"Mantis became even more angry. 'I will strike you if I wish,' he said. 'I will throw you down on the ground and step on you. I will stab you with my spear.'
"The gall spoke to him again, saying 'If you do, I will come out and cover you in with my darkness.'
"But Grandfather Mantis was too angry to listen. He lifted his spear and stabbed the organ. The gall came out as it had threatened, bitter, dark as a night without stars. and it covered Mantis in, even flowing into his eyes so that he was blinded.
"Mantis threw himself down on the ground, crying, 'Help me! I cannot see! The black gall has covered my eyes and I feel myself to be lost!' But no one heard him calling in that remote place by the pool, and no one came to help him. Mantis could only crawl along the ground, feeling his way, blind and helpless. 'Hyena will find me this way,' he thought, 'or some other hungry creature, and I will be killed. Grandfather Mantis will be dead—will that not be a sad thing?'
"But no one came to help him and he could only crawl on through the darkness. Then at last, just as he became so tired and fearful he could not move any farther, he put his hand down upon something. It was an ostrich feather, white as smoke, bright as a flame, and the heart of Grandfather Mantis was filled with hope. He took the feather and wiped the black gall from his eyes. When he could see the beauty of the world again, he took the feather and wiped off the rest of the bitter gall, which fell away, leaving the feather clean and untouched. Marveling at this wondrous thing, delighted with his escape, Grandfather Mantis threw the feather high into the sky where it stuck, a curve of white against a darkness as black as the gall. He danced and sang. 'You now lie up in the sky,' Mantis told the feather. 'From this day, you will be the moon, and you will shine at night and give light to all the people when there would otherwise be darkness. You are the moon, you will live, you will fall away, then you will live again and give light to all the people.' And it did. And it does."
!Xabbu fell silent, lowering his head as if saying "Amen" at the end of a prayer, Sam could not help noticing all the faces surrounding them in the unending twilight—childlike, expectant faces. The. crowd had grown larger still, pressing in like victims of a disaster pleading for information, until they surrounded the small knoll many rows deep.
She thought she should thank him for the story, although she felt again that she hadn't really understood—what was all that about some icky black fenfen getting all over the insect the story was about? And how could he be an insect but have a rainbow for a son? Also, she was puzzled why one kind of story, about making an antelope out of a sandal, had suddenly turned into another kind of story: it violated her sense of how stories were supposed to work. But she knew that these things were somehow important to !Xabbu, sort of like a religion, and she didn't want to offend anyone she liked so much.
A high-pitched voice called from the largely silent crowd. "Tell another!"
!Xabbu looked up, a little startled, but before he or Sam could make out where the request had originated, others were also asking, a growing chorus.
"A story!"
"Tell another."
"Please!"
"They want to hear more stories," !Xabbu said wonderingly.
"They're scared," said Sam. "The world is coming to an end. And they're all children, aren't they?" Looking around at the pleading, terrified faces, she felt herself fighting back tears. If Jongleur had been within reach she would have hit him, would have tried to knock him down and make him pay for what his cruel self-obsession had done to these innocents. "They have to be them," she said, as much to herself as to !Xabbu. "They have to be the stolen children."
She was arrested by a familiar face in the throng, although it took her a moment to remember where she had seen the handsome, dark-haired man before. He was a few rows back in me crowd, holding a bundle Sam couldn't quite see, watching !Xabbu with an unblinking, almost vacant stare. None of the fairy-tale children stood too near him, as though they could sense something wrong.
Sam pulled at !Xabbu's arm. "Look, it's that Grail guy—the one that disappeared when Renie disappeared!"
"Ricardo Klement? Where?"
"Over there," Sam said, but now there was only an empty space where Klement had stood. "He was there a second ago, no dupping!"
As they scanned the throng of refugees, Sam became aware of someone standing very close to her, a small child apparently made of mud. She tried to step around the tiny obstacle but the child moved with her and reached up a stubby hand to tug at Sam's Gypsy finery.
"He is not there now," !Xabbu said. "He is larger than most of these people—we would see him, I think. . . ."
"He couldn't have got away that fast," Sam said angrily. Beyond the crowd of refugees still begging for another story, the gray slope was empty for dozens of meters. "Not without us seeing him." The mud child was still trying to get her attention. "Stop pulling on me, will you?" Sam snapped.
The child let go and took a step backward. It was hard to tell from its odd face, the features little more than dents and grooves, what the creature was thinking, but it squared its shoulders in a way that clearly said it would not be chased off. "I want to talk to you," the stranger said in the voice of a little girl.
Sam sighed. "What?"
"Are you. . . . are you Renie's friends?"
Sam had been expecting a plea for another of !Xabbu's tales, and for a long moment could only stare at the child, dumbfounded. "Renie. . . ?"
!Xabbu was there in a heartbeat to kneel beside the child. "Who are you?" he asked. "Do you know Renie? Do you know where she is? Yes, we are her friends."
The girl looked at him for a moment. "I'm . . . I'm the Stone Girl." Her simple finger-stroke of a mouth writhed and she began to cry. "Don't you know where she is either?"
From the way he closed his eyes and grunted, like a man suffering a painful blow, Sam could see !Xabbu's terrible disappointment. "Maybe you'd better just tell us everything," she said to the weeping Stone Girl.
". . . And then after we ran away from the Ticks, up the hill, we crossed the bridge." The child was still sniffling a bit, but in telling the story of her travels with Renie she had found a sort of calm. "And we saw the strange man who was her friend, too, but he was just walking, and the Ticks went around him!" She was clearly impressed. "Like they didn't even care about him."
"That's so scanny!" Sam said. "That has to be what's-his-name, Klement."
!Xabbu frowned. "And then what happened? When you crossed the bridge?"
The Stone Girl chewed for a moment on a muddy finger, thinking. "We didn't really go to Jinnear Bad House, not like usual. We both went in, sort of, then right away I came out here at the Well. But Renie didn't." Her eyes squinted for a moment as she fought more tears. "Do you think she's all right?"
"We utterly hope so," Sam said, then turned to !Xabbu, "But where is she?"
The small man had a distant, disturbed look on his face. "The rest of us traveled in a similar way, I think. We came close to the Other, were weighed—judged, perhaps—and then were sent away. Those who belong in this world, like Azador and this little girl, did not even experience that much, but were simply sent straight here."
"What does that mean?"
He stood, absently patting the Stone Girl on the head, but he looked as miserable as she had ever seen him. "It might be I am wrong, but I think Renie was allowed in."
"Allowed in?" Sam was not following.
"To the Well." !Xabbu turned to look at the crater and its sea of restless light. "I think she is in the Other's innermost heart."