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‘Ah, lass,” says Don, “we're come to a hard pass. You and your sisters… I don't

know if your old man can help you now, my child.”

‘Alas,” she says, “old man, our fate is set. It's misery,” she says. “Exile.” The bitmites whisper it, but she can feel it deeper in her than their voice.
It's part of her, the graving all along her arm, the intertwining serpents of her nature, all the conflict and the strange peace born from it, written on her skin, carved in her as this prophecy that she was fool enough to listen to so long ago. It's the prophecy of her journey through the Vellum with Don at her side, their stops on strange shores and Don growing older, herself unchanged. It's the prophecy of them urging slave girls rescued from the houses of aristos before them like cattle, as rupter blasts shatter the ground under their feet. Don waving them on, staying back to hold off their pursuers, so fucking noble, so fucking stupid, so fucking …

Go on without me.

She missed him so much.

‘Ah, poor child,” he says.

He wraps his arms around her. In the white robe of his costume, he seems like a frail old swan folding its snowy wings around a cygnet. The bitmites whisper her next line and, as she says it, part of her is Phreedom, part is Anaesthesia, part some other girl called Anna. But a part of her, she knows, is truly Columbine.

Old man,” she says, “I'll weep for you. Farewell.”

“I'll cry for you,” he says, “and for your sisters too. Farewell… if one like you can fare at all well in this world.”

“I'll find my sisters and they'll share my exile and disgrace. We'll go someplace where Zithering can't see my face, where that damned mountain is beyond my gaze, where Harlequin's vine-covered staff, if it is praised by other members of the pack, is never raised.”

In this strange prophecy of her past graved on her arm, it seems so simple really, just another tale of loss, with Tom and Finnan, and the Evenfall, Don finding her in New York. They'd traveled so far together, gone so far together, looking for some place that would be safe from angels and their wars… then after all that, he was gone as well. How this war of hers felt like salvation then. How every angel head upon a spike gave her a sense of… peace.

She'd led her tribe back out into the Hinter, half barbarian, half hellion, sacking city after city with her army, Haven after Haven, burning every temple, every tomb they came to. She remembers the day they raided the Oracle of Locks, and afterward, her at the head of the pack, leading them all on the long march through the Hinter. A widowed bride, she'd led her children through this cold land of the blessed, toward a home they'd never find, and she knew that her ache was a torrential river she would never cross. She'd never really be at rest.

“Farewell, my home, my native land,” she says. “The Harlequin has laid his fury on us with a heavy hand.”

The consul stands holding a serving girl's arm, slightly in front of… Sara, her name is. She has a name, just as the consul is called Etmundt. And there's Merton and Rosai and Taner and… she knows all their names. These courtiers and serfs, these maids-in-waiting, water boys, they all have names and places in this Haven, under the Duke's roof, every one of them, and these few terrified souls just a fraction of a whole society of scribes and cooks, cleaners and gardeners, the choirs who sing every morning in the domes around the walls, bellringers and watchmen and whipping boys and guards. She wonders what they'll do now that the Duke is gone. She wonders if she's sad, knowing that she can't stay here any longer, because she'll miss them or because she's never really known them well enough to miss them.

“God forgive me for my crime,” she says. “I know I've sinned, but this is too unkind.”

The Harlequin, his eyes so blue beneath the mask, takes the Duke's skull out of Don's hand.

“Why wait?” he says. “Why do you still delay your fate? Columbine, if you'd only recognized me as the son of the divine, at the right time,” he says, “if you'd seen sense before it was too late, Columbine, you'd be happy now. We'd be on the same side. But even though I am divine, no son of mortal man but Sooth himself, I suffered your disdain. My name had no respect in Themes.”

He reaches up behind his head to pull a cord. The mask falls, and she sees the face that haunts her dreams. She's known it as an infant in her arms, and as an aging angel using all his charms to save his skin, but this is Jack not as some noble warrior but as a Harlequin, not as a Duke but as a Dionysus with a snicking grin.

“You know,” he says, “some say the gods are fools to let their passions sink so low, but long ago…”

He holds the skull of the Duke up. Bitmites crawl in the sockets of the eyes, eating the thing away from the inside. He gives a little blow and it bursts into dust.

“My father,” he says, “made it so, and so we must.”

“The soul takes many forms,” I say, “and many fates transpire. So what we hope for may not always come to be, but we find ways to bring about events we fear …”

The white dust floats out through the air, the bitmites clearing in its path.

‘As we, I hope,” I say, “have shown you here.”

There is no final curtain, just the dimming of the lights. We take no bows. The crowd stands silent as Jack pulls a lever here and there. A clang, a whine of motors and the stage begins to rise, Jack kicking polystyrene rocks out of the way. As Don leads Phree up to the wagon, Jack's already sliding open a compartment in the roof, retrieving hidden rupters. He drops one and then another down to me, and then a third. As the wagon's side wall judders into place, he pulls a fourth out for himself. He flicks it on, jumps for a rope and slides down to the ground beside me. Don is clambering out into the wagon's driving seat and slipping on the gloves that drive it. I take the rupters over to Joey and Guy while Jack, with one eye on the cowering audience, flips tarpaulins off the Waldo horses round behind the wagon, locks the harness straps on them, kicks out the blocks from under the wagon's wheels and swings up on the running board.

His hands held out in front of him as if he's playing a piano, Don brings the giant claw-things into life. The harness straps snap tight and the Waldo horses pull the wagon forward, trundling slowly round, out of the scaffolding of rigging, out into the hall. He steers it past most of the wreckage, though a few chairs crack beneath a wheel or have to be kicked off to one side by a finger flick.

As Guy and I follow the wagon out through the wide doors we came in by, Joey strides into the center of the room to pull the Duke's sword from the wreckage, and jogs back to join us. I catch a look at the consul's face before Joey and Guy swing the doors shut, the way he puts himself between us and the serving girl. I notice the old courtier at his other side, holding his hands in front of him, hiding the wet patch at his crotch. All in an evening's entertainment, I think.

Then the doors are shut and Joey is jamming the sword between the handles as a makeshift bolt; it might give us just a little more time. Guy clambers up onto the bench beside Don, and I jump up onto the running board, scrabble up a ladder onto the roof. The corridor in front of us is long and gray and there's a lot of guards and gates between us and the outside world. But at least there's six of us now—not much against an army, but just one man short of the Magnificent Seven.

And at least we've got Phreedom back.