The way Tain Hu told it, Tain Shir came down into the valley, alone, to negotiate with her mother. They met above the waterfall where Hu would one day build her keep. They paced each other on opposite banks of the river.

Shir told her mother, Vultjag, listen, I serve a better master now. Put down your spear. Come back to Lachta. Mother, you can serve my master, too.

Tain Ko raised her spear for the last time. She chose her final words.

I am not mastered.

The crossbow was faster than the spear.

*   *   *

“DURANCE,” Iscend whispered. “He’s ready.”

“Yes.” I shook myself too hard. I had to lean on my elbow, like a reclining lover, to get my head down to the ear of Dziransi’s casket.

“Dzir,” I murmured, in mountain Stakhi. “Dzir, do you hear me? Follow my voice. You’re not alone. Follow my voice.”

Sealed and muzzled within the steel sarcophagus he couldn’t so much as wiggle a toe. I think from the noises he made that he thought he’d been crushed in a collapse in the tunnels of his home Mansion, high up on Mount Karakys in the Wintercrests, where no trees grew.

I signaled to Iscend for light. She lit a candle with her sparkfire and dilated the casket’s left iris to the width of a blade of grass. “I’m holding up a light, Dzir,” I whispered, showing him the candle. “I’m holding up a light for you. Can you come to it?”

He gagged and rasped.

“Come closer, Dzir.”

Like river rapids the dream-hammer sucked him under. Like a sluiceway the drug flowed beneath the dam of his discipline. The dream-hammer gets into the fork of the mind that divides the roads of truth and falsehood, and it turns all the signs toward truth.

I unbuckled the casket’s faceplate.

Fungus-green eyes stared back at me, red with grief and madness. His beard had tangled in the steel muzzle that clapped his jaw shut.

“It’s all right,” I whispered, “it’s all right, I’m here.”

He looked up into the face of a strange woman against aurora stars. Not with a year’s planning could I have staged a better backdrop. The stars were everything to the Stakhi, and against those stars I had blue Stakhi eyes.

Gently I unmuzzled him. I knew he wouldn’t scream. Not as long as I held his eyes.

“Dzir,” I murmured. He shuddered at my touch. “Dzir, do you want to go home?”

He nodded as much as he could in the casket: only a tremor of his lips. He was weeping. He wanted very badly to go home.

“I have a message for you to carry home. Will you do that for me, Dzir?”

His jaw firmed up. His scowl tightened. He was summoning his courage. “Yesh,” he mumbled, in Stakhi. “Yesh. My duty.”