s recollections were lost in a dark fugue—not todash, but far from pleasant. A kind of amnesia, and it was red. A color Susannah had come to distrust. Had the pregnant woman’s transition from the world of the spirit to the world of the flesh—her trip to Mia—been accomplished through some other kind of doorway? She herself didn’t seem to know. Only that there had been a time of darkness—unconsciousness, she supposed—and then she had awakened “… as you see me. Only not yet pregnant, of course.”

According to Walter, Mia could not actually make a baby, even as a mortal woman. Carry, yes. Conceive, no. So it came to pass that one of the demon elementals had done a great service for the Crimson King, taking Roland’s seed as female and passing it on to Susannah as male. And there had been another reason, as well. Walter hadn’t mentioned it, but Mia had known.

“It’s the prophecy,” she said, looking into Fedic’s deserted and shadowless street. Across the way, a robot that looked like Andy of the Calla stood silent and rusting in front of the Fedic Café, which promised GOOD MEELS CHEEP.

“What prophecy?” Susannah asked.

“‘He who ends the line of Eld shall conceive a child of incest with his sister or his daughter, and the child will be marked, by his red heel shall you know him. It is he who shall stop the breath of the last warrior.’”

“Woman, I’m not Roland’s sister, or his daughter, either! You maybe didn’t notice a small but basic difference in the color of our hides, namely his being white and mine being black.” But she thought she had a pretty good idea of what the prophecy meant, just the same. Families were made in many ways. Blood was only one of them.

“Did he not tell you what dinh means?” Mia asked.

“Of course. It means leader. If he was in charge of a whole country instead of just three scruffy-ass gunpuppies, it’d mean king.”

“Leader and king, you say true. Now, Susannah, will you tell me that such words aren’t just poor substitutes for another?”

Susannah made no reply.

Mia nodded as though she had, then winced when a fresh contraction struck. It passed, and she went on. “The sperm was Roland’s. I believe it may have been preserved somehow by the old people’s science while the demon elemental turned itself inside out and made man from woman, but that isn’t the important part. The important part is that it lived and found the rest of itself, as ordained by ka.”

“My egg.”

“Your egg.”

“When I was raped in the ring of stones.”

“Say true.”

Susannah sat, musing. Finally she looked up. “Seem to me that it’s what I said before. You didn’t like it then, not apt to like it now, but—girl, you just the baby-sitter.”