In the real world, Sam thought sourly, you got breakfast. In this world, you got a two-hundred-year-old mass murderer spouting orders at you before your eyes were all the way open. "Yeah? How are we going to do that?"

Jongleur barely glanced at her. "Azador can take us to the operating system," he told !Xabbu. "You said that."

!Xabbu shook his head. "Not me. The . . . the stepmother told him he could. But he did not believe it."

"We will make him believe it."

"Are you going to torture him or something?" Sam demanded. "Trick him?"

"I think I can help him find the way," Jongleur said coolly. "Torture is unnecessary."

"Oh, you're going to show him how to do it?"

"Sam," !Xabbu said quietly.

"Your manners are typical of your generation. That is to say, nonexistent." Jongleur glanced at Azador, sitting a few dozen meters away, looking bleakly out at the forest. He lowered his voice. "Yes, I will do it. I built this system in the first place, and I have learned a few things now about this backwater section of it." He turned to !Xabbu. "Azador is a construct, a pet of the operating system, as is all this world. You proved that, to your credit." Disturbingly, he tried to smile. Sam thought of crocodiles. "He will have within him a direct connection of some sort, even if he is not aware of it. 'To the place where you touch the One, as we all do,' the stepmother-program said. Am I right?"

!Xabbu looked at him carefully for a moment, then shrugged. "So how will we do this?"

"We must find the next river. Those are the crossing points, the connections, like the gateways we built into the Grail system. The rest you must leave to me."

"How did you know what the stepmother said, anyway?" Sam asked suddenly. "You didn't listen to her. You went off by yourself."

Jongleur's face was a mask.

"You've been talking to Azador already, haven't you?" she said, answering her own question. "Just utterly whispering In his ear."

"He does not trust you," Jongleur said calmly. "He is unhappy, and feels you forced him to come here."

"Oh, and you're his friend now? He wants to kill all the Grail people. Did you mention that you had a little something to do with that?"

!Xabbu laid a hand on her arm. Across the foggy expanse of grass, Azador had turned to look at them. "Quietly, Sam, please."

For a brief moment Jongleur seemed about to respond with an equal measure of fury, then the storm building inside him calmed, or was suppressed. "Does it matter what he would really think of me? We need him. This part of the network—perhaps the whole thing—is dying. You said yourself that I was useless, girl. Perhaps I have been that so far, although I think your absent friend might remember that I saved her life on the mountain. Can I not contribute something now?" He fixed her with his cold, clear stare. "What will it hurt if I try, other than your pride?"

Sam could not help staring back. There was something odd in Jongleur's stiff manner, something off-kilter and discomforted. He's been funny ever since we followed Azador here, she thought. Could he actually be, like, turning into a human being a little bit?

She doubted it, but despite her dislike and distrust of the man, could not really argue with what he said. "I guess we have to do . . . something." She looked at !Xabbu, but the small man showed little reaction except to nod briefly.

"Good." Jongleur clapped his hands together. The crack echoed through the gloomy clearing. "Then it is time to set off."

"Just one thing," Sam said. "There were some clothes left in the wagon I slept in. If it's going to stay dark around here, it's going to be cold, so I'm going to find something to wear."

Jongleur did not smile again, for which Sam was grateful, but he nodded his approval. "As long as we do it swiftly, that is a good idea." He glanced down briefly at his own sarong of reeds and leaves. "The novelty of simply having a body has worn off. I grow weary of being scratched by branches and thorns. I will find some clothes as well."

Although the garments in Sam's wagon had been colorful, even gaudy, Felix Jongleur managed to find an old and somewhat threadbare black suit and collarless white shirt in one of the other wagons. Sam thought he looked like a preacher or an undertaker out of a net Western,

Bowing to the trend, !Xabbu had discarded his own brief kilt of woven leaves for a pair of pants only a few shades darker than his own golden skin, but had stopped there.

Sam inspected the blue satin pants and ruffled shirt she had selected—the best she could find, but nothing she would have been caught dead in at home. Like the back end of the world's saddest, most impacted parade, that's what we look like.

A quiet conversation with Jongleur had apparently reconciled Azador to the old man's plan. Whatever emotions the place had provoked in him, he did not look back as he led them out of the clearing and away from the circle of brightly painted wagons. Sam could not help taking a final, yearning glance at the ghostly vehicles, which seemed almost to float above the misty grass. It had been nice to sleep in a bed, however small and confined. She wondered if she would ever get the chance again.

Azador led them on a long winding trek through the forest, a journey that would have lasted until long past noon if anything like noon had ever come. The light remained minimal and diffuse, the forest a twilit haze. A few weak little lights like dying fireflies pulsed in the treetops but added nothing to the cold gray world.

Sam had grown so weary of stumbling through the damp, dark woods that she was about to scream, if only to hear a sound that wasn't dripping water or their own scuffing feet, when Azador stopped them.

"There is the river," he said dully, pointing downhill through a break in the trees. The gray water did not shine, and looked more like the mark of a broad pencil than the lively stream they had seen elsewhere. "But even if I find the bridge, it will only lead us to the next country, far from the center where the Well is."

"I suspect we were far from Romany Fair when you found the last bridge," Jongleur said. "Not in the country beside it. Am I right?"

Azador seemed tired and confused. "I suppose. I do not know."

"You found Romany Fair because it was where you wanted to go. Just as you found your way out of these worlds in the first place. Am I right?"

Azador swayed. He lifted his hands to cover his face. "It is too hard for me to remember. I have lost everything."

Jongleur took his arm. "I will speak to him alone," he told Sam and !Xabbu. The old man dragged Azador along the hill, out of earshot, then leaned close to his face as though forcing the attention of an unwilling child; Sam almost thought Jongleur would take the Gypsy's chin in his hand to keep him from looking away.

"Why can't he talk in front of us? I don't trust him, do you?"

"Of course I do not trust," !Xabbu said. "But there is something different in him. Have you seen that?"

Sam admitted she had. They watched as Jongleur finished his harangue and led Azador back toward them.

"We are going to find the bridge now," Jongleur said flatly. Azador looked stunned and exhausted, like someone who had given up arguing because he knew he could not win. He glanced at Sam and !Xabbu as though he had never seen them before, then turned and began to make his way down the steep, forested slope.

"What did you tell him?" Sam demanded between breaths.

"A way to think." Jongleur did not elaborate.

They came out of the trees onto a slope just above the river. Azador stood with his arms limp at his sides, staring at a bridge.

"Lock me sideways," Sam said, panting. "He did it."

It was a covered bridge made of rickety wood, like a single small house stretched to absurdity across the dark, flat river. She could just see the spot where it touched the other bank through the mist hovering above the river, but she knew better by now than to assume that the hilly forest there, a mirror of the place where they stood, was their actual destination.