It had seemed miraculous when Eremon saw his daughter Chemoise. She’d grown beautiful, no longer the freckle-faced child of his memory.

Seeing her had been enough. Eremon now felt his life was complete; hereafter he’d take a long slide into oblivion.

Yet one deed more lay before him. As he languished in the Dedicates’ wagon, it began to shake as men climbed onto the buckboard, opened the door. Slowly, Eremon opened his eyes. In the dark wain, flies rose in clouds from forlorn Dedicates around him. Men and women were crammed together like salted minnows in a keg, lying on beds of moldering hay.

Facilitators in gray robes stood huffing by the open door. Shafts of sunlight stabbing into the room blinded him, but Eremon could see that they’d set a body against the wall. A new Dedicate. Another victim.

“What have we here?” the guard asked. “Metabolism?”

The facilitator nodded. Eremon could see the scars on the man—a dozen endowments of metabolism he’d taken, and now he served as a vector.

Raj Ahten’s facilitators looked for a place to lay the newcomer. A blind Dedicate who slept next to Eremon rolled in his sleep, huddling for warmth next to a limp rag of a man.

Thus a slim spot opened beside Eremon, and now the facilitators muttered in their own tongue, “Mazza, halab dao abo”—“Here, move this brick of camel dung.”

One man nudged Eremon’s stiff legs aside, as if he were the brick in question. They lay the new Dedicate beside him.

Eremon stared into the fat face of the eunuch Salim al Daub, not five inches from his own. The fat man breathed oh so slowly, in the way of one who has given metabolism. The man who held Eremon’s endowment lay next to him, defenseless. A vector for metabolism. A vector, Eremon suspected, for Raj Ahten.

Salim slept a deep slumber from which Eremon swore he’d never wake.

A guard sat in the wagon, an Invincible on a stool in the far corner, wearing a curved dagger and bored expression. Eremon could not risk moving quickly, could not attract attention, but, then, he’d not moved quickly in six years.

For long minutes Eremon slowly tried to unclench his right hand. This unclenching came hard. He felt too excited, too wrathful. A thrill took him, for if he could destroy this man, he would win a double boon—his own endowments back, while he robbed Raj Ahten of metabolism.

Yet outside, a battle raged. Darkness strobed the sky, glimpsed as shadows and light breaking into the wagon. Men were screaming on the castle walls.

Eremon wished that he still had his endowments of strength, wished he could throttle Salim with supernatural finesse. But those had been lost last night.