"A story!"

"Tell another."

"Please!"

"They want to hear more stories," !Xabbu said wonderingly.

"They're scared," said Sam. "The world is coming to an end. And they're all children, aren't they?" Looking around at the pleading, terrified faces, she felt herself fighting back tears. If Jongleur had been within reach she would have hit him, would have tried to knock him down and make him pay for what his cruel self-obsession had done to these innocents. "They have to be them," she said, as much to herself as to !Xabbu. "They have to be the stolen children."

She was arrested by a familiar face in the throng, although it took her a moment to remember where she had seen the handsome, dark-haired man before. He was a few rows back in me crowd, holding a bundle Sam couldn't quite see, watching !Xabbu with an unblinking, almost vacant stare. None of the fairy-tale children stood too near him, as though they could sense something wrong.

Sam pulled at !Xabbu's arm. "Look, it's that Grail guy—the one that disappeared when Renie disappeared!"

"Ricardo Klement? Where?"

"Over there," Sam said, but now there was only an empty space where Klement had stood. "He was there a second ago, no dupping!"

As they scanned the throng of refugees, Sam became aware of someone standing very close to her, a small child apparently made of mud. She tried to step around the tiny obstacle but the child moved with her and reached up a stubby hand to tug at Sam's Gypsy finery.

"He is not there now," !Xabbu said. "He is larger than most of these people—we would see him, I think. . . ."

"He couldn't have got away that fast," Sam said angrily. Beyond the crowd of refugees still begging for another story, the gray slope was empty for dozens of meters. "Not without us seeing him." The mud child was still trying to get her attention. "Stop pulling on me, will you?" Sam snapped.

The child let go and took a step backward. It was hard to tell from its odd face, the features little more than dents and grooves, what the creature was thinking, but it squared its shoulders in a way that clearly said it would not be chased off. "I want to talk to you," the stranger said in the voice of a little girl.

Sam sighed. "What?"

"Are you. . . . are you Renie's friends?"

Sam had been expecting a plea for another of !Xabbu's tales, and for a long moment could only stare at the child, dumbfounded. "Renie. . . ?"

!Xabbu was there in a heartbeat to kneel beside the child. "Who are you?" he asked. "Do you know Renie? Do you know where she is? Yes, we are her friends."

The girl looked at him for a moment. "I'm . . . I'm the Stone Girl." Her simple finger-stroke of a mouth writhed and she began to cry. "Don't you know where she is either?"

From the way he closed his eyes and grunted, like a man suffering a painful blow, Sam could see !Xabbu's terrible disappointment. "Maybe you'd better just tell us everything," she said to the weeping Stone Girl.

". . . And then after we ran away from the Ticks, up the hill, we crossed the bridge." The child was still sniffling a bit, but in telling the story of her travels with Renie she had found a sort of calm. "And we saw the strange man who was her friend, too, but he was just walking, and the Ticks went around him!" She was clearly impressed. "Like they didn't even care about him."

"That's so scanny!" Sam said. "That has to be what's-his-name, Klement."

!Xabbu frowned. "And then what happened? When you crossed the bridge?"

The Stone Girl chewed for a moment on a muddy finger, thinking. "We didn't really go to Jinnear Bad House, not like usual. We both went in, sort of, then right away I came out here at the Well. But Renie didn't." Her eyes squinted for a moment as she fought more tears. "Do you think she's all right?"

"We utterly hope so," Sam said, then turned to !Xabbu, "But where is she?"

The small man had a distant, disturbed look on his face. "The rest of us traveled in a similar way, I think. We came close to the Other, were weighed—judged, perhaps—and then were sent away. Those who belong in this world, like Azador and this little girl, did not even experience that much, but were simply sent straight here."

"What does that mean?"

He stood, absently patting the Stone Girl on the head, but he looked as miserable as she had ever seen him. "It might be I am wrong, but I think Renie was allowed in."

"Allowed in?" Sam was not following.

"To the Well." !Xabbu turned to look at the crater and its sea of restless light. "I think she is in the Other's innermost heart."

"Oh, no," Sam said. "God, really?"

!Xabbu's smile, for the first time in Sam's memory, was something unpleasant to look at. "Yes, God, really. The god of this place, anyway. The dying, crazy god."

Sam's pulse was rabbiting. She had all but forgotten the Stone Girl who still stood between them face puzzled and sad. "!Xabbu, what will we do?"

"What I will do is go after her." He was staring at the Well as though seeing it for the first time. Sam could not help remembering how afraid he had been just to dive into a placid river. "I . . . I will go down."

"Not without me you won't." For the moment, her fear of being left behind allowed her to ignore the terror of the unnatural Well. "I already told you what I think about all that let-me-save-the-day fenfen."

He shook his head. "You do not understand, Sam. The Other—I believe it already has rejected me once, rejected you too, all of us." His voice had gotten very quiet. "I do not believe I will reach Renie, but I have to try." He turned to her, almost pleading. "I cannot take you, Sam, when I feel sure there is no hope."

She was just about to issue an angry rebuttal when she finally realized that an irritating noise which had been in the background for several seconds was Felix Jongleur's loud, angry voice. She turned and saw the old man on open ground midway between the place where she stood with !Xabbu and the outskirts of the Gypsy camp.

". . . But I do not believe that anymore. I think your silence is insolence—or worse."

The person he was shouting at was Ricardo Klement.

!Xabbu was already hurrying down the slope. Sam took a few steps, then turned, startled by a cry of unhappiness behind her. She had forgotten the Stone Girl.

"Come on," Sam said. "Do you want me to carry you?" The Stone Girl shook her head stiffly, but reached out and took Sam's hand in a cool and surprisingly firm grip.

By the time they reached the others, !Xabbu was doing his best to ask Klement a question about Renie, but Felix Jongleur was full of cold fury and would not be interrupted. Sam could finally see the thing Klement was holding and she was shocked and disgusted. The infant shape and vestigial features made a bad combination with its muddy gray-blue color.

"So you will not even answer me?" Jongleur asked Klement. "Come, I thought you were my ally, Ricardo—I have made many sacrifices for you. Yet you disappear when we are all in need, then will not even tell me where you have gone? And I suppose you will not explain your little . . . souvenir either?"

For a moment Klement almost seemed to clutch the little baby-creature tighter, a gesture that was the first human thing Sam had seen from the man. "It . . . is mine."

"Just tell me what you have been doing," Jongleur demanded.

"Waiting," said Klement after a long pause.

"For what?"

"For . . . something." Klement slowly turned toward the Well, then back to Jongleur, !Xabbu, and Sam. "And now . . . I have found it."

An instant later, Ricardo Klement was gone.

Sam stared helplessly at the empty space, then turned to !Xabbu, half-believing that something must be wrong with her. Her friend looked just as surprised, but his astonishment was as nothing to Jongleur's, who looked like a man who had just seen his own furniture rise up and attack him.