Anja was right. Behind him was the world-the white sand yielding to sparse green grasses that in turn yielded to the lush green fields. Tall, darker green forests carried the life of the world upward into the purple of the mountains, whose snow-capped peaks lifted it into the clear blue sky. And the sky seemed, to Joram's gaze, to leap from the mountains, soaring in a vast, serene expanse above him. Following its curve, he turned and looked ahead of him to where the sky fell at last into the misty void beyond the white sand.

And then he saw the Watchers.

Startled, he clutched at Anja's hand and pointed.

"Yes," was all she said. But the pain and anger in her answer made the child shiver in the waning sunlight, though the heat of midday radiated still from the sand beneath his feet.

Gripping Joram's hand firmly, Anja tugged him forward, her tattered gown dragging behind, leaving a snakelike trail through the dunes.

Thirty feet tall, the stone statues of the Watchers line the Borderlands, staring eternally out into the mists of Beyond. Spaced at twenty-foot intervals, the stone statues stand on the edge of the white sand for as far as the eye can see.

Joram gaped in wonder as he approached them. He had never seen anything so tall! Even the trees in the forest did not tower above him like these giant statues. Coming up on them from behind, Joram at first thought they were all alike. The statues were all figures of humans dressed in robes. Though some appeared to be male and others female, there seemed no other difference. Each stood in the same position, arms hanging straight down from his or her side, feet together, heads facing forward.

Then, as Joram drew nearer, he noticed that one statue was different. On one statue, the left hand, which should have been open like the others, was closed, clenched into a fist.

Joram turned to Anja, bursting with questions about these wonderful statues. But when he saw her face, he stopped the words upon his lips so swiftly that he bit his tongue. Swallowing his questions, he tasted blood.

Anja's face was whiter, her eyes hotter than the hot sand upon which they walked. Her wild, fevered gaze fixed upon one of the statues-the one whose hand was clenched. Toward that statue, she moved resolutely, floundering and falling in the shifting sand.

Then Joram knew. With the sudden, uncanny clairvoyance of childhood, Joram understood, though he could not have framed his knowledge in words. A sickening fear swept over him, making him weak and dizzy. Terrified, he tried to pull away from Anja, but she only held his hand more tightly. Desperately, shrieking words that Anja-from the lost, preoccupied look on her face-never heard, Joram dug his heels into the sand.

"Please! Anja! Take me home! No, I don't want to see-"

He fell down, dragging Anja off-balance. Stumbling, she landed on her hands and knees, and was forced to let loose of Joram to catch herself. Scrambling to his feet, the child tried to run, but Anja lunged forward and caught hold of him by the hair, yanking him backward.

"No!" Joram shrieked frantically, sobbing in pain and fear.

Grasping him around the waist with a strength her work in the fields had given her, Anja lifted the child and carried him across the sand, falling more than once, but never deterring from her fixed purpose.

Coming to stand before the statue, Anja stopped. Her breath came in ragged gasps. For a moment, she stared up at the statue towering above them.

Its left hand clenched, its fixed gaze looking over their heads into the mists Beyond, it had-to all appearances-less Life than the trees in the forests. Yet it was aware of their presence. Joram felt its awareness, as he felt its terrible, tortured pain.

Exhausted, he ceased to cry out or struggle. Anja dumped him at the statue's stone feet, where he crouched, quivering, his head in his hands.

"Joram," Anja said, "this is your father."

The boy squeezed his eyes tightly shut, unable to move or speak or do anything except lie upon the warm sand beneath the giant stone statue.

But a splash of water upon his neck made Joram start. Raising his head from where it had been pressed into the sand, the child looked up slowly. Far above him, he could see the statue's stone eyes staring straight ahead into the realm of Death whose sweet peace must ever elude him. Another splash of water struck the boy. With a heartbroken sob, Joram buried his face in his small hands.

While far above him, the statue, too, wept.

9.

The Ritual "I was the daughter of one of the noblest houses in Merilon. He-your father-was House Catalyst." was the daughter of one of the noblest houses in Merilon. He-your father-was House Catalyst."

Sitting at the table, once more in their shack, Joram heard Anja's voice coming to him from somewhere above him, trickling down through a haze of fear and horror like the tears of the statue.

"I was the daughter of one of the noblest houses in Merilon," she repeated, combing out Joram's hair. "Your father was House Catalyst. He, too, came of noble blood. My father refused to have a catalyst living with us like Father Tolban-little better than a Field Magus himself. I was sixteen, Your father was just turned thirty."

She sighed, and the fingers that tugged and pulled at the tangles in Joram's hair grew lingering and caressing. Glancing at her face reflected in the glass of the windows opposite where he sat at the wooden table, Joram saw his mother smile a half-smile and sway a little to some unheard music. Raising her hand, she patted her filthy, matted hair. "What beautiful things we created, he and I," she said softly, smiling dreamily. "I was gifted with Life, Mama used to tell me. Of an evening, to please and entertain my family, your father and I would fill the twilight with rainbows and phantasms of wonder that brought tears to the eyes of those who beheld them. It was only natural, your father said, that we, who could create such beauty, should fall in love."

The fingers in his hair tightened, the sharp nails dug into his flesh, and Joram felt the sticky liquid of his own blood trickle down his neck.

"We went to the catalysts for permission to marry. They performed a Vision. The answer was no. They said we would not produce living issue!"

Tearing at the tangled mass of black hair, she ripped at the knots with her talonlike nails. Clutching at the table, Joram welcomed the pain of his flesh that masked the pain of his soul.

"Living issue! Hah! They lied! You see!" Grasping Joram around the neck, Anja hugged him in fierce, greedy passion. "You are with me, my sweet one. You are my proof that they are liars!"

Pressing his head against her breast, she rocked him back and forth, crooning "liars" to herself and to him as she smoothed out the silken curls of his hair.

"Yes, hearts delight, I have you," Anja murmured, stopping in her combing for a moment to stare fixedly into the fire. Her hands dropped to her lap. "I have you. They could not stop us. No, even though they ordered your father to leave our house and return to the Cathedral, they could not keep us apart. He came back to me that night, the night after their foul Vision. We met in secret, in the garden where we had given life to such beautiful creations.

"He had a plan. We would produce a living child and prove to the world that the catalysts were lying. They would be forced to let us marry then, don't you see?

"We needed a catalyst to perform the ceremony that would create a child in my womb. But we could find none. Cowards! Those he ventured to approach refused, fearing the wrath of the Bishop if they were discovered.

"And then came word, he was being sent to the fields, a Field Catalyst!" Anja snorted. "Him! Whose soul was beauty and fineness, to be sent to a life of drudgery and toil. Little better than the peasants who are born to it. And it meant we would never see each other again, for once you have trudged in the mud of the fields, you may never walk the enchanted streets of Merilon.

"We were desperate. Then, one night, he told me that he knew of a way-an ancient, forbidden way-that we could use to produce a child."

Anja's hands twisted. She sank down upon a stool, her eyes still staring into the fire. Joram could not look at her, his stomach clenched with anger and a strange, almost pleasurable sensation of pain he did not understand. Instead, he stared out the window at the calm, lonely moon.

"He described the ancient way to me," she said softly. "I was sickened. It was ... bestial. How could I do it? How could he? Yet Yet, how could we not? For if he left me, I would die. We sneaked off ..."

Anja'a voice dropped to where Joram could just barely hear her.

"I remember little of the night you were conceived. He ... your father ... gave me a drink made of some bright red flower .... It seems to me that my soul left my body, leaving the body for him to do with it as he would. As if in a dream ... I remember his hands touching me ... I remember an awful, searing pain. I remember ... a sweetness ....

"But we were betrayed. The catalysts had been trailing us, watching us. I heard him cry out, then I awoke with a scream to find them standing over us, staring down at us in our shame. They took him away, to the Font for his trial. I was taken to the Font, too. They have a place there, where they keep 'women like me' so they said." Anja smiled bitterly at the fire. "There are more of us than you might suppose, my pet. I looked for him, but the Font is a huge place, huge and terrible. The next time I saw him was at the Punishment.

"You, my sweet, were heavy in my womb when they dragged me to the Borderlands and forced me to stand in the sand, the white, burning sand. Forced me to stand there and watch them perform their heinous act!"

Snarling, Anja twisted to her feet. Coming to stand before Joram, she dug her nails into his shoulder. "Magi who have broken the law are sent Beyond!" she whispered fiercely. "That is their punishment for wrongdoing in this world. 'The Living shall not be put to Death,' thus the catechism says. A magus walks out into mist, into nothingness, and so perishes! Pah!" She spit into the fire. "What punishment is that compared to being turned to living stone? Wearing out the ageless days of your existence, gnawed at always by wind and water and the memories of what it was to be alive!"

Anja stared into the night with eyes that might have been stone, for all they saw. Joram stared at the moon.

"They stood him in the place they had marked upon the sand. He wore the robes of shame, and two Enforcers held him fast with their dark enchantment, so that he could not move. Most catalysts, I have heard, accept their fate quietly. Some even welcome it, having been convinced of the enormity of their sins. But not your father. We had done nothing wrong." Her nails dug deeper into Joram's flesh. "We had only loved!"

Breathing heavily, she could not speak for long minutes, forcing herself to witness that terrible moment once again, reveling-for an instant-in her pain and reveling in the knowledge that she was sharing this pain with the boy.

"To the last," she continued in a low, husky voice, "your father shouted his defiance. They tried to ignore him, but I saw their faces. His words hit home. Furious, Bishop Vanya-may the ground upon which he walks writhe with scorpions-ordered the transmutation to begin.

"Twenty-five catalysts are needed to perform such a change. Vanya had brought them from all parts of Thimhallan, to witness the punishment for our great crime-the sin of loving!

"They formed a circle around your father and, into that circle, walked the catalyst's own Duuk-tsarith Duuk-tsarith, a warlock who works for them and who, in return, is granted as much Life as he needs to perform his foul duties. At his coming, the two lower-rank Enforcers bowed and left, leaving your father alone in the circle with the one known as the Executioner. The warlock made a sign. The catalysts clasped hold of hands. Each opened a conduit to the Executioner, giving him unbelievable power.

"He took his time. The punishment is slow and painful.

"Moving his hand, the Executioner pointed at your father's feet. I could not see his limbs beneath his long robes, but I knew from the expression on your father's face when he first felt the transmutation begin. His feet turned to stone. Slowly, the icy coldness moved up his legs, then his loins, his stomach, chest and arms. Still he yelled at them until his stomach froze. Even when his voice ceased, I could see his lips move. At the last moment, with his last effort, he clenched his fist just as it turned to stone. They could have altered it, of course. But they chose to let that sign of his last bitter defiance remain as a warning to others."

Yes, thought Joram, reaching up and clasping his mother's hands in his own, they left the look upon his face as well-a monument to hatred, bitterness, and anger.

Anja's voice dropped. "I watched him draw his final breath. Then he could breathe no more-as normal man. But the breath of life is within him still. That is the most excruciating part of this punishment that these fiends have devised. Think of him when anything hurts you, my sweet one. Think of him when you are tempted to cry, and you will know your tears to be petty and shameful compared to his. Think of him, who is dead but alive."

Joram thought of him.

He thought of his father every night, as Anja told the story while she combed his hair, and every night when he went to bed, the words "Dead but alive" reached out to him from the darkness. He thought of him every night from then on, because Anja told him the story again and again, night after night, as she combed the tangles from his hair with her fingers.

As some use wine to ease the pains of living, so Anja's words were the bitter wine that she and Joram drank. Only this wine did not ease pain. Born of madness, it gave birth to pain itself. For at last Joram understood The Difference, or thought he did. Now at last he could understand his mother's pain and hatred and share in it.

During the day, he still watched the other children at their play, but now his look was not envious. Like his mother's, it was contemptuous. Joram began to play a game of his own, sitting day after day in the silent hovel. He was the moon, hanging in the dark heavens, staring down at the buglike mortals below, who sometimes looked up at him in his cold and shining majesty, but who could not touch him.

Thus he spent his days. And every night, as she combed his hair, Anja recited her tale.

From that time on, if Joram cried, no one ever saw his tears.

10.

The Game Joram was seven when the dark and secret part of his education began.

One evening after dinner, Anja reached out her hands and ran her fingers through Joram's thick, tangled hair. Joram tensed; this was always the beginning of the stories, a time that he confusedly both longed for and dreaded every hour of his lonely day. But she did not begin to comb out his hair as usual. Puzzled, the boy looked up at her.

Anja was staring at him, fondling his hair absently. She studied his face, moving her hand to caress his cheek. All the while he could see that she was turning something over in her mind, fingering an idea as one of the Pron-alban Pron-alban fingers a gem to see if it is flawed. Finally, her lips tightened in resolution. fingers a gem to see if it is flawed. Finally, her lips tightened in resolution.

Gripping Joram by the arm, she pulled him down to sit beside her on the floor.

"What is it, Anja?" he asked uneasily. "What are we doing? Aren't you going to tell me about my father?"

"Later," said Anja firmly. "Now, we are going to play a game."

Joram looked at his mother in wary amazement. Never in her life had Anja played at anything, and he had a feeling she was not going to begin now. Anja tried to smile at the boy reassuringly, but Anja's strange, wild-eyed grins only increased Joram's nervousness. Yet he watched her with a kind of hungry eagerness. Whatever she did seemed to hurt him, but-like a man who cannot help running his tongue over an aching tooth-Joram could not seem to help touching his aching heart, feeling a certain grim satisfaction in knowing that the pain was still there.

Anja reached into a pouch that hung from a strip of leather she wore round her waist and drew out a small, smooth stone. Tossing the stone into the air, she used her magic to cause the air to swallow it up. As the stone disappeared, Anja looked at Joram with an expression of triumph that the boy found quite perplexing. There was nothing marvelous in the stone's disappearance. Such feats were commonplace, even in the lowly world of the Field Magus. Now, if she would only show him some of the marvels she had described that were created in Merilon ...

"Very well, little pet," said Anja, reaching into the air and producing the stone, "since you are so unimpressed, you try it."

Joram scowled, his dark, feathery eyebrows drawing a grim line across the childish face. There it was. There was the hurt. He touched the dull ache.

"You know I can't," he said sullenly.

"Take the stone, my sweet one," Anja said playfully, holding it out to him.

But Joram saw no playful laughter in his mother's eyes, only purpose, resolution, and a strange, eerie glint. Reaching out, Joram took the stone.

"Make the air swallow it," Anja commanded.

Still scowling, the boy tossed the stone into the air with an exasperated sigh. It clattered to the floor at his feet.

In the silence that followed, Joram could hear the stone rolling around and around on the wooden floor. When it stopped, Joram glanced at his mother out of the corner of his eye. "Why can't I make it vanish?" he demanded in a low voice. "Why am I different? Even a catalyst can do such a simple thing ..."

"Bah! And it will be a simple thing for you, too, someday." Anja fondled the crisp, black curls that twined around Joram's face. "Do not fret. Those of the nobility are sometimes slow to develop the magic."

But Joram was not satisfied. She did not look at him when she spoke, her gaze was on his hair. Angrily, he jerked his head back, away from her touch.

"When?" he demanded stubbornly.

The boy saw his mother's lips tighten, and he braced himself to face her anger. But then Anja's hand fell limply into her lap. Her gaze grew unfocused.

"Someday soon," she replied, smiling vaguely. "No, don't bother me with questions. Give me your hand."

Joram hesitated, staring at his mother, as if determined to argue. Then, seeing it would do no good, he held out his hand. Anja took hold of it, studying it intently.

"The fingers are long and delicate," she said, speaking to herself. "Their movement quick, supple. Yes, good. Very good."

Causing the stone to rise up from the floor into the air, Anja deposited it in the child's open palm.

"Joram," she said softly, "I am going to teach you to make the stone disappear. This is magic that I am going to show you, but it is secret magic. You must never show anyone else or allow anyone else to see you use it or they will send both of us Beyond. Do you understand, my heart's delight?"

"Yes," Joram replied, wide-eyed and incredulous, his fear and suspicion replaced by a sudden, hungry desire to learn.

"The first time that I threw the stone into the air, I didn't really make the air swallow it. I only seemed to, just as I only seemed to pull the stone back out. No, I mean it. Watch. Look, I've thrown it up into the air. It has vanished. Right? Wasn't that what you saw? Ah, but look. The stone is still here! In my hand!"

"I don't understand," said Joram, once more suspicious.

"I fooled your eyes. Watch, I seem to throw the stone up in the air and your eyes follow the motion I make with my hand. But while your eyes are looking at that, my hands are doing this. And there goes the stone. This is what you must do from now on, Joram-learn to fool people's eyes. No, sweet one. Do not frown. It is not difficult. People see what they want to see. Now, you try ...."

Thus, Joram began his lessons in sleight-of-hand.

Day after day he practiced, safe in the protective magical aura that surrounded the hovel. Joram enjoyed the lessons. It gave him something to do and it was also something he discovered he was quite good at doing. Child that he was, he never wondered how Anja came to know this secret art or, if he did, he passed it off as just another of the strange things about her, like her ragged dress. Only one thing bothered him. Once more, The Difference bobbed to the surface of his mind.

"Why must I do this, Anja?" Joram asked casually, about six months later. He was practicing moving a round, smooth pebble along his knuckles, making it skitter rapidly across the back of his hand.

"You will need this skill when you go out into the fields to earn your keep next year," Anja replied absently.