When they reached Azador, they discovered that his eyes were closed.

"I do not want to cross," he said quietly.

"Nonsense," Jongleur told him. "You want to find your people, don't you? You want to do what the One has commanded of you."

"My own end is there," Azador said miserably. "As it was foretold. I can feel it."

"You feel your own fear," Jongleur responded. "Nothing is achieved unless fear is overcome." He hesitated, then put his hand on Azador's arm—a more or less human gesture which surprised Sam almost as much as it startled the Gypsy. "Come. We all need you. I am sure your people need you, too."

"But. . . ."

"Even death can be outwitted," Jongleur said. "Did I not tell you that?"

Azador swayed. Sam could almost see him weakening. For a long moment she wondered whether she wanted him to give in or not.

"Very well," he said heavily. "I will go across."

"Good man." Jongleur squeezed his arm. The old man seemed excited, even anxious, but Sam could not imagine why. Her mistrust flared again, but he was already leading Azador onto the span.

Sam and !Xabbu followed a few steps behind. Within moments they had passed beneath the roof of the bridge. It was so dark inside that the gray twilight they had left behind now seemed bright afternoon by comparison. Sam found herself straining toward the single point of gray light hovering far in front of them, the opening at the bridge's other end. Her footsteps echoed in the small space. The bridge creaked beneath her.

"Wait a minute," she said. "If that's the light from the other end, how come we can't see Jongleur and Azador in front of us. . . ? !Xabbu?" She stopped. "!Xabbu?"

Even the point of light was wavering now, as though fog were drifting in from the river to fill the covered bridge. Sam's heart sped. She turned, but there was no longer a light behind her, either. "!Xabbu! Where are you?"

She could hear nothing but the thumping of her heart and the soft creak of timbers beneath her feet. The darkness was so close, so strong, that Sam could feel it twining around her like a living thing. She put out her hands, searching for the bridge's walls, but her fingers touched only cold air. Panicked, she began to move forward, or what she thought was forward—slowly at first, but her cautious movements quickly gave way to a trot, then a breakneck run.

Right into the grip of something as strong as pain, as cold as regret.

Living fear caught her up like a huge dark fist. In a split-instant a deathly chill burrowed into her, numbing her body into nonexistence, until there was nothing of her left but a tiny flicker—a thought, a breath, struggling against the all-conquering nothing.

I've felt this before—inside the temple in the desert. But I didn't remember how . . . how bad. . . !

She was not alone. Somehow she could feel !Xabbu, and even Jongleur, as if they were all connected to her through the dark by some sputtering, fading circuit—!Xabbu drowning in emptiness, Jongleur shrieking in the shadows, snatching at the blackness as if to pull it into some more coherent shape—but it was only a glimmer, a moment. Then the others were gone and she was left alone, a dying spark.

Let me go, she thought, but there seemed nothing that could hear her or wanted to listen.

The force that held her squeezed, squeezed hard, and the void wrapped her and pulled her down. . . .

It was the park near her old house—a place she had not seen for years and years, but the swings and monkey bars were still as familiar as her own hands. She was sitting on the grass at the edge of the play area, in the bright sunshine, scuffing her bare feet in the sand and looking at the patterns it made, at the bits of tanbark sticking up through the pale drifts like flotsam on a frozen ocean.

Orlando was sitting beside her. Not the barbarian-hero Orlando, or even the wizened, cartoonish thing she had sometimes seen in her darker thoughts since learning about his illness, but the Orlando she had once imagined, the dark-haired boy with the thin, serious face.

"It doesn't want you," Orlando said. "It doesn't really care much about anything anymore."

Sam stared at him, trying to remember how she had come to be in such a place. All she could remember with any certainty was that Orlando was dead, which didn't seem like a very polite thing to bring up.

"I think if you can, you'd better get out," he continued, then bent to pluck a long grass stem.

"Get out. . . ?"

"Of where you are. It doesn't want you, Sam. It doesn't understand you. I think it's stopped trying."

The ground shuddered—just a little, but Sam felt it in her haunches, as though someone had struck the world a heavy blow, but far from where they sat. "I'm scared," she said.

"Of course you are." He smiled. It was just the kind of crooked smile she'd always imagined him having. "I would be, too, if I was still alive."

"Then, you know. . . ?"

He held up the stem of grass, then blew it out of his fingers. "I'm not really here, Sam. If I were, I'd be calling you 'Fredericks,' wouldn't I?" He laughed. His shirt, she could not help seeing with loving pity, was buttoned wrong. "You're just talking to yourself, pretty much."

"But how do I know about . . . about what it thinks?"

"Because you're inside it, scanmaster. You're in its mind, I guess you'd call it—way inside. In its dreams. And that's not a very good place to be right now."

The ground shuddered again, a more distinct rolling, as though something beneath them had discovered itself confined and was chafing against its restraints. The rings on the monkey bars began to sway slowly,

"But I don't know how to get out!" she said. "There's nothing I can do!"

"There's always something you can do." His smile was sad. "Even if it's not enough." He got up and dusted off knees of his pants. "I have to go now."

"Just tell me what to do!"

"I don't know anything you don't know yourself," he explained, then turned and walked away across the grass, a field of green far more immense than what she remembered. Within moments the slightly awkward figure had diminished until she felt she could have reached out and picked him up in one hand.

"But I don't know anything!" she called after him.

Orlando turned. The day had grown dark, the sun lost behind clouds, and he was hard to see. "It's scared," he called back to her. Another rumble passed through the ground, bouncing Sam where she sat, but Orlando did not waver. "It's really scared. Remember that."

Sam tried to scramble after him but the earth beneath her feet had begun to pitch and she could not get her footing. For a moment she thought she had her balance under her at last, might be able to catch him before he disappeared—she had always been a fast runner, and Orlando was crippled, wasn't he?—then a vast black something came up from beneath the surface of the world, breaching the crumbling earth like a whale heaving up out of the ocean's dark underneath, and Sam was thrown headlong into the sagging, collapsing deeps.

The swift rasp, she realized at last, was the sound of her own terrified breath sawing in and out. She could feel dirt beneath her fingers, dirt against her face. She did not want to open her eyes, frightened that if she did she would see something staring back at her, something as big as all Creation.

It was the sound of someone gasping next to her that gave her the courage to look.

She was lying on her back beneath a purple-gray bruise of a sky, grimmer even than what had stretched above the forest. The ground beneath her felt hard and real. They were on a slope, surrounded by hills that looked something like the crown of the black mountain, a bleak landscape without vegetation.