He considered the woman trying to waken him. She had substance now. She appeared to be in her late teens, and of promising beauty.

Only in her eyes was the past of her, the time-depth of her, obvious. Her eyes were older and deader than the desert.

Ethrian permitted himself to be wakened.

“Deliverer! You have to free us, or we’re doomed.”

What had they contrived now? “Show it to me.”

The woman tried to drag him past the pond.

“I gave you power. Reach back. Show me from the beginning.”

She made excuses. That would require intercession by the Great One. He was preoccupied.

“Unpreoccupy him. Tell him to make time.” How can I have aged in dreams? he wondered.

He had, by drawing on those minds he was not entirely aware of having tapped. He was not the boy who had swum the strait and walked the beaches of Nawami. He was no longer the youth who had flown to witness his father’s passing. He had become someone else. Someone more sure of himself and more determined to remain his own creature. He had developed an arrogant face. He now had eyes like a snake.

“Please!”

“Show me. From the beginning.”

A savage bellow raged across his mind as the stone beast responded. It flung images at him like a barrage of angry spears.

They were coming. Shinsan was in the desert. The stone beast was animating a handful of its soldiers in waiting. They were out there now, overwhelming Shinsan’s reconnaissance parties.

Ethrian saw it through, to the moment, and wondered if anything could stop the Dread Empire. What drove it so? Did it feel compelled to conquer even lifeless lands?

He yielded no more power. The beast was trying to panic him.

Its soldiers obliterated a half-dozen patrols. The explorers stopped coming.

“Deliver us!” the woman begged, her soft eyes filled with water. “They’ll come again, and they’ll destroy us.”

“They might. That’s their nature. Who is master here?”

“The Great One.”

“Then you get no help from me. I won’t bend the knee to him.” Ethrian turned away, stripped himself, waded into the cool of the pool. Fish brushed his legs. Waterfowl chivied their young into the reeds. Sahmanan pursued him along the pond’s edge, begging from beyond the vegetation.

“You’ve made a work of art of this,” he told her. “Why not confine yourself to this? The patrols are gone.”

Would they give up? Of course not. Shinsan did not accept defeat. Her soldiers would try an alternate approach. It would have more weight behind it.

What would they do if they caught him?

A slow smile crossed his lips. Shinsan might provide the leverage needed to best the stone beast. He would play the wronged prisoner welcoming liberation. Why should they know whom he was… ? If he did not free it, the Tervola would dispatch this trifling godlet before noticing an ordinary boy.

He was living on borrowed time anyway. He could lay his bet with little to lose. The beast would accept his demands or perish.