Wyrms

Go away."

"What was it that you feared the most?"

His face took on a mockingly devoted expression.

"That you would die. I did all that I did to keep you alive. Why else do you think I served the Usurper's Son so faithfully? He had you hostage here."

He wanted her to believe, that he was lying. But she could also see that the headworms were not tormenting him. He had told her the truth. He simply didn't want her to know it was the truth. So she was asking the questions that would give her the answers she wanted. "Why were you afraid of my death?"

"Because I loved you. Back when I was alive. I remember it dimly."

But this was a lie. She could see the trembling around his lips; the headworms were in control of his nerves, and tortured him in unconcealable ways when he resisted.

So it wasn't love. It was something else. And thinking of that took her back to a time in her early childhood, to the night that most haunted her nightmares.

There was something in his face now that reminded her of his face that night. "You lied to me that night," she said. "I realize now, you lied about something."

"What night?" he asked.

"What was it you didn't tell me, Father, the night they brought you Mother's body in seven sacks?"

"You remember that?"

"For some reason it sticks in my mind."

He raised an eyebrow."! Don't remember it."

"Now more than ever you remember."

"God help me, if I must remember that night, then have the grace to take me from this rack and let me die."

"That night when you opened the first sack and saw what it was, you shouted, 'I'll never go, I'll never let you have her, not my daughter, not ever.' Who were you shouting at? What was it that made you so afraid? You trembled, Father. I never saw you tremble before or since."

"I was afraid of King Oruc, of course."

"You never were afraid of him. And lying does you no good-see what the headworms do with you?"

Abruptly he changed tactics. He smiled, and wryly said, "Even the headkeeper had some mercy. Now I feel like I've been constipated for a month and a diarrhea attack is begi

"Tell me now and have your ease."

Lightly he said, as if it didn't matter, "I feared the call to Cra

"Who else could it be but the gebling king?" asked Patience.

"Oh, you think you've solved it?"

"Angel told me that the gebling kings have always been able to command their people without a word. From mind to mind."

"Did Angel tell you that this power of the geblings has never touched a human being? We're deaf as a post when the geblings cry out to each other."

"The Cra

"I don't know who it is, but I fear him. I fear what he can do to people. The Wise of Grandfather's day were brilliant and strong, the greatest minds in the history of the world, working together, building on each other's learning, until they did things that had never been done on any world. Here, where iron is so hard to find that we can never rely on the machines that have always made humans powerful, they unlocked the powers of life. They weren't just petty breeders, like the Tassaliki, like the ancient scientists who created these headworms and gools four thousand years ago-those were mountebanks by comparison. The Wise of Grandfather's day had taught the chromosomes to name themselves in crystals, atom for atom, in patterns that could be seen and read by the naked eye. They had found how passion fish mate with clams to make cressid plants. And when I was born, they changed me so that I could never sire anything but sons."

Patience thought about that for a moment. "They did it so the prophecy wouldn't be fulfilled. So there'd be no seventh seventh seventh daughter."

"That was the plan."

"Why did you change your mind? Why did you have Angel undo what they did? Surely you didn't become a Watcher."

"No, not a Watcher. The Wise did this to me when I was still a child. As soon as they had made my body incapable of siring girlchildren, the Cra

One by one, the best of them began to leave. They would go off to teach somewhere. They would retire to a country home. They would be sent as ambassadors or governors.

But they would never arrive at their destination.

Instead they would be seen along the rivers and roads leading to Cra

"Your father was Heptarch then?"

"Not yet. My father watched what happened to the empire, as all the able men disappeared. He went to them and begged them not to go. The ones who hadn't yet felt the Cra

"So the Usurper wasn't the first to overthrow a Heptarch."

"For the good of the King's House, even treason.

Yes. But it was too late. Even when he tortured some of them, even when he killed some as an example, they went. Even when he cut off their heads and put them here, in Slaves' Hall, the Cra

The Cra

"What were they wanted for?"

"Do you think Father didn't try to find out? But they themselves didn't know. And no one ever knew what became of them, once they got to Cra

Oruc's father led it. But he wasn't called the Usurper then. He was called the Liberator. He came, he said, to restore Grandfather to his rightful place on the Heptarch's throne."

"Ah."

"Father should have killed Grandfather."

"As Oruc should have killed us?"

"Grandfather wasn't the-seventh seventh seventh daughter." Lord Peace closed his eyes. Patience knew that if he still had his body, he would put his fingertips together, then touch them to his mouth; she could almost see his hands rise. She felt the grief for his death well up in her for the first time, seeing him half-alive like this, remembering him whole.

She shook off the feeling. "How was I born, Father?"

"My father lost the city of Heptam before I came of age. I led one army, he led another. He lost and was captured and killed. I never lost. I wandered the wilderness with an ever-shrinking guerrilla band. One by one my sons came to adulthood. One by one they were killed. The enemy seemed to find my boys so easily-as if some traitor led them. It was as if some terrible invisible power guided them to destroy everyone but me.

Everyone but me. My first wife, my father, my children, and I alone was alive."

"So you could sire the daughter of prophecy."

"I studied the chronicles. I realized that my family's fall began almost the moment they undaughtered me.

That was the crime for which the Wise were taken and the throne was lost. You see, Patience, the prophecies that these men of science had long thought were mere superstition-someone or something of great power meant to have them fulfilled. And we thought-perhaps if we find a way to undo what was done. Perhaps if I could have a girlchild, then the Wise would come home, and all could be restored as it was. Peace could be restored to the world. But how could we undo the work of the Wise, so my daughter could be born? Who would know how to do it, when the Wise were all gone?"

"Angel," said Patience. "I know this story."

"I was in my forties then. He came to me, a very young man then, and said he had been studying the journals of the great men, and he thought he knew a way to refresh and revivify my woman-making sperm. He explained, but I could not understand it-I know what every educated man knows about genetics, but he was deep in the chemistry and mathematics of it, catalysts and countercatalysts and inducers and blocks. I said to him, 'You know too much. You've become one of the Wise. The Cra