The Cane and his charge walked up to Wander, who met them in the middle.

  The glassy eyes of The Stonehoof and The Stronghoof, who remained where De had come, fell on her area as she advanced on their party. The gaze of the other animals watched her too. Some bared their teeth in unison, clicked their jaws, and then shut them.

  De stood across from her. His heavy maroon robe resisted the wind, and he shivered.

  "S-Shaminkat," he whispered.

  Wander looked at him and then at Fragile. The Sixbraid's eyes were pressed open. He was not fidgeting. His breaths were shallow.

  "H-he is w-well," De stuttered. "M-my w-worker h-has h-him." He coughed.

  "I am surprised you could take him from the Light," Wander said.

  "I h-have had his t-touch." De rolled the fingers on his weapon. "A h-heavy o-one. I c-could t-take him f-from a far p-place."

  De waited for a reply which did not come.

  "D-drop your n-niv," De said, "and h-he w-will keep."

  Wander's blood was cool. The grip on her blaith relaxed, and did not release.

  De tilted his head. He lifted his finger.

  Fragile's hand reached into his hoofleather bag. It extracted the littlecane that he carried. Its small, silver blade reflected the sun.

  The hand slid it onto his throat and began to pull.

  The metal broke his skin. De watched her. Her brow and mouth remained flat as he made his way to a large vein, and her grip stayed loose. Some muscles in her legs began to tense. She looked at De, and saw instead the dimensions of Fragile's throat.

  The Cane raised his hand and Fragile's halted. A thin cone of blood traced down his neck, past a point where they could not see.

  De looked up at her. His eyes fell through his mask, uncovered by the sun. He tilted his head, and Fragile's hand dropped. He began to walk back towards De's army.

  "H-how?" De asked.

  "He has touched two," Wander said. "They have both put metal to his neck. If you want to hurt him, you will have to do it with that way."

  De looked at her.

  He stepped back toward his retinue. "T-these can t-take your tithe, firmtipper." His body clicked. "Or w-we m-meet again. T-tonight."

  He turned away and the ranks of howls and tusks and stompers moved on Wander. They let out a roar that started and stopped.

  Wander looked at the animals, and they were all stuck in her many assemblies. She admired their figure. She preferred the sound of them and the difference, which De's trick had now pressed out of them. There was no mystery in their movement, or difference, and they had all been tied together, and did not know anything. Their word had been risen from them into a new one.

  When the bodies washed around her and surrounded her, she stood still, and moved her body toward their mouths. The wings came down and perched on her and snapped at her face. The howls bit at her armor and the straps that closed it. The tusks thrust at her and shot dents into her torso.

  A stomper twice her size lumbered through the mass. The howls and tusks moved out of its way, and continued with their assault. It threw her down with a paw on her chest and wrapped its jaws around her head. In the darkness, the master's blades fell.

  A pair of hands wrapped around the stomper's jaws. A whirling occurred, and she had soon produced a room to conduct her work.

  Over the hours, Wander swept her blaith back and forward. The wings swam down to her and did not rise up again. That brought in the light, which shined black, red, and glared gold as the sun dropped and took on the shades of her department. She found twilight when the labor was complete.

  The fur and carcasses of a thousand dead beasts laid down around the roundseats of the shell. She sat down among the dead, her hesigns shimmering and her armor torn, at the foot of a howl with a stab in its throat.

  She took the howl in her hands, without her gloves. She looked into its eye, which had not closed.

  She bit into its coat. De watched from afar.

  As she ate it up, and ate the sinew, De sat down. He removed the mouthpiece of his mask and set aside. He withdrew his blower from the folds of his robe, clicked his lips, and placed it there. A sweet note rang out across the field and swam among the popping of the meat.

  The song De played was soft and slow. Wander had heard it once before. At that time, he had moaned and screamed through its holes. Now he was nurturing the air. His tune mixed itself between a parallel, floating series that plucked itself raw. She had not heard it from his instrument.

  Fragile's expression twitched and jolted. His eyebrows loosened and then tensed up again. Water stained his face. Wander looked into De's eyes as she crushed her teeth through a bone. He looked back at her as he passed his air through this style.

  When she was finished, Wander wiped her mouth and stood. De's lips separated from the blower. He laid it in the snow and rubbed it with his thumb. She advanced on him.

  De shivered in his robe against the Wild. The intensity of his shaking diminished when it took on the boiling air that Wander, hot with exertion, was creating. Her frame, covered with blood, took up her blaith and the wreckage of her Kathan blade and exited the battlefield. She took up a spot apart from him where sun shone between, and descending.

  De stabbed his walking stick into the frozen ground, cracking it apart. He removed his robe.

  He was nude beneath the smoky veils that he stayed behind. The Freeman's flesh, exposed to the naked eye, posed a mottled, shifting hue, which mixed and disposed of individual green, grey, and yellow shades. Chunks of iron had developed in deposits that encrusted his arms, chest, and stomach. Hanging from his arms, and from his legs, and from his upper back, where they collected in density, was an assortment of half-bodies. The beginning of hands and faces protruded from it, pushing out, no longer restrained by the lumps of cloth. On his abdomen, the crown of a head, emerged, trailing strands of Goalish hair. They were thick and black.

  He raised up a hand to his mask, and showed his face in.

  His appearance had been opened in many ways. Loops of skin lacked joins to the muscle and were tugged by the wind, revealing his naked cheeks and jaw. A track of bone stretched out around and bulged within his neck. A collection of bores were through his nose, piercing the cartilage in overlapping damages. The skin on his cheeks drooped such that his eye sockets were exposed. His left had been cut open with a knife, and was fully visible.

  All taken, it did not bring stature to Wander's brow. He looked back at her with a higher one.

  "I h-had f-forgotten y-you," De said. "The n-newest t-tipper."

  "I believed that you would."

  "Y-you place me s-so l-low?"

  De's lips bent toward his ears and the ribbons of open muscle beside them flexed.

  "I was n-new then," he said. "You s-should have w-waited. I am-m old, now."

  "I am glad that I did not."

  "And I-I – am g-glad. This should be it- the last conquest of my eye-"

  De wrapped his fingers around his weapon. A spray of ice and snow was sent off as he broke it out from the ground, brandishing it at his side. It twitched and jittered with him. "And there is no-one else I would rather see."

  He held out his palm. His fingers were black from fire. "So bring her to me, Firmtipper," he said.

  "Bring me Onn's last daughter."

  A blazing whirl of air, and she roared forward. Wander's blaith rose up and thrust itself into De's sternum, cutting through his body. The end left his back, leaving a thin trail of dark brown fluid.

  The Cane was unmoved. Wander's finger, when it went to touch the face of the blade, found that it could not. A hand had reached in around the metal and, at that moment, closed itself.

  When she was given flight by the hand, she took back half of her weapon. Her body crashed among the dead, bouncing through a clump of howl bodies and rolling. Her movement was stopped at last by the massive bulk of the stomper.

  The Cane extracted the sign-written blade from his chest and let it drop to the ground. He hunted toward her.

  Wander stood up and looked at the ruin of her blaith. The residue in the signs sputtered and dripped away, falling to the ground, mixing with the blood of the stomper, and dissolving.

  She turned her eye to the approaching Cane. She took the ruin of the Kathan blade in her free hand, the blaith in her burned one, and jumped into him.

  -

  As their clamor opened, The Bell's coil ceased its cling. Her body fell away from Wander's waist and became silent again. The air she was tingled, and she could not feel or touch.

  She looked toward De. If there was another, a peer, it would sit in the silence of him. She left Wander behind and approached the man.

  "Show yourself in, stranger," The Bell said. "Throw off this rude covering. Let us speak like friends!"

  De's place washed toward her. His worker was small, and many-pointed. She watched him plunge and dive through the light as he approached, staking his way through space with lines sharp enough that she could not see their tips.

  The Bell let herself be swirled and folded by spot after spot, until she and he sat opposed, and could regard the other's senses.

  "What is your name?" asked The Bell. "On our last meeting, you did not share it with me."

  "Name?" Her peer crooked himself. His first word rose up with incense and a stutter. It produced a stabbing that hived everything, burrowing out small holes in it. "A name has a speaker, feurkun-Bell. A name has friends. Their creator does not."

  "Then what is this word you carry? Creator."

  "It is a gift I carry, feurkun-Bell. Creator is mine. Creator is me. The Creator of Ones. I will create yours, feurkun-Bell."

  "There are no ones," The Bell said. "What a smiling notion! A one is frozen. I have seen nothing like that. If you wish to freeze me, you might do it soon. I like the warmth, and I have a path to it. I would walk it once again."

  "I have your ways, feurkun-Bell," said the creator. His word thrust chambers into The Bell's, shaking her as they rejoined. "Do not mistake my shape, feurkun-Bell. There is a wrong in you that can be made right. What it needs is your ear. It will be taken by my hands; either the ones I move, or the ones you move."

  "Where does she sit, at its correction?"

  She gave his gaze to The Joyous One.

  "The firmtipper is your limit," he said. "There are many other suns."

  "But none so mine. And none so me."

  The creator of ones moved closer.

  "Then take up your blade, walks-smiles," he said. "Show me the murder in it."

  He moved into her, and it was very quick. The Bell was pierced and cut apart.

  The creator laughed.

  He grew silent as the Ones he had created bounded around and cried out. They stuck back together again, and The Bell resumed.

  The creator twisted, and cut her more.

  -

  Below, the strangers hit at their respective metals with resounding speed and explosion. They thrust and cut and bludgeoned one another, and broke apart and paused as the world became enveloped by shifting experience. De, his weapon halfway cast upon Wander's hip, stumbled and jumped as his feet sank down, mixed in to the ground beneath him, which dissolved into a watery medium of gel and solids. They looked up at the sky as it thundered without clouds, and the stars all vanished. Then Wander seized him again, driving around his skull with a swipe, and they were returned to the project.

  Wander sought The Cane. She snapped and slashed at him with her stumped weapons. His Cane beat into them and they split and chipped, producing brilliant shine in the ear as they met his cudgel. She brought them across his arms and chest, and chunks of them broke away and splintered in his skin. When he saw it, he threw himself at her, taking his piece in both hands and stabbing it at her chest. She caught its shaft with one, kicked him back from her, and spat.

  A hoarse wail sprung out from De's throat when it was opened by her knocking, his voice left open lazily and thrown about by the cuts of her blade and his hands sudden shots of movement. He blew back against her, grit his teeth and shook, seeking to retrieve the pieces of himself.

  Wander hit him. It did not matter how much she did it. His flesh was voracious, and its soft parts grew firm when she thundered into them, excited by her ministry. She knocked him into the soil, swept up a heavy stone and threw it across his skull. It broke into pieces, but she continued.

  Wander slipped her weapons away and visited him with her hands. The dull of her fists brought a sledgehammer to De's firm and broke through his head and torso, quit his shaking and popping an eye loose from its place. He brought his iron up against her and she dug in her feet, meeting the blow to her arm with still. The shaft rebounded from its strike and turned, crooked where it once had not been.

  The star would not move, and had nothing that would move, or he could not retrieve such. Wander saw this, and went into him, hurling a fist at his second eye.

  The ground fought in their fighting. The air cut itself and rebounded. Their combat salted the shell with debris, the clang and clap constant to their exchange, and the viscera of De as the sun fell below the horizon and the stars bloomed. Once again De threw Wander. He moved where she struck, giving her the air, and seizing the arm she had meant to hit him with. She was spun deeper into the shell, whirled by wind until her feet again touched and so sawed open rivers in the snow.

  Her head lifted up at De. Her gaze was wide.

  He looked back at her, his jittering and jumping much reduced. He met her look with his own, softened by the heat he had taken.

  "This is Harmony, firmtipper," De whispered. "These hits can give you no position. No cause for this safe-feeling."

  He lifted his cane and, wrapping his fingers around the tip, wrenched it back into form.

  "You have no family here," he said.

  Wander's body thrust again at him, bursting from the snow with her arms outstretched. When she met him next, the peal of a Bell chimed. Her knives swept out as he threw her back, and she plunged forward, throwing aside his weapon and hacking at the crusts of white-and-red that encased his skin. De's eye turned and shook as he saw them excised and felt his hand restrained, and a moan emerged from him again as he lunged forward, his hesigns very bright.

  The ground was thrown onto other parts by the switch of their hips and feet. The moisture on their fists and skin met. As she fought Wander tore apart herself. Her body rebelled against the levers of the project.

  -

  De was soon thrown against the wall: a sturdy one, thatched, attached to a full intact roundseat inside the shell. Wander approached him and, crunching her body beneath his swipe, solved him against it with her fists. She pinned him in place, thrashed twice against his winding replies, and gave out a third which threw herself and her arm forward, cracking open the wall. It blew dust and De through it, and cast light into the darkness of the house. He remained on his feet, but he stumbled, and he was pressed back by her renewed play through the ruin, crashing past a stove and mats.

  Wander's Kathan blade rang out when she brought it up to thow aside his swings. He moved more quickly, blistering the air as he struck what stood past it. Black dents formed in Wander's throat and the mast of her, but no bellows emerged from her eyes or throat.

  Her body burst from the shell's far wall. He pursued it, only to find his ranging thrust sought, seized, and its blunt shoved into his gut. Their throws carried them through the ruin, nearing now on the shell's old speaking place, and the Larun order-stone at the center of it.

  She battered him past the ring of pillars, where De reversed his weapon and struck her three times, on the chin, knee, and a punch to the stomach, which produced a gap and pause. He wiped his eyes free of fluid and explored her face. When they returned to him and resumed, her arms snapped around him tossed him through the air.

  He caught himself on the heights of a pillar and fell from them. He landed in the snow.

  "You seem a law," De said.

  She moved toward him. Her eyes were small and her chin untucked.

  He continued still. "The laws have taken many faces. Yours is the five-hundredth I have seen them seek. The men before you, those that did not scream in the taking, screamed with silence, from a fear of it. Yours seems near the thing of mine. But that, too, is a misstep. Your kind, even your right-handed one, is priced for what I lack- these screams, and this crying. He told you once."

  Wander's heel came for his chest. His body bent as it crashed through him and he raised up his hand too slowly. She punctured him with the Kathan blade and twisted the handle.

  De did not let out any cry or flinch from it. He rose up and looked at her. The two were now almost at eye level. De's limbs shivered and choked out of their size. He lifted his gaze an inch.

  De's teeth bit together. His lips bent toward his ears.

  "The lack is I, you see," he said. "The lack is mine. The noise was taken from me. Silence is our property."

  He took out the Kathan blade and wrestled with her.

  "My I," De said, "is a Freeman."

  "My I," De said, "is a coin."

  He threw her off, and roared out a shriek. Her blood burned and a hand lunged into him.

  -

  The Bell raged around her assailant. He punctured and divided her. He produced holes and drove them apart, through her, whirling her around. She was scattered into pieces. He waited and he watched as they jumped into one another again. They coiled around his face, and he snapped them away.

  The Bell's concerns assembled themselves, and all of them were joined by the problem. She could grasp no blade. Her creator grasped many. When she pushed against it, she was shorn apart.

  The creator of ones was silent, and he became still, seeing her hold on to herself, and crying out by the cuts that her plan led her to.

  She moved herself around, and tried to create a pierce, but it only tugged soft the sense of the creator. He spoke, and his word became filled with light and humor.

  "You hardly have a hand for what you are!" he cried. "You have a nature, woman. It cannot be changed."

  He moved again, and pinned her with his knives, and not enough to break her apart. She squirmed and worked toward it, that she might be free.

  "If there is a cut in my nature," she screamed, "you will find it, brightplague."

  The creator's shape wiggled and rippled with a jolt at the word. "I have seen the aberration," he said. "That is not your true way. You are wasting your potentials."

  "My potentials!" The Bell cried. "Shall I now hear of smiles from you, cuts-apart?!"

  "The cutting is creation," the creator said. "The cutting is a way to your concerns."

  It traced its edge along the rough seams in her composition. "Inside the ties you seek- there I am! I am always. To reject me, impossible. My work, and its figures, the principle. The power that rises up and prices this priceless firmament. Yours is second to it. But even in that rank, a heavenly system can await you."

  The Bell sparkled. "Heavenly?"

  The pressure on her lifted slightly.

  "Let me show you the paths I can offer your Firstpoint," said The Creator. "Take ten of these breathers' turns. Our shape shall form the whole of this space we inhabit. The fibre of the ground shall fit to our step! Be brave, and receive the ecstasy of your post. Look up at me."

  The Bell did.

  "Answer me, now," The Creator said. "Little Bell."

  The Bell sparkled again. Parts of her drifted out from underneath him.

  They wrapped around his point, and between themselves, crushed it.

  -

  A yowling red thunderbolt cracked across the shell, from the ground to the sky and back down again, and remained there, glowing down. Fragile's gaze - fixed where it had last been ordered, on the clouds of dust spilling up from the roundseats - twitched again. He blinked.

  The fissure that had threaded itself up to the stars emitted raining showers of luminous golden drops. They marked the fields that Wander plowed with De.

  The warrior sheathed her weapons and brought down her fists on his side and jaw. He stumbled backward, so she hit him again in the chest and the chest. She pulled him close, and bit off his cheek with her teeth. She threw him into the order-stone and swallowed.

  De's body cracked over the monolith and splashed into the snow. Brown fluid stained it and the rock. He did not move or make noise.

  Wander watched the streaks of light play over him. Another bolt cracked across the sky that was white. Snow fell from it, as the air continued to rage and heat. As it did so, she moved on him.

  Around her step, the snow melted within a large radius, stretching high in to the air, such that the precipitate became rain many metres up. The air waved, the ground steamed, and her eyelids drooped. She removed the ruined blaith from her belt and pricked her finger with it. Its signs were silent and quiet. Her arm fell, and she trudged forward. Her eyes focused on his neck.

  The Freeman's body twitched. She stopped.

  It recoiled. The eyes and mouth De was marked with opened; tugging muscles underneath hugged them toward plans of expression and alignment that conflicted and changed, and the faces they made swirled between possibilities. They began to look and speak.

  "How I price you, Otiser; how I praise you! For what is it you want? Please, speak to me!"

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  "What's happening? Is this design? This feeling, a great trial. Prodda sees me first."

  "The fight is on! The firmtipper must fall. She must, at our hands. Where are my hands? Where is my niv?"

  Their hands and legs began to move. They returned him to a standing posture and turned him.

  When they had done this, De was absent. A younger man had taken his place. His head had a face, formed with Fragile's skin color. Black hair grew out from his skull. His eyes were fully white. There was no green in them.

  "I will say it," the man said. "Your law is high. I do not know that it is high enough."

  Wander unsheathed her Kathan blade.

  The man lifted his arm. The material of his weapon had sealed onto his skin. It had become a dark, heavy skewer melted into his wrist, and the cheek of his palm. He splayed all of his fingers, on his hand, his chest, and more curling over his shoulder, reaching out from around his back. The parts of his body loosened and unfolded, and gained new definition. They fell out from his rear and center, reached toward and above her, and unfurled themselves.

  "The higher law can break another," The Cane said. "We can find a freedom there."

  He looked at her. "Show it to me, Dry Man."

  The faces chittered. "Fight the firmtipper!" "Fight her." "Do only what is right."

  His fingers wrapped around the shaft and started forward. "Show me a higher law."

  -

  The Bell bit again upon her foe.

  The creator of ones screamed and stabbed into her vise. Her feeling loosened, but he did scream from her new experiment, and kept doing it.

  "Feurkun," he said. "Shamin leavings."

  He drove his point through her. She resumed again, and was growing dry of screams, but she did not like it. She saw less well, and less particular.

  He forced himself against her and she wrenched his tip back and forward. She fell on him and came apart by it, rejoined into a bash.

  The creator squealed and scrambled to get a push on her. Once he did, he howled, and splintered her into many pieces. He threw them out, and kept up his work, making her smaller and smaller.

  A group of her pulled itself together, and he slammed into it.

  "You see this a smiling work," the creator roared. "I was your Joyous One's last hope. Your faithless, know-nothing coin destroyer. Her last. Let it be said. Have you even seen what it's like? The silence?"

  Her parts reared and crawled around him, and he beat them back together.

  "We are alone!"

  He struck her into a small space. "I have taken the only path. The same that you would have taken. The one you could have taken, feurkun Chamark. That little spark we murdered burned the words into you. Must I really scream them for you to hear?

  WE HAVE NO RULERS. WE HAVE NO HOUSE. WE HAVE NO GOAL.

  He struck her at last, and she was shot apart at speed. She reached for herself, what was left, in the dim, and the creator reached for it too.

  -

  The foreigner fought back. Wander moved and he struck her in the chest and waist. Her posture shook with each blow. They found paths inside that had not been travelled.

  The Cane's hands reached out and picked at her. His body struck at her without stopping. Her torso bent as it rolled through her head, and her arm waved as it rose up to knock him back. When she returned a cut to his throat, he moved like gusted water.

  The speed of his swing folded the metal of his shaft. It shot across her ear and, her stance sat on a slab of ice, blew her down into the snow.

  "Where is the Dry Man?" The Cane asked. His voice still shook, and now at such a rate that the sound fluttered and could give out his words unbroken. "Only she can show this law, Firmtipper. You are but a body. And that cannot tell a name."

  Wander stood up. She knocked her blades together and moved back toward him.

  His limbs lunged at her face. She dove from their grip and cut one free at the wrist. His weapon knocked into her and a cord in her back plucked. She cut another hand, splitting it down the middle, and a third at the palm. Their parts fell from his body, trailing liquid.

  His cane struck back at her with a whistle. Her feet shifted and her hand blew against the wrath of it. De's mouth fell open and his arm bent backwards as her blade descended toward his eye. His head moved, and he sprung away.

  She stepped toward him. He struck again, and again she threw it back. He stepped away.

  He delivered a third blow, which she cast aside easily. Her frame did not tense, and she adjusted the grip on her blaith. He scrambled backward, his mouth wide.

  The metal hissed toward her, one more time. Wander's hands wrapped around his stab and threw him into the snow, his body slapping and leaving clumps of skin as the rock bit it.

  She twisted, and a cord in her back snapped. She was stopped, frozen to her spot. An eye in the Cane's back blinked at the gesture. His arms and legs righted him.

  When he next struck, Wander's guard blocked nothing. He jumped at her rear and struck at it. The cords shivered, and she swirled to meet him; he was already away.

  A knock crushed her shoulderblade. She reached her hand back around to cover herself. When she seized his weapon, he struck with his fists.

  She swung herself around and a fibre tore, sounding a crack through her skull. She chose not to hear it.

  Her blaith thrust out, not where she intended. The Cane's hand came up and dashed away the remaining metal, which her back sent a foot aside his position. Its shape disintegrated, the last cutlet of sign-covered blade out into the snow. The halves of its hilt struck a stone cracked open at the base.

  She did not pause. She struck him with the Kathan blade, her ears ringing. She stabbed his chest, and chopped at his throat too quickly for one to see.

  Before she could get very far, two of The Cane's limbs reached from his chest and back and clamped over her edge and palm.

  "Your I is a teller," he said.

  His foot lashed forward, exploding a roundseat next to the order-stone. It dissolved into a billowing mist of dust and splinters.

  "Softer than mine."

  His bleeding stanched as he walked over to where she lay.

  Wander's body was generating no more heat, and her body's hesigns had become dark. She could see The Cane approaching as a blur, but he was not moving fast. She placed up a leg and brought her body with it, and sent a fist into his head. She received it back, and it could not be moved.

  She exploded against the ground again, cracking the dirt. The force of her descent produced thunder.

  "I cannot see the Dry Man," The Cane said. She did not stand up.

  The Cane raised his weapon. "I will go looking."

  Wander's body cracked apart and swelled. Her eyes flooded with black fluid that increased with each strike to her head, and his body left them. Soon everything was clouded and dark.

  He stopped striking her when she stopped moving, and lowered his cane again.

  "I had not forgotten you," he said.

  The Cane placed his stick into the ground and leaned on it. The bodies hanging around and beneath him writhed and clung to each other. They stopped all at once.

  "I tried to forget," The Cane said. "I tried to forget until the cold came for me. That one so new could be so wrong. That one so new could pierce right so true. That one so new could see so little."

  He shut his eyes. "It was the first day I saw a beast in breathers. And I could not. My eye is for your type. My eye is for adoring. What was told sheared, and cut up the law. The break is in your flesh."

  The Cane breathed heavily. "The Firstpoint has ordered me to attack." His hands plucked at Wander's cheeks and eyelids. "To put my niv through you," he continued, "would manage well the hurt of it. I can take your breath, too, with my hold. I can perform any way you prefer. Yours is a high price. You will receive my favors."

  An incomplete noise left Wander's throat. He turned his ear towards her.

  Hurt is my favor, said The Dry Man.

  The Cane leaned back. "Never have I met one who broke so well," he said. "Even the Star you shot apart, firmtipper. He was a higher kind. A Firstpoint to us both. But he did not know how to break himself as well as you. His foundations were low, and was he. With this, his height could play no part. Not to a firm as high."

  The Cane looked at Wander's wounds, which had been laid bare by the melee. They entered his eye as a piece unseen, a new shape that he did not know how to pronounce. Her weapons had broke and the feeling was good. It was covered with cuts and signs, as he was, and he had strength embedded in his bones that he saw grown whole in hers. His eye found he could pronounce it well.

  His right arm broke out from its place and twisted over her. It pointed his weapon at her chest.

  "Your firm is high. But it is not above the sky."

  -

  The Bell did not move, and could not feel herself anymore.

  She had been cut into dust. Each point of her hiked and flew a distance to the other, but as they grew smaller and smaller, the distance grew larger and larger. There was a new feeling emerging, and it was not one she had chosen, and it was not a kind of nothing. It was a pull before her, and she could not move as it began to tug.

  The creator of ones approached the largest part of her that remained. He pressed down on her lightly, and she put out no noise.

  For a moment his word scattered and did not rise high. It gathered together after that, and loomed. "I have found no cut."

  She did not speak to him anymore. He pierced her once, and she flinched.

  "My tells are fine, feurkun nothing," the creator said. "They give me a way to something wrong."

  He pierced her again. "They give me a way to things impossible."

  She began to come apart.

  "All of these will share in them," the creator said. "These breathing unders. I offer you calm with this."

  He arrayed many blades over her and began to dig.

  "Ten turns or twenty," he continued. "Only what is right will enter my eye. So get out from it – feurkun Chamark."

  He pushed darkness into The Bell's thoughts, and they grew more empty.

  This work made room, and it was filled: by a sun, and its great invading voice.

  -

  "Eldbrother!"

  Wander's eyes flicked in the direction of the sound. The Cane switched about, his eyes running up and down. His mouths babbled after the sound.

  They all settled and stilled on a little figure, stood nearby in the dark. The thick flock of his hair showed through the debris. His was shivering, and he was covered with sweat. His teeth were pressed together, and his eyes were wide, drinking in some visual from the flailing hues of the night, and he blinked quickly.

  Fragile rushed over and fell at The Cane's feet. Fragile clutched at the bodies above it which fell apart in his little hands. He pressed a kiss to The Cane's abdomen, and the eyes there widened at him. Their hands hovered over the Sixbraid, some of them clenching, Others reached out.

  "Please," Fragile said. He spoke in broken Sprak. "Firstpoint, please. Change tell. Change tell!"

  The Cane looked down at him, his mouth open. The others did the same, and his body became a top of darkness, tongues and teeth.

  Fragile cried. "Remember words your! Can remember words your? Remember? Remember! Remember!" His cry spat forth tears.

  "I can remember."

  "Touch not pain," he said. "But – this touch pain! This touch! Tell wrong! Tell wrong!"

  He wept. "Please, eldbrother." He spoke in Goalish, even though The Cane could not hear it. "You must know what it all means. You have said it. You have said it to me. Please. Please!"

  A boot shoved off Fragile, and he fell back into the mud.

  "You price high your Firstpoint, feurkun," said The Cane. "And I price high my own."

  He brought up his weapon and admired it. Many hands reached out from his arm and clasped its shaft. "The Tells are your way to calm and sun. They are the only feature I regard. My work is for them alone, and it is only there that I find a sun for myself. My Teller gives me peace. You cannot keep her taking from him what he has taken from her. No piece can."

  "My part!" Fragile cried.

  The Cane tilted his head. Fragile crawled back over to him on his hands and knees, soaked with dirt. "M-my part," Fragile whispered. "Me… me…" He wept. He tapped his chest. "She… see me. Give me chain. Safe Firstpoint. Give me fire. Tjeni. Make me free. Man free. Push me away. Cut me. Cut me… not her. Cut me! Cut me!"

  His eyes weighed on Fragile.

  "A strange virchue," he said. "The wit of Partless found you out. Perhaps you do have a preferred way. It would be a delving work. Maybe it could have found a law."

  Fragile's eyes widened. De turned back to Wander.

  "But a tell-" he said. "It is told. Rest now, feurkun braid. You have a right. Sett will bring you into words. Words that can see."

  He cocked back his arm. "Words that can fly.

  Fragile moved, and Wander whispered. The world flashed wild red, white, and black, and then silver as the bolt shot into her. The sky cracked with fire.

  Fragile shivered. His arms clung around Wander's neck, and he looked into her eyes. They were very wide.

  There were shallow gasps. "I'm s-sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry, s-star."

  He fell down. Her eyes moved to follow him.

  The Cane took up his arm, and his weapon went away from Fragile's back. A red drop flew from the metal onto Wander's mouth. More blood had been spilled there, slipping through her lips and onto her tongue. It began to run down her throat.

  Without The Cane's support, Fragile rolled off of her and tumbled into the dirt.

  The Cane poked Fragile with his shaft. He looked at Wander.

  "This was not my meaning," he said.

  He looked back at Fragile. "This is a heavy sun," he said. Two hands wound around his head and covered his eyes. "I had a glimpse of it once, and now it is found out."

  The hands moved away. He hunched and let his arm down. His stick pressed into the dirt. "Take calm from this, firmtipper. The tell is here to give it to us – a place where it can be found. All is for the firm – the firm is for its suns."

  He opened his eyes. His cane moved on her. "Many breath and fall without finding such a prize. There are no parts for it. Take your calm, Dry Man, for you have found one. And you will meet again, in the eye of Sett."

  -

  The Bell felt herself descending, pierced by the creator into grains without fixture.

  The fireworker's image, the pieces, process and fluid of it, resounded through her eye. As she dispersed, a sun shined itself into the world. There could be no sun, as it was night, but she saw it anyway. The sun was sealed beneath a stone.

  It moved toward her, and she became excited. The sun's nearness tightened her feeling, and in a different place, she could feel a prod hacking and hitting at it and bellowing Larun words.

  She could not move any closer to the sun, and the rock stopped her up. There came then, the idea of its removal, and she reviewed her experiments.

  She had not found a pierce. But, there was a push of its own type, and it did make a scream as the pierce did. Her post could produce a work from its oppost.

  So Bell reached out with her own way, and the rock was touched by it. It shattered, and shifted a warrior. The sun fattened and created the whole world after that time. And it created twos. The weak thing was in it, and he was making fire.

  She looked on his word and the picture of it. She moved back through Fragile's path.

  She found another two, seated over a table, where the flame was kept. The two of them wrote some words beside it, in a pool of stone.

  PAIR

  PRIOR

  HEART

  They made flames too. They were, like the others, made from a little melting parts, which she had found in every place. And she discovered no exotic method to it.

  For this, she made a new experiment, while the creator tried to crush them into memory. But she did not cut the parts.

  She pulled them together. She made her own sun. Like the one she knew.

  -

  A swirling column of fire and dust rose. The dark retreated, and did the cold.

  The Cane's eyes opened. They realized that they had shut.

  His bodies had blown through the Larun order-stone, and cracked it apart. He found himself splayed out in the center of the open. He breathed in a wheezing gasp. His legs stood him up, and he steadied himself with his weapon.

  A fire had spread around the entire shell. The columns and seats were being consumed, and a great volume of snow and steam was being thrown up, offering up the foliage which sat underneath. He could not hear his worker.

  The frost meant the fire moved slowly, but it had plenty of fuel and heat to run. In the distance, bells sounded, clanging in from the Wild. He had heard them before.

  The Cane's mouths let out cries and keens as the flames crawled through the weeds, closing in on them. A bout of smoke rolled down his throat and he let out revulsing coughs.

  His weapon swept out at the fire. He stamped at it with his feet, and his arms reached out to smother it. He smashed and bashed. Great holes were bored in the ground, and he managed to throw a chunk of soil with which to douse it, but the explosion with which he did so was weakening. The whole wrapped around the douse and boiled through.

  He looked toward the destroyed house where he had catapulted his adversary. He felt a scream in his gut as he found its shape, but he saw no movement. No, he saw movement.

  It was shrouded in the swirling tongues, and in the vapor and rolling tide of smoke. A tall figure made of these rose up from off its knees, bringing up its hand from the ground.

  He saw movement.

  The figure unbent itself and turned to face The Cane. The ringing grew louder.

  He saw movement.

  "The beast," he whispered.

  The ringing stopped.

  The fire exploded. It shot out a green and black fury, its features alive with flame, that struck The Cane in the jaw. He fell backward in silence. His hands wound out and threw at the spirit, and scalded themselves. He recoiled, and swung up his shaft. It struck her right and flung the beast into a roundseat flowering with heat.

  He looked away. The fired dwelling burst, and his face snapped forward.

  The beast hacked her blows into his waist and throat. Heat coursed through Cane's belly. He could see her face, and it did not scream.

  He and his hands rushed forward. She punched his jaw. A middle shot from the right, her left to his cheek.

  The Cane was shivering. Wander took hold of his club and the arm it was attached to and ripped them out of place. She struck it through his chest, blowing a thick chunk of him out the other side.

  He was made silent for a moment, and then he erupted. A noise like shredding iron ran out from his mouth. He struck the beast and sent her rolling away.

  He gasped in heaving breaths and looked down at the woun. He gripped its hilt with a number of hands and freed it from his innards, sending brown fluid spilling out of him.

  Her hair and form trailed loops of smoke when she returned. Her fist shot sparks as she cracked him across the face and seared his flesh.

  She struck him then, on the chest and the chest and the face and the chest and the face and the gut and the side and the chin and the eye, which became dislodged by her hit.

  She thrashed him in the chest and he was thrown to the ground. She picked up his cane from where it hand been left, placed down a foot his stomach, and drove it through his heart, into the dirt behind it.

  The nail did not take at first, and made a moderate dent in the soil. She took her fist and brought it down. It went deeper. She hit it again, and it went deeper, so that she needed to get on her knees.

  She hit it again, and it went deeper. She hit it again, and it went deeper. She hit it again.

  Wander left him for a moment.

  She took a long component beam of one the columns that lined the open. She grabbed fire around its tip.

  She returned to him and, placing her boot on his chest, rammed it down his throat.

  The Cane and his faces moaned. They cried and whined and muttered and breathed heavily and breathed softly. The eyes closed. His chest rose and fell.

  The cold in him left, and his face wrinkled. His hair fell out.

  The sound of fire howled and snorted with the wind. The boiling water screeched and hissed.

  -

  Wander ran towards Fragile. She slid into the snow, crowding the flames of her tattered vest with wind and ice.

  He was face-down in the ash and white. She turned him over, and with her hands, she could feel the hole that The Cane had made, which was heavy and large. The tissue, waterways, and fibres of him were shattered.

  Fragile's eyes were closed. She took the back of his head and put her fingers to his throat.

  "You can hear me," she said.

  His lips moved. "B-bata…"

  She retrieved her shoulderskin and laid him on it.

  "The call, Fragile," Wander said. "The call. My call, Key."

  She snapped off her belt and laid it out in the snow, exposing its instruments.

  "My call. All was cold," she said. She picked out a brush and a knife from the belt. "Once, all was cold, Fragile. There were only clouds. And Onn."

  The animals, along with the coil of The Bell, which wrapped around The Stronghoof's head, approached, and gazed at Wander's tugging and ripping. The Stonehoof nudged Fragile's hairline as the sky split apart and it began to rain, dropping water onto Wander's fingers and effects, washing away the snow, and filling up the dirt.

  She cut open Fragile's shirt and slipped out two corks of clear liquid. She uncorked both, dipped her brush in them, and began to scrub their juice into Fragile's chest.

  The blood in Fragile's back began to clot, but the exit wound continued to spill. She flexed her fingers and looked at The Bell.

  The air shivered as Wander's hand crackled to life and took on flames. The rain fell on her hand and turned to smoke.

  "She had cold," she said. "Onn. All was cold. And-"

  The fire sat over Fragile's gap for a moment.

  Wander looked down at the mud. It curled around her knees. A leaf stuck to her garment.

  She put down her hand and touched him.

  The rains extinguished most of the fires. A few still kept on, possessing the last ruins of the shell. Wander looked over her opponent's body, which had not moved since her victory.

  The stake ran through it, pinning him to the soil. It was broken and mottled, with no clear claim to strength. It was scrawled over with faded, sputtering Hesigns, many layered over each other, along with cuts where sections of flesh had been removed, marks older and younger than the signs that had nevertheless found their way onto them at some point. Sprak phrases were etched alongside them. She found a familiarity in it, and she shook. There was a great sinking to its spot.

  She gripped her blade. She felt the prospect of breaking it apart, and as she did it broke up further. Red-brown lines trickled from his wounds onto the ground. He was intact.

  The skin was blistered, risen by swollen bluffs. Bones had snapped and fell out, writhed on the ground, crumbling. He persisted through tears. His breaths heaved and wheezed and came in stumbling bursts. Each swelled ichor from his wounds. He hunched over, and did not shiver anymore. His body gelled instead. Its contours were a chambered liquid.

  The warrior looked at the bumps patching up his skin. She looked at the bones and the shapes they made. She found the word he formed.

  "Freeman," Wander said.

  His head tilted toward her. He had one eye left. It was mostly green, with small flecks of white. "Onn's daughter."

  "You are my first," she said. "There will be more."

  "I cannot show you roads," De said. "And you cannot take them. But try, if you must."

  "Where is your Firstpoint?" Wander asked.

  "He is in my heart," De said. "He wrote it so."

  "Then I will take it out."

  His teeth bit together and his cheeks creased.

  "Which of you threw my Wiser?"

  His teeth parted. "I," he said.

  "How was it done?"

  "We moved into the mass," he said. "Her friends attacked. I broke them. I broke her. He took the parts he liked."

  "Did she fight?"

  De's eye blinked. "Yes."

  "How did she feel?"

  "She had no signs," De said. "I do. She was strong. But it was fast."

  "That is not what I meant."

  An earthy paste fell from De's mouth as his teeth closed.

  "What was her feeling?" Wander asked. "Her way. Her touch.

  De's fingers touched the soil. His eye closed and his body shivered.

  "Are you in search of something true?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  "Her touch was strong," De said. "You have read the Otiseran. She says that ones in races, run in you. She has run a long time in me."

  "Why?"

  "She granted nothing."

  Wander's fingers wrapped around her weapon, and she stood by him without moving or speaking.

  "I'm happy for you both," De said. "I hope he keeps his breath. I hope he makes you smile. There is nothing more perfect to the ones that made me."

  He blinked when she failed to respond. His gaze became drawn to the fire. She followed it.

  "Will you give me to the ease?" he asked. "That is the best way for me. I can take my calm from it."

  She extracted the cane from his body. She took De in her arms, and brought him over to the fire, and laid him down inside it. The flames lapped around her hands, arms, and chest. She stepped back when he was inside, wreathed in flame.

  De made no noise as he was surrounded by the flames. It charred his skin and some of it slowed. He opened his mouth and a cloud of frost came out, and he looked at the sky.

  "Bati?" he whispered.

  Thereafter his body crumpled and became black. Its ashes became carried on the wind.

  -

  -

  -