Into his dreams crept whispering voices, arguing.

“It’s not worth the risk, Great One.”

“He has to be polarized. He has to finish what he started.”

“But the Power we’d use… We have so little. If we fail…”

“If we fail, we’re lost. And if we don’t try, nothing changes. We’re as good as lost.”

The stone beast and woman in white? Ethrian wondered. Had to be. But how was he tapping their exchange?

He slept, and yet had a feeling of wakefulness, of being outside himself. He could float and gaze down on the curled form of Ethrian, lying there between the stone beast’s paws. He could be amazed. That boy had changed. He had grown.

So had the pool. It was bigger, deeper, murkier, and muddier. A few droopy reeds now grew along one side. A frog peeped out from among them. Insects swarmed. A family of dull-colored mudhens patrolled the pond’s surface. Swallows had daubed a few mud nests into cracks in one of the stone beast’s forelegs. There was a twig nest in the scraggly old acacia that had been there when Ethrian had arrived.

A turtle dragged itself from the pond and paused to take the sun.

“We’re growing. He’s opened the door…”

“It’s a crack too narrow to slide a razor through. All this time. What’s been gained? A bigger pond? Ten thousand years of this won’t restore Nawami. The door has to open all the way. We need a flood of power. Take him there, Sahmanan. Show him.”

“The investment is too big. It would leave us blind. We couldn’t see to K’Mar Khevi-tan.”

“I know the risks. Nevertheless, you go. The Word has been spoken.”

“As you speak, so must it be, Great One.” There was more. Ethrian lost the thread. His new awareness slid down a wormhole into yesteryear, into a time when the stone beast was a thing freshly hewn from the heart of a mountain. Artisans clambered over it, polishing away the last marks of hammer and chisel. The thing loomed over the landscape like some timeless guardian, yet at that moment it was just shaped stone.

Nahaman and Sahmanan conducted fell rites between the monster’s forelegs. They and a thousand lesser priestesses dragged sacrifices to their altar, tore out hearts, and filled buckets with blood and the air with a stench of burning corpses. They bathed the stone with the blood. Their summons went out.

It was heard, and to them came a hatchling god, a bundle of dark energy so small the women gathered it into a basket. They hauled it up the stone beast’s back, and down a stairwell which plunged to the monster’s heart. There, with further ceremony, they bound their new national godling, and constrained him to their service.

The god in the stone beast grew. His power waxed. His cunning sharpened. He was subtle. Not till too late did the sisters realize there had been a reversal of the roles of servitor and served.