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“Come, Alfred,” said Bane, regarding him with smug self-assurance, “there’s no use denying it. I know it’s true. Do you want to know how I know?” The child was enjoying this immensely. And there was the dog, its head raised, watching him intently, as if it understood every word and it, too, was awaiting his reaction. The dog! Of course, it was understanding every word!

And so was its master.

“You remember the time when the tree fell on me,” Bane was saying. “I was dead. I knew I was dead because I was floating away and I looked back and saw my body lying on the ground, with the crystal pieces sticking right through me. But suddenly it was like a great big mouth opened and sucked me back. And I woke up and there weren’t any crystals hurting me anymore. I looked down, and there on my chest I saw this.” Bane held up the piece of paper he had removed from his father’s desk. “I asked my father about it. He said it was a sigil, a rune. A rune of healing.”

Deny it. Laugh lightly. What an imagination you have, Your Highness! You dreamed it, of course. That bump on your head.

“And then there was Hugh,” Bane continued. “I know that I gave him enough hethbane to kill him. When he fell over, all in a heap, he was dead, just like me. You brought him back to life!”

Come, now, Your Highness. If I was a Sartan, what would I be doing earning my living as a servant? No, I’d live in a grand palace and you mensch would all flock to see me and fall at my feet and beg me to give you this and give you that and raise you up and cast your enemies down and offer me whatever I wanted except peace.

“And now that I know you’re a Sartan, Alfred, you’ve got to help me. And the first thing we’re going to do is kill my father.” Bane reached into his tunic, pulled out a dagger that Alfred recognized as belonging to Hugh. “Look, I found this in my father’s desk. Sinistrad’s going to go down to the Low Realm and send the Gegs to war and fix the Kicksey-Winsey and make it align all the isles, and then he’ll control the water supply. All the wealth and power will go to him, and that’s not fair! It was my idea! I was the one who figured out how the machine worked. And of course, Alfred, you probably know all about running the machine, since you and your people built it, and you can help me with that too.”

The dog, with its far-too-intelligent eyes, was looking at Alfred, looking straight through him. Too late to deny. He’d missed his chance. He’d never been quick-thinking, quick-reacting. That was why his brain had taken to shutting down when confronted with danger. It couldn’t cope with the constant war that raged inside him, the instinctive urge to use his wondrous powers to protect himself and others versus the terrible knowledge that if he did so he would be exposed for the demigod he was—and wasn’t.

“I cannot help you, Your Highness. I cannot take a life.”

“Oh, but you’ll have to. You won’t have any choice. If you don’t, I’ll tell my father who you are, and once my father finds out, he’ll try to use you himself.”

“And, Your Highness, I will refuse.”

“You can’t! He’ll try to kill you if you don’t obey him! Then you’ll have to fight, and you’ll win, because you’re stronger.”

“No, Your Highness. I will lose. I will die.”

Bane was startled, perplexed. Obviously this was one move that had never occurred to him. “But you can’t! You’re a Sartan!”

“We are not immortal—something I think we forgot.” It was the despair that had killed them. The despair he was feeling now; a great and overwhelming sadness. They had dared to think and act as gods and had ceased to listen to the true gods. Things had begun to go wrong—as the Sartan saw it—and they had taken it upon themselves to decide what was best for the world and act accordingly. But then something else went wrong and they had to step in and fix it, and every time they fixed one thing, it caused something else to break. And soon the task became too large; there were too few of them. And they had realized, finally, that they had tampered with what should have been left undisturbed. But by then it was too late.

“I will die,” repeated Alfred.

The dog rose to its feet, came over to him, and laid its head on his knee. Slowly, hesitantly, he reached out his hand to touch it, and felt its warmth, the well-shaped bones of the head hard beneath the silky fur. And what is your master doing now? What is Haplo thinking, knowing that his ancient enemy is within his grasp? I can’t begin to guess. It all depends, I suppose, on what Haplo is doing in this world in the first place. The chamberlain smiled, much to Bane’s frustration and ire. Alfred was wondering what Sinistrad would do if he knew he had two demigods under his roof.

“You might be ready to die, Alfred!” said Bane with sudden sly cunning. “But what about our friends—the Geg and Hugh and Haplo?”

At the sound of its master’s name, the dog’s plumy tail brushed slowly from side to side.

Bane came forward to stand at the chamberlain’s side, the child’s small hands clasped earnestly on his servant’s shoulder. “When I tell father who you are and when I prove to him how I know who you are, he’ll realize—like I do now—that we won’t need any of these others. We won’t need the elves or their ship, because your magic can take us where we want to go. We won’t need Limbeck because you can talk to the Gegs and convince them to go to war. We don’t need Haplo—we never did need Haplo. I’ll take care of his dog. We don’t need Hugh. Father won’t kill you, Alfred. He’ll control you by threatening to kill them! So you can’t die!”

What he says is true. And Sinistrad would certainly realize it. Expendable. I make them all expendable. But what can I do to save them, except kill?

“The truly wonderful part,” said Bane, giggling, “is that at the end of it all, we won’t even need father!”

It is the old curse of the Sartan, coming back to me at last. If I had allowed the child to die, as, perhaps, he was meant to, then none of this would have happened. But I had to meddle. I had to play god. I believed that there was good in the child, that he would change—because of me! I believed that I could save him! I, I, I! All we Sartan ever thought about was ourselves. We wanted to mold the world in our image. But perhaps that wasn’t what was intended.

Slowly, gently thrusting aside the dog, Alfred rose to his feet. Walking to the center of the room, he lifted his arms into the air and began to move in a solemn and strangely graceful—for his ungainly body-dance.

“Alfred, what the hell are you doing?”

“I am leaving, Your Highness,” said Alfred.

The air around him began to shimmer as his dancing continued. He was tracing the runes in the air with his hands and drawing them on the floor with his feet.

Bane’s mouth gaped open. “You can’t!” he gasped. Running forward, he tried to grab hold of the Sartan, but the magical wall Alfred had built around himself was now too powerful. There was a crackle when Bane’s hand touched it, and the child, wailing, snatched back burned fingers.

“You can’t leave me! No one can leave me unless I want them to!”

“Your enchantment doesn’t work on me, Bane.” Alfred spoke almost sadly, his body beginning to fade away. “It never did.”

A large furry shape plummeted past Bane. The dog bounded through the shimmering shell and landed lightly at Alfred’s side. Leaping, teeth snapping, the dog caught the chamberlain’s ankle in its mouth and held on tightly. A startled expression crossed Alfred’s now-ghostlike face. Frantically he kicked his leg, trying to jerk it from the dog’s mouth.