He came to himself leaning on a stone and weeping. He could not remember stopping, could not remember weeping ever before. Not for anyone. He wiped his eyes and went on. He knew the drill. He just didn’t know how to make the drill fit Zasper, that’s all. Zasper wasn’t supposed to die. Zasper wasn’t ever supposed to die. Not Zasper, not Fringe. Certainly not both.
He did not stop to rest until he had come some distance from the community, and then he climbed into a large tree and stretched out along a stout branch, his coat folded beneath him, wondering why the invaders had come first to the village rather than to the jail where he and Zasper had been held. Because of the rock, he decided. They had come through the soft soil first. They had encountered Mother-dear and her people first.
Danivon had not much liked the idea of being Mother-dear’s lover, but he did not relish the idea of her death, either. Hers or that of any of her people. Or anyone’s. Anyone’s.
Zasper’s.
Fringe’s.
He laid his arm across his eyes and forbade himself to weep anymore. Enforcers did not weep. They exacted vengeance, when necessary, but they did not weep! They slept when they needed to, but they did not weep!
When he woke, his face wet, the first flush of dawn lay on the sky, so he took up his burdens and went westward once more. He felt less like an Enforcer than like some small prey animal, fleeing endlessly from an implacable foe. Why were those creatures behind him so set upon killing him?
He had asked Zasper that same question.
“Boarmus says they kill for the same reason men and their gods have always killed. To prove they can.”
It made no more sense than any other reason for death.
Jory and Asner were staring down the river from the end of the pier when Bertran and Nela limped out of the woods along the river, very weary and bedraggled. Neither of the old people would have recognized them except for their posture, the one cuddled protectively under the left arm of the other.
“Jory, look what happened to me!” Nela’s voice crying, like a child calling, Look at me, Mommy, I’m hurt.
“At me,” echoed Bertran. “Look at me, Asner.”
The old people looked at them both for a long moment, seeking their eyes, which were unchanged.
“So,” Jory sighed, “you were on this side of the wall when it happened. What about Fringe?”
“Fringe was there,” said Bertran, baffled at her lack of surprise. “The gaver got Fringe.”
“What do you mean, on this side of the wall?” asked Nela.
Over Nela’s shoulder, Jory saw several of the Arbai gathered with Cafferty on the path to the acropolis. Both Arbai and human seemed equally interested in these new arrivals. “On this side of the wall,” she repeated softly, “where the Arbai Device operates.”
Nela followed the direction of Jory’s gaze, slowly turning to catch her first glimpse of the Arbai. They were taller than men. And very bony, though not particularly dangerous-looking. She sighed, tired of new things, tired of things always happening.
“Dragons,” she said, trying to sound politely interested. “Are these Danivon’s dragons?”
“They are Arbai,” said Asner. “All of them who’re left.”
Bertran stood on his hind legs, rearing high to get a better look, hands held pawlike before him. “So they aren’t all dead! Somebody said they were all dead! I thought they would seem more mysterious.” He crouched tiredly, letting Nela step away from him. “They should, shouldn’t they? Seem mysterious, I mean? The inventors of the Doors were something very strange and special, I should think.”
“They are as they are,” said Jory. “Rather reptilian in appearance, though not at all biologically. Slow to grow. Slow to breed. Able to accept any new scientific discovery or technological idea without a moment’s hesitation, yet still, after all these centuries, unable to accept the concept of evil.”
“But there is evil there,” said Bertran, pointing his muzzle back down the river. “Enough to convince anyone.”
“Oh, yes, there is,” cried Nela. “They had us in a place like a church, Jory. They told us we had to solve the Great Question or they’d torture us. They made dinka-jins of us. It was … It was awful.”
“Fringe said that’s what we were,” said Bertran. “Dinkajins. We wanted her to melt us, but she wouldn’t.”
“I know it must have hurt you,” said Jory. “Otherwise you would not be … as you are.”
“Someone must stop it, Jory! Someone must stop it happening to people!” cried Nela.
Asner shook his head wearily. “We’d like to stop it! Oh, yes!”
“Why did they do it to us, Jory! Why?”
“Because they’re monsters,” said the old woman.
“I thought they had perhaps once been men,” said Bertran. “Though they are something else now.”
Jory made a wry face. “They were men and teachers of men, but man alone is only a halfway creature: half ape, half angel. Some men get worse when they get learning, made monstrous by too much language and the manipulation of ideas. They lose the experience of reality.”
“But if they are monsters, why don’t people destroy them?”
“That’s always the question. Who does the destroying? We good men? Good men don’t kill others easily; instead we look deeply into the hearts of bad men, and what do we see? We see things we recognize in ourselves. And once we have admitted that kinship, it’s hard to kill the other man. It’s hard to say he’s evil, for that means we too are evil. It’s easier to pretend he’s sick, easier to pretend he can be cured, even when we know he cannot. We all have the same evils inside us, so what gives us the right to get rid of the other? Ah?”
“You’re being prophetic again,” complained Asner. “You’ve retired,
