"When his philosophy touched people on a large scale, it perverted and destroyed as much as it comforted and enlightened. There have been others like him since, but not nearly as strong. have spoken with none * of them."

Michael was tempted to ask more, but the tone of the Serpent's voice dissuaded him. After a while, when his clothes were dry, he stood and stretched. "I don't have much time," he said. "I have to find Kristine."

"We have wandered far with words, haven't we?" the Serpent asked. "How much have you learned?"

"Some. Not a great deal," Michael said.

"Then you know that what must be learned cannot be taught with words."

Michael felt a chill.

"You must sacrifice yourself now."

"I don't understand."

"You pride yourself in your individuality, your personal memories and accomplishments. But if you were to place all you have thought and been and done on top of what I contain, your mere two decades on my millions of years, you would be lost."

"Yes. Probably."

The Serpent growled softly. "That is what you must do."

Michael stared. "Why?"

"You cannot be a mage as you are now. You must have experience. You must learn."

"I don't want to be a mage," Michael said softly, shivering again.

"Do you have a choice?" the Serpent asked.

"Is this what you offered the last man you spoke to?" Michael asked. The Serpent did not answer. "Is it?"

"Yes."

"And he refused?"

"He had the mark of Adonna."

"Do I have the mark of Adonna?"

"You do not," the Serpent said. "You shed the mark in the Realm."

"And you want me to carry your mark?"

Again the Serpent burned lava-red, and the water around his submerged length bubbled and steamed.

"You must combine worlds. You must create new worlds. You must unite the races."

"Yes, yes, somebody has to do that! I know."

"And you are a candidate. Perhaps the best candidate."

"But why must I submerge myself in... in you?"

"I have the experience. The memories. I cannot use them. You can."

"You have something else," Michael said, hardly believing what he was feeling, what he was about to say.

A voice inside him fairly screamed that he was being childish and stupid. Who was he to challenge the oldest living human? But another, stronger voice compelled him. Both voices were purely his own. This choice was his. "You carry the horrors of the past. If I absorb you, and lose myself, then I become you.

And you were as evil and willful as Adonna."

"I have contemplated my excesses," the Serpent reiterated, its length obsidian-black.

"But would you commit those excesses again... to save your people?" Michael put on his clothes again.

The Serpent withdrew a few yards into the water. "If I were given no choice, I would."

"When you tried to destroy the Sidhe, did you really have no other choice? Or did you hate them?"

"I hated them," the Serpent admitted.

"And you would try again?"

"They are weak now."

"Would you try to destroy them?" Michael felt a surge of defiant horror. "You could, now that they're weak. You could finish what you started."

* Only the last three yards of the Serpent's trunk and head protruded onto the shore now. "I hope I would not do that."

"But you might... anyway."

"I might," the Serpent conceded.

"I can't become you," Michael said, crying out again. "I can't be the kind of mage you were. If I can be any sort of mage at all..."

"You are very young."

"I wish there was a way I could learn from you, learn what is necessary, without the risk. If that is possible..."

But the Serpent withdrew into the loch without another word. The ripples stilled along the shore, and Michael was alone. He turned toward the tree trunk where the Breed female attendant had faded away.

She stood there again, her white hair dazzling in the sun, her baggy black suit and starchy white shirt and narrow black tie just as he remembered them.

"Follow me," she said. She tore away a part of the landscape beyond the tree trunk and stepped into inky darkness. Michael crawled through the hole after her.

And returned to the eleventh floor of the Tippett Hotel.

The Breed woman was a translucent shadow ahead of him, halfway down the hall. "You have failed," she said, her voice as weak as her image. "You are no longer a candidate. Go home and weep for your people and your world."

Chapter Twenty-Two.

Michael stood in the hallway, alone and angry and as still as the marred plaster walls around him. Why did I do that? he asked himself, relaxing his clenched fists and arm muscles. Because I am a coward? Afraid to submit to a higher personality?

"No," he said. He felt his strength returning - that strength which had been growing, unaided, since he had returned from the Realm, since he had dropped out of the complex picture of machinations between the Sidhe and Waltiri and Clarkham. The strength returned, but not his confidence. The talk with the Serpent Mage had been so interesting - and for it to come to such an unexpected and painful end, because of his own rebellion, was agonizing.

In a way, he had been waiting for just such a conference for months.

"I'm a renegade," he said. If he was out of the picture completely, with no hope of returning, then he was free to act as he chose...

Which was what he seemed to be doing anyway.

He turned to look at the rectangle of darkness. When he had first passed through, following the old Breed female, he had felt the nature of the region beyond as a kind of tingling against his palms. He could feel that same tingling now. The unspecific gate led to nowhere in particular - it was an open exit with no fixed destination. To someone with no training whatsoever - the soldiers and police in the streets below, for example - it would be simply a blank wall, darkened as if by a polarized filter. For someone with inadequate training, it could be very dangerous. It could put Michael into a between-world as complex * and delusive as a nightmare... Or it could take him where he wished to go.

To the Realm.

To seek out Tonn's wife, the skull-snail, if she was still alive.

Toh kelih ondulya, med not ondulya trasn spoon not kod...

So Eleuth had told him in the Realm, before bringing back a beetle from Earth. "All is waves, with nothing waving across no distance at all."

" The Sidhe part of a Breed," she had explained, " knows instinctively that any world is just a song of addings and takings away. To do grand magic, you must be completely in tune with the world - adding when the world adds, taking away when the world takes away."

Did he feel that instinct clearly? When he had last stood on the top of the Tippett Hotel, looking out over the city, he had felt in touch with the inhabitants of the Earth for miles around - and he had felt even more in touch later, lying in bed in the Waltiri house. But the inhabitants were not the world itself. He needed to make that final link.

It was certain no one else would do it for him. He was working alone now, without support from any faction or quarter. He had to lift himself up by his bootstraps.

For an instant, he felt a sense of despair and defeat that left him dizzy. How inadequate he was, how ill-trained and ignorant...

And yet...

And yet, he was capable. He had the means to do what needed to be done. Clarkham, the Serpent Mage, Adonna, Tarax, even Waltiri aside, Michael felt the strength within him. The product of a long year's discipline.

For a moment, the hallway ahead of him seemed to vanish, and he saw nothing but waves of darkness shimmering against each other. Addings and takings away - risings and fallings. Peaks and valleys. He felt the hum in his palms, the singing of all reality, and closed his eyes to tune himself to that.

With Tarax's suggestion, he had broken free of Clarkham's weak trap-world.

Now - He turned to the dark rectangle. He remembered the tune and timbre of the Realm. He made the distinction between Earth and the Realm. Their wave-trains separated, and he could feel the distinct hummings. He reached out with one hand, feeling the buzzing in his palm, and pressed against the darkness.

Adding.

Taking away.

The darkness became potential. For a moment, he felt a hideous between-world beyond his fingers, and he wanted to pull back, but he held himself there and tuned an interval higher. Closer. Another interval.

His index finger drew a gash in the darkness, and sunlight beamed through onto his feet. He clawed the opening wider and felt it resist him, trying to close again.

The Realm was distinct and real beyond the darkness, but hardly stable. The tune and timbre were in fact fluctuating even as he tried to break through. He ad-libbed a tremolo to the song. The darkness faded.

He stepped through.

And stood on a grassy dell, with thick, green forest beyond. Overhead, in the dusk of a failing day, stars were twirling like fireflies on short leashes, and the moon was cutting a trail of crescents in a pearly band across the sky.

The Realm.

For the first few hours, Michael reveled in the clean, cold sensation of air that had blown across scattered patches of snow and through miles of uninterrupted forest. He reached out to the auras of any within his range and found only a few lone Arborals - and a hint of others in the direction of the setting sun. He * then settled into a cold evening, warmed by his hyloka.

Wherever his probe extended, it met an undertone of disruption. In one direction, he actually felt a cutting-off of the Realm - an edge, beyond which lay something distastefully like the Blasted Plain that had surrounded the Pact Lands. As the evening lengthened, he felt more such edges. The Realm was now cut through by swaths of decay. He did not know whether he could cross such a discontinuity or whether the Realm would last long enough for him to find Tonn's wife, but he felt a nervous contentment nonetheless.

He was actually doing something to locate Kristine. For the time being, it was all he could do.

Until, of course, Tarax came forth to present his daughter. When - and if - that happened, Michael would change his plans accordingly. But the thought of waiting for Tarax's move had eaten away at him.

This was much better, if no more certain.

Michael had never suspected himself to be such a rebel. He had trained under the Crane Women with a bare minimum of argument, accepting the situation and the necessity of their discipline. Now he was ignoring Tarax, who was almost certainly more powerful, and he had defied the Serpent Mage, who was beyond doubt wiser.

But tainted. If the wisdom of the past came with all the patterns and mistakes of the past built in, then surely there was another and better way.

He ruminated on these thoughts until dawn, which came much sooner than he had expected, even given the Realm's erratic time scales. Everything was shifting.

Then he set out in the direction of the murmuring crowd of auras, more certain with each mile he ran and walked that there were humans among that group - a great many humans. This gave him another hope, that he could rescue the humans he had left behind in the Realm. That was something he had never felt right about. However weak he was, he should have tried to help them... But he had not been his own individual then. He had been carrying out somebody else's mission.

And what if that's what you're doing now, and you don't even know it? The nagging doubt was his own; it came from no outside source. He was of so little importance now, so rejected and ignored, that nobody in all the Realm felt it necessary to cloud his mind with messages.

Not even Adonna, who might be dead... though that was hard to believe. What could kill a god-like Sidhe? Nothing, perhaps, but the end of his greatest creation. If Adonna had fashioned the Realm out of himself, then the Realm's death would be his own.

Within two of the irregular days and nights, he stood on the inner edge of the forest that had once surrounded the Blasted Plain. Nearby, the river still flowed, and the bitter, corrupted circle of the Blasted Plain itself still stuck out like a festering sore. But where the Pact Lands had been, where the villages of Euterpe and Halftown had stood and the house that had once belonged to Clarkham, there was desolate emptiness. The Blasted Plain had half-heartedly moved in to fill the emptiness.

There were no humans, no Breeds, and certainly no Sidhe nearby... with one exception. Michael probed cautiously, unwilling to intersect with the minds of the Children, if any still existed.

But the Children were gone, too They had been expunged by the Sidhe who had carried away the humans and Breeds and resettled them, perhaps in the direction in which Michael sensed a large group of humans.

He thought of Lamia, the last inhabitant of Clarkham's house. The house and the decaying field of vine stumps behind it, on a bank above the sluggish river, were gone.

Michael blanked his thoughts of all cross-connections and associations, searching for the trace of one aura: Tonn's wife, transformed into the skull-snail.

He found nothing. Concentrating, reaching out again, he refined his sweep. Again nothing - and still no sign of the Children or anything else alive - or quasi-living - in the Blasted Plain.