Sam slowly let go of Orlando's arm. The white marks her fingers had made remained for a moment on his skin, livid in the half-light.
"We're . . . still here," she said.
Orlando laughed raggedly, flopped over onto his back, arms spread across the path. "Dzang, Frederico. You haven't lost your talent for the obvious."
She stared into the pit. Only moments ago something Sam found almost impossible to distinguish from Satan himself had been rising from the pit. Now it was . . . gone.
"I mean . . . we're alive!"
"Speak for yourself." Orlando rolled over and struggled onto his feet, rubbing at the place Sam had squeezed him. Indignant at being dislodged, a small cloud of monkeys fluttered up, protesting loudly, and swept out to circle above the now-empty Well. Despite her overwhelming confusion Sam almost smiled. The real Thargor wouldn't have rubbed his arm if a dragon had bitten it off.
"Everything feels . . . different," said Florimel, who had also stood.
"Big bad thing gone," one of the monkeys fluted, sweeping back to hover before her. It paused for a moment as if listening. "Both big bad things."
"That's not all," said Orlando, staring up at the opening far above, the faint stars. "The whole place is different. Scanny-different, but I can't explain why."
Sam looked too. Hadn't the stars disappeared completely only hours before? Now they hung in the dark sky again. Orlando was right—everything was different. The pit had seemed endless, bottomless, impossibly, nightmarishly huge, even after it had devolved into something less realistic. Now, for all its size, it seemed simple, almost normal. It was just a big hole in the ground. Had everything changed? Or were they just seeing things differently. . . ?
"Martine! Where is she?" Sam spun. The blind woman's body was stretched along the ledge, her face turned toward the pit wall, almost hidden in the shadows. Sam pulled her over. She was unconscious but breathing,
Florimel bent down to examine her. "We have all survived, it seems."
"All but Paul," Sam could not help pointing out. She was angry about it—such a stupid waste! "He didn't have to."
"He felt he did," said Florimel gently. She lifted one of Martine's eyelids, frowned, then checked the other.
"But what happened? Someone explain." Sam turned and scanned the ledge for the boy who had spoken with Sellars' voice but could not see him.
"He just . . . disappeared," said Bonnie Mae Simpkins. "That Cho-Cho. Don't ask me, child—I don't know either."
"The man Sellars brought him into the network," said Nandi. "If he's gone, perhaps that means Sellars is gone, too . . . or dead."
"Who won, so?" T4b demanded. His usual truculence had been blasted away. He seemed more childlike than Sam had ever seen him. "Us?"
"Yes, in a way," said a voice from nowhere. "Our enemies are dead or disabled. But we too have lost much."
"Sellars?" Florimel looked up in offhand irritation, as though disturbed by a neighbor while she did some prosaic household task. Sam guessed that, like the rest of them, the German woman wasn't hitting on all cylinders. "Where are you? We are tired of tricks."
The invisible presence laughed. Sam wondered if she had heard him do that before. It was a surprisingly nice laugh. "Where am I? Everywhere!"
"Scanned," muttered T4b. "Lockin' scanned."
"No," Sellars said. "It is far stranger than that. But Florimel is right—I should remember my manners and make it easier for all of us to talk." And suddenly, he appeared—a strange, shrunken creature in a wheelchair, his face crinkled like a dried fruit. The chair's wheels did not touch the ledge. In fact, it hovered several meters away from it, out over the great emptiness. "Here I am. I know I am not much to see."
"Are we all to live, then?" demanded Florimel. "Can you help me with Martine?"
Sellars floated forward. "She will awaken soon, I think. She is physically as well as can be expected." He shook his misshapen head. "She carried a tremendous burden—pain and horror that few could bear. She is an astonishing person."
Martine groaned, then threw her hand over her face and rolled over, turning her spine toward them. "You are saying kind things about me," Her voice was hoarse and almost inflectionless. "I hope that means I have died."
Sam crawled to her and awkwardly patted her hair. "Don't, Martine."
"But it's true—you have done an amazing thing, Martine Desroubins," Sellars said. "In fact, we have all done something nearly as amazing just by surviving. And it is possible we are to be the witnesses of something more astonishing still."
"No more puffed-up talk," said Florimel. "I am alive when I did not expect it—but I am not ready to be lulled with a speech about what we have done. Where is my daughter, Eirene? I can feel her, I think—her real body still lives, and that is good, but what of the coma?" She scowled and rose from Martine's side to face Sellars. "Her spirit must be somewhere above us—lost and terrified after all that destruction. I will climb to her now and the rest of you can spend as much time talking as you wish."
"I am sorry, Florimel." Sam decided that "hover" was not the right word: Sellars sat rock-solid above the void, as though a hurricane could not move him an inch. "I wish I could tell you she was recovered, that even now her real body was awakening, but I cannot. There is much I simply do not know, and there are still many mysteries here. However, I can at least promise that the Eirene you love is not up there, huddling in fear on the shores of the Well, and she never was. Now, will you let me explain what I do know?"
Florimel stared at him, then nodded once. "I will listen."
"I will tell you some of it as we proceed," Sellars said. "There is one last thing that must be done here, and I do not trust myself to deal with it alone."
Orlando sighed. "Do we have to kill something else?"
"No." Sellars smiled. "And there is a happy side to this duty as well. There are friends waiting. No, not that way, Javier."
T4b had already begun to trudge up the sloping path. "What?"
"Down." Sellars began to drift beside the ledge, following its path into the depths. "We have to go down to the bottom."
"Old melty wheel-knocker," T4b grumbled quietly to Sam and Orlando as they helped Martine up. The others also struggled to their feet, murmuring with pain and weariness. "Don't have to walk, him—just float like some sayee lo butterfly."
He was silent and very still, but his chest was moving.
"!Xabbu?" She shook him gently. "!Xabbu?" She could not, would not believe that they should have come through so much and fail now, "!Xabbu, I think . . . I think it's over."
She looked up, still uncertain what was different. The bottom of the pit lay in a half-light, only a little of it provided by the stars far, far overhead.
Stars. Were there stars before?
Most of the light came from the river, if it could still be called that. Although it flickered with strange gleams, hints of blue and silver light, it had shrunk back to a tiny rivulet.
But the mantis, the shadow-child . . . the Other . . . was gone.
Those two children came, she remembered. They took it . . . him . . . away. Who the hell were they?