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When I got back home I went straight to the House of Uquar. I banged on the gate at the guard house until I heard someone scrabble for the latch, and then I pushed the last chunk of my hair back and waited. It was still dark, pre-dawn, and now I'd stopped moving, the clothes from Adam's world were too thin to keep out the cold. I stamped my feet while whoever it was took ages with the lantern. Finally they got the light angled so it shone straight onto my bare face. I heard a gasp.
"Uquar's free," I said. "Let me in."
Apparently there are no protocols for dealing with heretics who refuse to die quietly and come back to blaspheme even more grandly. After a bit more dithering, the gasper rang a bell. People came and went behind the gate, and eventually about twenty guards came out and stood around me in a heavily armed wall. I did wonder then if I should have waited for one of the others to come with me.
I think the only reason they eventually let me in was that the punishment for actively prophesying heresy was even more painful and prolonged than stoning. Jamie would have liked that.
The sun was already halfway up the sky by the time they brought me inside. The courtyard was white tile, and the light bounced off it somehow in a way that made it even brighter, especially on the tips of the pikes the gate guards carried. All the Hands were solid black blocks against it. We glowered at each other. I recognised some of them from the stoning. I wasn't all that happy to see them again, but at least I hadn't ended up coming back a hundred years too late. Eventually a very old Hand, thin and wrinkled like a dried-up seed pod, came out of the far door and tottered over towards me. The chunks of people parted to let him through, and everyone fell silent.
His voice was as faint as the last seed rattling in the pod, and I had to strain to hear him giving orders to the guards, even with the quiet. But I recognised him. He was the one who'd banished me.
I kicked the guard holding me in the shin and wrenched myself free. She went to grab me again, but I held up my right arm — unchanged — and it put her off long enough for me to speak.
"Uquar’s free," I said again. "They’re gone. No more games."
My eyes pricked at that. I blinked. It must have been the glare from the tiles.
The elderly Hand peered up at me. “You’ve been on a long road, child,” he said. "Perhaps you’d like a drink." He held out his hand and waited for me to take it. He didn't flinch when I scraped it with the stub of a thumb.
We left the courtyard and, trailing guards, tottered slowly to one of the judgment rooms. I got water, some flatbread and dried fruits, a chair, every senior Hand in the House, and three novices in their most formal robes who wrote down everything I said. I told them everything. What they wanted was Uquar — what he'd said (what I remembered, anyway), when he was coming (soon, once the demons were checked up on), what he would want them to do (bring forth the wider times, surely, although this provoked a lot of very heated arguing about finer points of theology).
I wanted them to know more than that, but when I tried to talk about Jamie the story turned on me. I'd talk about starting to walk the Bounds with Jamie and what came out was a stilted travelogue where a vague companion was helpful in nonspecific ways, or I'd try to say about Jamie becoming the Anchor and end up recounting yet another extended battle sequence with demons dying horribly on every side (the novices became much more interested during these bits). I said all the bad words I knew from this and other worlds. They came out perfectly clearly, and I watched the novices write them all down.
I knew forgetting Jamie would keep everything safe. I still didn’t want to do it.
Eventually they'd turned out every last corner of my story and shaken it so thoroughly that even I couldn't remember what word came next. My memories of meeting Uquar felt pale, drained of all colour by repetition. I let the Hands argue between themselves about what to do next, and I curled up in my chair and went to sleep. It was easy. Everything smelt right again.
When I woke up, the room was nearly empty, with only two guards leaning against the opposite wall. Someone had put a thin grey blanket over me while I slept, and I pulled it down into my lap, my fingers tracing the weave of the puddled fabric. The guards snapped to life.
I was not permitted to visit my mother. They were sorry for the inconvenience. I was not permitted to travel to any other worlds, and they were sorry for that too. I was not, in fact, permitted to leave the room, and the ensuing argument featured so many apologies that I eventually gave up in frustration. It's hard to hurl yourself at someone, fingernails and everything, when they restrain you as carefully as a particularly savage china teacup.
I tried to sleep again after that. It didn't work.
The next few days were almost as bad as being stuck on a world waiting for the Bounds to call. Something, many somethings, were obviously going on. No one wanted to talk to me directly — teacups weren't to be alarmed — but eventually I picked up enough.
While I slept the first time, a sept of Hands snuck off to the circle of bones and went through to another world. Multiple other worlds, either because they forgot the first principles of using a traverse or more likely because some of them had had their own plans from the start. Some of the worlds they ended up in were about as friendly as my own, and most of them had inhabitants who were very interested in finding out the secret of travelling on the Bounds. Capturing these travellers was a logical first step, especially now that there were no penalties for interfering with them. Heavily armed rescue parties were sent out from the House, along with a few Hands with a more diplomatic approach, mainly in the hope of negotiating for more weapons. Old rivalries flared up again and new ones developed. The circle was placed under constant surveillance. I, as the agent behind all this — and the apparent Saviour of prophecy — was the only thing more heavily guarded.
No-one would let me go anywhere. I sent messages to Jamie, the Khans, Joris, Adam; descriptions of them and their worlds in the hope that someone would stumble across the right world and the right person. To my mother, who at least was in this world, or should have been. And I shouted. A lot. Apparently saviours weren't supposed to do that, but everyone was very polite about it while still insisting I stay exactly where I was. Wrapped in a smothering blanket of concern.
After a particularly unhelpful and noisy lunch, I stomped away from the refectory table. My ceremonial guard padded silently behind me. I growled, changed course, and went out through the kitchen — startling the cooks and kitchen hands into a clatter — and into the tiny high-walled kitchen garden.
"Stay here," I snarled at the guards. The most senior one considered and nodded. The others, at a gesture from her, spread out along the near wall and loomed quietly.
I stomped off to the far end of the garden — it didn't take long — and stopped. The old seed-pod Hand was in the shaded corner, picking aphids off a stubby bush of mint.
"You," I said, with all of the feeling I could muster. He was the Mouth of Uquar, and it was his fault I was here. I'd been trying to speak to him again for days.
He pinched an aphid in half and brushed the bits off on his robe.
"Move them instead," I said. I'd meant to say something about letting me have more freedom and had even considered how best to sound agreeable, but it wouldn't have worked. I don't have an agreeable face.
"Then there is a chance they will return," the Mouth said in his thin, rattling voice.
He squashed another aphid. My fingers twitched to stop him, but I didn't. I knew now that this meeting was arranged. Threat or opportunity — or both.
"So there's a chance they won't," I said. Opening up the worlds so far had been nothing but chaos, from the reports I'd had, but at least we were making our own mistakes rather than having Them make them for us.
He picked another aphid off the mint. This time he set it down on a half brick that jutted out from the wall.
"I received a runner from the circle not two hours ago," he said. "A visitor has come through. He asked for you."
He selected another aphid and held it up on the tip of his index finger, considering. "He said he wouldn't hang around forever, and although at least no-one had tried to kill him yet it wasn't much improvement. I believe he also mentioned that you ought to have done something about the weather by now."
The aphid's antennae twitched. It lifted one thin jointed leg up, searching.
"A prophesised Saviour is a very powerful figure," the Mouth said. "A lot of people are waiting to see what you say, and who you side with. Some would rather silence you first and avoid the inconvenience."
They had gone. It didn't mean an end to games. At least now all the players were on the board, not separate observers. They were just as at risk as all the other pieces.
And I'd returned Home. Re-entered play.
"I can't tell you who he is," I said, watching the aphid. "You won't remember. But if you bring him here, I'll help you."
The Mouth put the aphid down on the brick. He tore a few handfuls of mint from the bush, fingers trembling slightly, and tucked them into a fold of his robe.
"He's already on his way," the Mouth said. He turned and motioned me along with him. "Mint tea, I think."
We began to move back through the garden. Inside I was thinking, as fast as I could. Outside, I muttered agreement and dutifully followed the Mouth back towards my waiting guards.
He needed me for support, to maintain power, and he'd have to let me act — eventually — to do that. I'd have to be careful, at least until I found other resources to draw upon. Jamie couldn't be killed, but I hoped the Mouth didn't know that, and I didn't particularly want him to try.
When I was finally ushered into an outbuilding near the stables, redolent with manure and animal sweat, just for a moment I saw a scrawny street orphan, someone your eye would only pause on if you feared for your valuables, and I wondered why the guards had let him in. Then I blinked, and it was Jamie.
I could tell he saw it happen. His mouth twisted.
"It'll probably get worse each time, He says," Jamie said. I had to concentrate to hear him.
"Come anyway," I said.
We stared at each other.
"I know who you are now," I said, grumpily. He laughed and reached out to embrace me. I let him draw me in.
"Same old Helen," he said into my hair. I lengthened my arm just enough to snake up his back and curled my fingers around his neck. I'd thought about doing that, being the same. Making myself his Anchor, a constant to return to over the years.
It wouldn't work. At best it would postpone things. At worst — well. I'd be acting on the board, but not committing to being one of the pieces. And Joris already thought I was part-demon. I didn't want to be another Them.
"No," I said. I pushed him back a bit. "Nothing stays the same."
That was the only hope I had, where he had none. Everything changed. Even Jamie and, I hoped, the laws that bound him.
"Come back. Even when I forget you." I glared at him, trying to fix his appearance in my mind. "Especially then."
I'd remember as long as I could. And when I did forget, maybe one day something would shift enough that I'd remember him again.
THE END