I stood there quietly for a long moment, hands clasped just under my chin. I lifted my right hand, one finger raised.

“Am I your leader?” I asked. It was so hard for me to speak, to form the simplest words. “Will you accept my decision as to the disposition of the Voice?”

No one answered for a moment. I couldn’t shake off the languor I felt. I couldn’t rally. I wanted them all to leave me now.

Then Gregory said softly, “But what possible disposition for the Voice can there be? The Voice is in the body of Mekare. Mekare is quiet now. The Voice is quiet. But the Voice will begin to scheme again. The Voice will plot.”

“This creature, Mekare,” said Sevraine, “she is a living thing. She knows, in some brutal and simple way, she knows her tragedies. I tell you she knows.”

Seems Fareed said something about reasoning with the Voice, but I scarcely heard him.

Seth asked me if I was hearing the Voice. “You are communing with it, aren’t you? But you’ve sealed yourself off from us. You’re battling the Voice alone.”

“So this is the decision you want from me?” I asked. “That the Voice remain with Mekare?”

“What other decision can there be for now?” asked Sevraine. “And whoever else takes this Voice into himself risks being driven mad by it. And how can anyone seize Amel from Mekare without ending her life? We have no recourse but to reason with it as it lives inside of her.”

I drew myself up. I had to appear alert, even if I was not, in control of my faculties, even if I was not. I was by no means irrational. It’s simply that I had to return to a state of examining these things on my own which I could not share.

Gregory was trying to read my thoughts. They all were. But I knew too well how to lock them out. And in the dark little sanctum of my heart I saw that blood-red face, that suffering face. I beheld it in pure wonder.

“Put aside your fears,” I said. My tongue was thick, and I didn’t sound like myself to me. I looked directly at Gregory, then at Seth, then at each of the others in so far as I could see them. Even at Marius who reached out to grasp my arm.

“I want to be alone now.” I removed Marius’s hand from me. The Latin words came to me. “Nolite timere,” I said. I gestured for patience as I started to close the door.

Slowly they withdrew.

Marius bent forward to kiss me and he told me that they would all be in the house till morning. No one was leaving. Everyone was here, and that when we were ready to talk with them further, they’d come together at once.

“Tomorrow night,” said Marius, “at the hour of nine, Viktor and Rose will be brought over by Pandora and me.”

“Ah, yes,” I answered. “That’s good.” I smiled.

At last, the door was shut once again, and I moved back into the room. I sat down again, on the leather ottoman of one of the chairs, near to the fire.

Moments passed. Perhaps half an hour. Now and then I drew to myself the random sounds of the house, and the great metropolis beyond, and then banished those sounds as if I were a magnet at the center of a consciousness greater than myself.

It seemed the hallway clock struck the hour. Chimes and chimes and chimes. And then after the longest time, the clock chimed yet again. The house was quiet. Only Benji’s voice went on way up there in his studio, talking gently and patiently to the young ones, those isolated on far continents and in far cities, still desperate for the comfort of his words.

Easy to close myself off from that. And the clock chiming again as if it were an instrument being played by my hand. I did like clocks. I had to admit it.

There came that vision of sunshine and green fields. The soft musical sound of the insects humming and the soft rustle of trees. The twins sat together and Maharet said something to me in the soft ancient tongue that I thought very amusing and very comforting, but the words were gone as fast as they’d come, if there had ever been words before.

There was a slow trudging step in the hall beyond the door, a heavy step that made the old boards creak and the deep sound of a powerful beating heart.

The door opened slowly, and Mekare appeared.

She’d been lovingly restored since last night, and wore a black wool robe trimmed in silver. Her long hair was brushed and clean and lustrous. And someone had also fastened a fine collar of diamonds and silver around her neck. The sleeves of the gown were long and full, and the robe draped exquisitely on her, on the girlish body that was now a thing of stone.

Her face was fiercely white in the light of the fire.

Her pale-blue eyes were fixed on me but the flesh around them was softened as it had always been. The fire glinted on her golden eyelashes, on her golden eyebrows, and on her white hands and face.

She came towards me with those slow steps as if the effort cost her body pain, pain that she did not acknowledge, but pain which slowed her every movement. She took her place in front of me, the fire just to her right.

“You want to go to your sister, don’t you?” I asked.

Very slowly, her pink lips, so very like the pink insides of a seashell, spread into a smile. The masklike face fired with subtle perception.

I rose to my feet. My heart was pounding.

She lifted her two hands, palms turned inwards, and gradually brought her fingers to her eyes.

With her left hand poised, she reached with her right hand for her right eye.

I gasped, but it was done before I could stop her, and the blood was pouring down her cheek, the eye gone, plucked out and fallen to the floor, and only the empty bleeding socket was there and then her fingers—the first two fingers—once more jabbed, jabbed into the blood and broke the tender bones, the tender occipital bones, at the back of the eye socket. I heard the little cone of bones snap and shatter.

I understood.

She reached out to me, imploring me, and out of her there came a low desperate sigh.

I took her head in my hands and closed my lips on the bleeding eye socket. I felt her powerful hands caressing my head. I sucked with all my strength, drawing as strongly as ever I’d drawn blood in my life, and I felt the brain coming into my mouth, flowing viscous and sweet as the blood, flowing out of her and coming into me. I felt it fill my mouth, a great gusher of tissue against all the tender flesh inside my mouth, and then filling my throat as it passed down into me.

The world went dark. Black.

And then it exploded with light. All I could see was this light. Galaxies exploded in this light, whole sweeping pathways of innumerable stars pulsed and disintegrated as the light grew brighter and brighter. I heard my own distant cry.