"What are you looking for in my face?" Sumner asked. He was weary and emotionally sprained. Ever since Bonescrolls' death, his self-horror had been widening, and he wanted time to find something he liked in himself.I see into you, Lotus Face. Tears sparkled in its eyes. I'm as vacant as you without the magnar. Everything I liked in myself was tribal. But here we are. Alone. The ne motioned at the pillared darkness and the smell of gods. I'm tired.Drift wandered off among the small altars and worship-columns to grant Sumner privacy. It was exhausted from a full day of one-with, and within minutes it had curled up in a remote alcove and fallen asleep.Sumner sat in the clenched shadows, the pain of his solitude unraveled around him: Everything he had ever done was a dream. I have my life, he thought. I live. But that wasn't true. He wasn't the same being who had known lifelove in Miramol and One Mind in the desert. Without his voorsense, his memories of Bonescrolls and the Serbota were lame. Everything he had done then was a dream.Blood was calling to blood: Truly we are.Even the dark things voors had done to him had become lucid with time: Jeanlu's attempted lusk had led him to the Rangers, and Corby's lusk had brought him to the Serbota. Voors had been his secret strength most of his life. With the pith of his bones, he knew that it was Rubeus and the Masseboth who had made his reality vagrant and unreliable.His hands lay limp in his lap, and his head was cocked back against the hardwood. He sat as if his whole life had sunk away. Shadows hooded his eyes, and his breathing dimmed. In selfscan, he became the temple: puddled sounds of footsteps and glass windbells, furzy incense odors, and a calm, almost motionless air current patterned with damp-ness. . . .His body slept while his mind watched everything. Feel-ings too big for memory shifted their vast weights, and the darkness of the shadows began to harden. So slowly that it took all night, Sumner's eyes filled with tears.A wing of gray-blue sunlight stood like a presence among the spare shadows of the alcove when Sumner woke. His grief had smoked away with his sleep, leaving him quiet and empty. The cool heat of dawn seeped through the slatboards with the fragrance of pimienta.He moved to stretch—but, impossibly, his body was inert, immobilized as it had been in Rubeus' presence. His legs were dull shapes, and his hands weren't his anymore. Weirdly then, his fingers began to twitch, his wrist turn. Even his breathing slued in and out of him under another will. Quite close, he heard his heart moaning.Confusion staggered him when his body twisted to its feet. He was moving as if voor-possessed, but there was no voorsense, no Iz-noise, no deep sensitivity—only the immense compulsion to move. Then he saw it: a leather-handled knife, its oil-black blade long and mooncurved, stuck into the wooden wall of the alcove. His right arm levitated, and his fingers uncurled to grasp the leather haft.Mind wheeling, Sumner watched helplessly as his hand tugged the knife from the wall and turned the blade inward. A cold blank space in his belly widened, and terror rattled in his throat. As the knife stabbed into his chest, horror ex-ploded into will, and he twisted from the waist. The knife edge slashed through his tunic top and sprayed blood onto his killing-hand.Keeled over, he saw past the carved outline of the alcove to the sunfrayed shadows where a figure was lying. It was Drift, unconscious or dead. Above it, in the caliginous light, a distort was watching him with the abstract stare of an iguana. His face was slim, baked-looking and broken. His right hand rose, and Sumner's right hand lifted. The distort's eyes purred. Above the spiderhairs of his eyebrows, two skull-plates caught sunlight and glinted like horns. His right hand pounded his chest.Fury twisted in Sumner's arm, and his knife-arm sprang at him. Again, panic-energy wrenched him backward from the waist, and he tumbled out of the alcove and banged into a tray of ash-carvings. The blade had caught him deep in the shoulder, and its pain transfixed him. The distort stood nearby, his eyes musical, his fig-face tight with will. He moved his right hand away from his shoulder and pulled it strongly across his throat.Sumner's hand jerked the knife free from his shoulder, and the pain shone like light. In its blaze his fear shriveled, and space pulled away from him, unfolding into the distances of his body. It took all the power of selfscan, all his inner-knowing, before the wheels of thought whirring inside him jumped to a stop.And all at once, he wasn't fearing or hurting or thinking. The blade that had been kissing his throat turned away.The distort's face seemed to rearrange. He stepped back, and his left hand flashed to a hip pocket.Sumner's knife-hand wristrolled, and the blade hissed through the air. It caught the distort's arm and kicked the seh he had been reaching for out of his hand. Lizard-swift, the man snatched the knife from his arm and shimmied for where the seh had fallen.Almost casually, Sumner rolled to his side and, with one arm, hoisted the black-iron tray of scattered ashes. The dis-tort pulled up short as the ornate tray crushed the seh.The distort spun about, blade high. Sumner was on his feet and calmly approaching, moving between him and Drift: no rage, no doubt in the irenic blue of his eyes.The distort feinted with the blade and dashed into the shadows. He dodged among the candle altars and demon-columns, kicking idols and incense braziers into Sumner's way, and banging his knife against the glass chimes and metal gods. "Get away from me, eth!" he shouted, his voice electric with command. "You don't know who you are." His eyes were bright with urgency. "You're less with each step." He spun about and waved his wounded arm before him hypnoti-cally, slow-stepping backwards. "You're nothing, nothing—"The distort's words echoed through the temple with trance-strength, but Sumner wasn't listening. He stalked past the Paseq altar, gauging the distance to the exit, feeling out the shapes of escape the man was carving for himself. He let the distort take a slight lead among the bell-pillars, planning to bound over the stacks of sitting-mats and snag him at the door. But he moved faster than Sumner thought a human could. He flitted through the blue shafts of dawnlight and bolted out the door before Sumner could close in.Killing-genius stopped Sumner. Unthinking but know-ing, he took out his seh, and his fingers moved coolly over its metal face, rearranging the pinprick lights. With his painumb arm, he seized a bulky dragon-idol from its niche and rammed the wooden seh-grip into its gaping maw. The iron god bob-bled into the air with the buoyancy of the seh. The distort's footfalls softstepped along the fringe of hearing. Sumner flicked the seh's forward-thrust to max, thumbed the delayed-stop, and heaved the dragon in the killer's echoed direction.The temple wall blasted outward, and in the receding din another explosion bansheed from nearby. Sumner stepped over a sagging roofbeam and saw in the metallic morning light that the flying dragon had found its mark. The distort's legs hung over the splintered bole of a tree. The idol was embedded in a small blood-puddled crater.Sumner brushed his ear. A whistle was twining in his head. As he stepped forward to see if the seh was intact, the whistle became a shrill-pitched wail. He saw that the others standing on the hill weren't hearing it. The whine became a needle skewed between his eyes, pithing his skull. He fell to his knees, hugging his head, and roared. The ringing agony trilled into his teeth, shook vision to shards, and dropped him beneath his cry.note 21A pungent scent grazed Sumner's nostrils, sending nee-dles of light straight up into his brain. The olfact dragged him awake but left his senses dangling in a watery ash of slumber. Words came to him sheathed in the warm current of his blood, slendering through an uneven sequence of layers— "Wake up. Come on."