I focused on the girl. Gamelpar was right. What she had to say was far more important right now than any of my old memories. I pretended a kind of calm, but decided to push her a step further.

Riser would have done the same to me in a tough situation.

“So tel us—did you ever realy know?” I asked.

She gave me a feral look, pushed between the old man and me, turned away from both of us, and closed her eyes again. For a moment she swayed back and forth and I thought she would fal over, but instead, she spun around several times—then jerked out her arm and pointed a finger.

“There!” she cried hoarsely. “I feel it again! We need to go there.” She jabbed her finger at a diagonal to the far gray wal.

“Not away from the wal?” Gamelpar asked.

“No,” she said, face radiant. “We need to move that way.”

“That takes us back to the city,” Gamelpar said.

This confused her. “We don’t want to go back there,” she admitted, her voice low.

“Why not?” I asked. In truth, I was curious to see the city.

“Bad memories,” Gamelpar said. “Are you sure that’s the way?”

“We could walk around the city. . . . ,” she ventured. Then she shook her head. “No. I need to go there . . . into the city, through the city—first.” She took Gamelpar’s hand. “But we’l go around the vilage. They don’t want you there.”

“Are you sure the city’s deserted?” I asked.

She nodded. “Nobody goes there anymore,” she said.

“Not even Forerunners?” I asked, but neither of them seemed to think that was deserving of an answer.

Chapter Six

WE TOOK THE long way around the vilage toward the old city.

As we walked, I decided on my own terms for directions on the wheel. Inland or inward meant away from an edge wal—until, I supposed, one reached the midpoint of the band, and then one would be heading outward, or outland, toward the opposite wal.

East was the direction from which light swept around to wake us each “morning.” West was the direction of the fleeing light.

We rested as night came down. I lay on my side, several paces from the old man and the girl, and tried to anticipate what might happen next. Wherever the Didact and Bornstelar had taken me, memories and ideas and even indelible instructions had popped up in my thoughts, in my actions. Vinnevra was now experiencing the same troubling gift.

Maybe the Librarian wants only the girl—not you or the old man.

The old spirit again.

“Go to sleep,” I muttered.

Death has been sleep enough.

Gamelpar had pointed out that my skin was not marked. I presumed that would reveal to Forerunners that I was a recent arrival. My thoughts grew hazier and wilder. Having seen my lack of a mark—or my strangeness—could have triggered Vinnevra’s urge to travel. I could almost imagine the instructions the Lifeshaper had laid down in our flesh: See this, do that. Meet this visitor, take him there. Face this chalenge, behave this way. . . .

Like puppets, at times we seemed to be motivated only by the Lifeshaper’s omnipresent touch.

But going into the city—despite my curiosity, the necessity of that was less than obvious to Gamelpar and me.

The next day, we stood before a broken wooden gate on the western side of the old city. The thick mud and rock rampart stretched unbroken for hundreds of meters in either direction. There were no other gates.

The gate gave entrance to a tunnel about twenty meters long.

“Thick wals—to keep Forerunners out?” I asked Gamelpar.

He shook his head, leaning on his stick before the gate, staring into the gloom. “Other cities, roving bands . . . raiders. Humans were on their own for centuries before I came here.”

“War and pilage,” I said.

He blinked at me, nodded, then turned to face Vinnevra, who was steeling herself to go through the tunnel.

“You are stil sure?” he asked her.

She stubbornly lifted her shoulders and sprinted ahead, eager to get through the darkness.

Gamelpar regarded me again with weary eyes. “The Lady has her ways.”

As we folowed the girl, I told them my words for directions, describing where we were going on the wheel. We emerged from the tunnel into the light, stepped over another broken gate, and stood in a narrow lane that folowed the wal and separated most of the buildings from the wal itself.

The old man listened intently. When I finished, he said, “East, west, north, south . . . new words. We say turnwise, lightwise, crosswise. I suppose they’re al the same. Vinnevra hasn’t traveled far enough to care much for the old words. The new ones wil work just as wel.”

Above us, a parapet leaned out, crossing the top of the gate and meeting a stone tower on either side. Guards had seen fit to look within as wel as without.

“War,” I said. “The Lady always alows us the freedom to fight each other. . . .”

Gamelpar lifted his lips in a gap-toothed smirk. “Where there is freedom, there wil be war,” he said. “We covet. We hate. We fight. We die.”

“Was it that way before we met the Forerunners?” I asked. My old spirit did not express an opinion.

“Probably,” Gamelpar said. “It’s likely the same for Forerunners.

But who wil ask them?”

Vinnevra circled back and glared at us. “Keep close,” she said.

“We shouldn’t stay here any longer than we have to.” She looked around, lips drawn tight, then moved off again, running like a young deer on her long, skinny legs.

I have no doubt you have seen marvels of architecture on the worlds you know—Earth today, perhaps. And I had seen great marvels—or their ruins—on Charum Hakkor, revealing the genius of humans before the Forerunner wars brought us low. But this old city reminded me of Marontik—though surrounded by thicker wals.

The mud-colored buildings were never more than three stories high, the third stories on both sides leaning in and almost touching over narrow dirt or cobble streets. The second and third floors were supported by wooden beams which poked through the wals —old wood no doubt cut from the nearby forests until only stunted trees remained.

But if anything, as we walked and walked, I suspected that this city had once been larger and more populous than Marontik, though its true scale was difficult to judge. I would have liked to see it from above—a layout of al its streets and neighborhoods.

From the Didact’s ship, before being sealed into our bubbles, Riser and I had looked down upon entire worlds—cities no more than tiny smudges. A revelation at the time.

The old spirit observed this, to him, primitive yearning for a map —but again, did not comment. I wasn’t sure which was more irritating—his comments or his silence.

As we penetrated deeper into the winding lanes, Vinnevra seemed to lose confidence in her geas, her sense of direction.

Several times she turned around and doubled us back. But we tended—I noticed, and no doubt Gamelpar noticed as wel—ever toward the diagonal she had first pointed out, cutting, I judged, across one-third of the old city.

The low oval doors of the buildings were dark and silent but for a

mournfuly hooting wind. Hangings or rough fiber curtains stil hung like drooping eyelids in a few higher windows. The streets were filed with windblown clutter from the last inhabitants: rotting sandals, scraps of filthy cloth, broken wood—no iron or other metal. The city had been stripped of anything valuable, leaving only the wals.

That meant, of course, we would not find caches of food or anything remotely like treasure. I thought sadly of Bornstelar and our shared quest for treasure. Which of us had been the most naïve?

You have affection for a Forerunner.

“Not realy,” I said. “We traveled together.”

It is no crime. I once felt affection for a Warrior-Servant as I hunted his ships and destroyed his fighters. No lover ever felt my attentions so fiercely.

The old spirit suddenly burned. For a while, his questing intensity made me feel as if I held a caged animal—but it passed. One can grow used to anything, I suppose.

I have grown used to the way you find me now, after al. I barely remember the flesh. . . . No. That’s a lie. I remember it too clearly.

At least the Lord of Admirals, back then, was stil lodged in flesh.

My flesh, to be sure.

The shadows grew long, the lanes dark enough to let us see stars overhead—stars, and something larger: a round planet the width of my outstretched thumb—as wide as the moon as seen from Erde- Tyrene, red and gray and foreboding.

This was the first time I saw the object that would cause so much disaster—but I am getting ahead of myself.

Chapter Seven

THE DEEPER WE traveled into the old city, the softer and sadder sang the breezes. Gamelpar kept up with us wel enough, but Vinnevra and I were more eager than ever to leave these ruins behind. Ghosts within are one thing—ghosts without, another.

Down one long, straight lane, wider than any of the others, we debouched onto a wide circle, marked off by flat platforms and stone wals barely higher than my waist. From the wals poked the remains of broken-down sheds with gaping fronts.

“Market?” I asked Gamelpar.

He nodded. “Been here many times,” he said. “Happy times.” He looked fondly at Vinnevra, who rubbed her nose and looked suspiciously around the broad circle. “My daughter had stals . . .

here, and . . . there.” He pointed out the spaces. “We sold fruit and skins and ceremonial flutes—whatever we could gather or grow or make. We had no idea how happy we were.”

We kept walking. A sudden gust brought with it flurries of dust that spun up and over the flat platforms, rustling shreds of woven mats. I shielded my eyes as the flurries passed—and then, on the opposite side of the circle, saw that we had come upon something different and unexpected. Half-blinded by grit, I bumped against the girl, who under ordinary circumstances would have delivered me a walop—but now she just stood her ground.

I wiped the dust from my eyes and looked over a platform of Forerunner metal, about fifty meters wide and shoulder-high. It supported a great, egg-shaped structure as high as the platform was wide. This central egg, the color of beaten copper laced through with swirls of dusky sunset sky, was incised al around by smooth vertical grooves spaced an arm span apart.

“A boat?” Vinnevra asked.

Gamelpar shook his head, as puzzled as we were. “Never saw it before. But it’s been here a long time,” he said. “Look—the shops were built around it.”

Vinnevra squatted, picked up a pebble, and threw it at the egg.

The pebble bounced off without making a sound.

“The Lady has eyes everywhere,” Gamelpar said. “We never know when she is watching.”

“Hidden . . . camouflaged,” I said. “Why?”

“If she sees our plight, why doesn’t she protect us?” the old man asked. He worked his jaw. “We should find water. There used to be good wels.” He hobbled off on his stick. Vinnevra and I chose to study the tal, sunset golden egg for a while longer.

The old spirit was shaping a vague explanation.

From here she can reach out and touch all the newborns. I resented his swifter analysis, but could not deny it.

“Unseen, central—like a lighted tower, a beacon,” I told Vinnevra. “Maybe this is where the Lady sends out her voice to touch your People.”

“Maybe,” she said, with only the barest scowl. “Does it stil send out messages?”

“The children stopped being born,” I said. “Right? No more children—maybe no more messages.” Then I had a discouraging thought. “Is this where you’re supposed to go when you don’t feel safe?”

“No,” she responded quickly. “That’s over there.” She pointed in the same direction as before, arm steady.

Gamelpar caled out that he had found a little water left in a wel.

We walked around the Forerunner beacon—or whatever it was— and joined him at the lip of a circular wal made of bricks and stones. He had puled up a wooden bucket on a decaying length of rope, and offered us a drink of muddy brown water—probably old rain.

“Al there is,” he said.

We drank despite the smel. On Erde-Tyrene, I thought, the water would probably be filed with wrigglers—but here in the city, nothing wriggled that I could see.

Even the mosquitoes had abandoned this place.

We walked on. Vinnevra led us down another winding lane. Al the lanes looked alike to me. Many of the buildings had falen in, revealing sad little rooms filed with drifting leaves. Once these places had held real people, real families.

There had been communities al across the Halo, I suspected, filed with people touched by the Lifeshaper—the Lady. They had been alowed to be completely human, to find their own strengths, succumb to their natural weaknesses—to fight their wars. Humans alowed to be human, left like a garden to grow wild, just to see what new flowers might sprout up.

But were we always observed by the Lifeshaper herself—or her cadres?

And had she watched over us—them—through the successive times of brightness, darkness, new skies, new suns? Had she watched when, years ago, the wheel had been taken to Charum Hakkor, to unleash the bitter briliance that burned the soul?

Had she herself offered refuge to the Captive—the Primordial?

My old spirit expressed skepticism at that. If the Primordial were allowed to rule and control this place, it would conduct its own experiments, the Lord of Admirals suggested.

“What sort of experiments?” I asked.

What the old man has seen . . . the Shaping Sickness. It is the Captive’s great passion.

But the old spirit could not convey things too far beyond what my mind had already experienced. I would not comprehend until I myself had seen more.

We found another straight road. At its end, we saw a larger gate opening to the plain beyond. Vinnevra chose that direction, to my relief. We helped Gamelpar along.