Makemin stands before our assembled number with his head down and his back to us, still silent as a stone. In our search, we found dead Wacagan everywhere. Many still bled from fresh wounds.

Everyone waking-dreamt himself valiant defender of the shining city, repulsing barbarians repulsing the invading kingdom. No one has set off the machine I saw yet, and I have given my warning about it.

Thrushchurl sits on a boulder of broken concrete not far from me, rocking slightly and humming his song. Makemin strides over and tears him from the stone, fistful of jacket in his hand.

“Revive them at once!” he bellows. Makemin is pointing to the bodies. A Yeseg militiaman lying there with his head flung back, his mouth a rigid, fibrous O. Makemin shakes Thrushchurl, who seems stiff and light as a scarecrow, eyeing Makemin back, with crazy fascination.

“You were at the mortuary school—you know how to do it! Bring them back!”

Thrushchurl’s face writhes weirdly around his teeth in an expression of utter bewilderment. Makemin releases him and now he has me, shakes me, face in my face—

“You do it!” Pulls me closer with overpowering strength. “You were there, you saw them do it! You do it!”

I’m not saying anything—his eyes are like black pits and I can only stare at them. They don’t budge even as he shakes me so hard my teeth rattle.

“Listen to me damn you—you do it! What did they teach you medics anyway!?”

What I’m looking into isn’t even a face but a pitted crag the setting sun rusts over.

Silichieh’s voice comes to me from somewhere—“Low, can you do it? Spirits here talk to you—can you talk back, and tell them to go back in?”

“Well can you?!” Makemin nails the words into my face.

“No! I don’t know anything!” I hear my voice and try to put force into it and it only makes my throat knock shut. I strain out the words as though I were being choked—“I only patch wounds up! I don’t know anything! I don’t know why they talk to me it just happens!”

Makemin is gone. I can’t take my eyes off of him. The bit of uniform he held me by is still bunched, slowly uncrumpling, and seems to retain his heat and venom, I want to pull off my tunic to keep it from seeping all over me like a pollution. It’s like a fat spider fastened on me.

Makemin goes to Jil Punkinflake, who leans by a ruined wall, his head and shoulders lost in the deep shadow of the overhang.

“You!” Jil Punkinflake is now driven back against the wall. “You do it!”

I can’t see his face. The voice comes out of the dark under the overhang, resonating in the stone.

“Do what?” It asks, bubbling with a wild derision.

“Bring them back!” Makemin roars, drawing forward and bashing Jil Punkinflake against the wall with one hand, pointing again at the Yeseg body stretched there on the rust.