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I felt a sort of sick happy-sadness every time the Bounds brought me back to Helen's world.
I know a lot more about the Bounds and the way the different worlds work than I used to. Helen's world is actually quite difficult to get to. Lots of the oldest ones are (I think Helen's world is maybe very old indeed, it feels old) and if you have the time to look around, sometimes you'll find black scratchy spaces in the air – I can't describe it better than that, that's how they feel – which I think are places where They closed off some of the Bounds. In Helen's world there are lots and lots of those, because of course they were the world that knew the truth about him, the one she calls Uquar. They didn't want them going anywhere if they could help it.
So there's only one definite route to Helen's world, which goes through the place that belongs to him, his Home. You can also get there by going to one of the RANDOM Bounds and concentrating hard on where you want to be. Sometimes a RANDOM Bound will fling you to a place anyway, especially if you aren't thinking about much of anything – all it takes is a thought of a beetle or a snake appearing in my head, and next thing I know I'm standing among the dragon bones. That only happened a couple of times before I started taking more care about what I thought. I didn't want to start treating her world as Home. That would mean everything was for nothing.
But I did go back to visit, because I promised. I visited everyone – Adam and Joris and even him – in all their different worlds. The way time goes made things confusing. Time in Adam's world barrelled along, so I went back every two months or so – in my view – and I saw him being twenty-four and forty-three and sixty and ninety, and then I went to his funeral. I'd always go to the world of the demon hunters straight after Adam, and there the time went more slowly, so Joris would be seventeen and twenty and twenty-five and thirty, getting if anything even more decent as he got older. Adam's sister Vanessa was there too. She was married to Konstam at first, and then later she wasn't anymore, but what I always noticed most of all was how every time I saw her she was getting steadily younger and younger than Adam was.
Helen's world, though, was the slowest of all. That was one of the things that made me think it had to be very old. She was the last one of us to die. And that was why her world made me feel all warm and unhappy inside, because I was waiting for it every time I went there. I'd go to the temple-palace thing and ask to be let in, and every time I was terrified of seeing her again and seeing how much she'd aged, and terrified too in case I wouldn't see her at all.
I still went back. Once every couple of months, same as all the other core worlds. Every time I went it had changed a little bit – now They weren't playing anymore they'd managed to get rid of some of their giant lizards, for a start – and Helen would have changed a little too. And it gave me that sick-happy feeling I was talking about. The thing is that Helen changed differently from the others.
_
Joris, for example. Joris didn't just get decenter as he got older – he also became a grown-up, which I wouldn't be for centuries yet, and it put a gap between us. We'd be trying to talk and be friends the way we had when we were Homeward Bound together and then suddenly the gap would open up out of nowhere, like on one of the earthquake-worlds where the ground was full of cracks that became huge gaping caverns with jagged rocks at the bottom at a moment's notice. Children were one of the things that could make the gap start gaping. Joris married Elsa Khan and they had four children. The first time I met them they were little squishy yelly things, and the next time they were taller but still kind of snotty and boring, so I forgot about them almost at once.
The next time I came to the demon hunter world I'd just come from Adam's funeral, so I was already shaken up, and then I walked into a girl right by the doors to the mansion-complex thing where all the Khans lived – and I mean I actually walked into her. We both fell over, but she bounced back to her feet in the way lots of people there had – they all learned how to fight really young, sometimes it seemed like they were made out of rubber – and held out a hand to pick me up. "Hello!" she said, in an open friendly way. "Who are you?"
She was quite pretty, for a Khan – I could see she was a Khan, she had the same kind of straight-nosed strong-jawed face as Konstam had, which I'd discovered all of them had, right down to Joris' Elsa. It never looked quite as good on a girl. This one had a scattering of freckles on her nose and slightly lighter colouring all round. "Who are you?" I answered rudely, but then I was a bit shaken after being knocked over like that.
"Me," she said. I blinked and then realised it was her name, Mie. "Are you visiting for the New Year's party?" (Somehow I always managed to end up in that world around the holidays. The Khans usually celebrated by going out and killing some demons. They're a bit mad like that.) "Where are your parents?" asked Mie.
"I'm just passing through," I said, and then I blustered a bit because my friends were important people around here and she was pretty enough that I wanted to impress her. "I'm staying with Elsa Khan and Joris."
Mie looked confused. "Mum didn't say anything about extra guests –" she started, and then she got interrupted because Joris came through the complex doors shouting, "Jamie!"
Both of us turned to answer him at once. Joris looked surprised when he saw me. His hair was starting to go, and it had a bit of silver in it now. "Jamie!" he said in quite a different tone of voice. "We weren't expecting you."
"Then why –" I began, before I got it. Joris had been looking for his youngest daughter, the one they'd named after me.
Mie's mouth was round and open and she looked at me with something like awe. She'd probably been told the whole story like us being told fairy stories for bedtime when I was still at Home. I couldn't really enjoy it, though, because I could see what Joris was thinking all over his honest sincere open face. He looked at me standing there next to his youngest girl and I could see him realising that she and I were the same age, imagining his little Jamie out on the Bounds like I was. It made him really unhappy, you could tell, and he looked at me with immense, solemn sadness.
After that we weren't really friends anymore. Joris kept trying to convince me to stay with the Khans for good the whole time I was there, and I ended up spending lots of time with pretty Jamie Khan just to avoid how unhappy he got every time he talked to me. I was centuries older than he was, but I was also just a kid, and now he had kids of his own he couldn't help seeing a kid when he looked at me.
You start to find, after a while, that the kids are the only ones who really understand. The grown-ups think they do, but they're too busy feeling sorry for you to really get the point.
_
So when I say that Helen changed differently, what I mean is that she never became a grown-up. Not the way Joris did. She got older, sure, but she never started to look down on me in that special way that grown-ups have, the way that means they really just want to take care of you. She stayed crotchety and annoying and unforgiving and Helen, no matter how much they crawled to her on her godawful world (and they crawled a lot, calling her the Prophetess of Uquar and the Redemptrix of the Wider Times and all sorts of bunk.)
I took the Archangel out of her about it, you can bet. One time I went to her world and the priest types waiting at the Bound for visitors thought I was a pilgrim. The idea made me snort so hard that I just went along with it, and the expression on Helen's face when I walked into the receiving-hall where she had to do pilgrim-welcoming duty was worth it. She hated all that rot. Everyone in that world was awed because she'd actually met their precious Uquar, so they just ignored everything she said about how much she didn't like him.
She really didn't. I sort of admired him – quite a lot, really – but Helen never forgave him about what happened to me.
The time I pretended to be a pilgrim I'd come there through his real place. I didn't go there very much. He did the same thing as Joris – feeling sorry for me, I mean – and it made me feel very tired and sorry for myself, even though he was a lot subtler about it than Joris was. I'm glad I went there that time, though, because that was the time he died.
_
I hadn't really thought that he could die, you know? I'd imagined he was kind of like Them that way – They didn't die, not if they could help it, which they mostly could, despite the demon hunters' best efforts. And I think he could have done the same if he'd wanted – been immortal. In a strange way I'd been counting on it, because I didn't have a choice – I had to be immortal – so it was nice to think that there was someone else who was going to last.
But when I set foot in his real place the birds weren't singing, and I knew he was dying. It wasn't a sad sort of death – it was just the leaves falling gently from the trees, and the wind blowing a little harder. I walked along till I got to his cabin and there he was, sitting on a wooden chair outside, smiling at his world. "Hello Jamie," he said.
"What are you doing?" I demanded.
He turned to look at me. "I'm dying," he said simply, as if I hadn't already worked that out.
"What for?"
"It happens to all of us, you know," he said. "Death is a part of living. Even They ought to die in their time – they don't, of course, but that's because they prefer to cheat. All the other Titans died thousands of years ago. I'm the only one left."
"But," I started, which was pointless, because you could tell his mind was made up. So I stayed there with him while he died. He did it slowly and comfortably, without any pain as far as I could see, and he stayed mostly outside among the trees and hedges of his garden world.
"What'll happen to this world without you?" I said right at the end. It was the only thing I could think of, because I knew how much he loved his Home, and it had gone faded and empty when he'd been tied to his rock.
"It'll keep going, don't worry," he said. "This is just a winter. Those are a part of living too."
"But it won't be your Home anymore," I protested. "It won't be Real without you to remember that it is –"
He smiled at me then, and I think he knew what I was really saying, which was please don't, I'm already lonely. And I think maybe part of the reason he chose to die then – looking back – is that he suspected I'd end up thinking of his world as Home otherwise. It was a nice one, and if I knew I could always come back and find him in it, feeling sorry for me the way he did, I probably would have started to get fond of it. So he died.
"Home isn't just where you live," he said to me before he went. "Home is a place to lay your bones."
_
He was right, of course. It's why I'm still immortal even though Their rules aren't in force anymore. You can't die if there isn't any place for you to die in.
In Helen's world they told me to humbly state my business as pilgrim before the throne of the Prophetess of Uquar, so I strode boldly in with my hands in my pockets and said, "He's dead."
Helen recognised me at once, and her nose came out from behind her curtain of hair. The priests and scholars and robed people who spent their whole lives hanging around the House of Uquar twittered at me to be respectful and remember my place, and I just folded my arms and waited for Helen to tell them who I was. She didn't even bother – she just got up off her ugly dragonbone throne (they liked to show off the dragons they'd managed to get rid of in that world, I guess) and gestured at me to follow her into one of the back rooms, and behind us I heard the robed people start to twitter about the Sainted Anchor of the Worlds instead, which made me snicker.
"You mean him, don't you," Helen said to me when we'd closed the door on all of them. She must have been in her forties by then but she still looked like just Helen to me.
I told her all the things he'd said about winters and laying your bones, and she nodded thoughtfully. "Prometheus is truly Unbound, then," she said, which was just Helen being educated so I ignored it. Anyway I sort of knew what she meant – it was that by dying he'd finally managed to get the better of Them for good. They'd never be able to take him away from his Home again, even if They did manage to come back. And his Home wouldn't need him to remember it, because instead it would be remembering him. In his own way he'd be another anchor.
Like I said, I know a lot more about how the worlds work than I used to.
_
They're all gone now. Helen was the last one to go. I still go back to her world every so often. They're having all sorts of religious schisms right now. Helen told them Uquar was dead, and now there's one group that claims she was being metaphorical and meant they ought to stop venerating him, and another group that just thinks she was wrong, and a really weird splinter cult that ignores the whole thing and worships the Sainted Anchor of the Worlds – me, I mean, though I talked to some of them and I think they'd be pretty shocked if they actually knew who I was. Their Sainted Anchor character sounds like a bit of a wet blanket.
I go back to Joris' world, too. Mie has gone the way Joris used to be – grown-up and pitying, I mean – so I talk to her children now instead. One day I'll talk to theirs.
Adam's world is unrecognisable – it's not just that it's a fast one, it changes really quickly even in its own time. There are some worlds which will be nothing but pig farms for eight hundred years, but if you go back to Adam's world fifty years apart five times in a row it's completely different every time. I lost track of the Macreadys in the end. An ordinary suburban family is a lot harder to keep tabs on than an ancient semi-royal clan of demon hunters.
And I go back to his real place, too. I buried him there under a tree. And he was right, after all. Winter there came and went, and the trees still sprout leaves every year. The birds start singing again. If it weren't so empty – if it weren't so lonely – it could almost be a Home.