Wyrms

I meant for Angel to warn you of this. I didn't mean for you to be ignorant of it. But that's all now. That's all, now go."

But even now, there was more, she could see what the headworms told her, that he was hiding still another secret from her. The headkeeper hadn't broken him. His power of resistance was still strong. But she would do what the headkeeper had failed to do. She would break him and have from him the tale he didn't want to tell.

"I know you better than that, Father," she said. "If I am such a danger to the world, you would have killed me in my childhood."

"The Starship Captain didn't say to kill his daughter.

He said to save her. And even if he had not said so, I could not have killed you. Anyone else could die, child, anyone at all, but you would live. To destroy mankind or to save the world, I ca

"Why! Not because I'm your daughter-so why!"

His face twisted in agony. She had asked him the unbearable question, and the headworms would torture the answer from him. But even as she realized this, she also remembered something else. This was the expression on his face the night of Mother's death. This was the mask of pain he wore. "In all your talking, Father, you never told me what you meant when you cried out on the night they brought Mother's body to you."

His mouth opened wide to form a scream that never sounded.

"The Cra

"That doesn't answer my-"

"Your mother was always with you. She was also called. She was weaker than I was. She tried to take you.

That's why I carried you away from her. She vowed she would never rest until she had you back, that she would do anything to get you away from me."

Even now, though the dread was thick within her, she could not bring herself to understand what he meant.

"Listen, foolish girl! Didn't Angel and I teach you how to listen? My father was weak enough to let Grandfather live, when he should have died. I was stronger than my father was. Hekat meant to take you to Cra

I had no strength to kill you, against the Cra

Patience stopped pumping breath for him.

"You," she whispered. "You told me it was a group of soldiers trying to curry favor with Oruc. You told me-they were even executed for it-but it was you."

His lips formed words as he ran out of air. I never meant to tell you. His eyes accused her. You made me tell you, and you didn't need to know.

It was more than she could bear.

"Why didn't you let her take me to Cra

"The King's House is all the world," said his lips.

"You weren't the Heptarch! You didn't have any responsibility for the whole world! You didn't have to kill my mother!" And she swept him from the table, spilling him to the floor. At once she rushed to him, to lift the head back to the table, restore the gel that would keep his gools alive.

But he looked at her steadily as she knelt over him, and his lips moved and said, Let me die.

So she did the only thing she could do. She took Lord Peace by the jaw and tore the head away from the rack that held it. The headworms wriggled in the open air and the gools slid off and slopped onto the floor. All the time her father's eyes looked at her in gratitude and love.

Then, gasping with grief and fury, she tossed the head through the open grate in the ceiling and climbed up after it. She carried it with her for ten minutes as she scrambled through the heating system to the vent by the garrison barracks. By then it was dead beyond reviving, and she thought of leaving it at the barracks door. Let the soldiers explain to King Oruc how she got it there without being seen.

No. She could not leave his head like the carcass of a cat in the street. Not that he would care-he was beyond such concerns as respect and dignity. It was herself she was concerned for, Patience who could not bear to treat even this fragment of her father's body with disrespect.

What she could not understand was why she did not hate him.

He had killed Mother. All his weeping when they showed how she had been mutilated, all his grief, all his embraces as he tried to comfort his daughter-and he was the one who killed her. All because of some madness about an ancient prophecy. Seven thousand years ago their ancestor went mad, and a few hundred thinkers took unlicensed trips to the gebling city, and for that her mother was murdered by her own husband.

Yet it was this monster who had made her what she was. For her own honor, if not for his, she could not shame him in death. Not because she loved him. She certainly certainly did not love him.

As she made her way along the ledges of the cliff outside the wall of King's Hill, she filled her father's throat and mouth with rocks and tossed the cold, misshapen thing into the sea.

Chapter 5. HEPTAM

ANGEL WAS SUPPOSED TO BE IN DISGUISE, LECTURING ON astrophysics in the School. But he wasn't there. It didn't surprise her. She was supposed to have arrived almost as soon as word first reached the city that Peace was dead.

Every minute she delayed made it more dangerous for Angel, who was not unknown and might be recognized despite his disguise.

Perhaps he had stayed until nightfall-but he would certainly not have dared to stay the night inside the city.

There were too many tongues paid well to wag, too many eyes that would see and remember the new teacher who had not been seen or heard of before. Perhaps, though, he would return in the morning. So, still passing as a boy, she passed the early hours of day like the many students searching for a teacher whose haranguing was particularly pleasing. She was tired, after a night without sleep. But part of her regimen had been sleeplessness, from time to time, staying awake and alert against the urging of her body. Angel and Father had stretched her limits so far that she no longer knew where they were.

She quickly recognized the spies circulating through the crowd. They had not been trained by Father or Angel; they were not subtle, and Patience knew she was not the only one who could tell they were not earnest seekers after truth. Many a teacher became tongue-tied when a spy came near, and tried to purge his doctrine of anything that smacked of sedition. Patience also knew that the spies she saw were not the dangerous ones. It was the spies she could not discern who frightened her.

So she made her way into Kingsport, the warehouse and shipping district that had once been a separate town and still had its own council and made some of its own laws. Great Market, only a short way up from the docks, stank of fish and sausages, alcohol and spice. It would not do to linger too long without buying-the merchants hired their own spies to search for thieves. So she made her way to the tonguing booths. She stopped at the canopy of a man whose sign promised he could translate Agarant to Dwelf, Dwelf to Gauntish, Gauntish to Geblic, and then back to common speech without a word changed.

It was so extravagant an impossibility that she liked the man at once. She leaned on his writing table. He looked up at her from heavy brows and thick moustaches and said, in Agarant, "Take your hands off my table or I'll cut them off."

Patience answered in Panx that she knew was accent- less. "My hands for your mealbag, it's a fair trade."

He squinted at her. "Nobody ever needs Panx," he said. "Don't speak it myself."

She spoke now in Gablic. "Then perhaps you can use my services somewhere else."