"It's not that simple," Sam said stubbornly. "We can see the other side of the river, but that doesn't mean we can get there. So if we can see things we can't reach, why shouldn't there be things that we can't see but we can reach?" She had to stop and say it over again in her head to see if it made sense. She decided it did, more or less.

"We can do nothing more today." !Xabbu's troubled expression had not gone, but it had changed into something different, more remote. "We will think again in the morning." He reached out and touched Sam's arm. "I am happy you were not hurt, Sam."

"Just my leg, and that's better now." She smiled, hoping to cheer him a little, but wondered how convincing it was with her teeth still chattering.

For all !Xabbu's concern, he was not beside her when Sam woke sometime in the middle of the night. She could see the shadowy forms of the other two revealed by the dying coals, but no sign of the small man.

Call of nature, like, she guessed, and had almost toppled back into sleep when she remembered that there was no longer such a thing for any of them. She jerked upright. The idea of losing him, of being left alone with only Jongleur and Azador, was too horrible to consider.

I don't want any of this. I just want to go home.

She tried to calm herself, forcing herself to imagine what Renie or Orlando would do. If !Xabbu was gone she had to go and look for him, that was all. She considered rousing the others but decided against it. If she could not find any sign of him within a hundred meters or so of the campfire she would think about it again.

She was just pulling a smoldering stick out of the fire to use as a torch when she noticed that someone else had already had the same idea: a hundred meters from the camp a single spot of orange light stood out against the black velvet hills. Sam trotted toward it.

The end of !Xabbu's torch had been spiked into the soft loam of a grassy hillside; he was sitting beside it. He did not look up at her approach, and she was just beginning to feel frightened again when he shook himself out of his reverie and turned to her.

"Is everything all right, Sam?"

"Yeah, chizz. I just woke up and . . . I was worried because you were gone."

He nodded. "I am sorry. I thought you were too deeply asleep to notice." He turned back to the sky. "The stars are very strange here. There is a pattern, but I cannot hold it in my mind."

She seated herself beside him. The grass was damp, but after the mishap in the river she scarcely noticed.

"Will you not be cold?" he asked.

"I'm okay."

They sat for a while in silence, Sam fighting an urge to drive the fear away with friendly noise. At last !Xabbu cleared his throat, a sound so uncharacteristic in its uncertainty that Sam felt her skin goose pimple.

"I . . . I did a terrible wrong to you today," he said.

"You saved me."

"I let you go into the river. It should have been me, but I was afraid."

"Why should it have been you? You're as bad as Renie—you think you should do all the dangerous things before anyone else."

"The fact is that I feared the water. I was almost killed once in the river where I grew up, when I was a child. A crocodile."

"That's terrible!"

He shrugged. "That does not mean I should have let you do what I could not."

Sam hissed with exasperation. "You don't have to do everything," she said. "That's uttermost fenfen."

"But. . . ."

"Listen." She leaned toward him, forcing him to look at her. "You've saved my life a dozen times already. Remember the mountain? Remember how you got us off that disappearing trail? You've done more than your share, but that doesn't mean the rest of us can't, like, do our part." She raised her hand to keep him from speaking. "Orlando got killed helping us—saving me. How could I live with myself if I wasn't taking risks, too? If I just sat back like some . . . some princess-girl in an old story, and let everyone rescue me? I don't know how things are in the Okey-dongo Delta or whatever it is, but where I come from, that scans for days and days."

!Xabbu smiled, but there was pain in it. "Renie says it is 'old-fashioned bullshit.' "

"And she'll say it again when we find her if you don't straighten up." Now Sam was the one to smile. She prayed it would be true, against all the odds. Renie and !Xabbu deserved each other in every way. So much love, so much stubbornness. She hoped they would have the rest of their lives to argue over which of them should do the harder jobs. "Is that why you came out here? Because you felt bad you didn't go into the river and I did, and I got a cramp?"

He shook his head. "Not only that. Something is troubling me, but I do not know what it is. Sometimes I need quiet to think." He smiled again. "Sometimes I need more than that. I thought I might dance."

"Dance?" If he had suggested he was considering building a rocket ship she could not have been more surprised.

"For me it is . . . like praying. Sometimes." He flicked his fingers, troubled by the inadequacy of his words. "But I am not ready. I do not feel it."

Sam didn't know what to say. After a moment, she stood. "Do you want to be alone? Or should we go back to camp?"

!Xabbu plucked his torch from the ground and rose lithely onto his feet. "I am troubled by something else," he said. "It is not enough simply to be silent about Jongleur's true story in front of Azador."

Sam felt her face warm with embarrassment. "I'm sorry—that was so stupid today."

"It is hard—unnatural—to think of such things all the time. But I think we must make it clear to Jongleur that Azador has a hatred of the Grail Brotherhood. Then I think he must keep himself quiet, if only to protect himself."

"It's so strange," Sam said as they walked back toward the remains of the campfire. "Nothing here is real, you can't trust anything. Well, almost anything." She bumped !Xabbu, a gentle nudge of comradeship. "It's all like some kind of . . . I don't know. Like a carnival. Like a masquerade."

"But a terrible one," he said. "Dangerous and terrible." They reached the campfire, and the sleeping forms of their two companions, without saying anything more.

The next day was spent in what Sam felt was a clearly hopeless search for a way to cross the river. They clambered through the reed beds alongside the river, hoping to find some clue to how others had crossed—footprints, the remains of a bridge or dock—but without success. Sam was depressed, !Xabbu reserved and thoughtful. Jongleur, as usual, spoke little, lost in his private thoughts. Only Azador seemed unbowed. In fact, he talked for much of the day, chattering compulsively about his adventures in the network, his discoveries of how things worked, of secret shortcuts within simworlds and well-hidden gateways to get out of them. Some of it was clearly bragging, but Sam could not help being impressed by the depth of his knowledge. How long had this man wandered the Grail Network?

"Where do you come from?" she asked him as they sloshed through a shallow backwater. A group of promising stones were proving to be only the cracked remains of a larger rocky shelf. "I mean, before you were here?"

"I . . . I do not wish to talk about it," he said. He scowled, poking at the silt between his feet with a length of reed. "But I have made the best use of my time here that anyone could. I have learned things the builders of this place thought would remain forever hidden. . . ."

Sam did not want to hear another recitation of his accomplishments. "Yeah, but you can't find a way across the river, so at the moment the rest of it doesn't count for much."

Azador looked hurt. Sam felt bad—unlike Jongleur, he had done nothing to harm her or her friends—so she tried to think of something else to talk about.