«Nothing,» Yasmin answered immediately. «I don't want anything from you. Go away.»

«What do you ask?» the woman said again. Her breath fouled the air like sewage.

«I told you, I don't need anything. I don't want to talk to you.» Yasmin snatched up her sword, though the body was floating just too far to reach. «Go back wherever you came from.»

«Impossible,» the dead woman said. «I have been recognized. What do you ask?»

«I ask you to get out of my sight!» Yasmin's voice was becoming shrill. «Now!»

«That is not within my power,» the floating corpse replied. «What do you ask?»

Yasmin balled her hands into fists and covered her eyes. I put an arm around her shoulder and growled at Garou, «What's this all about?»

For a moment he didn't answer, perhaps debating whether the truth would cause us more pain than ignorance. Then he said, «Nothing truly dies in the multiverse. When a soul is killed in one place, it is merely re-embodied on another plane… but with no memory of its former existence.»

«Any leatherhead knows that,» Miriam muttered.

«But if the memories are gone, where do they go?» Garou asked. «They can't just vanish – the multiverse doesn't let anything slip through its fingers so easily. Every dying person's memory drifts like flotsam on unseen tides, until it fetches up in a holding basin like this one. Here lie the remembrances of all those drowned on a million worlds. I could show you other such memory sinks: the Poisoned Jungle, the Plain of Knives —»

«What do you ask?» interrupted the floating corpse.

«Why does she keep saying that?» Yasmin whispered.

«The memories are drawn to those who knew their owners in life,» Garou replied. «If you recognize and name them, they are compelled to reveal a secret to you. Your mother – or rather, the cast-off memory of your mother – will not rest until she has discharged this burden.»

«What do you ask?» the dead woman said. She spoke in a monotone, devoid of emotion; yet I suspected she would follow us the length of the Styx until we had let her disclose something of her past.

«Ask her anything,» I told Yasmin in a low voice. «If you don't have an important question, ask something trivial. What she had for breakfast the day she died.»

But Yasmin wasn't listening. She simply stared at the floating woman, an unreadable expression on her face. Yasmin had never spoken to me of her mother, nor revealed a word about her childhood… but then, we'd had so little time to talk. Anyway, a child may have a hundred hard questions to ask her mother, and be afraid of every answer.

Yasmin licked her lips. «Who…» She cleared her throat. «Who was my father?»

The corpse sighed. I could almost see the air thicken with the bilious smell of corruption from her guts. «Your father was a man, a human man,» the woman said. «For the week we were together, he called himself Rudy Liagar. But later, much later, I saw him from a distance in the streets of Sigil; and every tongue chanted admiration for the hero, Niles Cavendish.»

Without hesitation, the corpse disappeared once more beneath the clear moonlit water. I would have sold my soul for her to leave ten seconds earlier.

«It could be a lie, couldn't it?» Hezekiah said, when no one else spoke. «Some kind of demonic trick…»

His voice trailed away. Even a Clueless boy knew when he was grasping at straws.

Still, Yasmin turned to me with a fierce look in her eyes. «Tell me it is a lie, Britlin.»

I couldn't meet her gaze. All I could say was, «My father was a hero, not a saint. I know he had other women: mostly short-lived romances during his adventures, but a few dalliances in Sigil too. It always made me so sick at heart, but… never mind. I usually didn't know the women. One of them might have been your mother; but by all the gods, Yasmin, I never suspected… if I ever suspected…»

Could I say it would have made a difference? It made a difference now, yes, with Yasmin staring at me in horror; but still, the sight of her, the brown skin of her shoulders, the flow of her body… could I have resisted her on mere suspicion?

«It's possible,» I sighed. «It's very possible. What else can I say?»

Miriam made a spitting sound. «How about saying, 'Who the hell cares?' I've been watching you two; I have eyes. And the way I see it, people should play things for themselves, and pike the rest of the world. Why should fathers and mothers matter? The past is past, and bloody good riddance. Seize the present, make it yours, however you want. It's your own hearts that matter, and sod all else.»

None of us said anything in reply. Garou laughed and continue to pole past the silent floating bodies.

The skiff was moving swiftly at last. Our marraenoloth boatman had no more reason to dawdle; he had hurt us and was happy. Soon we entered another spume of fog, leaving behind the haunted moonlight and coming out under a swollen red sun. A wash of heat struck our faces, like stepping into the Great Foundry when the furnaces blazed their brightest. In seconds, sweat was dribbling profusely down my forehead.

The banks of the Styx rose high on either side of us, twenty feet tall and made of dusty red clay. Much of the bank was covered with bramble, a thick brush reminiscent of Sigil's omnipresent razor-vine; but in spots, recent earthslides had left patches of bare dirt, now squirming with ants and beetles. Fossilized bones poked out from the soil, all of them blood-red, of no recognizable species. A skull with three fat horns protruded some distance over the water… and each horn ended in a screaming skeletal face.

«The uppermost level of the Abyss,» Garou announced, «called the Plain of Infinite Portals. We're not far from a portal that can take you to Plague-Mort.»

«And you'll show us which that is, right?» Hezekiah said.

«All part of the service.» The boatman bowed mockingly.

The river soon widened and the banks fell away, to reveal a desert of rusty gravel and stone. Here and there, pools of molten metal dotted the landscape, sizzling with bright orange heat; their shores were scattered with lumps of glowing lava, spat out by the pools as subterranean gases belched up to the surface. I could see no lifeforms larger than insects moving amidst this desolation, but I was sure bigger game lurked out of sight – creatures that could eat our party and wash it down with a slurp of liquid iron.

«Just your typical homey hell,» I said aloud; and I huddled myself sullenly on my chosen thwart of the boat, refusing to gawk at the infernal scenery. As a Sensate, maybe I should have tried seeking out ever more sulphurous fumes to sniff, or strained my ears to hear the wailing of the damned… but frankly, I wasn't in the mood for such melodramatic fizz-fazz. I'd seen lava before. I'd tasted iron-contaminated dust. For a while, let the world rot on without my active participation.

Garou put in at the base of a ruined bridge: a construction of pure white marble that seemed to have dropped in from the Upper Planes by some fluke of magic. Local citizens had obviously taken offense at the arrival of such a pristine celestial object, and demolished the central span – fallen chunks of marble congested the river below, raising doubt whether we could sail our way past. However, it appeared we didn't need to; Garou pointed up the bank and said, «There's your portal.»

We all looked. Hezekiah was the first to say, «I don't see anything.»

Garou chuckled, in a tone I had come to dread. «It's up there, my esteemed passengers. Do you recall I said the key was an open wound? Go up there bleeding, and see what happens.»

«How addle-coved do you think we are?» Yasmin demanded.

But Hezekiah had the required addle-coved look in his eye, the kind that was seconds away from volunteering. The boy took a moment to look over at Miriam; and I realized he wanted to show her how brave he was. The truth clicked for Miriam too. Before Hezekiah had a chance to speak, she hopped from the boat and growled, «Wait here, you berks.»