or wherever with William Galileo and Albert Shakespeare and all the rest. I’m Elli. And I’m me. And I’m here.” She stuck out her tongue. “So there!”
Bess had heard of the concept of body-robbing, and knew that most of the major churches forbade it. The punishments, she imagined, would be severe, especially if the robber happened to be something that couldn’t properly call itself sentient. But Elli’s tale, and that final pink protrusion of her tongue, made the deed hard to condemn.
It was better, though, that she stayed eating berries and broiling moles on the Isle of the Dead. In any other part of Ghezirah, or any of the other Ten Thousand and One Worlds, life for her would be not so much difficult as impossible, and would most likely be brought to a rapid end.
“How long have things been like this?”
Elli now looked awkward. “I don’t know. I…” She looked up at the hissing, dancing roof. “… Can we leave this place?”
It was good to be back out in the warm afternoon, even if all the falling memorials were now a constant reminder to Bess that this was a place of the dead. But as for Elli, she thought, as she gazed at her friend sitting on a pile of rocks with her arms wrapped around her grubby knees, she’s right in what she says. She isn’t some ghoul or monster. She’s truly alive. Then Bess’s eyes trailed down to that lightgun. The reason it looked like a toy, she realized, was that it had probably once been one. But she didn’t doubt that it was now deadly, or that Elli knew how to use it. In her own way, this little grave-runt was as much a warrior as Bess was.
It seemed a time for confidences, so Bess explained what little there was to explain about her own life. The long days of endless practice. The even longer dormitory nights. The laughing chants. That sense of not properly belonging even in a community of outcasts. And now—the way her entire church and all its intelligences seemed to have withdrawn from her, when she’d been expecting to face some kind of ultimate challenge through which she could prove her worth.
“You mean, like a dragon or something? A monster that needs killing?”
She nodded. A dragon, or even a quasi-dragon, would certainly have done. Anything, no matter how terrible, would have been better than this. It was as if she’d been thrown back into the empty nowhere from which she had come, but pointlessly trained in swordplay and changed into the thing she now was…
Something patted down Bess’s scales, leaving blurry silver trails that her camouflage struggled to mimic. After a long moment’s puzzlement, she realized it was tears.
“Don’t you have any idea of your earlier life?” Elli asked. “I mean, some hint or memory?”
Bess gave an armor-plated shrug, and rumbled about the piece of jewelry that she happened to possess. A thing on a chain, oval-shaped.
“You mean a locket?”
“I think it’s called a locket, yes. You’ve heard of them?”
“Of course I have. I’ve got one myself. So—what’s inside yours?”
“What do you mean, inside?”
Elli laughed and leapt down from her perch.
“You really don’t know much about anything other than killing things, do you, Bess?”
Then she explained how lockets came in two hinged halves—there were, after all, plenty of examples of this and every other kind of trinket to be found on this isle—although the main thing that Bess was conscious of as they talked was her friend’s close presence, and the strange and peculiarly delicious sensation of a hand touching her own strange flesh.
It was getting late. The dawn-singers had already made their first preparatory cries, stirring up an evensong of birds. Contrary to the once-popular saying, it proved far easier to depart the Isle of the Dead than to get there, and Elli soon led Bess back toward the same marble steps through which they had entered, and down into the depths of the forest that lay below. Moving through the pillared near-dark, Bess was conscious again of the danger of this place. Far more than the island above them, this was a landscape wherein monsters and wonders might abide. Yet Elli led on.
The clearing lay ahead.
“You’ll be here tomorrow?”
“Yes.” Elli smiled. “I will.”
Bess shambled across the meadowgrass, which, amid darker patches of bloodflower, already shone with dew. The caleche hissed open its door. She climbed in and laid down her sword. The keyhole eye at the center of the cabin’s altar, which would surely soon bear her a fresh instruction, and perhaps even apologies for this pointless waste of her time, remained unseeingly dark. The food tray hissed out for her, and she ate. Then, as she prepared to lie down, she remembered what Elli had said about lockets. Vaguely curious, but somehow still feeling no great sense of destiny, she opened her small chest and lifted the thing out. After a moment of struggle, the two sides broke apart.
Another morning, and, although it was still too early for dawn, Bess was standing in the dim clearing outside her caleche with her sword. She, too, was a thing of dimness; her armor saw to that. But already the dawn-singers were calling. Light would soon be spilling from tower to tower. And there was Elli, standing out from the shadow trees, pale as stripped twig.
“Bess! You’ve come!” She was almost running. Almost laughing. Then she was doing both.
“I said I would, didn’t I?” Bess’s voice was as soft as it was capable of being. And as sad. It made Elli stop.
“What’s happened?” They stood a few paces apart beside the rusty beetle of the caleche in the ungreying light. “You seem different.”
“I haven’t changed,” Bess rumbled. “But I’ve brought you this. I want you to take it…” She held out the locket, glinting and swinging on its silver chain, from her hand’s heavy claw.
“It’s that thing you described…” Elli looked puzzled, hesitant. “The locket. But this is…” She took it in her own small fingers. Here, in the spot in which they were standing, the gaining light had a rosy flush. “… mine.”
“Open it.”
Elli nodded. Red flowers lay all around them. The silver of the locket was taking up their color, and Bess now seemed a thing entirely made of blood. Swiftly, with fingers far more practiced and easeful than Bess’s, Elli broke open the locket’s two sides. From out of which gleamed a projection, small but exquisite, of the faces of three women. They were the same faces that hung in the hologlass pillar of Dallah’s mausoleum. But in this image they looked as happy as in the other they had been sad.
“Dallah’s mothers.” Elli breathed. “This thing is yours, Bess. But it’s also mine…”
“That’s right.”
Elli snapped it shut. Dawn light was flowing around them now, and the bloodflowers made Elli beautiful, and yet they also made her pale and dangerous and sharp. “This doesn’t really have to happen, does it?” she whispered.
“I think it does.”
“Don’t tell me, Bess.” She almost smiled. “You remember it already…?”
“I didn’t—not at all. But I’m beginning to now. I’m sorry, Elli.”
“And I’m sorry as well. Isn’t there some way we can both just go our separate ways and live our own lives— you as a warrior and me just as me? Do I really have to do this to you?”
“We both do. Nothing is possible otherwise. We’re joined together, Elli. We’re a monstrosity, a twist in spacetime. Our togetherness is an affront to reality. It must be destroyed, otherwise even worse things will break through. There are no separate ways.”
The killing moment was close. Bess could already hear the lightgun’s poisonous hum. She knew Elli was quick, but she also knew that the use of any weapon, be it blade or laser, was the last part of a process that any trained warrior should be able to detect long before the final instant came. But how by all the intelligences was she supposed to do such a thing, when Elli was her own younger self?
Then it happened. All those hours of practice and training, all the imam’s praises and curses, seemed to collide in a moment beyond time, and emerged into something deadly, precise, and perfect. For the first time in her fractured life, Bess executed
