Eric suppressed the urge to wince. She's lucky to be alive, he thought, and then he wondered if that was true.

"My Lord Teacher, this despised one begs your indulgence," said Nail in the Beam.

He looked deflated. Not an hour ago, Eric had seen the man taking blows that should have felled an ox. Now, though, he looked as if his own daughter could have toppled him with a stern word.

"In what way does Nail in the Beam need my indulgence?" he asked.

Nail's hands lowered as if he simply lacked the strength to hold them up anymore. "This despised one…he needs your intercession with the Nameless Powers, with the Servant. He…" Nail in the Beam wet his lips. "He has tried, my lord, the Servant's Eyes have seen that he has tried to hold true to the Words. But his wife…his wives…" Nail didn't even try to finish his sentence.

"I'm no true Teacher, Nail in the Beam," Eric said gently. "The Nameless and the Servant will not hear me."

"You are all this despised one has," he said, bowing his head. "He pleads, my Lord Teacher."

Eric said nothing. He simply stood in front of the kneeling man with his stained, scarred hands and frightened eyes. He felt the thick air of the Realm press against his pores. He felt the weight of the clouds overhead and of the distant Walls. He remembered his distorted reflection in the visors of the Vitae who came to collect him like a specimen of vanity cattle. He remembered the eagerness in Kessa and Tasa Ad's faces as they spun him tales of freedom beyond the World's Wall. He remembered all the long years of belief, belief as strong and as sure as the belief that kept this man kneeling in the mud waiting for his decision.

He remembered Aria aboard the U-Kenai, laughing at all his great and grand heresies and asking if he thought the Nameless cared who else he served.

Your first wife has done nothing wrong, he said silently. Your second…Eric looked toward Branch in the River. Defiance still smoldered in her eyes. She had made her bid for what she knew as power and had lost, but she was in no way defeated. Eric found himself doubting very much that she would stay with the clan for long.

He lifted his hands over her husband's head and raised his voice to the sky.

"I stand in the place of the Nameless Powers and I see with the eyes of their Servant Garismit. If any think shamefully of Nail in the Beam dena First Hand to the Work, the shame is theirs, not his. The Servant sees and the Nameless know him to be faithful and stern in his keeping of the Words."

Eric took Nail's right hand in his and reached out with his power gift. Nail grunted as the gift added a new scar to Nail's hand marks, a small straight line indicating that forgiveness had been sought and received. Most people carried eight or ten of them. Nail, Eric noted, did not have any others but his.

"Go now, Nail in the Beam. I think Iron Shaper will need help organizing your exodus."

Nail stood up heavily and bowed deeply, retreating backward as the Words dictated. Branch in the River picked herself up off the ground and followed him without looking back. Eric watched them until they both vanished through the stands of Crookers and bamboo.

"Thank you for that"

Eric's head jerked around. Aria stood in the shadow of a stunted evergreen.

Eric ran his hand through his hair. It was tangled and damp and he thought longingly of the cleaner in the U-Kenai. "What else was I going to do?"

Aria shrugged and moved into the light. "You could have told him the Words were all about as meaningful as a cloud of splinter-chasers and that the Teachers were totally powerless to intercede for anybody."

"I thought you told me to look for the truth under the Words."

"I did." She smiled softly. "But I wasn't sure you were listening."

Eric felt himself smile in response. "It is next to impossible not to listen to you, Aria." He nodded in the direction of the huts. The noise of voices and bustle drifted to them on the wind. "What's happening over there?"

"Everybody is getting ready to pull out at sunshowing. Reed in the Wind is going to head for Narroways to find our work-walkers and tell them what's happened. Mother is going to stay here with Storm Water for two weeks in case anybody comes back before then." She bit her lip for a minute, concern plain on her face. Eric could picture the scene that must have happened when that idea was proposed. "Jay and I will head straight for his dome to see what's there," she went on with forced calm, "and you and Teacher Heart…" Aria broke off and looked at him sharply. "Eric, what happened between you two?"

Eric knotted his fingers in his hair. I don't have to tell her. She has no right to ask. What could it possibly matter? I'm back. I'm doing everything I can. What business is it of hers?

"What you heard was true," he heard himself say. "I did once have an affair with Lady Fire in the Dark. She was a friend of my sister and married to a half-dead cousin of ours. She was so beautiful…I loved her, I really did. She…we…she became pregnant and I was the father of the child. You know the law. No child of an adulterous union carries a name from the Nameless. It has to die. I was a Teacher. I had to…I had to…" He couldn't finish. She looked at him with mute sympathy and he remembered she had borne seven children but only had four that lived. He wondered briefly if some Teacher had declared one or more to be tainted, but he didn't ask. "She cursed me. Threw me out of the house for obeying the Law and the Words. I was in shock. I went home. I thought, some rest, some contemplation, and I'd be all right.

"I stayed in First City for two months. The longest I'd been home in years. My sister, Mind, had a new husband." He waved his hand toward the houses. "And I started noticing things about him. How he watched me. Some things he said. Curious papers he'd hide when I came around. He…it didn't take me long to work it out. He was a Heretic. He was listening to a group of people who were suggesting that the Words didn't come from the Nameless and the Servant, that the apocrypha had been taken out by the Teachers, not the Nameless…" He caught her glance and saw her wry humor creeping into her expression. "All right, all right. I was young. I was a Teacher!" He raised both palms toward the sky. "I believed. Nameless Powers preserve me, I believed. All of it. Including that Heretics had to die. I couldn't…not so soon after Lady Fire…"

"I went to my father instead. And do you know what he said? He said that he knew that Heart was a Heretic. That it was useful to have him about. That way they knew what the First City groups were up to, because he always told Mind and Mind reported it all straight to Father and Mother. So I would do nothing. Nothing at all."

Eric hung his head. "By rights I should have killed him as a Heretic. Should have taken down the whole house. Those are the words of the Nameless. Those are the words of the Servant."

"But you didn't," said Aria.

"No." Eric raised his head again and looked past her into the trees. "I left again. I tried to go on procession. Thought some weeks of hard living would take my doubts away. I even thought about dropping myself straight into the Dead Sea…" He forced himself to stop and start again. "Then I got to Tiered Side and I started hearing the most blasphemous story I'd heard yet. About people from over the World's Wall wandering about. I found them in the Temple with one of the Teachers, an old, half-blind, all-the-way crazy woman who was trying to ward them off. It was Tasa Ad and Kessa and they were trying to find somebody, a Teacher for preference, to go over the World's Wall with them.

"It seemed an even grander defiance than killing myself. So I did." He shook his head. "By then I hated this whole crashing world and everything in it, but I hated Heart most of all. I hated him for being alive when my son was dead. I hated him for driving me out of my home. I hated myself for not doing my duty. I hated the Nameless and the Servant…"