Nested: Cocks of Stone

(Sex scene types. Warning - spoilers.) This story contains explicit gay sexual content including: a magical body swap between bonded partners, a guided first-time anal scene in which a virgin enters his own body while his partner occupies it, telepathically shared sensation across a bonded group, mutual masturbation at a distance, oral sex, fingering and prostate stimulation, a magically induced cum overload, and heavy cum play including swallowing, facials, and a magic butt plug used for suction. All sexual activity is consensual between adult men, with explicit consent sought and given before the bond-network is opened and before penetration. No underage content.

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The Council and the Deflowering

The elves put something in the walls to keep the rooms sweet. I never found out what. It smelled green and a little bitter, like a stem broken between fingers. It was the first thing I had every morning in that city.

Joren was still asleep. His breath came slow and even and the whole nest moved with it. The silk was soaked through from the night. My legs were tangled in the folds under his balls and one of my arms had gone dead where his cock lay across it.

The light through the shutters was grey going gold.

I climbed up the shaft. Slowly, because he was not awake yet and I liked the part where he was not awake yet. The skin under the head was tacky. I licked it clean and worked down the ridge and around, and the cock lifted against my chest and pushed me back into the weave.

"Today," I said.

"Today." His voice came out rough. He had been awake for a while then. He often was.

His hand came down over the pouch and gripped it like a handle. His thumb found the slit through the fabric and circled it. A drop came up through the weave and I caught it on my tongue.

"You started without me," he said.

"You were asleep."

"I was listening."

"You were snoring."

"Sprites lie," he said, and his thumb pressed harder, and I was flattened against the head with my face in the wet.

Down the corridor a door opened and closed. Lirael and Pisson had the next room. The thread to Pisson was quiet that morning. It had a settled feel to it, low and warm. A house feels like that when everyone in it is asleep. It had been jumping for three days before the ordination. Now it just sat there being whole.

The fragment was in my chest pocket. Cold. It had been cold since the Stone realm and it was cold now.

The pull had not changed. I checked it once, the same as pressing a tooth with your tongue. Still there. Still pointing at nothing I could name.

Joren's hand went still on the bulge. Then it moved again, kneading the whole outline slow, grinding me down into the wet silk.

"You are thinking about the rock," he said.

"It is cold."

"It is always cold."

"Then I am always thinking about it."

He laughed low in his chest and I felt it in the fabric before I heard it. Then he sat up and the nest tipped. I slid down into the seam where his balls met his thigh. I stayed there, warm, upside down.

"Get out of there," he said.

"No."

"There is bread."

I got out of there.

The crew ate in the main room. The elves had left a board on the table before dawn and gone away again without being seen. Dark bread cut thick. A wheel of white cheese with the rind still on. Green apples in a shallow copper bowl. Water in a stone jug with beads of cold on the outside.

Vesper had his notebook open beside his plate and he was already writing. Ink on the side of his hand. He wrote fast and struck things out. He talks the same.

Garrick sat with his back to the wall and ate an apple in six bites and said nothing.

Lirael came in with Pisson. They came in together and sat down together and their shoulders touched the whole time and neither of them moved away from it. Pisson's hair had gone properly gold overnight, amber at the tips where it fell past his jaw. His hands on the table were still the wrong hands for the rest of him. Wide. Cracked at the knuckles. A gardener's hands on an elf.

Cockper sat on the copper bowl. He liked metal. He had picked the bowl the moment we came in and he had not moved off it.

Joren tore bread and passed it down the table.

"I will open it," he said. "I will tell the story so far. Quickly. Then I will ask the rest of you to talk. Then I will ask everyone to talk. We listen first. We do not push."

"Agreed," Vesper said. "I will write."

"You always write."

"I write well." Vesper turned a page. "Somebody has to. In forty years the only reason anyone will know what happened here is that I sat in the corner with a bad pen."

"Pisson should speak when he is ready," Lirael said. "Not before."

Pisson nodded. He had a piece of bread in his hand and he had not eaten it.

"I will," he said.

Garrick swallowed the last of the apple. "Yes," he said.

I was on Joren's shoulder, small, holding the collar seam. I looked down the table at all of them and at the bread going and at Vesper's ink hand.

"And the bath after," I said.

Pisson looked up. Something in his face came loose.

"And the bath after," he said.

The elves gave us their library.

It was the longest room I had been in since the Stone realm and it did not feel long, because of the shelves. Dark wood on every wall, floor to ceiling, packed tight with bound volumes and scroll-cases in leather sleeves. Two rolling ladders on brass rails. Reading-lecterns set out down the middle at even spaces. The elves had pushed those to the sides overnight. They put out benches in a wide ring instead.

The windows were tall and narrow and there were nine of them. The light came in in stripes. Between the stripes the elves had hung oil lanterns from the shelf-ends and lit them. The two kinds of light did not match. The room was warm and yellow because of it.

It smelled of paper and old leather and something herbal underneath. The same green bitter smell as the sleeping rooms. They must have used it on the books.

The delegations came in and found places without being told where to sit. I watched them sort themselves. Nobody crossed the room to sit with anybody new.

The Lesbian Realm took the bench nearest the windows. Milianne in the middle in a green coat with the collar turned up. Holta on her left with her arms folded. The consort on her right, quiet, hands in her lap. Nessa beyond them with her sword laid flat under the bench and Sprinkle sitting on her shoulder with her legs hanging. Halvar stood behind them instead of sitting. She did that everywhere.

The Thorendale people took two benches and did not divide them neatly. Mossen and Tariq and Holm and Eben together at one end, the four conduits, close as always. The five senior magicians in their coloured robes, upright, composed, and the four reformed brothers sitting in among them without any space left between. That had not been true a season ago.

The inn had its own bench and only needed half of it. Tommy and Halsten and Doran, leaning back. Three days' walk from their own beds. The only people in the room who had come without crossing a realm.

The Baestoricks took the bench opposite the windows, all five in a row. The horse man on the end nearest Joren. The fox man and the badger man beside each other with their hands joined on the badger man's knee. The bear man next. The wolf man last, sitting forward with his elbows on his thighs.

Two elders came in last and sat at the back near the door. They had not been invited as a delegation. They sat down anyway and folded their hands and did not speak all day.

The crew took the floor end. Pisson with us. Not apart.

Joren walked into the middle of the ring. He had put on the dark shirt and left it open at the throat. His trousers were the old ones, worn pale at the seat. His hand was at his crotch. He did not know it was.

"Thank you all for staying," he said. "Some of you have travelled a long way. Some of you have known us since before any of this. I want to tell the story so far. I want to listen to what each of you knows. And I want to see what we can put together that none of us has alone."

Nobody answered. That was the answer.

"I will go fast," he said. "Most of you know the parts. I want us all to have the same picture in our heads before we start."

The horse man inclined his head. It was a big head and the movement went a long way. Milianne's hands stayed folded in her lap. Somewhere in the shelves a lantern popped.

Joren's fingers dug into the root of the bulge and squeezed once, and I felt the shaft go hard against my back, and he began.

He did not perform it. He laid it down like planks.

Six years ago the evils had Thorendale. He and I went out to end them. The Eternal Rods, which was a name other people gave us and we kept. On the road we met Garrick, who was a man then and became a sprite later. We met Lirael. We reached the Overlord and we finished him.

He said that part in nine words. He always did.

"The Servant was the Overlord we defeated," Joren said. "The tower grew up around him as he turned. He bound himself to it in gratitude. He has been there ever since. He speaks to me. He speaks to Spark. We have known him as the Servant for six years."

The magicians did not move. The eldest of them had his eyes half shut and his chin down. He nodded a beat before each thing Joren said.

Then the Lesbian Realm. The fountain that makes the new life for every realm had slowed and then stopped. The crew went. The crew worked. The fountain came back part of the way.

Milianne nodded once at that. So did Holta.

"While we were there we felt shapes at the edges," Joren said. "In the space between. Standing in it. Not moving. Not coming at us. Just there."

"The Watchers," Holta said.

"The Watchers. Last year. In the crossing and at the edges of your realm, standing in it, not moving." He paused. "We went at them in the end. Cum and sex and everything we had. It worked. They gave ground."

"They never once defended themselves," Holta said.

"No."

"That has sat badly with me for a year."

"It has sat badly with me too," Joren said. "You do not feel clever afterwards. You feel like a man who has shouted at weather."

Vesper's pen was going. I could hear it from where I was.

Then the walk home across Thorendale. Then the thing in the plaza.

"The monument," Joren said. "We did not put it there. It was there when we came back. Half of it crystallised. The old people in the square said it had always been there. We knew it had not. We did not understand it then."

He stopped. He let that one sit longer than the others.

Tommy was leaning forward with his forearms on his knees. His hair had grown out since the inn. He nodded at the Thorendale parts and stopped nodding at the rest.

"That is where we were," Joren said, "when the new patches came up on the tower. The Servant sent the conduits out. And the Stone realm became the next thing."

I sat in the nest and felt him go through his own life at that speed. His heart did not change once. Not at the Overlord. Not at the fountain. It changed at the monument, one beat, then back.

Pisson had his eyes on Joren the whole time. Some of this he had heard in pieces at the inn and in the temple. He had never had it in order before. His jaw was tight. Lirael's hand was on the bench between them, palm up, and after a while Pisson put his hand in it without looking down.

Joren's fingers slid up the outline of his cock through the trousers, straightening it, and every vein came flat against my chest.

"That is the ground," he said. "Now I want to hear from you. Thorendale first. You have been watching something for us."

Mossen stood up. He was a dwarf and standing did not gain him much, and he knew it, and he stood anyway.

He held his hand out flat. On his palm was the stone. A pale river pebble, near white, fist-sized, smooth all over. He had pulled it out of the channel himself with two others against his chest and he had been holding it ever since.

Tariq lifted his. Then Holm. Then Eben. Four hands, four pale stones, held up around the bench.

"You made these with us at the river," Mossen said. "I want that said out loud in front of the elves, because they keep asking me what enchantment is on it, and the answer is that four men got in the water and were serviced and that was the enchantment."

"That is roughly the method," Vesper said.

"It is exactly the method," Mossen said. "The little one carried it mouth to mouth onto the baby and the baby went onto ours. I felt nothing. Then I looked downstream and there was a patch under the rushes that had not been there a minute before, except it had been there the whole time."

"The monument has changed again," he said. "Half of it is no longer the wrong stone. It is the right stone. It is beautiful."

He said the last word plainly. He was an ironworker. He did not throw words like that around.

"And what do they show you now," Joren said.

"That is why I stood up." Mossen turned the stone over on his palm. "The patches are still in the walls. They have not gone. But they do not look like they looked. They used to sit in the stone like a stain sits in cloth, all one piece with it. Now there is an edge round each one. You can see where a thing was taken out and something else was put back."

"Repairs," Tariq said.

"Repairs. That is the word we settled on between the four of us on the road." Mossen looked at Joren. "Somebody has been in the wall."

"When did they start looking like that," Vesper said.

"We noticed it eleven days ago. All four of us in the same week without talking to each other first."

Vesper wrote the number down and underlined it twice.

"That is the Stone realm," he said. "That is our fortnight in the deep. The repair is what we did, showing up in the wall from the other side."

Then Holm spoke from his seat. Broad man, weathered, hands like boards.

"There is the other thing," he said. "The monument."

The room turned.

"Understand what it is first," Holm said, "because half this room has walked past it. It stands in the plaza. Everyone sees it. Everyone has always seen it. Ask any man in Thorendale how long it has been there and he will look at you for asking how long the hill has been there."

"It was not there," Joren said.

Mossen turned round on the bench and looked at him.

"It has been there my whole life," he said.

"It was not there when we left for the Lesbian realm."

"Joren." Mossen's voice came down soft, which it never did. "I have worked iron forty paces from that spot since I was nine years old. I have eaten my dinner sat on it. My father shod horses in its shadow."

"I believe you," Joren said.

"Then you see the difficulty."

"I see the difficulty. We walked out of that plaza and there was nothing in the middle of it. We walked back in and it was standing there and every one of you told us it had always been standing there."

Vesper looked up from the page.

"He is not making a claim about your memory," he said. "He is telling you what four of us saw with our own eyes, and I wrote it down at the time, badly, in the dark, because I did not expect anyone to argue with me about it later."

"I am not arguing," Mossen said. "I am telling you what my life has been."

"I know. That is the difficulty."

Two of the magicians began talking at once and stopped.

"Most of it you cannot look at," Holm said. "Not because it is hidden. Because it is crystal. It goes up out of the base into that bad glassy stuff and your eye slides off it. That is the state we left it in."

He turned the pale stone over in his palm.

"These let you look into the crystal," he said. "Not through it. Into it. Like holding a lamp up in a dark barn. You get what the beam falls on and no more, and you move the beam, and you build the thing up in your head a piece at a time."

"And you have been doing that every day," Vesper said.

"Every day since we left, and the four of us comparing after." Holm put his hands on his knees. "There is much more of it to see now than there was. That is what I am here to say. The crystal has pulled back a long way up the shaft and what is underneath is finished work."

"Describe it," Lirael said.

Holm took a moment.

"The base is one stone," he said. "Pale. Fine. No grain in it that I can find and I have looked with the lamp on it for an hour. It is cut in long curves that run back into themselves, and between the curves there are ranks of small round hollows, hundreds of them, none bigger than a thumbprint."

Beside me on the bench Garrick had gone very still.

"Above the base it stops being one stone," Holm said. "It changes. Band after band of different rock going up, and I do not know all of them, and I have carted stone for twenty years. Dark ones. Green ones. A red I have never seen in any quarry. And metal in it. Veins of it running up through the bands and tying them together, and the veins are not the same metal twice."

"That is not construction," Tariq said. "There are no joins. I have looked for the joins with the lamp on and there are none. It is one object that changes what it is made of as it goes up."

"How high does the finished part go now," Joren said.

"Higher than a man. Higher than two." Holm shook his head slowly. "And it is beautiful. I want that written down by the man with the pen, because I am not a man who says that about a rock, and I have stood in that square with my lamp on it and not wanted to go home."

Vesper wrote it down.

"Above that it is still crystal," Eben said. "It has not finished. Whatever it is doing, it is not done doing it."

"And nobody is touching it," Mossen said. "That is the part I cannot get past. There is no scaffold. There is no mason. Children sit on the base."

Joren had not sat down. He stood in the middle of the ring with his hand at his crotch and looked at nothing for a while.

"When did the crystal start pulling back," he said.

Mossen looked at the other three. Tariq answered.

"We cannot give you a day. We can give you a season. It has been coming back through this whole year and it went faster somewhere in the middle of it."

"Faster when."

"I would have to sit with my notes."

"Sit with them tonight," Joren said.

Vesper put his pen down, which he almost never did.

"You are asking whether it moved while we were down there," he said.

"I am asking."

"Then say the rest of it out loud, because I am not going to be the only one holding it." Vesper turned in his seat to take in the whole room. "That thing has stood in that plaza since before anybody here was born. Every man in Thorendale will tell you so and every man in Thorendale is right. And it was not there when we walked out of that city. Both of those are true. They have not taken turns being true. They are true at the same time and they always have been."

"That is not possible," a magician said.

"No," Vesper said. "And yet there it is, in the rock, with children sitting on it. I have been wrong about eleven things this month and I am starting to enjoy it."

The magician sat back. Behind him one of the reformed brothers was grinning at the floor.

Garrick made a sound from the crew bench. Not a word. Just the low hum in the chest he does when a thing is right.

Joren took the floor again.

"The Stone realm," he said. "I will give you what we learned. It matters for what comes after."

He gave it in order. Down through the deep passages. The trapped reefers. The cumulate that could not move and was made to move again.

Then the thing that mattered.

"Piss carries the signal of life," he said. "Not water. Not blood. Piss. Every man who pisses puts a mark on the world that says a living thing was here and is well. The Stone people read it. They have read it for longer than we have had names. When a region goes quiet in the piss, they know before anyone up here knows."

Pisson's hand tightened in Lirael's.

"That is what our High Priest was made for," Joren said. "We did not know that when we started. We know it now."

The elders at the back of the room looked at each other for the first time.

"There is more," Joren said. "The Servant."

Vesper's pen went faster.

"He is not whole," Joren said. "Vesper read it off the amber in the deep. There is a piece out of him and there has been for a very long time."

Milianne's chin came up.

"Taken from him?"

"He did it himself."

The room moved on that. One of the magicians said something to the man beside him and did not finish it.

"He was the thing that held the realms to each other," Joren said. "That was his work. He cut himself off from it. He chose to. And he chose to forget why, and the forgetting was part of the cutting, so there is no bottom to that hole to go looking in."

"Then ask him," a magician said.

"I have asked him." Joren's jaw moved once. "He says he does not know. He says it fast. Then he asks me what the weather did on the road."

"What came off him went somewhere," Vesper said, without looking up from the page.

"Yes. Some of it turned. Some of what turned became the Overlord I put down six years ago without knowing what I was putting down."

He let that go around.

"And the rest of it?" Milianne said.

"A guess. I am keeping it as a guess."

Holta unfolded her arms.

"Say it anyway."

"That the part that stayed loyal is what has been standing at the edge of your realm watching you for a year," Joren said.

Holta did not answer that for a moment.

"That would explain them," she said. "They never wanted anything from us. They never took anything. They stood there. And when we came at them they gave ground and did not fight, and I have never been able to make that into a victory in my head."

"No," Joren said. "It is not one."

He stopped there. His hand went to the bulge and he cupped the whole thing tight, thumb tracing the outline, and I was pressed flat along the underside with my cheek against the vein. He did not know he had done it. Garrick knew. I saw Garrick's eyes go there and come back.

When Joren spoke again his voice had dropped.

"There is one more thing and I do not know where it goes," he said. "We brought a smell out of the Stone realm."

The bench opposite the windows went still. All five of them at once.

"In the deep place there was a pulse in the amber," Joren said. "Vesper read it through the Veil. That was where we learned the Servant was incomplete. And while it was happening, Spark caught a smell that did not belong down there."

Every face in the room came to me. I do not mind that. I stood up on the collar seam so they could see me do it.

"Wet," I said. "Something rotting and something growing, at the same time, in the same breath. Warm. It went past fast. I could not hold it long enough to say what it was."

"We have not been able to place it," Joren said. "It is the only thing from that place we did not understand." He looked along the benches. "Has anyone here ever smelled anything like that?"

The horse man turned his head. He looked at the bear man. Then at the wolf man. Then back at Joren. He did not say anything yet.

Nobody else moved.

Milianne stood.

She was small next to the room and it made no difference to the room. She thanked Joren for the account and she did it in one sentence and moved on.

"The fountain is working again," she said. "Slower than it should be. We have new children, but not as many as the rhythm suggests we should. Two in the time we would expect five. The water is clear. The basin is full. The pace is wrong."

"How long has the pace been wrong?" Vesper said.

"Since it restarted. It has never come up to what it was." She sat. "We watch it every day. We have nothing else to tell you. It works and it is slow."

Holta spoke without standing.

"We have had no Watchers since you went at them," she said. "Not at the edges. Not in the crossing. Nothing at the rim of the realm for a year." She turned her hands over on her knees. "I want to be careful how I say the next part."

"Say it badly," Vesper said. "We will fix it after."

"They are not there and I have never once felt that they were finished." She looked at Joren. "You came at them and they went. That is all that happened. Nothing broke. Nothing screamed. A thing that is destroyed leaves you something to sweep up."

Sprinkle stood up on Nessa's shoulder.

Her voice is small and it carries, which is a sprite thing. She held on to Nessa's collar with one hand.

"The crossing was empty when I came through," she said. "I looked. I always look now."

"And?" I said.

"Empty." She was quiet a second. "It was not comfortable. An empty room somebody has just left is not the same as a room nobody was ever in."

She looked over at me across the room and I looked back and neither of us said the rest of it.

Then Nessa cleared her throat.

She stood, which she did not have to do. She is taller than most men in any room and she stood anyway, and she looked down the benches at Lirael.

"Lirael," she said. "At the inn I told you I had something to say later. This is later."

Lirael inclined his head. "I remember."

She put her hands out in front of her, palms down, fingers spread. That is what she does when she reads. I had seen her do it at the camp with the weather coming in from the north.

"I read weather," she said. "Seasons. The turning of natural things. Days ahead, sometimes longer if the thing is big. I do not read what people intend. I read what the land is about to do."

"We know," Vesper said. "You told me at the inn. You were very clear that I was not to be impressed by it."

"You were impressed anyway."

"I was extremely impressed."

She almost smiled. Then she did not.

"For months I have been reading something in a body of water far from here," she said. "A small sea. It is not a storm. There is no storm in it. The land flinches around it. That is the only way I have to say it. The ground near that water is holding itself the way you hold a limb you have hurt."

Her fingers moved slightly. She was doing it while she talked.

"I did not have a word for what I was reading," she said. "I still do not. I have had it in me since before the fountain slowed and I could not bring it to anyone because there was nothing to bring. A feeling about water I have never seen."

"Why now," Joren said.

"Because of them." She turned to the Baestoricks. "Since they arrived it has been sharper. It got stronger the day they walked into this city and I did not know why until I sat down in this room."

Vesper had stopped writing. His mouth was open a little. I watched him put two things together that he had been carrying separately since the inn.

"Say the rest," he said.

"What I have been reading at that sea," Nessa said, "is what these people have been carrying in their bodies. It is the same thing. I can feel it from here."

Lirael stood.

"Thank you," he said. Nothing else. That was the whole of it. He sat back down and Pisson's shoulder came against his.

The horse man got up.

He filled his end of the room when he did it. Broad through the chest, thick-limbed, the leather vest hanging open over all of it. His coat was dark bay and his mane went down between his shoulders and he had big dark eyes that did not blink often.

"We came because something has been happening to us," he said. "We did not understand it. We thought the Elven realm might know."

He stopped. He looked at the fox man.

The fox man let go of the badger man's hand and stood.

He is small next to the others. Narrow through the body, red at the shoulders going to white at the throat, quick gold eyes that go everywhere. He looked at the floor and then made himself look up.

"After we have sex, sometimes," he said, "there is filth on us. On the body. Where it has never been." His ears went back flat. "We have never heard of this. Our elders have never heard of this. There is no story about it. There is no word for it in our region."

The room did not make a sound.

"We thought we were sick," the wolf man said from the end of the bench. He had not stood. He had his elbows on his thighs and his yellow eyes were on Joren. "We thought it was something in our bodies. We came here to be told what was wrong with us."

"It is not in your bodies," Joren said.

"You do not know that yet."

"No," Joren said. "Say the rest and then we will know."

The horse man bent and lifted a bag onto the central table.

It was a travelling bag. Waxed hide, dark with use, a wooden toggle at the neck. He worked the toggle open and folded the sides down.

He took the things out one at a time and set them in a row on the wood.

Peels. Long spirals of apple skin, red on one side, white on the other, still curled as the knife had left them. The white had not gone brown.

Vegetable scraps. Carrot ends. The green tops of something. Still green.

And a piece of cheese, about the size of a fist, cut on three sides and rind on the fourth. White. Slightly damp at the cut faces.

"These have been in this bag for six weeks," the horse man said. "The cheese was cut the day before we left. Nothing has turned. Nothing has rotted."

Vesper got up and went to the table. Everyone watched him do it.

He picked up an apple peel first and let it hang from his fingers and turned it in the lantern light. He put it down exactly where it had been. Then he took the cheese in both hands.

He held it up near the lantern. He turned it. He looked at the cut face. Then at the rind. Then he brought it to his nose and breathed in over it twice, once fast and once slow.

He put it down on the table.

"The cheese should have gone first," he said. "It has not gone at all. It has not even started thinking about it."

"What should it smell like," Tommy said.

"By now? Like a dead thing in a wall." Vesper wiped his fingers on his coat. "It smells like cheese. It smells like it was cut yesterday afternoon by someone who knew what they were doing."

Nessa spoke slowly from the window bench.

"Then it is not your bodies," she said. "Something that unmade things has stopped unmaking them."

Vesper turned around fast enough that his coat moved.

"Both at once," he said. "That is the thing. That is the whole thing. What cleans you after, and what rots a peel in a bag. We have always talked about those as two different facts about the world. They are the same work. Something does that work. And in one region of the world it has stopped doing it."

"The same engine," Joren said.

"The same engine."

The room went quiet enough that I could hear the lanterns.

The wolf man raised his head.

"Is anyone else seeing this?" he said. "Anyone. In this room. Has it happened to you."

They checked. It went round the benches and it was not a dignified thing to watch, and nobody in that room cared. The conduits looked at each other and shook their heads. Tommy said no, and Halsten said no, and Doran said no more loudly than he needed to. The magicians conferred and the eldest said no for all five. The reformed brothers said no. Milianne said their realm had nothing of the kind. Halvar said no from where she stood.

Only the five on the bench opposite the windows.

"It is only us," the horse man said.

"It is only your region," Vesper said. "Which is the most useful thing anyone has said today, and I am sorry that it had to be you who said it."

Then one of the reformed brothers put his hand half up and took it down again.

It was the fourth one. The filthy brother. He had been at the end of the magicians' bench all morning with his hands in his lap. He had not said one word since we came in.

"I said no," he said. "I want to say something else."

"Go on," Joren said.

He stood. He was not comfortable standing.

"I have a gift from the magicians," he said. "I live on what other men put out. Shit. Piss. The leavings. That is my food and I asked for it and I am not ashamed of it, so nobody has to be careful with me while I say this."

The room did not make a sound. Tommy was watching him with something protective in his face.

"When you eat a thing every day you learn it," the brother said. "You learn it better than the man producing it. And there is a thing about shit I have never been able to get anyone to take seriously, because who would."

"I will take it seriously," Vesper said. "I have taken worse things seriously on less evidence and been paid for it."

"It is not in there."

"Say that again."

"It is not in there." He put his hand flat on his own belly. "It is not sitting inside a man waiting. I have had my face at the ring every day since they granted it and I am telling you it is not there and then it is there. It begins at the ring. It starts to be, right at the edge, at the moment it comes out. Inside the man there is nothing. Warmth. A body. No load."

"That is not possible," a magician said. It was the same one as before, and he heard himself say it, and he closed his mouth.

"I have said it before and I have been laughed at before," the brother said. "I said it to the other three the first week I could taste it. They laughed at me. They are sitting right there and they will tell you they laughed." He did not look at them. "I have said nothing about it since."

The fox man had come very slowly to his feet.

"Say the last part," Vesper said. "Say what you are getting at. Do not be polite about it."

The brother turned and looked at the Baestoricks properly for the first time.

"They are finding filth on the body after," he said. "On the outside. Where it has never been. That is not a sickness. That is the same shit that all of us make. It is just being made in the wrong place." He was breathing hard. "It is supposed to begin at the door. In them it has started beginning inside."

The fox man made a noise. The badger man had both hands on his arm.

"Say it in one sentence," Joren said quietly.

"Whatever makes it at the door has stopped working in their region," the filthy brother said. "So it is forming in the room instead."

Vesper sat down slowly on the edge of the table, which he had been standing next to for some time.

"Then it is not localised to their bodies at all," he said. "It is localised to the work. The same work is done in every one of us in this room, right now, every day, and none of us has ever noticed it because it has never once failed." He looked up. "You noticed. You are the only person alive who was ever going to notice."

"I eat it," the brother said. "You do not look at it."

"No," Vesper said. "We do not."

Nessa spoke from the window bench without moving.

"Then it was never rot stopping," she said. "It was making stopping. Those are the same thing said from two ends."

"The same engine," Joren said again.

Pisson had not spoken all morning.

He spoke now. Quietly, so that the far bench had to lean in.

"I have been feeling them since they arrived," he said.

The horse man turned his big head.

"The land they come from," Pisson said. "The signal in it is thinning. I can feel where bio-life is well and where it is not. It came with the office. I did not ask for it and I did not know it was there until the second day." He looked at his hands on the table. "Their region is not well."

"Thinning how," Vesper said.

Pisson took his time.

"Like a room where people are still talking but fewer of them each time you listen," he said. "It is not silent. It is quieter than it was, and it is quieter this week than last week."

Lirael's hand had gone under the table. Pisson's hand went down and found it.

"There is more," Pisson said. He looked across the room at Nessa. "The sea you described. I can feel it too. From my side. It is the same place."

Nessa did not move for a moment.

"You are certain," she said.

"I have nothing to compare it to. It is the only place I have found that feels like that." He held her eyes. "It is the same place."

"Yes," she said.

"Yes," Pisson said.

Something went round the room then that I have no clean word for. Not fear. The other one. The feeling in a room when two people who have never worked together turn out to have been drawing the same map from opposite ends.

"Two different ways of reading," Joren said. "Same thing."

"Same call," Lirael said.

I looked at Nessa and then at Pisson. The two threads I carry were both alive at once. Hers came second-hand through Sprinkle. His came whole. They were pointed the same way. I had never felt that before and I did not enjoy it.

Joren's hand found the bulge and hooked underneath and lifted the weight, and I slid down onto his balls and lay there in the warm.

"Steady," he said. Just to me.

"I am steady."

"You are not."

"I am mostly steady."

The Baestoricks were sitting very still on their bench. They had been living inside the thing the whole room had just described. That does something to a face. The bear man had his eyes shut.

It came in the middle of the room.

The first thing was the temperature. It went up. Not much, one degree. A room changes like that when somebody opens an oven two rooms away. Then the light went amber and the lantern light and the window light stopped being two different things.

Then the smell.

Vanilla first. Warm and thin and sweet.

Then earth. Turned earth, wet, the smell of a garden in the hour after rain when the worms come up.

Then wine. Then bread out of an oven.

And then, underneath all of it, the smell I had caught in the Stone realm and could not hold. Rotting and growing in the same breath. Only now it was not going past. It was standing in the room.

"That is it," I said out loud. "That is the smell."

A figure formed in the centre of the hall.

He came up from the floor and downward from the air at once and took about as long as a breath. There was no flash. There was no wind. He was simply in the process of being there, and then he was there.

A man in his fifties. That was the first thing. Not a monster, not a light, not a shape. A big mature man standing naked in a library.

From his feet to his hips he was soil. Dark, fine, damp, the kind you get under three years of leaf fall. Pale roots threaded through it and moved a little where they came near the surface. At the hip line the soil went into a band of dried flowers and dried leaves, woven right into the body, brown and rust and faded gold, pressed flat like something kept in a book. Above the band his torso was soil again and lighter in tone, and it smelled clean, which soil should not.

His arms went from soil at the shoulders to moss at the elbows to lichen at the wrists. His hands were made of fine pale roots. The roots shifted while he stood there, curling and settling, the way fingers do when a man is thinking.

At his upper chest another woven band. Herbs this time. Rosemary and thyme and sage, dried and laid into the skin in rows.

Bees crawled on his forearms. Six or seven of them, unhurried, working. Two lifted off and circled and came back down. Near his hands the honey moved in slow trails through the air and did not fall.

Around his shoulders there were swirls. Wine, deep red and pale gold, two of them passing each other slow. Beer foam held its shape behind him and broke and made itself again. Dark tea near his chest and it was clear at the edges. Vinegar in thin sharp threads where his collarbone caught the lantern light.

Mushrooms came up on his shoulders and his forearms while I watched. Small ones with bright caps, yellow and red and purple and blue. Each one stood for a few breaths and then went soft and sank back into him.

His face was a man's face. Fifty and weathered and kind and steady. His eyes were dark violet, the colour red wine goes at the rim of the glass where it turns. His beard was dark with silver through it, kept short, with a faint green fur of moss along the jaw. His hair was dark and grey at the temples with tiny bright threads in it. A small fern frond grew from behind his left ear and curled forward.

Above his head there was cum.

A swirl of it, suspended, turning. Jolts fired up out of the swirl in short pulses, three or four ropes at a time, launching a hand's height into the air and arcing over and falling back down. The rhythm of it was the rhythm of a man coming. It did not stop. Above his shoulders a ring of it hung and turned, and the ring caught what fell and took it back in.

In his left hand he held a small branch of apple.

Bare wood. Then green buds. Then leaves opening out. Then white blossom crowding the length of it. Then the petals dropping and going to nothing before they reached the floor. Then small hard green apples. Then red. Then the apples falling. Then the leaves going yellow and letting go. Then bare wood again.

The whole year in about four seconds. Then again. Then again.

I heard the chairs. A bench went back and hit a shelf. Milianne's hand was at her throat and her other hand had closed on Holta's arm. The five Baestoricks were on their feet all together and none of them was making a sound. One of the magicians said one word in a language I did not know and stopped.

Joren did not move at all. In the nest I felt his whole body lock down, every muscle from the hips up, and his hand came over the bulge and pressed me hard against him and stayed there.

The figure looked at Joren first.

Then he looked at Pisson. He looked at him for longer and the look changed. Two men finding out they do the same job in different towns.

Then at the Baestoricks. Then at all of them.

He spoke. His voice was deep and dry and warm and slow.

"I have been calling for a long time," he said. "Most have not heard. You did."

Nobody answered him. Vesper had his pen in his hand and was not using it.

"The smell you carried out of the Stone place was me," he said. "The thinness in their bodies is me. The bag is me."

The horse man made a low sound.

"Something has broken in me," the figure said. "I cannot tell you what. I have gone looking and the place where the answer should be does not answer. I need someone to come."

The apple branch went through blossom and dropped its petals.

"There is a place," he said. "A small sea. A platform in the centre of it. Circular. Not very large. The way is there." He shifted his weight and the soil at his hips moved like soil. "Come to me by water. Bring the High Priest."

Pisson stood up.

The figure turned his head to him.

"I have been calling you since you became what you are," he said.

Pisson's mouth opened. Nothing came out of it. The dark violet eyes stayed on him a moment longer and then went to Joren.

"Bring them all," he said. "There is work to do."

He held the room one more breath.

Then he was gone. Not fading. Gone between one blink and the next, all of him at once, the bees and the wine and the ring above his shoulders.

The apple branch stayed about half a second longer than the rest of him. It was at bare wood. Then it went too.

The light dropped back to lantern and window. The temperature came down. The smell hung on for four or five seconds after that, vanilla and earth and the wet rotting growing thing, and then the room smelled of paper and leather again.

Nobody sat down.

Vesper started writing.

He wrote for about twenty seconds without lifting the pen and the sound of it was the only sound in the library. Then he stopped and put his hand flat on the page.

"I have got the branch," he said. "I have not got the order of the swirls. Did anyone get the order of the swirls, or was everyone else also busy having a religious experience."

"Wine, then beer, then tea," Holm said. "Vinegar at the shoulder."

"Thank you." He wrote it.

Joren stood up.

"Sit down," he said. "All of you. Sit down."

They sat. It took a while. Halvar did not sit.

"Now," Joren said. "Anything. Anything anyone has ever heard about a small sea with a stone circle in it. It does not have to be true. Tell me the version your grandmother told you. We will sort the true part out later."

The room came apart into talk.

The eldest magician got there first. He was a narrow old man in a blue robe with the sleeves worn through at the elbows and he did not stand up to speak.

"There is an old tale," he said. "A small sea to the south. A circle of water that the fishermen did not net. We have a story about it and we did not believe it."

"Say the story," Joren said.

"The water there does not move as water moves. It goes around something. Around a disc of stone in the middle. My master told it to me as a lesson about how sailors lie." His mouth went sideways. "I have taught it that way myself. For forty years I have taught it as an example of a lie."

The magician beside him said something quiet and the old one shook his head.

"I believe it now," he said. "I would like the record to show how long I did not."

"Noted," Vesper said, writing.

Tommy had his hand up like a boy in a schoolroom and then put it down when he realised.

"Sailors at the inn talk about a place like that," he said. "Travellers from the coast. Once every few years someone brings it up. They call it haunted. They say nothing fishes in a circle out there and that the fish go round it." He rubbed his neck. "I pour drinks. I have heard nine hundred stories about haunted water. I never thought about it once."

"Do you remember which coast," Joren said.

"South and east. Past the salt flats. They come up the river road."

"That is my grandfather's route," Mossen said.

Everyone looked at him.

"My grandfather's people had a coastal route down that way," Mossen said. "Trade. Ore going out, cloth coming back. They stopped using it. Two generations ago. Nobody could tell me why. I asked when I was a boy and I got told it was not worth the tolls, and I have since done the sums on those tolls, and it was worth the tolls."

"Do you have the route," Joren said.

"I can draw you the first half of it from memory and find the rest."

Tariq was already turning pages in a small book he had brought.

"There are references in old texts," he said. "Not in Thorendale. In the copies we hold from the coastal houses. I remember a phrase about water standing on a floor. I thought it was a translation error and I marked it as one." He looked up. "I will see if I can find them again. I will need three days with the elven library and permission to open the sealed cases."

One of the elders at the back nodded once. That was the permission.

"I worked that coast as a young man," Holm said. "Long time ago. Before the carting. The fishermen there were odd about where they went out. They would take a longer way round for no reason you could see and they would not talk about it to anyone who was not born there."

"I baked for a sailor's wife," Eben said. "In Thorendale. Years back. She used to tell me things while the bread was proving." He frowned. "She said there was a ring out there the fish would not cross. Not a bad patch. A ring. They come up to the edge of it and they turn along it and they go round."

Nessa's head came up.

"Say that again," she said.

"They go round it. They do not go in."

"How wide."

"She never said. She said her husband could sit at the edge of it all day and take nothing, and drop the same net forty paces off and fill it."

Nessa put her hands out flat in front of her, palms down, and held them there a moment. Nobody in the room said anything while she did it.

"That is not superstition," she said. "That is the animals reading it."

"Reading what," Tommy said.

"The same thing I have been reading." She lowered her hands. "I read the turning of natural things. Fish are a natural thing. They have been telling anyone who fished that water exactly what I have been feeling from six hundred miles away, and they have been telling them for longer than I have been alive." She looked at Eben. "You have just given me the only outside confirmation I have ever had. I have carried that reading on my own for months and I have had nothing to set beside it."

"It was bread talk," Eben said.

"It was better than bread talk."

Halsten and Doran were talking to each other fast and low. Doran said something and Halsten hit his arm.

"Say it out loud," Joren said.

"The eel man," Doran said. "At the market. He said his father lost nets in a place where the water went round. We thought he was drunk. He was drunk. But he said it twice, on two different days, the same way both times."

"That is worth something," Vesper said. "Drunk men repeat their lies differently each time. They repeat the true ones the same. That is the only useful thing I learned in six years of drinking."

Milianne and Holta had their heads together at the window bench. Milianne straightened.

"We have nothing," she said. "I am sorry. Our water is different water. It comes out of the ground and it goes back into the ground and we have no sea. There is no story of this in our realm and I have looked at our records for other reasons often enough to be confident of that."

"Could they be there," Holta said. "The Watchers. At that sea." She turned her hands over. "I do not know. I only think it because they are everywhere else."

"Write that down as a question," Joren said.

"Written," Vesper said.

Lirael rose.

"The elves may have records," he said. "Not in this room. There is a lower archive that holds the water-tables and the old coastal surveys, and they are not indexed with the rest." He looked to the back of the hall. The two elders were both looking at him. "I will go through them before we leave. And there is the crystal chamber. It may carry more than we have asked it for."

The horse man stood up again.

"We have nothing about the sea," he said. "Our forests are far inland. Nobody among us has seen salt water." He put his hand on the back of the bench. "But we know the road from here toward the coast, and we have horses, and we breed them and we speak to them. If you need to travel that road quickly we can help with that."

"Yes," Joren said. "We will need that. Thank you."

"We will also come partway with you," the horse man said. "As far south as the fork. Then we turn back to our own region." He looked at the fox man, who had sat down again and taken the badger man's hand. "We have people at home who are frightened and have been told nothing."

"Then go home and tell them something true," Vesper said. "That is more than most people get."

Pisson had been listening with his head down.

He lifted it.

"I can lead us," he said. "The pull was there before and it was a direction with nothing at the end of it. He has put something at the end of it now. I can orient on it. I do not need a road. I will know if the road is wrong."

"That is the map, then," Joren said. "A man for the direction and a dwarf for the route and a scribe for whatever we have forgotten."

"And a tapster for the sailors," Tommy said.

"And a tapster for the sailors."

It went on like that for a while. It was not tidy. Two conversations ran at once down at the Thorendale end and the magicians argued with each other about a place name and Nessa and Pisson looked at each other across the room twice without speaking. Vesper filled six pages and asked people to say things again.

What came out of it was not a map. It was a direction, a stretch of coast, and a stone disc that at least four separate lies agreed on.

"Then we know enough to begin," Joren said.

Joren stayed on his feet when the talking ran down.

"Here is what happens," he said. "I want it said in front of everyone so nobody has to guess."

The room settled.

"We leave for the coast in two or three days. Not tomorrow. We are tired and half of you have been walking for a month and I am not starting a sea journey on this much sleep." He counted it off without using his fingers. "Before that we rest. We send you all home through the portals. Pisson comes with us. Lirael goes through the elven records. Vesper writes it all up properly so that there is a copy that is not in his head."

"There is already a copy that is not in my head," Vesper said. "It is in this book, which I will now guard with my life. I have never said that about a book. I have said it about a cheese."

"The Baestoricks help us with horses south," Joren said. "Tommy puts word out at the inn for sailors who know that stretch. The conduits keep watching the monument and send word if the line moves."

"We will arrange the horses by tomorrow," the horse man said.

"I will ride ahead and find you sailors," Tommy said. "Give me eight days. If there is a man on that coast who has been out there and come back, he drinks somewhere, and I know every somewhere between here and the flats."

"We will watch and we will send word," Mossen said. He held the stone up again. "Every day. If a single hollow changes you will know inside the hour."

Milianne stood.

"We will be ready when called," she said. "Say how, and it will be done, and it will be done fast."

"Cockper," I said.

Everyone looked at the copper bowl, which was in the library because Cockper had brought it, and Cockper was sitting on it.

"Cockper goes home with Sprinkle," I said. "He can come back. He can bring her when we need her. That is the fastest road anyone in this room has."

Sprinkle put her chin up. Cockper's copper body pulsed once on the rim of the bowl and the sound went round the shelves.

"Then that is the line," Joren said. "That is how we reach each other."

It broke up after that.

Not cleanly. It broke into eight or nine smaller conversations at once. People got up and stretched. The benches scraped. One of the magicians went straight to the shelves and started reading spines without asking anyone.

Joren went round all of them.

He did it one delegation at a time and he did not rush any of them. The conduits first. Then Tommy and his two. Then the magicians, who kept him a long while. Then the reformed brothers, who did not have much to say and wanted to be spoken to anyway, and he stood with them for as long as he had stood with the magicians.

Then the Baestoricks. He put his hand on the fox man's shoulder and said something quiet that I did not catch, and the fox man's ears came up off his skull for the first time that day.

Milianne last, at the door.

I sat in the nest through all of it and felt him work. His heart never went above where it sits when he is walking. That is what he is for. Vesper had said something like that at the inn once and made it into a joke, and it was not a joke.

The threads sat in me all afternoon and none of them was quiet. Joren was the big one, close and steady. Cockper was on the bowl and warm. Sprinkle came and went as Nessa moved around the room. Pisson was full and whole and pointed south like a needle in oil.

The fragment was in my pocket. It had not warmed and it had not moved.

The crew went back to the quarters and shut the door.

Nobody spoke for a while. Garrick sat against the wall. Lirael took his robe off over his head and sat down in his under-things, which he never does in company, and nobody said anything about that either. Pisson lay down on the low couch with his forearm over his eyes. Vesper put his book on the table and looked at it.

Joren poured water. He handed it round. He sat.

"Did anyone else see the apple branch," Vesper said.

"I saw it," Lirael said.

"I saw it," Joren said. "The whole cycle. Over and over. Bare wood at the end each time."

"I got the branch and I got the mushrooms and I lost the bees." Vesper turned a page. "There were bees on his arms and I cannot tell you how many and I cannot tell you what they were doing."

"Six or seven," I said. "Working. Two flew and came back."

"Working at what."

"Bees do not tell you."

Garrick said, "The hands."

We all looked at him.

"Roots," he said. "They moved when he was not talking. Like this." He opened his own hand and let the fingers curl slowly closed. "Not with the words. In between them."

Vesper wrote that down.

Then he stopped writing.

He sat with the pen up off the page and did not move for long enough that Joren looked over at him.

"The swirl," Vesper said.

"What about it."

"Above his head. It fired up and it fell back down and the ring caught what fell and took it back in." He put the pen down. "Nothing left him. Not one rope of it. It went up and it came back and it went in again. That is a closed loop. It goes out and it returns."

"Yes," Lirael said slowly.

"Now tell me what the fountain does."

Nobody answered him. He answered himself, which is what he wanted.

"The fountain sends life out," Vesper said. "That is all it does. It pushes. It has never once taken anything back and no one in that realm has ever expected it to, because why would you. You stand at a spring and you do not ask where the water is going." He had both hands flat on the table now. "It is one half. It has always been one half. And we have spent a year calling it a whole thing that broke."

Joren straightened up.

"Say it plainly."

"The fountain was never broken." Vesper looked round at us. "We went there and we worked on it and it came back partway and we have all been quietly pleased with ourselves and quietly puzzled that it never came back the whole way. It never came back the whole way because there is nothing wrong with it. It is pushing exactly as hard as it has always pushed. It is pushing into a return that has stopped returning."

The room went very quiet.

"His engine is the other half," Vesper said. "Out through her. Back through him. Round. That is the circuit. He is not a separate problem that turned up today. He is the reason we could not finish the first one."

Lirael sat forward with his elbows on his knees.

"Then the slowness in the fountain is not a fault in the fountain," he said. "It is the fountain running against a blockage further round."

"It is a man breathing out into a closed room," Vesper said. "He is not ill. He is running out of anywhere to put it."

Pisson had taken his arm off his eyes some time during that.

"That is why it is thinning where they live," he said. "It is not that their region is sick. It is that their region is where the return has stopped first."

"Very probably," Vesper said. "I would want to check that and I have no way to check it and I am going to write it down anyway."

He picked the pen back up.

"Six months of notes," he said. "Six months. And the answer was that I was looking at half a machine and calling it a broken one."

Pisson took his arm off his eyes.

"He looked at me and he had been waiting a long time," he said.

"He had been," Joren said.

Lirael turned. He put his hand flat on Pisson's chest, over the sternum, and left it there.

"He recognised you," he said. "As a brother of office. That is what that look was. Not as a boy from Thorendale. Not as an elf. As the holder of a function speaking to the holder of a function."

Pisson's throat moved.

"Yes," he said.

"You will meet him properly at the platform," Lirael said. "You should know before then that he will speak to you differently than he speaks to us. That is not favour. It is grammar."

Pisson laughed, one breath, wet at the edges. Lirael's hand stayed where it was.

I was small the whole time and I stayed small. I sat in the nest with the silk against my back and Joren's cock warm along my side. I did not say very much. Months ago I had that smell in my nose for one second in the deep place and let it go past me. Today it stood up in a library and said its own name.

Joren's hand came down. He pressed three fingers along the shaft through the trousers and held them there, and I felt him count the pulses without meaning to count them.

"You are quiet," he said.

"I know."

"You smelled it first."

"I smelled it and I lost it."

"You smelled it first," he said again, and that was the end of it, because when he says a thing twice he does not say it a third time.

They divided the work before the light went.

Joren would go back to the Servant in the morning. He said it plainly and nobody argued and Vesper's pen went across the page.

Lirael would take the lower archive with Tariq. Vesper would write the whole council up clean, both copies, one to stay with the elves. Garrick would go through the gear and say what needed replacing before a sea road.

"Rope," Garrick said.

"How much."

"All of it. And the boots go. All four pairs. They will not last salt."

Joren nodded. That was the longest conversation Garrick had all day.

Pisson said he would sleep, and then he said he did not think he would sleep, and Lirael said that both of those could be true and to lie down anyway.

The light in the room went from white to yellow to orange while they talked. Somebody in the city was cooking with fennel. Cockper had found the copper water jug and moved to it.

Joren stood at the window at the end with his back to us and his hand at his crotch, kneading the whole outline slow, grinding me down into the warm weave without knowing he was doing it.

"I will go back to the Servant tomorrow," he said. "He needs to know what we just saw."

Lirael and Pisson went to their room after that. Nobody remarked on it. They had been holding hands under a table all day in front of nine delegations and everyone in the crew had seen it and nobody had said one word.

Vesper took his book to the long table by the lamp and Garrick went with him, because Garrick goes where Vesper goes. He had been out of him all day for the council and he did not stay out. He got small at the door and went back up into him and that was the last anyone saw of Garrick that night. Joren stayed at the window a while longer and then came away from it.

I stayed with Joren. I got small and got into the nest and the day started coming off me in pieces.

We were an hour into the quiet when my tooth went warm.

It is the back left one. Amber crystal, the colour of frozen amber-water, set in me since the Stone realm. It sits in my jaw doing nothing most of the time. When it warms it means somebody has opened the channel.

Pisson's voice came into all of us at once.

We are going to try something. It is only for us. But we would like to leave it open, if you want it.

Then Lirael, and his voice through the tooth was the same voice he uses in the temple, formal and unhurried.

You are not required to. It is not a rite. There is nothing owed. If you would rather have your evening, close your jaw and it closes.

Then, after a moment, and less formally:

I will say why, because otherwise it looks like display and it is not. We have both spent this month watching everyone we love get ready to walk into something none of us understands. I would like the five of you to have something of ours before that happens. This is what we have got. It is not advice and it is not a plan. Take it or do not.

I felt the others come in one at a time.

Joren first, a low steady yes with no words in it. Then Vesper, quick, and the scratch of his pen stopping somewhere across the building. Then Garrick, slow, from inside Vesper, which meant we got both of them on the same thread.

Yes, I said. Yes. Please.

Then take it as it comes, Lirael said. And do not be polite about it.

The channel opened wide.

Their room was dark except for one lamp. I got that first. Not as a picture. As a fact about how much light there was.

Then the smell of the room came, which was the green bitter herb in the walls and the linen and Pisson's skin, which since the ordination has smelled faintly of warm stone.

Then their bodies.

They were on the bed and they had been kissing for a long time already. That was the first thing that surprised me. There was no hurry in it anywhere. Lirael's hand was flat on Pisson's chest over the sternum and it had been there long enough for the skin under it to go the same temperature as the palm.

Pisson's mouth came off Lirael's.

"Do it again," he said.

"You do it."

"I did it last."

"Then do it better."

I felt Pisson laugh. Not the sound. The movement of it through his ribs.

He put his forehead against Lirael's forehead and shut his eyes and went.

The merge is not a slow thing. I have felt him do it twice now and both times it was between one breath and the next.

His body went to gold light and the light poured down through the point of contact and then there was one body on the bed and two men inside it.

Lirael's chest rose and it was Lirael breathing. Then it rose again and it was Pisson.

There, Pisson said. That.

I know.

Your hands are cold. You never say your hands are cold.

They are always cold. It stops being information after four hundred years.

They lay in the one body and did nothing with it for a while. Pisson went through Lirael like a house he had been given the keys to. He found the ache in the left shoulder that Lirael has never mentioned to anyone. He found the place at the base of the skull where the tension sits. He found what water tastes like in a mouth that has been drinking water for four centuries, which is nothing, which is why Lirael never comments on water.

You are bored of water, Pisson said.

I am not bored of water.

You are so bored of water.

Come out of my body if you are going to be rude in it.

Pisson came out.

The gold went up out of Lirael's chest and gathered and set, and there were two men on the bed again, and Pisson opened his eyes.

And I felt every one of us notice at the same moment.

Because the eyes that opened were grey-green. And the hand that came up to the face was long-fingered and pale gold. And the hair that fell forward was silver-white and heavy and wet at the ends from the bath that afternoon.

Pisson was looking out of Lirael's face.

Across from him, on the other pillow, Lirael's eyes came open and they were amber-green. And the hands that went up were wide and cracked at the knuckles. A gardener's hands.

Nobody moved for four seconds. I counted them.

Oh, Pisson said.

Yes, Lirael said.

Pisson sat up in Lirael's body. He looked down at Lirael's chest and put Lirael's hands on it. He turned Lirael's hands over and looked at the palms.

I did not go back, he said.

No. You came out into me and I went out into you. We crossed.

Can we do that.

Evidently.

Can we get back.

Lirael sat up in Pisson's body. He took a long breath with Pisson's lungs and let it go.

I expect so, he said. Not immediately. Not on purpose. It will want to settle first.

Then he said something else, quieter, and he said it to Pisson and let the rest of us have it because he had already opened the channel and did not go back on that.

This is not a trick of the office. I want you to know that. I have had the merge with you since the day you were made and I have never once come out anywhere but back into myself.

Then why now.

Because there is nowhere in you I am not welcome, Lirael said. That is the whole mechanism. There is no door in you that is shut to me and I have not shut one to you, and so there was nothing to stop me going the wrong way, and I went the wrong way.

Pisson put Lirael's cold hands over Lirael's own face, which is to say over his own face, and laughed into them, and it came out wet.

Pisson made a sound with Lirael's throat. It came out as Lirael's laugh in Lirael's register and Pisson's timing, and even through the tooth it was the strangest thing I had ever received.

I sound like you, he said.

You sound like me being amused, which I do not do.

You do it constantly. You just do it very quietly so nobody can charge you for it.

Vesper came through the channel then, and he had been trying to hold it in and had failed.

Sorry. Sorry. Continue. I am writing nothing down. I want that on the record. I am not writing this down.

You are absolutely writing this down, Pisson said.

I am writing it down later, which is different.

They spent a while just being in the wrong bodies.

I want to say what that was like to receive, because it was not what I expected.

It was tender. That is the whole of it. There was no strangeness in it for them. Pisson lay in Lirael's long cool body and found out what it is to be tall, and what it is to have hair heavy enough to feel on the back of the neck, and what it is to have hands that do not catch on linen. Lirael lay in Pisson's body and found out what it is to be twenty-three and to have a chest that recovers in four breaths.

Your heart, Lirael said. It is so fast.

It is not fast.

It is very fast. It has been fast this whole time. All these months I have had my hand on your chest and I thought I was feeling you being nervous.

That is just what it does.

I know that now.

Pisson reached over with Lirael's cold hand and put it on Pisson's own chest, where Lirael was.

Then feel it from outside, he said.

They lay like that. One body's hand on the other body's sternum, each of them holding the heart they had grown up with and were not currently using.

I felt Joren's breathing change under me in the nest. Not aroused. Something else.

This is the part I did not expect, Lirael said quietly, to all of us. I have lived a long time and I have been inside almost nothing. You spend your whole life at the edge of another person. You get very good at the edge. You learn to read a jaw and a shoulder and a pulse in the throat and you tell yourself that is knowing someone.

And? Vesper said.

And it is knowing someone. I am not taking it back. A pause. But I have been at the edge of him for months and I did not know his heart was fast.

Pisson did not say anything. Through the channel his throat had gone tight, and it was Lirael's throat, and he did not know how to make it stop doing that yet.

They started slow.

Pisson touched Lirael's own body with Lirael's own hands. That was where it began. He ran Lirael's palm down Lirael's chest, which was where Pisson was, and both of them got it at once from both ends.

Oh, Pisson said. Oh, that is not fair.

Because he felt his own hand moving and he felt it arriving, and neither one of them was where it should have been.

Do it again, said Lirael, out of Pisson's mouth.

He did it again.

They worked out fast that it doubled everything. The passenger-merge doubles it differently, two men on one nerve. This was cleaner and stranger. Two bodies. Two sets of nerves. Wrong drivers in both.

Pisson found out what Lirael's cock felt like from the inside as it filled. Long and cool-skinned and slow to rise and, when it rose, holding the silver at the tip that Lirael has always had and never explained.

Lirael found out what it was to be hard at twenty-three, which is not a gradual event.

Ah, he said. Ah. That is very sudden.

That is normal.

That is not normal, that is a catastrophe.

That is what it is.

Garrick came down the channel. One word, dry as a board.

Youth.

Everyone got that at once and the whole network went over into laughing, all five of us, in four different rooms, and for a while nothing happened at all except that.

And I want to put down what Pisson was like, because the tooth does not only carry sensation. It carries the state of a man, and his was the loudest thing in the channel all night.

He was happy. That is it. That is the whole of him.

Not excited. Not proud of himself, and he had reason to be. Happy, which is how he goes when somebody hands him something to hold. He was in the body of a man four hundred years old with silver at the end of his cock and cold hands, on a bed in a foreign city, three days from a road going somewhere none of us wanted to go, and he was delighted about all of it. He kept laughing at things that were not jokes. He kept saying Lirael's name for no reason and then not following it with anything.

Twice he stopped in the middle of what he was doing and said, to no one, this is so good.

And underneath him, holding all of it, Lirael.

I have known Lirael a year and a half and I have never once known him to be careless. Not with a rite, not with a word, not with a man. He goes at everything the same way, which is completely, and with his whole attention, and without hurrying.

He was doing that. To Pisson. All night.

That is what came down the tooth, and it is not the part I expected to be sitting in the dark receiving. Not the doubling. Not the strangeness. A young man who could not stop being delighted, and an old one giving him the whole of his attention and not looking away once.

Then Pisson went quiet, and it was a different quiet, and we all felt him decide something.

Lirael, he said. I have never done it.

Done what.

Been taken. A pause. I have never done that. Not with anyone. Not once.

I know.

You know?

You would have told me. You tell me everything within about nine minutes of it occurring to you.

Pisson laughed in Lirael's throat again.

I never thought about it, he said. That is the part I want to say properly. It is not that I was frightened of it. It is not that I did not want it. I grew up in a hole in Thorendale and then I was in a temple and then I was in love with you, and there has not been one hour in all of that where I sat down and considered it. It simply never came up in my own head.

That is allowed.

And you like it.

Lirael did not answer straight away.

Yes, he said.

You like it a great deal.

Yes.

You have never asked me for it.

No.

Why.

Because you never brought it up, Lirael said, and a thing a man has not brought up is not a thing you go and fetch out of him.

Through the channel I felt Pisson take that in. He turned it over. He was in Lirael's body and Lirael's body has a slow careful way of breathing and he used it.

Then I am bringing it up, he said.

Now?

Now. And here is what I want, and you are going to tell me if it is stupid.

It will not be stupid.

I want to do it while we are like this. He said it fast. I am in your body. You are in mine. I want to use your body to go into my body. So it is me going into me. And it is you feeling it.

The channel went very still.

Say it again, Vesper said faintly, from wherever he was.

You heard him, Garrick said.

I heard him. I want it said again.

I want, Pisson said, to take my own body, in your body, with you inside it.

Lirael sat up in Pisson's body. He put Pisson's rough hands flat on his own thighs.

That is not stupid, he said.

No?

It is the least stupid thing anyone has said in this building today, and today I sat through a council.

Then listen to me, Lirael said, because I am going to be tiresome for a few minutes, and you are going to let me be.

I am listening.

You have never had this and you are about to have it in a body that has, which is going to confuse both of us. My body knows what it is doing. Your body does not. The knowledge is with me and the flesh is with you and we have to move the knowledge across.

How.

I talk. You do it. And nothing happens fast.

I felt Vesper stop breathing for a second, and then start again, quietly, in a room somewhere down the corridor.

First, Lirael said. Warmth. Not touch. Warmth. Put your hands on me and leave them. Nothing that arrives cold is going to be let in.

Pisson put Lirael's long cool hands on Pisson's own thighs and left them there. I felt the temperature come up under them, slow, a full minute of it.

Longer than you think, Lirael said. Everyone rushes this and everyone is wrong.

Your hands are still cold.

My hands are always cold. Use your mouth for the parts that matter.

Rude.

Accurate.

Second, Lirael said. Slick. And a great deal more of it than seems reasonable.

I can do that.

Can you? You are in my body.

I felt Pisson stop and check. He went looking through Lirael's body for his own domain, patting it down like a coat he was not sure was his.

And it was there.

It came with me, he said, and there was wonder all over it. It is not in the body. It is in me.

Then that is a thing we have learned tonight as well.

Vesper. Write that one down.

Already have, Vesper said. I lied earlier.

Pisson made it come. Warm and slick and clear, more than enough, and he kept it at blood heat, which he does with everything, and he took it in Lirael's hands and warmed them with it first before he brought them anywhere near.

Good, Lirael said. That was good. You worked that out on your own.

Third.

Third. There are two rings, and everybody forgets the second one.

Two.

The outer one you can persuade. It answers to touch and it opens if you are patient with it. The inner one does not answer to anything. It is not under your command and it is not under mine either. It opens when the body has decided it is safe, and not one second before, and there is no argument you can make to it.

So what do I do.

You wait, Lirael said. That is the whole of the art. Everything else is decoration. You wait, and while you wait you keep the rest of me busy so I am not lying there monitoring my own arse like a customs officer.

Garrick came through the channel again.

He is good at this.

He has had four hundred years, Vesper said.

Fourth, Lirael said. Breathe out when it goes in. Never in. If you breathe in, everything shuts. Out. Long and slow and out.

I breathe out. You breathe out. Which of us.

Both of us, and it does not matter that it is my instruction and your body, because I am in your body, and I will do the breathing and you will feel me do it. That is the advantage of this ridiculous arrangement.

Fifth?

Fifth. One finger. Not two. Not two for a long time. And when it is in you stop, and you do not move it, and you wait for the grip to go. It grips. It always grips. It goes away on its own if you leave it alone. If you move while it is gripping you teach the body that this is a thing that hurts, and then you have to unteach it, and unteaching takes a long time.

Sixth.

Angle. Toward the belly. Toward the navel, not straight in. The passage is not a straight line and every man who has ever hurt anyone did it by pretending that it was.

Seventh.

Seventh is the only one that matters, and it is this. If it resists, you stop. You do not push through resistance. Ever. There is no version of this where pushing through is correct. If the body says no, the body is right, and the answer is more time and more slick and more mouth. Not more force.

And if I hurt you.

Then I will say so, and you will stop, and we will not have failed at anything. A pause. This is not an examination, Pissondel. It is us.

I felt Pisson go still all over at his own name.

What came after took a long time and I am going to be honest and say I did not track all of it, because about a third of the way in Joren's hand went into the nest and everything on my end became complicated.

But here is what came through.

Pisson was patient. He was more patient than I would have believed, and he was patient because he was afraid, and the fear made him slow instead of fast, which is not the way fear usually goes in a man of twenty-three.

He used Lirael's mouth on Pisson's own body. He found out that his own thighs are ticklish, which he had not known, and Lirael laughed with Pisson's mouth about the timing of learning it.

He kept everything warm. That was his whole contribution and it was enormous. Nothing in that room went cold at any point. He held the slick at blood heat and he held the air at blood heat and I think, though he never said, that he held the sheets.

The first finger took eleven minutes. I know because Vesper counted, and told us, and was told to shut up by three people at once.

The grip came, and Pisson waited, and the grip went.

There, said Lirael, out of Pisson's mouth, and his voice had changed. There. That is the thing. That is what it does. Do you feel it let go?

I feel it.

That is my body deciding you are not a threat. You did not talk it into that. You waited it out.

How long until.

Longer. Much longer. Ask me again in twenty minutes.

He asked again in twenty minutes and the answer was still longer.

That was the part that got me. Not the sex. The twenty minutes. Two people who had faced a thing made of soil that morning, lying in the dark, and the most urgent matter in the world was that one ring of muscle had not yet finished making up its mind.

When it happened it happened almost by accident, in the middle of a sentence Lirael was saying about the temple.

Oh, he said, and stopped.

Was that.

That was it. That was the inner one. It has gone.

What do I do.

Nothing. You do nothing at all for a moment. Let me have it.

And Pisson did nothing at all, which I think was the hardest thing he did that night.

Now take your fingers out, Lirael said. Slowly. Do not just pull.

And then.

And then more slick than you think, and put it on yourself, and do not be shy about how much.

Pisson took Lirael's cock in Lirael's own hand and slicked it. I felt him do it and I felt him find out what that was, because Lirael was hard and had been hard for a long time and Pisson had never had a hand on it from the inside before. Long. Cool-skinned. The silver at the tip going slippery under his thumb.

Now how do you want me, Pisson said.

Facing you.

It is easier the other way. You said so.

I said it is easier. I did not say I wanted easier. Lirael got Pisson's young body up onto the pillows and put his knees apart. I have waited a long time for this and I am going to watch your face while it happens, and your face is currently mine, and I do not care.

That is very confusing.

Come here.

Pisson knelt between his own thighs, in Lirael's body, and looked down at himself.

Then he took Lirael's cock in Lirael's hand and put the head of it against his own arse.

He did not push. That was the part I want to set down, because everything before it had been building to exactly this and he did not push. He set the head against the ring and let it rest there and left it.

Look at me first, Lirael said.

I am looking at you. You are wearing my face.

I know what I am wearing. Look at me anyway.

He looked. I got it through the tooth and it was not a sexual thing at all, it was two people checking that the other one was there.

I love you, Pisson said.

I know. Breathe out.

They breathed out together.

The ring came open under the pressure. Not much. Enough that the tip went in past the first tightness, and Pisson made a sound in Lirael's throat and stopped dead.

Do not move, Lirael said. Do not move. It is only the head.

It is not going to

It is. It will. Wait.

They waited. The grip came, hard, and Pisson stayed exactly where he was with only the head of it inside, and I felt him hold himself there with everything he had.

Then the grip went.

There, Lirael said, and his voice had gone thin. Now the widest part is through. That was the worst of it and it is behind us.

Are you hurt.

No.

Truthfully.

Truthfully. A breath. It burns a little and the burn is going. That is normal and it is going. Give me a moment and then a little more.

He gave him a moment. Then a little more.

It went in about an inch and stopped. Then they waited again, and it went in further, and stopped again, and each time Pisson stopped without being told, and each time Lirael let out a long breath under him and the body opened another degree.

It took a while to get all the way in. When it did, Pisson stayed there and did not move at all.

You are in, Lirael said.

I know.

You are all the way in.

I know. I can feel where I end.

No, Lirael said. That is the thing I wanted you to have. You cannot. Look for it.

Pisson looked for it.

I felt him go along himself for the join, for the place where one of them stopped and the other started, and it was not there. Not blurred. Not there. His body and Lirael's body and his own self in the wrong one of them, and no line anywhere in any of it.

Where am I, he said.

Here.

That is not an answer.

It is the only one there is, Lirael said. Twelve years I sat in a temple asking what the rite was for. It is for this. It is not a metaphor and it is not a lesson. Two men actually stop having edges. Everything else the priests say about it is decoration.

They stayed like that. Both bodies still. Joined and not moving, and neither of them in any hurry to start.

Then Pisson bent down and kissed him, which is to say he bent Lirael's long body down over his own young one and put Lirael's mouth on his own mouth, and stayed there.

That was when it got difficult to receive, and not for the reason you would think.

Because they did not do anything for a long time. They lay joined and kissed and Pisson kept himself deep and still, and every so often Lirael's body would tighten around him and both of them would breathe out and wait for it to pass.

Whenever you want, Lirael said, against his own mouth.

I do not want to yet.

No?

I want this bit.

When he did start to move he moved barely at all.

An inch out. An inch back. Slow enough that I could count it against Joren's heartbeat on the other side of the building.

Like that, Lirael said. Exactly like that. Do not get ambitious.

How long do we do this for.

Until it stops being enough.

It was a while before it stopped being enough.

Pisson learned the whole thing in that hour. He learned that if he came almost all the way out and went slowly back in, Lirael's breath caught at the same point every time. He learned that there was an angle, forward, toward the belly, that made Lirael stop talking mid-word. He found it by accident, went past it, came back for it, and then used it about nine times in a row until Lirael got a hand up and held his hip and made him stop.

Not that many times together, Lirael said, unsteady.

Why not.

Because I would like this to last past the next minute and you are making that difficult.

So it is good.

Pissondel.

Say it is good.

It is very good and if you say one more word I will finish and be furious about it.

They stopped for a bit after that. Just stopped, with him still inside, both of them laughing about something, breathing, coming back down off it.

Then they started again.

That is what the rest of it was. Long stretches of movement and then stopping, and kissing while they stopped, and going again. Twice Pisson pulled all the way out to slow himself down and both of them complained about it and then he went back in and neither of them complained about that.

And underneath it, the doubling.

Because he felt his own cock going into his own body. He felt the push at one end and the give at the other. He felt Lirael's pleasure from inside Lirael's nerves and he felt his own body being opened from inside Lirael's chest, and none of it lined up where it should, and all of it was him.

I do not know which of us I am, he said at one point.

Neither do I.

Is that all right.

It is the best thing that has ever happened to me, Lirael said, and I am four hundred and eleven years old.

There was a long stretch after that where they barely moved and talked almost the whole time.

Not about the sea. Not about the morning. He asked Pisson whether he had been frightened at the ordination and Pisson said only of the part with his fathers watching. Pisson asked how many men Lirael had wanted before him and Lirael said six, and named them, and said what had gone wrong with each one in about four words apiece, and did not sound sad about any of it.

And then you, he said.

And then me.

And then you, and it worked, and I had stopped believing it was a thing that happened to people. I want you to understand the size of that. I had made my peace. I had made a very good peace. I was going to be a priest with a long life and no one in it and I had decided that was acceptable.

And?

And you came to me and asked me to pee in your mouth.

Pisson laughed and it moved through both of them and Lirael made a noise about it.

Do not do that while I am talking.

I did not do anything.

You laughed. It is not a neutral act from where you currently are.

Somewhere across the building Garrick was going to pieces about that, and Vesper got it first because Vesper always gets it first. Nobody said anything. Nobody was going to embarrass Garrick.

Say something to me, Pisson said later.

What kind of something.

The kind you say in the temple. The big voice. I want it aimed at me for once instead of at a room.

And Lirael did it. Out of a twenty-three-year-old throat, in the register he uses for the rites, with his own body over him and inside him:

I hold you as the office holds the water. Wholly, without reservation, and for as long as I am able.

Nobody in that channel breathed.

That is a real one, Vesper said afterwards, very quietly. That is not something he made up. That is out of a book.

It is out of the binding rite, Lirael said. It is the last line of it. I have said it four times in my life for other men and I have never once said it for myself.

And that is when Garrick did the thing.

He was inside Vesper. He had been inside Vesper all evening and had said four words the whole time and one of them was youth. He did not announce it and he did not ask. He turned round in there, and he put his head against Vesper's prostate, and he held it there.

Not working it. Not pressing for a result. Resting his head on it and leaving it.

Vesper made a noise I have not heard out of him in a year and a half.

And every one of us got it. Both ends of it. Garrick's cheek on the gland from the inside and Vesper's whole pelvis going warm around him from the outside, and underneath that the thing neither of them has ever once said out loud in front of anybody.

I want to be careful here, because it is theirs.

Those two do not do this. Not in a room. Not at a table. Vesper makes a joke about it if anybody gets near the subject and Garrick says nothing at all, and between them they have kept a whole marriage off the page forever. They are discreet about their emotions.

They let us have it anyway.

Here is what it was, as plainly as I can put it.

Vesper was alone at the long table by the lamp, two floors and a corridor away from me, with his book open and his pen down. Garrick was inside him. He has been inside him most days for six years and in all that time I have never once been told what it is like in there.

Now I knew. Garrick turned round and laid his head against the gland and stopped.

He did not rub it. He did not push. He put his cheek on it and let his weight go, and he stayed.

Vesper's hands went flat on the table. His chair took his weight back. His mouth opened and stayed open and nothing came out of it, and down the whole length of the channel we all felt his pelvis go soft and warm and heavy around the small shape of his husband.

You do not have to, Lirael said. Quietly. From the other room. To both of them.

I know, Vesper said.

Then?

There was a pause. I could feel Vesper deciding. I could feel Garrick not moving at all in there and letting him decide it.

Then everyone has been very generous tonight, Vesper said, and I have written down four hundred pages about other men's bonds and never once put my own in the book, and if I am honest about it that was not modesty, that was cowardice with a good filing system.

Vesper.

Also he is currently using my prostate as a pillow, so the moment for discretion has arguably passed.

Garrick hummed. Like a cat purring. From inside him. It came up through Vesper's whole body and out along the channel and every one of us got it in the jaw.

In their room, Pisson laughed so hard that Lirael had to stop moving.

Do not, Lirael said. Do not, I am serious, I will finish.

Sorry.

You are not sorry.

I am not sorry.

Then Vesper's hand came off the table and found the lamp and turned it down, which is the only privacy he asked for all night, and he left the channel open.

Back in the dark room, Lirael and Pisson started again.

I will not give all of it. Some of it was theirs, and even with the channel open there were minutes where the two of them dropped their voices to almost nothing, and I let those go by without listening hard.

But the love in it came through the tooth like heat off a wall.

That is what the crew got. Not the mechanics. The other thing. Four hundred years of one of them, stopped expecting this. Twenty-three of the other, out of a hole in the ground. The two of them meeting in the middle in each other's skins.

Vesper stopped making jokes about halfway. He went quiet and stayed quiet.

Vesper had stopped writing. He put the pen down flat and put both hands on the table and did not pick it up again.

Joren had me out of the nest by then and grown, five feet of me, on my knees on the boards with him in my mouth, and he had one hand flat on the back of my head and was not pushing at all.

And every one of us was in that dark room, and every one of us was in our own body, and both were true at once, which was the whole subject of the evening.

Then it changed.

I felt it before either of them said anything. The channel went hot. Not warm. Hot, and my back teeth all ached, and my nest went tight.

Something is wrong, Pisson said.

Nothing is wrong.

Something is happening.

I know. I feel it too. It is not wrong.

It came up out of both of them and it kept coming. The build did not level off where a build levels off. It went past that and kept climbing and there was no ceiling in it anywhere.

This is not mine, Pisson said. This is not coming from me.

And then I understood, and I think Vesper understood at the same moment, because he said it out loud through the tooth in a voice that had gone completely flat.

The library. This morning. He was in the room with us for a minute and a half and every one of us breathed him in.

The Decay, Lirael said.

He left something in the room. He left something in us. He is the engine that makes it, and he stood in a library this morning, and we have all been carrying a piece of him around since breakfast.

Vesper, Pisson said, I am about to

Yes, Vesper said. So am I. So is everyone. Hold on.

It exploded.

It broke in that dark room first, in two bodies with the wrong men in them, and then it came down the channel and took the rest of us with it, and there was nothing anybody could have done about any of it.

Pisson came in Lirael's body into his own body. Lirael came in Pisson's body underneath him. Both at once. Both feeling both.

And it did not stop.

That is the part. It went on past every reasonable end. Lirael made a sound I have never heard him make in a year and a half. Pisson stopped making sounds altogether about ten seconds in, because there was no breath left anywhere in that body to make them with.

It came out of them in volume. Not the ordinary amount. Not the generous amount. An amount that had nothing to do with either of them and everything to do with what had stood in the middle of the library that morning with a ring turning over its head.

Down the corridor Vesper cried out once, alone in a room with a notebook, and I heard it through the wall as well as through the tooth, which is how I know how loud it was.

Vesper went over with Garrick still in him, and the two of them came at the same time, and neither of them made a sound about it that I heard through a wall.

And Joren.

Joren had both hands on my head by then and he still was not pushing, and when it came it came like nothing he has ever given me. The first pulse hit the back of my throat and I took it. The second I took. The third I took.

And then it kept coming, and I understood that this was not going to work.

I have never not been able to.

That is my whole thing. That is what I am for. Since the first week I have taken everything Joren has ever had, at every size, in every position, and I have never once had to stop.

I called the plug.

That is all it takes. It is a gift from the Lesbian realm and I do not use it often because I do not need it. I thought about it and it was in me and it was already working.

Full draw. It opened me out and started pulling from the other end, and that is the whole point of it. It takes in whatever is near it and draws it up into me, so I am swallowing at the top and taking it at the bottom at the same time, and both of them count.

It found what was already running down me. It found what had gone past my chin and down my chest and was coming off my belly onto my thighs, and it pulled that back and took it in, and I felt it go up into me while I was still swallowing at the other end.

Both ends of me working at once. That has always been enough. It has been enough every time.

For about four seconds it was enough.

Then it came faster than either end could take it and my throat filled and my mouth filled and I had to come off him.

It went across my face. It went into my hair. It went down my chin and my chest and my belly and it kept coming and I knelt there with my mouth open and my hands out and could not do anything about any of it, and Joren was saying my name over and over in a voice that had come apart at the seams.

It ran off the ends of my fingers onto the boards.

I have not been beaten before. I have never been outmatched at this. Not once in five years.

I knelt in it and I let it happen and I laughed, wet-mouthed, with my eyes shut.

It ended the way weather ends.

The channel came down slow. The heat went out of my tooth. In the dark room down the corridor two men lay in each other's bodies and did not move for a long time.

Pisson, Lirael said eventually.

Mm.

I am going to need my body back at some point.

Not yet.

No, Lirael agreed. Not yet.

Nobody closed the channel. It thinned on its own and went quiet, and we all lay where we were, in four rooms, in whatever state we had ended up in.

Joren got down on the boards with me. He put his arms round me from behind and did not say anything about the mess and did not try to clean any of it up.

"You could not take it," he said.

"No."

"First time."

"First time."

He put his face in my wet hair.

"Something is very wrong out there," he said.

"I know."

"That was not us. That was left over. That was a minute and a half of him in a room."

"I know."

We stayed on the floor. The lamp burned down. Somewhere below us in the building the elves were awake and moving about and had no idea.

I could feel the fragment in the pocket of the bodysuit on the bench across the room. Still cold. Still pulling south.

And under my jaw the tooth sat quiet and warm, which is how it goes after, and I lay in Joren's arms on a wet floor and thought about a small sea with a circle in the middle of it.

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