V - Channelwood

Masks

The moon had set in Channelwood.

Only a few frogs sang this late. The night breeze barely shifted the leaves of the massive trees and the spidering walkways that hung between them. Stars burned amongst the branches, distant in the deep night. Thirty feet above the ocean's surface the people slept, curled balls of soft fur by the dozens, breath stirring their ribs, their simple dreams barely touched by the silent hour. And thirty feet above them one man slept, tossing with unknown worries, and another paced his wooden floor, gibbering.

It was the hour of dark sleep or troubled wakefulness, the hour when old men died and babies drew their first breaths. The natives, remembering a distant time, called it the hour of dark water. The mother of the two men sixty feet above the sea called it the hour of wahrksong, for it was then that the great predatory fish would wail and keen in the deep seas that fell away from her jungle home. Their father called it the hour of the wolf, as his grandmother had, as her father had, as he'd learned it in his home beyond the desert.

The man pacing and muttering under his breath did not care for any name; he only knew the creeping fear, and he hated it.

"Sometimes I feel like Channelwood is your home age, Achenar. You get along so well with the people. I think you understand the world better than I do. You just don't talk about it as much."

"That was before, Father," Achenar muttered. "Before, before, before."

Before he'd grown up and his nightmares had become his reality; before he'd started looking at the strange waters of Channelwood with fear and suspicion and vague and discordant joy; before the night there had begun to fascinate him, then terrify him, then hold him in a hopeless, addictive spell.

He knew this place during the day. It was his place, his own place, familiar, a shrine of power. The candles, the hanging masks--familiar. The altar upon which the monkeys would place limbs as mere gifts to him, as if it were normal--familiar. He'd turned off the holographer and lit the wax candles in their tall wrought-iron holders when he'd entered in his restlessness, hoping to make it familiar again.

But now it was night, and the night in Channelwood could drive Achenar mad.

He didn't remember why he'd woken up. It had been a dream, one of those dark dreams that comes with the setting of the moon, and he'd woken, terrified, knowing it was not the usual fears that haunted him, that he was almost accustomed. No helpless terror and shocks of pain through his paralyzed form. This had been something else, something that was Channelwood's, not his.

Slowly, though, he began to remember. It had something to do with furred faces, with monkeys telling of infinite mysteries, with a dying man, with the water.

I have to remember. I don't want to. I can't sleep. I must know--

Then it came together, and the images of the dream roared through his waking mind as if they resided integral in the air itself, and he screamed, wordless, terrified.

Sixty feet below a frog startled and plopped into the water. The windmill turned lazily. Almost silence.

I hate this place. I hate this place. I hate this place.

Achenar didn't know where the sticks of pigment had come from; it didn't matter, he didn't care. They made colorful gouges in the soft wood of the walls. He giggled. The wood is bleeding yellow and green and blue and purple. The wood is bleeding water. This whole place is crazy, crazy, crazy.

He crouched next to the wall, clutching at the splintering wood with one hand and brandishing a stick of pigment in the other, mumbling incoherently. The night wind rustled in the trees, making him want to scream. He scribbled wildly, slash and gashes, turns and spirals. The dying old man. The dying old man was talking to me.

"And the color of the water never changed after that." His father's voice, as quiet and solemn as it had been the night he'd told him the story. "As if his ancient will had made those changes happen. I'm still not sure I understand the causality of Channelwood."

Achenar rubbed at his head. "No, no, he said that later." Scratch, scrawl. How the humans stopped the island from sinking, how the water changed color and then stopped. Never understood causality, what does causality matter, the water is talking to me? His hands were shaking wildly. The rope bridges outside creaked in the wind. He screwed his eyes shut, trying not to imagine the darkness casting crevasses of shadow into the tree bark, the midnight wind stirring the leaves and lattice, the black and hungry water rippling everywhere. "I've never been able to explain these things." Atrus had said that, his father, the Writer who could explain everything. Everything but the important things. Dreams. Dreams bleeding into waking life. "Never been able to explain..."

There was a crash from the shadows of the room. Achenar jumped, sweating, nearly screamed aloud. Wrought iron candlesticks toppled on the wooden floor.

One of the masks had fallen from its hook; the wood had split down the middle.

Achenar sliced at the wall with the crumbled stick of pigment; the red powder spread in a long line down the wall, smearing his hands with the consistency of half-dried blood, and he was burning, burning in the dark.

When the mask is broken what's behind is naked, naked to the night with chalk blood and maggots for eyes--when the mask is broken and the paint washed away all that is left is pestilence and terror, all that is left is a face slashed open across the eyes and the mouth, all that is left is a monkey bleeding from its ears and the water eating, eating everything--

Achenar clutched his face, the cold sweat smearing beneath his broad hands. He had skinned a man once, skinned his face, lifted the delicate sheet of life and death away from his bulging eyes; the face had been a rubber mask, pinned by needles about the edge, pinned so that what was beneath could hide and hide forever. His face, now, his own face, with the hairs falling one by one to the floor as if plucked out by tweezers, with the skin distorting like a painting hanging in tatters as it fell away. What was beneath that? Flesh, bone, mind? How many masks beneath the broken one, how many walls beneath the scrawls, how many hands beneath the paint and water and blood, blood, blood...

Achenar rolled onto his back, shaking uncontrollably from head to toe, his teeth chattering, his hands clenching and unclenching. He tasted blood in his mouth, didn't realize he had bitten his own tongue; in his mind the mask fell and fell again, broke and broke and broke until everything was revealed, everything built up was toppled like broken bones into the water, and he was naked before the eyes of strangers and savages, his brain bare to the salt breeze, his heart torn out and thrown in the sea. He was screaming now, screaming in broken, shuddering gasps. His face was being peeled away like rubber, his eyes popped out of a hewn wood skull and dropped into cups of black water, his mind laid bare to the endless, endless night.

The wind shifted restlessly; the candle guttered, burning low, and Achenar was terrified of the moment when it would blow out and he would be alone with the giant trees in the dark, the trees which still had their masks, who could toss him broken between their roots in all their majesty and goodness and never, never care.

Broken.

Achenar curled on his side, sobbing. He felt frozen to the bone, buried in water, unable to move.

"The masks," he lisped, blood staining his lips, "the masks."

"Zeh-Achenar."

A soft, gentle voice, calling for him through the haze of sheer terror.

"Zeh-Achenar, can you hear me?"

For a long while he did not know where he was, what Age would greet him when he finally managed to find reality; he wondered even if he was dreaming still, thinking he had awoken, but then there was a hand on his shoulder--"Zeh-Achenar, are you awake?"--and he registered the trip-catch of the extra syllable before his name and knew he must be in Channelwood.

It was Mathriv, the closest to him amongst the monkeys, who was trying to wake him, the furred wash of his brow wrinkled in worry.

"Zeh-Achenar." His wide shoulders slumped with relief. "I thought you might not wake. Here." He pressed a clay cup of water into Achenar's hands. "Drink, please."

Achenar sat up, barely noticing his surroundings--the bare and slat-woven walls of his Channelwood bedroom--and stared for a long moment into the water, limpid and pure against the dark clay. Fresh water; unchanging water. Early morning sunlight, misty and very white, slanted in between the slats. Achenar drank down the water greedily, then looked over at Mathriv, who was crouched by the low bedframe, his dark animal eyes wide with concern.

"You collapsed, Zeh-Achenar. I found you on the floor of the sanctuary in the night, raving. Are you all right now?"

Slowly, Achenar raised a hand to touch his face, not daring to believe--but he was all right. He still had his face, his sanity, his masks. Mathriv was still taking care of him. "Yes," he whispered, and turned to look at the monkey's familiar face, the brindled tufts of hair on his cheeks, the dark nub of his nose, the ruff of golden mane beneath the darker fur of his head. "Was one of my hanging masks broken?"

"Yes. We brought the pieces here."

"Burn them. I can't stand them. Burn them. I'll make a new one."

"Zeh-Achenar..."

Mathriv again, later in the day, just as quietly insistent. Achenar was standing on a walkway that stretched between two of the monkeys' round hub-huts, watching the sun slide beneath the ocean and the shadows gather in the towering trees.

"What is it?" he asked, distracted. The frogs were singing their evening song--the early evening song, in full chorus, not the sporadic chirps and whirrs of later night. Every aspect of Channelwood had long since been ingrained into his bones; he knew it as well as Myst itself, knew the taste of the ocean and the feel of morning air on his skin.

"Your brother wanted me to inform you that he's left Channelwood." Mathriv came a few steps closer--a little uncomfortable, perhaps, but not terrified of Achenar as most would be. But Mathriv had known him for years, since he had first come to Channelwood as a child. Mathriv had taught him the barking language of the monkeys; Mathriv had guided him through Channelwood and cared for him while Atrus was elsewhere, a great furry uncle from another Age.

"Where to?" Achenar asked, not curious in the least. Sirrus, too, of course, had been with him then, with him and Mathriv, but he'd never really cared. He'd just liked the presents, the adventures, the admiration. Sirrus had talked their father into letting them stay, true. But Channelwood, Channelwood was Achenar's.

"Osmoian, for at least a week. He says he has matters of his own to take care of. He says he wants you to stay here." It had always been like that. Sirrus never knowing how little control he had over him. Or so Achenar promised himself, told himself--he was using Sirrus just as Sirrus was using him. It balanced. It worked. And as they were both men averse to baring their faces to the world, it didn't matter that they didn't even bare them to each other.

"Does he, now?" Achenar giggled. "He's found another woman, hasn't he?" Foolish brother, foolish Sirrus, whoring himself across the Ages for his idea. Kill the one and another pops up. At least real people stayed dead. Not like the ideas. Not like the water, creeping through everything.

"He didn't--"

"I wasn't asking you."

Mathriv fell silent, returning into the quiet, bestial presence that the monkeys so often had--a hundred wide dark whiteless eyes watching Achenar from between the branches, not a word passed between them, frozen in watchful stillness or moving with the uncannily swift and birdlike grace of tree-climbers. Achenar looked back at the sunset, and Mathriv looked with him.

"Strong color tonight," Mathriv said softly, spreading one long-fingered hand open before him. "It's almost as if it changes again."

"He didn't even bury the last one," Achenar murmured, barely noticing Mathriv's words. "She's far under the water."

"...Zeh-Achenar?"

"Not this water, monkey. Not even her home water. Some other water, and I don't think that water changes either, except maybe when you put blood in it."

"Are you sure you're all right?"

"Of course," said Achenar, with a high and brittle laugh. The sun was barely visible now beneath the vast smooth horizon of the ocean.

"Night soon," said Mathriv. "Are you going to stay as your brother wishes?"

"Not because of him," Achenar said sharply. "Not because of the golden boy." He stared out at the vanishing sun.

"Zeh-Achenar, you're shaking."

"The night is scary," he said, almost under his breath. A child's truth--but as a child he'd run fearless down the highest walkways by moonlight and slept in pure peace, curled on a pile of mats in a corner of Mathriv's hut.

"If it frightens you so, Zeh-Achenar, why don't you leave before full dark?"

"I can't," Achenar whispered. Silence. The chorus of the frogs changed--the night-loving peepers were hauling their finger-wide bodies up the first few inches of the broad-bottomed trunks and puffing up their tiny purple throats. The silvery shower of their calls spoke nightmares to Achenar. "I can't."

"Zeh-Achenar, your eyes are glazed and you are pale. Come inside."

"Yes," said Achenar slowly. "Yes, I suppose you're right." And he allowed Mathriv to lead him off like a child and brew him bitter Channelwood tea and tell him a story.

"Is Zeh-Achenar well, Mathriv?"

Mathriv's father, Sunyev, sat on an upturned pot in his hut--an old monkey's seat, for those to creaking and stiff in the knees to crouch properly. The old man was wrapped in a coarse blanket and sharing a cup of seawater with his visiting son--never any fresh water in Channelwood, not without terrible effort, and monkey stomachs could handle the sea. Mathriv took a long gulp, the salt burning his throat, and ruffled his golden mane--no. "Did you hear of what happened, then?"

Sunyev's eyes widened slightly--surprise. "I did not hear of anything. I merely watch him. Sometimes a child of ours will go mad, you know. They start pacing the trees at night, unable to rest between the setting of the moon and the rising of the sun. They attend the mysteries and return hypnotized, unable to walk or see properly, with blood and water pouring from their mouths. They will sit in the high branches gibbering about the ocean, about the power of the water, and never come down."

"Zeh-Achenar," Mathriv interrupted, passing the cup back to his father, "was asleep, yet not asleep. Shaking from head to toe. Bleeding. It took him a long time to wake."

"It does not surprise me. Have you ever attended the mysteries?"

"Once, when I was quite young."

"Tell me what you saw."

"A woman held her arm over a bowl and cut herself and bled water. Lots of people held candles, and their faces looked different. Somebody said many things about water and life and trees and wind, but mostly water, and there was the story of the two peoples. Then they took the woman and called her Zeh and threw her into the ocean, and it changed all around her, more colors in one place than I'd ever seen, and she screamed like she was dying. I saw her the next day, unharmed, and nobody called her Zeh. I didn't understand."

"You would hardly be expected to. There are some things you never can understand and explain. Some people come to them headlong, and know them, and are unharmed. Some people find them without being prepared, and wander about bleeding. But the water knows. The water always knows."

"Father?" Mathriv said slowly, a tremor in his voice.

"Adam was "Zeh." That woman was "Zeh." Achenar might be, and so we call him, and the water calls him, and I think he hears."

Mathriv sat very still, staring at the smooth-worn slats of the floor.

"Mathriv, son of my blood, I remember when I was a tiny child and the strongest of our people sat in the heavy chair untroubled by this terror of water. When Zeh-Krestla as well as Zeh-Adam still lived, and they stood side by side by the strongest seat and color pooled round the foot of the tree and peace was among our people. We are fading, Mathriv." His knobbled hand tightened on his son's shoulder. "My young brother, who sits as the strongest of our people, quails with despair, and in his worries has put no trust your friend Zeh-Achenar and has so abandoned our last hope. Hala, who stands by his side where Zeh-Adam spent his last days, we name Zeh in our desperation, for it was her sister and not her who last sent the water flaring in the moonlight, and she is no more than an empty-headed creature basking in her fame. We should throw her aside with Achenar's brother and have done with it. But Mathriv, do you not see? We are fading. Not merely our minds. Our strength, our honor. Do you know how many of us throw ourselves in the water, hoping to stop the sinking of our lives? Our people is fading, failing. Only one thing can keep us from squabbling like fish over a frog. Only one thing can keep the strongest seat from blowing away on the wind."

"I understand," said Mathriv quietly, but his heart was troubled by the choice as it never had been before. He had found Achenar that night, bleeding from the mouth, shaking from head to toe, his eyes open but seeing no thing of the world, his words flowing but meaning nothing but madness. The water would devour him, this man who he had known as a child, treated like a son; the water would destroy him, and lie gray until Mathriv bashed his head in for guilt. That was how he was sure it would happen, but he did not speak of it, merely leaned his forehead against his father's, touching the whisker-hairs that arched forward from the sides of their faces, in the gesture of kin, friendship, understanding.

"There will be mysteries soon," Sunyev said softly.

"And Zeh-Achenar will be there," Mathriv finished, and released an anxious keen from deep in the back of his animal throat.

Once there were two peoples on this world. There were the people of the trees, the Avkeh, and the people of the water, the Zehkeh. The Avkeh, a simple folk, knowing only the laws of strength and survival and contentment, were thick with fur and agile of limb and lived high in the great trees, and thus they were called the people of the trees. The Zehkeh were bare-skinned and frail and lived on the rocky land, but their wisdom of their souls was that of the sea, and thus they were named the people of the water. For through all things in this world flows the water, and when the souls of the Zehkeh were with the water they could make it into rainbows every day and night, a thousand colors of joy and life, for the Zehkeh walked in a waking dream of the spirit. And the Zehkeh, too, by their wisdom of the water, could draw up the salt sea and change it to sweet purity. Thus the water flowed joyful through everything, and the people of the trees took their joy in it as well, for they saw from above the magic of the water, and they felt in dream the wisdom of the Zehkeh. And so all the souls of the world became one in the joy of the water.

He is among us. Zeh-Achenar is among us. Let him be shown the water.

"Achenar."

His mother stood in the door of his room--his childhood room, carved out of the bedrock of Myst island and hung about with tapestries--bearing a pitcher of water with the quiet, bestial presence of the monkeys, only she came from Riven, which he had never dreamed in, so it must be all right.

"Achenar, are you feeling any better?"

She set the pitcher down on the table beside his bed--smooth-polished knotted wood, the table, shot through with the twisting blue iridescent veins of the Serenol trees. Atrus had done the rough carving and the jointing for him, for he'd been too small to do it himself; Achenar had pared it down and polished it until his arms ached, and then scratched little designs all up the legs and around the edge, the meaningless glyphs of a ten-year-old. The pitcher, red clay inlaid with leaves--a gift from the Shirnao of Whiterock, and one of Catherine's favorites. The cup beside it, beaten tin, his since longer than he could remember.

"In the dream, blood and water are one."

"Yes." He slumped up to sit and poured himself fresh water from the pitcher. And it was true, at least enough for him to believe it. They were still talking in his mind, the words of the mysteries still tearing into him, but he could sleep in peace now, away from Channelwood, and the fear was fading. So a half-truth. A Sirrus-truth.

"In the water, human and monkey are one."

"It still puzzles me that you've been ill for this long," she said. "That you've had no fever, but act as if you might." Worrywart--but she was his mother, so of course she was a worrywart.

He passed his hand over his eyes. "I know what I know, that's all."

"I know," she echoed, with a small and cryptic smile.

"In the soul, joy and pain are one."

She came over to sit on the side of his bed, as she would when he had a fever as a child, and he had to pull his long legs up to make room for her, for his body was almost too big for his child's bed. He watched the side of her face and wondered briefly what it might be like to kill her.

"In the dream, all souls are one."

"Do you plan to return to Channelwood?" she asked.

"I don't know yet. I don't want...this to happen again."

"Of course not. But--"

"--I want to understand."

"I know." She paused. "Perhaps a look at the kormahn? You could ask your father."

"Perhaps." And then Achenar let silence pass, grow.

"I don't see you or Sirrus nearly often enough," Catherine said at last.

"We're...traveling so much it's hard to travel more. We go one place to do this, another place to visit that, and forget to come home in the middle."

"Oh, I understand." After all, both she and Atrus had heard that countless times. "Are you happy, Achenar, wandering other's Ages as you do?"

"Yes." Sirrus-truth. Wandering was the least of it.

"I've always thought you might become a Writer. Oh, I do not mean to scold you in the least. With your D'ni blood you're still young--there's plenty of time, and you already know many of the important garo-hevtee. I've always thought you're sensitive in some of the ways a Writer has to be, ways that, in all truth, I'm not sure your brother is." She ruffled his hair. "Don't tell him I said that," she added mischievously, and Achenar laughed.

I write, he thought. I write in blood on human skin. Don't you know that, mother? Can't you imagine your little boy killing?

It took every shred of sanity he had to fight back the giggle, the burbling uncalled-for tic of a giggle that tried to force its way out of him. Not here. Not now. Mother would be suspicious. Sirrus-thought, Sirrus-truth. Charm and pretend and never be careless. Hide your face so the world can't see you. Achenar would much rather hide the world, kill it dead. Little brother, get your serpent's tongue from my mind.

But the damage was long, long done. Sirrus had corrupted him, Sirrus had infiltrated him. Greed, at least, he remained safe from. Gold meant nothing to him. Only blood. But he hated having to pretend. Even here, especially here. But here, in Myst, among his child comforts, he felt safe. Pretending, lying, masked, safe.

"My brother..." he whispered. Catherine looked at him in concern.

"Are you quite sure you're all right?"

He shook his head clear and took another drink of water.

"Better, Mother. Better. But--"

"--it haunts you." She nodded. "Such is memory. If I scolded Atrus or he me for all the times we've found each other staring into space, we'd have no breath left." She caught her breath as if to worry, but did not speak it.

Mother understands, he though, then stopped himself. She only understands a little what dreams are like. What this was like. Why I came here after...

Memories crowded; a monkey took off a mask to reveal a human face; blood that was water dribbled down his throat; water that was blood seeped from the walls.

But she understands so much more than Father.

"I should take my leave of you," Catherine said, sounding almost awkward. "The orchard in Ancam is ready for harvesting, but it will wither if I leave it 'til night."

"Of course."

"Do you want me to bring some to you?"

"I'm not hungry. I'll find it in the kitchen when I am."

She laughed. "My sons turn into larder-raiding rats when they get sick. No, it's all right. Just make sure you eat enough."

"Yes, Mother.

"Be well," she said softly, and kissed him on the forehead, and left.

Achenar flopped back down on his bed, sprawled and limp with one bare foot hanging over the edge, and stared at the ceiling--strip-carved from the rock and braced with painted timber, with dozens of toys and contraptions from his childhood dangling from the beams from builder's hooks and twine. Familiar, every one, familiar.

Then he closed his eyes and the memories of Channelwood roared back into his mind.

Then he rolled over and fumbled about in one of the drawers under his bed. A sheath of paper, ink, a pen. The mark of his family--his parents, both creatures of letters, seeding his life with words and writing, presenting him with blank books and clean nibs until he his life day by day wouldn't have filled the empty pages, only he couldn't even write that. There were no words for his dreams. There were no words for Channelwood.

But, desperate, he wet his pen and began to write, fierce strong strokes of the pen on the heavy paper, as if with a knife into flesh.

the water--in the black water masks monkeys trees--all one impossible, impossible, I can't be one with anybody not with the dreams not with them tearing me apart white masks white eyes no no--I am crazy even my brother damned lying brother says I am crazy

Words flowed from him like blood from an open wound.

is that why it wants me? the water? because I am crazy?

They had held his hand over a bowl, and Mathriv had looked at him with very sad and gentle eyes and taken up a knife and slit across the familiar skin, and Achenar, screaming deep in the world, had bled water, water had fallen from his veins to the bowl

it wants to break me open, it wants to peel away the mask of the world--how can I survive?

They had carried him down to the level of the sea and taken his hand and thrust it in the water--

--rainbows, rainbows of joy, why, why that, why does making them tear me apart?

Words flowed, too fast for his pen to follow, and he found his hand following the old patterns, the old exercises--My name is Achenar. I live on Myst Island.--calligraphy lessons, the flowing ornaments of the capitals that he simplified, made blocky, not wanting them to look like the extravagant hand of his brother. And then he realized what he was doing and couldn't even laugh for the absurdity of it, and his eyes watered instead.

so am i achenar, he wrote, each letter a loose and lazy loop, little more, and then, without hesitation, he slashed into the back of his wrist with the sharp nib of the pen, then spat in the wound and rubbed it to wash away the ink. And though black stained his torn skin the blood ran true. Red. Not water.

"I'm bleeding," he laughed softly, and then in a great shout, not caring whether the cave swallowed his voice away from the ears of his family, "I'm bleeding!" He scooped up blood with the tip of the pen, and it streaked and strung out as he wrote, sure and triumphant and with magnificent blocky capitals. Just the way I should be. Blood inside, not water. I could spill the blood of all the world and none of it would be water.

He stopped writing when the third drop of blood hit the paper and began instead to laugh, squeaks and rumblings and a great clatter of joyless power.

"They say he changed the water!"

"Is it true?"

"It spread out like rainbows from his hand."

"I haven't seen anything like it since Zeh-Adam lived."

"I knew it! I was sure all this time!"

"So that's why you give him presents?"

"But does he know what he's doing?"

"Of course he doesn't. He's human."

"What do you mean, grandmother?"

"Don't you think he'll break and bleed?"

"He can't! He just...this has to be it. This must be our redemption. Fate could never be so cruel."

"Could everybody be quiet for a moment?"

And, to their own surprise, they were. Mathriv lowered his hand slowly, and every eye in the great hut turned to him; they could hear the frogs chirping from the walkway far below. Revyan, his uncle in the strongest seat, and Hala by his side both gave him attention so intense that he quailed and could not meet their eyes. Yet everyone was listening. Mathriv was the closest to Achenar; so they all knew, and when Mathriv finally drew a deep and shaking breath to speak, they listened.

"Do not push Zeh-Achenar. Please. I have spoken with him since last night, since the mysteries. He did attend, and he did change the water, and he touched it more deeply than any of our people ever could. All that you have heard of that is true. But he was very badly shaken, he has left for his own world. He's going to be there for a while, I think."

"Could you not go after him?"

"As I said, we cannot push him. None of us. Even me. We can only hope he will return. The water cannot be forced upon him again as we did last night. He must come to it. He must accept it. We cannot make him do this, or he will drown or run away and we will gain nothing but more pain."

"But he must," whispered a very old woman, who could not stand but slumped on an upturned pot in the corner, and all eyes turned to her. Leika was her name, and though she had never changed the water, she had lived deep in the mysteries all her life, and it was rare these days that she even spoke. "There is no hope without him. His mother will not come, his father will not stay, and his brother is blind and cruel as lightning. Now that Zeh-Adam is dead, he is our last, and if he slips through our fingers, we will die." She doubled over in a fit of coughs, soft and choking. "Know this as truth," she managed at last. "Know this and face it. For I touch the dreams of this people, and I know that you have not."

There was silence amongst them for a long while, blank and terrible and unfeeling silence.

"Does he even realize what rides upon it?" Revyan, the strongest, asked in a voice made pathetic by his fear.

"I do not know," said Mathriv quietly, hoarse with argument and worry. "I do not know if he truly understands, or if he imagines we can continue to survive upon the small joy we make ourselves."

"We will go mad," said an old man, his hands trembling upon his staff. "We will not survive."

"I know."

The dark silence of desperation settled upon the gathering.

"Should we not tell him what rides upon it?" a young woman asked

"If we did," Mathriv answered reluctantly, "I fear he would never return."

Achenar didn't even think about how they all knew to be there when he linked, but they were. A line of monkeys stood six heads deep on the walkway before him, and more stood above on the swinging bridges, watching in predator silence. He couldn't hear even a breath from the lot. The frogs chorused on, heedless and uninterrupted.

At least it's day.

"Mathriv," he said quietly.

"Zeh-Achenar...?" Mathriv slid between the packed bodies and hesitated at the front of the group.

"Come here."

Mathriv walked the few steps that closed the distance between him and Achenar.

Achenar reached out, touched his shoulder as he often did in greeting, and, with a practiced motion of his other hand, slid the knife into the soft spot under his ribs. Blood spurted over the white sleeve of Achenar's shirt. Mathriv choked on a scream and dropped to his knees, his short tree-climber's back arched high with pain.

Second old friend of mine who's taken a knife to the ribs recently. Mathriv panted, trying to breathe around the paralyzing weight within him, grasped at the hilt as if to pull it out but only groaned in shock. Mathriv, meet Branch. You'll get along. You're both meddling, crazy little bastards. Achenar pulled out another knife, thin and sleek and brutally sharp, and it flashed with a flick of his wrist in the cloudy afternoon sun. Break your mask, old caretaker, Father's friend. Two deep cuts on either side of Mathriv's face, and that knife could part a hair falling upon the blade. Break you open, and who are you, really? A hoarse yowl of agony, but he did not move, seemed paralyzed. Didn't you know that friend means nothing? The tips of his whiskers drifted to the walkway, along with a shower of half-parted hair, brown and gold and everything in between. What did you want from me?

Eventually he realized he was speaking aloud.

"Save us," Mathriv whispered, as if even the words were agony. "Please. Give us--joy." The broken tones of a begging man.

Achenar looked around, surveyed the faces and the fear of the people, hazed with the drunken rush of a well-taken kill.

The monkeys were silent. Watching and silent. He hadn't heard a scream or a gasp from any of them. He looked up, around, then back down. Mathriv shook at his knees and coughed blood.

"Don't you people know how to feel anymore?" he said sharply.

"No, Zeh-Achenar," said one of them quietly--Revyan the strongest, standing blank-faced not ten feet from his dying nephew.

"You know why, don't you?" asked another--Hala, her dark animal eyes empty of hope, kindness, joy.

Achenar started laughing, so hard he got a stitch in his side and had to drop to his knees. His face was level with Mathriv's; both of them were gasping for air, and Achenar saw the tears of pain making furrows on Mathriv's red-streaked face.

"Zeh-Achenar," Mathriv whispered. "My friend..."

Achenar stuck his bloodied hand in the water.

First a cloud of red billowed off his fingers, smoky-dust and meaningless in the cold steely wash of the sea.

Then the water turned cobalt, crimson, teal, fire and indigo, forest green and sunset orange--every color imaginable spreading out from his hand. Rainbows billowed amongst the deepwater roots of the trees, ripples of color, swirling in eddies and loops or pooling in great sheets or blending into flawless washes of greengold and vermillion, and the little waves ran through and caught the sunlight and sent it sparking in the depths, until even the sunken earth could be glimpsed through the limpid color of the sea. Frogs chirped and leapt away with little splashes of alarm. A gasp of awe ran amongst the people of the trees, and a child burst into tears, and voices screamed and sung with joy all across the Age.

Mathriv closed his eyes. There was joy in him again, sharp and sudden and true as the sun. The tears redoubled; the pain vanished. He was bleeding water; light danced in his mind.

"I am alive," he whispered, his voice clear and free of pain. He arched up, raising his bleeding face to the sky. "I am alive!" It was a bell toll of joy, the simplest truth of all, even though he knelt dying in sacrifice to the waters. Clear and shifting colors bled onto the knife, slid onto his hands with the ease of water.

Achenar drew up a handful of the sea and it was crystal clear in his palm.

"Drink," Achenar commanded. Mathriv smelled the water, eased forward, and drank. There was not a hint of salt and blood; it was the purest he'd ever tasted. His hands unclutched, relaxing with peace, reaching out in hope. He felt Achenar take hold the knife, felt the blade shift and bite within him, but the pain was nothing to the joy within him, and he did not even flinch.

Then Achenar twisted the knife, drove it full into his heart, and knocked his body into the water.

Leika, crouched trembling at the edge of a hut, screamed from high above.

"You ask too much," Achenar whispered. The ocean flowed black around Mathriv's body. Monkeys fell to their knees like leaves from a dying tree. The spirit of the people that had soared now fell, sinking like dark earth into darker waters.

Achenar stood and plucked up the little razor knife he'd stabbed deep into the walkway. Revyan fell to his knees, weeping, and yet he was still the strongest.

"Far too much."

Then he drew the linking book out of the pouch slung over his shoulder, held it over the water, and reached for the image of Stoneship.

Leika, pure ghost-white with age, stood, a bright and trembling shadow against the trees.

"Zeh-Achenar!" she cried, and her voice echoed like a trumpet through the trees. "Zeh-Achenar, please! We need you! We cannot change the waters ourselves--the color does not remain, the emptiness drives us mad!" She gasped for breath--still old, still failing, but it was as if some great spirit had taken her, and a murmur of awe and unbelieving hope rose amongst the people. "We have been too long without Zehkeh in our world. When the water is only gray, our hearts cannot feel true joy and our souls cannot truly live. It took us far too long to realize this, I confess. It is our shame that we took the miracle for granted until the earth itself stole it from us. But now--now--Zeh-Achenar! You have condemned us to death! You gave us a taste of life, but now you steal it from us forever. Your father will never return, your brother is blind, and you...you..." She paused and gasped again. "I beg of you, stay! We will all go insane without you!"

The linking book fell into the gray water.

Achenar promised himself he'd never go to Channelwood again, but every night, his mind betrayed him. He'd see monkeys slitting their own throats into the sea in desperate hope that their sacrifice would turn the tides; he'd see old men ranting mad after moonset, mimicking the bent form of the shadow of Adam; he'd see mothers and children lining up and walking into their tree, melting into the bark with tears running down their faces. Blood and water, men and trees and monkeys and the black earth crowing malevolence in the heart of all things. The masks of a world stripped away to flooded earth, bony and joyless. Once he'd dreamed of the black bitch of Mechanical and the keels pounding the waves in the high-moon dark. Now trees rose from the water and his brother took off his mask to reveal a wheel of gold, his mother a monkey, his father a book.

He found his papers and the red-nibbed pen. It was the hour of the wolf on the island of Myst, with the dew drying on the grass and the cool of the night settling deep into the bones of the land, with the trees standing dark and vigilant and the ship riding low at dock. He scribbled blindly in the dark, staining his hands with ink and tears. He wrote Mathriv's face onto his own, masked himself in Mathriv's death, gashes of red rubric ink down his cheeks. Later, of course, he'd lock it all away, hide it where nobody would ever find it. But now there was nothing else to do.

The dreams faded, slowly, over time. He imagined they faded as the people of Channelwood were dying, one by one falling with Mathriv into the water. But he promised himself that he would never know because he would never go back. Never return. The water would swallow him, would bury him alive, would suck him into the fabric of the world to make him a conduit of joy for the dances of monkeys. He denied; he rejected. The masks in his dreams turned white and eyeless--the dead. He tore at their edges; beneath they were nothing but bloody holes. And they stabbed him through, tore him apart, killed him.

And he woke soaked with sweat, shaking in terror, triumphant. The water was gone, the water no longer haunted him; he was back to normal. He went to an Age that didn't matter and killed, savaged, took the strongest man he could find and saw how much pain he could take before his heart stopped. Blood, no water, no colors. Blood. The old madness drove out the new and he reveled in it, shook a bloody mace to the sky and screamed. Blood. He carved a plain wooden mask and painted it red from the body of a long-haired man and stalked faceless amongst the terrified villagers, shrieking of retribution for crimes never committed, dancing for death. Blood. A time when he had no need for masks, for all his self was destruction.

It was his secret, of course--Channelwood his feared and beloved secret. Sirrus weaseled and prodded and coaxed and never found enough to go on, and Achenar locked up his papers and swore everything was all right. And that he would never go back.

It was months later, after Whiterock, that he broke his word.

Channelwood was empty.

Achenar walked every pathway and looked in every hut. There was nobody alive, just a few bodies, which he took the time to drop into the sea. The reeds which the monkeys had painstakingly cultivated in the shallows were dying out, surrendering to the rot of the water. Ropes had frayed and walls had fallen. The heavy form of the hut that held the strongest seat was torn down entirely. The wind blew and the windmill turned for no one.

I am the only one who knows what happened here.

It was a strange knowledge.

I am the only one who knows their language anymore. I am the only one who remembers their mysteries. I am the only one alive who understands Channelwood.

If it were any other Age, he wouldn't have cared.

He experimentally touched the water; it remained gray.

He saw faces imprisoned in the trunks of trees. He found scrawled madnesses of their own--no notes, no words, for the monkeys did not write. But pictures, faces and trees and streaks of color for water and blood. His own; theirs; everybody's. Those he carefully gathered, rolled up, and stuck in a pot, along with a string of metal chips he found in Mathriv's room.

"Did they make you take me to the water?" he whispered. "Did they, old friend?" He closed his eyes and remembered Mathriv's warm blood flowing over his hand, remembered Mathriv bending down to greet him when he was nine years old. He didn't regret; he couldn't.

There was a half-carved wooden mask in the hut. After carefully setting the pot to one side, he broke it against a trunk with a ferocious scream.

He went to his own room, his bare-walled bedroom, and hauled the reed mats and the embroidered blanket off the bedframe and kicked them spinning out into air to splash down far below. No more need for them. Then to his forechamber, to look at the walls and the masks. The steel door swung open at a touch. It had not changed. As he expected, the lights flicked out and the familiar eerie glow of the holographer filled the room. He ignored it.

"I hope I pushed the right button."

Achenar froze where he stood, feeling his gut twist with shame and hate and sheer blinding shock.

"Brother," he hissed.

Sirrus' message continued, his voice dripping with scorn.

"Very interesting device, dear brother. I'm not erasing anything important, am I?" He paused, then dropped his voice to a conspiratorial tone. "He is...preparing. Remember, take only one page."

The message ended in a burst of static; the glow faded and the light returned.

"Brother..." It was a high, wavering wail. Sirrus had known that Achenar had promised never to return. He'd told him--not why, but he'd told him, said he'd sworn it. Then, he'd laughed. And now...

He knew. He knew I'd come back.

"Brother..." Achenar stared at the mask before him, locking his gaze on the shapeless eyes. The empty Age demanded silence; he allowed it, not daring to provoke it, lest the water rise to devour him again.

The only thing I can do is go on doing what I'm doing. The only people who made anything any different are gone. His hands clenched by his sides. I'll go to that world in the secret book, and I'll kill, and kill, and kill. It's been too long. I've cried too much.

As he took the elevator up to the Myst book, he repeated the promise aloud, reinstated it, his last words for the water.

"I'll never come back here again."

That promise he kept.

Except...except, maybe, if I know I'm going to die, I'll die here. That would be nice. I can link in over a fire and die here alone and nobody would ever know anything.

That never came to pass, although he would, at least, die alone.