He carried Wart all the way to the darkness. The darkness proved to be a cool dark of overhanging spruce trees; not nearly so terrifying, close up. Aneas laid Wart gently on the pine needles and turned and trudged all the way back to the pile of corpses. The second was Ta-se-ho; the old hunter weighed nothing, although the wound that killed him was a terrible ragged tear and a loop of his intestines came out and caught on the brambles. Aneas put the old man down and pushed the slippery stuff back into the wound, and because this was his mind, he put out his hand and closed the wound. Then he lifted the old hunter and carried him to the woods.

A little golden light fell on a patch of green grass, and there was no sign of Wart. His corpse was gone.

“Two can play at this symbolism game,” Aneas said bravely, although tears were rolling down his face, and a strange hope burned in his throat. He laid the Outwaller in the sun, and turned away, afraid even to watch.

His mother was the hardest. He didn’t even think that he felt he had killed her; hadn’t even registered such a guilt, but while he carried her slight, rotting form, stiff with rigor mortis and with the skin moving disgustingly over the hardened muscles, he thought of Orley; of his hatred for the man. Aneas was too intelligent to fail to understand himself.

He placed Ghause in the widened circle of sunlight, on what had become a mound. When he laid her down, he knelt by her awhile, and then he went back and got Fitzalan.

There was something particularly terrible about handling in death a body you had lusted for in life. Ands something disconcerting and paradoxical about the corpse; it was more decomposed than his mother’s. And the head was attached. Some of Richard’s rotting skin stuck to his; fluids leached out of his friend. The smell was so bad he choked.

He got Richard to the new meadow. He took time to lay the body out, tried to close his friend’s eyes, but that proved a bad idea. His gorge rose.

He turned with a muttered prayer and went back for Anthony.

He looked at Anthony for a while, too, wondering whether he’d loved the boy or simply wanted to strike a blow at his father. Who had certainly struck back. In the extended metaphor of his mind, Anthony looked exactly as he had looked when his father had ordered the boy killed. He was not decomposed at all.

“I knew,” Aneas said aloud. “I knew what he’d do.”

He went back and got Prudentia, and the others. All in all, there were an uncountable number of trips; some he held only as shadowy forms, others had a firm reality of decay and ordure; this, too, he understood.