I did not head straight for the ways.

Instead I wandered to where Laya had fallen in the ash – no longer a rifle now but a spear instead. I could not recall if Esparatos had changed it to such before I’d torn it from his grasp, or if it had simply reverted to this more elemental shape upon his death. Nor did I really care.

Still, I hesitated before picking it up.

It was entirely possible that Esparatos had built some kind of trap into the ima, keyed it to his taint and his alone, so that if I or any other of my kind picked it up it would rebel – perhaps animate and attempt to kill, or perhaps simply explode.

I had good reason to be suspicious.

I had no idea what would happen if someone other than me were to draw Akeem. I’d never allowed it and it was impossible to test the sword’s potential in this regard in any other way. But when I’d made the sword, I’d definitely tried to incorporate such a trap. Chaos was too unpredictable for me to know if my effort had succeeded but I was pretty sure something would occur.

I smiled at the thought. Akeem had never spoken to anyone else, as far as I knew, but if someone were to get their hands on it that might change. Hence the trap – the sword knew things, things I’d never told a living soul.

It was also a terrifying weapon in its own right, a weapon I trusted in no hands save my own.

Do you really trust your own, Rukh? Remember the last time you used it? The last time you unleashed its full potential…

I pushed the thought away. No point in dwelling on the past.

Looked back down at Laya.

There were only really three options. Leave it, pick it up, or try and destroy it. I wasn’t really sure how to destroy it without picking it up, but I’d always been good at breaking things. Still, that had its own risks.

I could leave it… but then Shas, when she next decided to check in with Esparatos, would no doubt find it. If it could be used by someone other than Esparatos, I didn’t want it used against me…

You used it in the War, remember?

I did, but the thought was scant comfort. Yes, a couple of times I’d borrowed it. The one that sprang to mind was when Esparatos had handed it to me, in rifle form, to take a shot he’d been unable to take by virtue of being temporarily blind. I’d used it, but it had been very much subservient to his will – held in form by his wishes, not mine.

Using an ima someone else had made was an uncomfortable experience anyway. It was intimate, invasive, a little like wearing their underwear.

Knowing Esparatos, he might even have lent it to me so that the weapon could learn my taint, know my otherness and be prepared to destroy me… would it not be so like him? To plan so ridiculously far in advance? To claim a posthumous victory at the very moment I thought my triumph complete?

I shook my head, laughed to myself a little.

It was all moot. I had already resolved to pick it up anyway.

I took the shaft of the spear in my hand.

Tensed.

A few heartbeats passed – I knew from ripping it from his grasp that any booby trap wouldn’t activate on touch alone.

The weapon remained still in my hand.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Akeem. ‘You don’t need that. If there’s killing to do I will do the killing. I will bleed Reality white!’

‘Hush,’ I said. ‘I promise, you’re still the only sword for me. For the moment anyways.’

As I held the spear I became aware of something else that should have in no way surprised me – Laya was alive.

Not alive in the sense that Akeem was alive. It wasn’t going to start speaking to me or anything. But it had an awareness of the hand that held it, a concept of movement in the way it could change forms, and this did surprise me, it seemed to express a constant low-level warmth that I could only describe as love.

I raised my eyebrows.

The love, in this case, was directed toward me. Not for any reason beyond the fact that I was the one holding Laya at present – I doubted it could distinguish me from Esparatos in any meaningful sense. But it was unconditional, genuine…

Something, to be honest, I had never really expected to be on the receiving end of again.

Laya, it seemed, had the soul of a hunting hound. Again, I wondered why I was even surprised. Esparatos had made it, and to the hunter a dog or a hawk was as much a weapon as a spear or gun.

An effort of will and the spear became a blade of similar proportions to Akeem. Then a rifle again, then a shotgun, and a hunting knife and…

‘Stop it,’ said Akeem. It sounded even more petulant than usual.

‘I told you,’ I said, absently, ‘there’s no reason for you to be jealous.’

But I stopped playing, nonetheless. I left Laya in the form of a set of brass knuckles, and slipped it into the pocket of my jeans. It sat there quite contentedly, the way a dog would sit in front of a warm hearth.

Shaking my head, I headed for the ways

* * *

Ilkan was a day’s journey from Osha, assuming a stuck to the route. Add in the additional time it would take for the Faris-binding Esparatos had placed on me to wear off and to track down and find the others at the other end…

A day and half, assuming they didn’t move on.

But they would, and from Ilkan I would have to track them to wherever else they’d gone from there. I was already mentally sorting options.

Only it wouldn’t be a day and half. It would be longer, far longer. My fight with Esparatos had caused me to expend my most important resource – chaotic power. The Illumis trick with which I’d finished him had nearly emptied my reserves.

Speaking frankly, I did not have enough left to face another of my kind in battle. Not with good odds, anyway. Drained as I was, I would be unable to use Ensis or Kasis in any meaningful way, have to rely to Turis alone if it came to blows. Not an option.

I needed a chaos rent.

Akeem could sense the lack as well.

‘You need power Rukh. You need power so that you can make power, make force, wield me. Wield me, make power… it’s time to draw.’

The blade sounded eager. But it chaotic power was the only thing besides killing that ever got it excited.

Not for the first time, I wished there was a way to put the bloody thing on mute.

I had a few options with regards to chaos rents. On the one hand, they weren’t exactly common, on the other the ways tended to emerge in their vicinity on those worlds that had them. A chaos rent was about as pleasant a landmark as a nuclear waste dump was, but it was also a fuel stop on the highway of infinity – a place to recharge. The ways were built by my kind after all, and thus they went to places where my kind might want to go.

The closest I knew of was on a world called Sebaria.

A world that the Dark Pact had controlled all access to, back in the War…

Exan will be using it as a supply depot. He must be.

After all, it was usefully positioned. From the rent and the basalt fortress that protected it one could patrol the ways in several useful directions, reach several civilised worlds and support attacks deep into what had, back then, been considered Alliance territory. With the War back on, Exan would have to be an idiot not to have secured Sebaria…

Is that where he’s taken Mako?

I dismissed that idea almost as soon as it formed. I knew where Exan would have made his headquarters, and it wasn’t on Sebaria. It was too short a journey from Sebaria to the House itself.

I thought back to the last time I been back at that grim, black fortification. I’d brought a thousand imaski through the ways to relieve it from Alliance assault. Saskia Delmarchos, six disciples and the full might of the mortal kingdoms that they’d rallied against us. Sebaria had been Desikim’s responsibility and she’d fucked it up, mismanaged our local forces so badly that…

I tore my mind from the reminiscence.

Going to Sebaria would add another day and a half to my journey, longer if Exan had left some sort of defences in place. The next closest chaos rent would add four days, enough that I might as well head direct to the House after that rather than try and catch Sanjay and the others.

Not that Trickster, if she really was observing them, would let them get there alive. She only needed a free shot with Sansis against Sanjay and the others would be easy meat. And that was without any of the “new abilities” I’d heard Esparatos reference in his conversation with Shas.

But if Basalt Tower, the fortress that protected Sebaria’s chaos rent, was once again occupied…

I shook my head. I was thinking out objections but, as with my decision to pick up Laya, I had already made it. I was confident in my abilities – if I couldn’t reach the rent I could at least reconnoitre the area, gather some useful intelligence.

Assuming I didn’t get killed of course.

And, if I was honest, another hope was building within me.

We’d never really abandoned Basalt Tower. The Dark Pact’s dissolution and the end of the War had meant that we hadn’t maintained it, but it had been defended by a garrison of imaski, not human soldiers.

There was every chance that they were still there. A couple of hundred of them, at least.

With a few exceptions, I’d freed the imaski from my service at the end of the War, sent them off to do as they wished. To enjoy the peace, if they could. No doubt some were roaming in the furthest reaches of Reality, an unfathomable distance away.

Some, however, had stuck to their old haunts. It was what they knew.

And if I was Exan…

Well, if I was Exan and exulting in my new role as a lying, treacherous bastard, I would want to use the imaski. I would tell them that their mistress was dead, that the Alliance had killed her, and that we were going to War as a matter of revenge. Then I’d quietly be trying to scrub me out to make the lie unassailable. After all, if I was Exan I wouldn’t see much hope for victory without the imaski on my side.

Certainly I would see very little hope with them against me.

Of course, I wasn’t Exan. If I had been, then that Sansis ambush on Altain would’ve been directed at one Helena Rukh rather than at Isande, and solved my biggest problem in one fell swoop. But he hadn’t done that, perhaps because he’d wanted recognition for his deeds, perhaps because he’d held out hope that I would swoon and fall into his arms and throw away everything to be his consort. Perhaps he’d even been telling the truth when he’d said that he’d loved me.

Perhaps he was playing some deeper game.

But the truth was, if I called then the imaski would come. And while I anticipated a few questions about our dramatic shift in objectives, I didn’t doubt that…

Only I did doubt. How could I not, after Exan and Trickster and Esparatos?

They are loyal, I told myself.

But it had been a long time.

Either way, a journey to Basalt Tower handed me an opportunity to find out. Either there would be some imaski would be there, or they wouldn’t be. If they were, there was every chance they were on Exan’s team and thinking I was dead. There was an outside chance they had betrayed me, but if that was the case better I found out sooner rather than later and got a look at the size of the problem.

And if they aren’t there? If they’ve gone off out into Reality?

Well, Basalt Tower wasn’t the only place where imaski might be found. After I dealt with my more immediate concerns, gathering those of them that I could would probably be the most effective means of prosecuting the war against Exan. Certainly if he’d gone where I thought he’d gone some help wouldn’t go amiss.

More importantly, if there weren’t any imaski at Basalt Tower, I would get a good look at whoever else Exan had left to garrison the place.

And have all the fun of sneaking past them to the rent…

But that was a problem for later. If, indeed, it was a problem at all.

* * *

In the end, it took me a little more than a day to reach Sebaria.

My less-than-ideal travel pace was due to the healthy amount of caution I was deploying. If Basalt Tower was once again a forward base for the Dark Pact then there might be patrols of some sort across the nearby ways, or static surveillance of the kind that Idigan Rodrisantos had been so wonderfully incompetent at back on Curia.

I couldn’t take any chances. True, the longer it took me to catch up with Sanjay and the others the worse things looked for them, but it was going to be of no help to anybody if someone fried me from ambush with Sansis because I was not being careful enough.

Losing Sanjay’s group was a loss I was prepared to accept. My own loss?

Not so much.

I made one brief stop on Chuan, a world with luscious green grass and hot streams as clear as crystal. I had a blissful hour in that water to wash away the ash and filth I’d brought with me from Osha, and then it was back on the trail in wet clothing.

In another time I might have repaired the tears in my jeans with Bayis, forced the filth from the weave by power alone, or at least used Sansis warmth to dry myself off in the aftermath of my swim. But I afforded myself no such excess. The smidge of power I had remaining had to be carefully hoarded.

I could afford vanity no more than I could afford undue haste. Either would kill me.

Eventually though, Sebaria.

I emerged from the way near the rim of a great caldera. Black mountains stretched off into the distance like the spine of some enormous beast. Molten fire plumed in the distance. It was night, but the hollows of the peaks glowed with up-cast light. The caldera I stood near was dead, no lava cauldroning within, but the air scorched at my lungs nonetheless and struck against my recent memories of fire.

I turned around.

Behind me, rising just beyond the caldera’s far side, was the squat, ugly shape of Basalt Tower. Tall, black, and forbidding, hewn from rough volcanic stone. I saw no light at its arrow slits, but that, alone, meant nothing.

A road wove along the ridgeline towards it.

I paused.

Now that I was here, beneath the eyes of that fortress, I wondered if this was such a good idea. There was no cover around me, no way to approach unseen. If there was anyone up there…

But then, there was no cover for them to ambush me from, either. At the very least I would see them coming.

And have to run back towards the transition offworld without a shred of dignity.

Well, yes. That would be exactly what I’d do. Dignity was for those with the power to spend on it.

But the truth was...

‘I can feel the rent,’ said Akeem. ‘Let’s go draw. Draw and kill and draw and kill and draw me and with me…’

The truth was that I needed to refill my reserves. The truth was, the other options meant abandoning the trail and leaving Sanjay and his little band to their fate, or…

…or doing something I had once promised myself I would never again do.

But you didn’t promise, Rukh. Not aloud. Because you knew that one day…

I crushed the thought. Tried to bury it beneath happier ideas, like the one where Basalt Tower was in the hands of loyal imaski, just as I had left it.

I stepped forward, following the road.

No alarms went up that I could hear, no beacons flared to life on the battlements of Basalt Tower. No army poured across the ground to meet me.

I kept going.

And, before I was halfway there, I stopped again.

There was a figure sitting cross legged by the side of the road a hundred metres or so ahead, a figure tending to a small fire on which hung a small pot of…

When did I last eat?

Not for days, I realised, belatedly. Not since the meal Sanjay had cooked by the lake on Sandim. I had been sustaining myself on chaotic power alone – not a hugely expensive use but hardly a good idea either.

Suddenly, I was ravenous.

I sensed no chaos taint from whoever it was. That by itself didn’t mean anything – Danis could bait craftier traps than simple ambush – but Sebaria was a populated world. Of course, what a mortal was doing up here among these fire-spewing peaks…

Somehow, without realising it, I had started walking towards the fire.

It is a depressing fact about all sentient life, even those raised to the power, that we never really escape our animal instincts. We sate them, bury them deep under the sheer lack of scarcity afforded by technology or chaotic energy or whatever, but when we forget about them they bite and they bite hard. It was easy to forget how much I relied on my powers – a thin trickle of background energy, barely enough to register but constantly there - to keep me fed and watered and energised, to keep my menstrual cycle firmly switched off, to substitute for sleep, to kill cancers that formed in the blood when I walked through a world with high background radiation, to maintain myself at all times at peak efficiency…

I had switched it all off to conserve power, and now I was hungry and I was thirsty and I was tired from the long walk without proper sleep or rest and the smell of the stew rising from the pot above the fire was incredible.

The figure turned around as I approached, turned a little too quickly, and three inches of Akeem’s white blade was out of the scabbard before I’d even thought about it.

‘Yes!’ said the sword, exultant. ‘Kill him!’

It had been going on about killing him for some time, I realised. Perhaps before I’d even noticed him.

You’re slipping, Rukh. Not paying attention.

Lack of sleep will do that of course. I had forgotten.

The “him” that Akeem was on about was an old man, probably somewhere in his sixties or his seventies if I was any judge. He had several days growth of stubble on his chin and was bundled up in a heavy cloak despite the warmth of the surrounding air.

His eyes were wide as he looked at the sword.

I slid it back into the scabbard and took my hand off the hilt.

‘You turned a little too quickly,’ I said to him. ‘And I am, in some things, quite a cautious woman.’

He let out a slow breath.

Be welcome at my fire, traveller,’ he said, and gestured to the ground across from him. His hand trembled as he did so.

I hid my surprise. The usual reaction to armed strangers was not to invite them to the fire. But then, customs might have changed on Sebaria since my last visit.

It had been a while, after all.

Ignoring Akeem’s protests I went over to where the old man was pointing, and half-sat across from him, my legs in a figure-four position, my hand resting on the ground. Easy to explode to your feet from there, easy to get up and fight if it became suddenly and unavoidably necessary, which it sometimes did.

I wasn’t too worried though. The seat put both the old man and the fortress in the distance firmly in my sights. And even without power, I was pretty sure I could take one unarmed old man.

He stirred the stew for a while longer, the black travelling pot that held it swinging from side to side above the flames. Then he rummaged in the pack next to him and produced a bowl, and a moment later he was proffering me a bowl of stew and a hunk of stale bread.

I have received many tributes in my time. I would have, in that moment, traded the stew for none of them.

Well, not for any of the ones without tangible military value, in any case.

I ate it quickly, stealing just enough heat from it with Sansis so as not to burn myself. The old man sat there, watching me eat, clearly fearful.

It was greasy, and I couldn’t identify the meat in it, but it tasted like heaven come to Earth all the same. Most things do, when you haven’t eaten for so many days

When I finished and past him back the bowl, I saw that the pot that hung from the fire was empty but for a few scrapings. I’d eaten his entire dinner, it seemed.

I was quite incapable of feeling bad about it. Instead I wondered if I would, had he been less welcoming, have taken his dinner from him by force.

Well, no. But only because the treaty would have prevented me.

‘Are you a goddess?’ he asked, all of a sudden. His voice was too loud in the emptiness of the mountain air, and he flinched at the awkwardness of the question.

To me, on the other hand, a few things were beginning to make sense.

‘I have been called so,’ I told him. ‘Why do you ask?’

But he’d gone pale, and I knew he had heard only my answer and not my question. ‘Have… have you…. Have you come for me?’ He swallowed.

Ah. Well, no need to ask what I am supposed to be the goddess of.

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ I said, settling back. ‘Why do you ask me these things?’

I could practically smell the fear now. ‘It is said that Death herself walks these hills. That she is known to take the guise of a woman. That this woman has black skin… and carries a white blade.’

I laughed.

This was Desikim’s work.

She’d always been in to all that mortal mysticism and mumbo-jumbo. She’d been fascinated by religions and the way they were structured and especially for their potential as a means of control. Her end vision of the Dark Pact’s pan-dimensional empire had been one where the five of us were worshipped as gods.

On some worlds, no doubt, we still were.

Of course, the Alliance had countered with the same measures, cast us as antagonist figures wherever they could. Mortal hearts and minds had been critical to the war effort. For all that they couldn’t travel from world to world there were just so fucking many of them.

Religion, mysticism and prophecy had played their part in mobilising that multitude. For both sides.

On Uriban we’d set up the Cult of Rukh. One of Desikim’s early experiments, mortal followers we could appear to no matter how long had passed and have their instant service. The statues and the secrecy made it hard for another of our kind to turn the instrument against us, and the comparatively liberal religious environment of Uriban had meant the Cult’s persecution or elimination were themselves unlikely

But there had been other models. Desikim had subverted existing myth wherever she could, folding us into different pantheons. And she had had responsibility for Sebaria. I could imagine what she’d gone for…

I was usually the goddess of death, or just Death. Sometimes I was the goddess of personal combat, or the straight up queen of the gods. Exan was more commonly the god of war, Esparatos of the hunt or the sky or whatever, and Desikim herself a goddess of secrets and magic. Trickster usually rounded off the pantheon as the goddess of lies and deception.

Not that she ever used our names. The details were deliberately vague. A black woman with a white sword was a good example. An identity I could, if I chose, confirm or deny.

Or neither.

‘It is likely your legend refers to me,’ I told the old man. ‘As for whether or not I am a goddess… well, I have been called such. Certainly I have been death for many.

I drew the heat out of the fire with Sansis and dumped it into the ground, and the flames went instantly dark. The old man was a trembling silhouette on the other side of the embers.

‘But I am not here for you,’ I said. ‘I am pleased with the offering you have made to me, humble though it was. If you do me further service, then my regard shall pass from you and this will be no more than a tale you tell to other travellers that you meet upon the road.’

No lies. Even to a mortal, my word was still as iron. But his preconceptions, the sudden darkness I had enforced with Sansis, and whatever inertia Desikim’s propaganda had planted in my absence would sell the deception nonetheless.

Not, of course, that it was entirely a deception. I had never claimed to be a goddess. But to a mortal, I might as well have been.

‘What… what would you ask of me, my lady?’

I pushed some heat back into the fire, enough to make the embers splutter into life once more, and pointed past him, at the fortress.

‘Tell me everything you know about that place. Tell me why you are here upon this road.’

To his credit he did not ask me what business a goddess had with such prosaic questions. He simply started talking.

It turned out, once I got through the grovelling and the stumbling, that the old man was up here because fragments of precious metals and stones could be found in the dirt up near the craters. Apparently, there was a thriving scavenger community making use of all these old mountain roads – there was even a town a scant twenty miles away from where we currently sat. The old man was a such a scavenger, and though he had had no luck on this trip apparently he was lucky enough to make a living. He went into this, in fact. In some detail.

It came to me that in the old days, I would probably have killed him at this point out of sheer boredom. Perhaps my time on Sansara with Eli and the others had changed me more than I thought.

Not enough that I saved them from their fate, obviously…

Only I might have done, I realised. Not because I placed a huge value on the brief, transient lives of mortal beings, but because I placed some value. I always had. It was just that I valued many other things higher. But I would probably, with three chaos rents right there, have made them water using Bayis.

I just hadn’t wanted to because of where that path would have led. It would have been water first, then other things, and before I knew it they would have been utterly dependent on me and I would have been their leader in all but name.

Not a path I had wanted to walk. And then Isande had shown up and rendered the whole question moot.

I wondered, belatedly, if their wells had stopped making water yet. If they had begun, as Eli had feared, to die of thirst.

‘Enough,’ I said, and he went instantly silent. ‘That is only half the question, and you have more than answered it.’ I pointed at the fortress again. ‘Tell me of that place.’

And, after a short pause, he did.