With nothing to copy it from, he saved the beak for last. But by then he was so comfortable with the process that he didn't hesitate. He drew out a long triangle, the underside flat and the top half thick and curved like an exotic dagger. He stepped closer, examining his work. Something was missing. He smiled to himself and added a divot to either side of the top of the beak, providing its nostrils.

  A crow squawked. Dante let out a strangled yelp—had he brought the statue to life? The bird called again. From up in the trees. There, a murder of crows clung to the branches, shuffling their wings. Butterflies bounced up and down on the air. A squirrel clung to a moss-free tree trunk, head oriented to the ground, tail lashing violently.

  Around him, the temple stood tall and sturdy. Though there were a few cracks in the walls, this only made it more beautiful.

  "Well done," Gladdic said.

  "Except I still don't see any people," Blays said. "We're still not there yet, are we? How many times are we going to have to do this?"

  Dante gestured to the frolicking animals. "Well, at least we're one step closer. But we're dealing with a god whose greatest desire is to never be seen. Our real worry should be if we get to where we're supposed to be but have no idea that it's the right spot."

  "We do not yet know that we are not in the right place," Gladdic said. "The temple is restored. It may have brought its master with it."

  Blays eyed him. "An optimistic Gladdic? All right, I no longer think we're just moving back in time. This has to be a whole other universe."

  They strolled about the temple grounds, which were a little wild but in reasonable repair. This all but insisted that people were around to tend the grounds, but while there was animal and insect life all around them, they neither saw nor heard any sign of human life. Until they attempted to walk inside the open front of the main temple and bumbled right into a man between late middle age and early old age.

  "Visitors?" He gawked at them, then at the swords on Dante and Blays' hips. "But how did you get here?"

  Gladdic laughed softly. "Do you not remember? For it was you who sent us here."

  Blays blinked at him. "Apparently this is the universe where you were born without a functioning sense of sanity."

  "Observe his robes. His bearing and his build. This is the same man we met at the edge of the dead woods."

  The man's robes were the rich purple of Urt, decorated here and there with obscure symbols. The garment was just starting to get worn at the hems, but Dante could imagine it falling apart bit by bit until it became what they had seen the skeleton wearing. The man looked to be about the right height, and there was a similarity to the movements of this fellow and the undead's that was made uncanny by the fact that the latter had just been a bunch of bones.

  "Lords above, I think you're right," Blays said. "We did meet earlier. Or much later, because you were, ah, just a little older. I don't think we caught your name."

  "Tarlic." The man peered at them with eyes of a striking amber color. "I don't seem to remember this meeting. You will have to forgive me, I'm even older than I look and my memory isn't what it was. But I hope I was still in good health."

  "For your age when we met you, you were extremely lively."

  "I am glad to hear it. Yes, very glad."

  "We've been sent to find Urt," Dante said. "Is he here?"

  "He once was. But he's gone now, just like everyone else."

  "What happened to him? And to his people?"

  Tarlic thought, then gave a quick shake of his head. "I would say it was the war."

  "They were killed in the fighting?"

  "Only some of them. But the war brought a plague, and that killed many others. The two priests couldn't stop it, so they traveled into the forest for medicine. There, they were slain by great cats. Then we sent messengers to the south to beg for aid, but the messengers never returned. The plague mainly claimed the young and once it was finished there weren't enough strong laborers left to work the crops. More died of hunger that winter."

  He paused to remember, his amber eyes shifting back and forth. "The hard times eased after that. But only a handful of our people were able to have children in the years afterward. It seemed as though all spirit had left us; several died of no visible cause, but we knew it was despair. Others took to the woods to forage. They didn't return. Maybe they were caught by beasts or maybe they just walked away to find somewhere that wasn't so cursed. Eventually there were only three left: myself, and a man and wife…their names slip my mind. We were starving and I warned them not to eat too much of the dila shrub root but they did so and that is what killed them. I buried them beneath the shrub that was their undoing. It is just north of here.

  "When I was the only one left, my lord came to me and asked me to stand watch over this site. Then he left, too. I don't recall how long ago this must have been."

  "I'm sorry to hear all this," Dante said, more than a little awkwardly. "We're trying to find our way back to Urt's realm as it once was. To do that, we need to find something broken or lost and return it to the way it used to be. Can you help us?"

  Tarlic shook his head in a jerky back and forth. "No…no, if I once knew of what might help you, I don't remember now."

  They asked him a few more questions, getting nowhere. Once it was clear they were wasting their time, they thanked him and walked into the woods. There was much less moss and mold on the trees and far more flowers and seeds growing from them.

  Blays glanced over his shoulder. "Nice of his god to leave him here all by himself for eternity."

  "We're not even sure this is really real," Dante said. "Anyway, part of serving the gods means obeying their commands. Even when they're terrible."

  "Would you say you're doing a great job of obeying the gods' commands right now?"

  "I don't see Arawn telling me to go home and let the lich kill me."

  "When the forest was dead, our duty was to restore the forest," Gladdic said, ignoring everything they'd just said. "When the temple was crumbled, our duty was to restore the temple. From what we have learned so far, it is this place's people that now must be restored."

  "If you mean to repopulate this wood, I have bad news for you," Blays said. "All three of us are male."

  Dante swatted at a fly; it had been nice to be without them for a while. "We might not have to literally bring them back. It's probably enough to perform a symbolic revival."

  "How do you propose to do that?"

  "Tarlic said the last two people here died from eating poison. Maybe we can unpoison them."

  "This sounds like something that's really not going to work."

  "Considering it's all Tarlic could talk about, I think it's worth trying."

  They headed north from the temple. Not knowing what a dila shrub was or looked like, the search might have taken them hours, which would have been unfortunate, given that it would be less than two before the sun was down, but Dante knew a grave when he saw one, and quickly located one at the foot of a shrub with glossy green leaves that were nearly circular in shape.

  He moved into the earth beneath the patchy grass. "There are bodies here."

  Blays stepped back. "Try to keep the excitement out of your voice."

  Dante sank the earth from within the grave. There was no coffin—not surprising, given that they hadn't even had enough food to not die from eating poisonous roots—and the bodies lay three feet down, a respectable depth given Tarlic's age. Rather than being bare bones, the two corpses were wrapped in grimy but intact clothes. They still had most of their skin, too, though it had stretched and dried, mouths hanging open, making the bodies look like they were horrified to have been unearthed.

  Dante had smelled much worse, but he hadn't been expecting any odor at all, and breathed shallowly through his teeth as he sent the shadows into the bodies. The poison was easy enough to spot, distributed through what little was left of their organs and long-congealed blood. As he neutralized it, it occurred to him to wonder whether this would have worked at all if they'd been bare skeletons like he'd been expecting.

  He did away with the last bits of poison, then looked around himself. "Did it work?"

  "It didn't." Blays gazed down at the bodies. "You seriously can't go one week without desecrating a corpse, can you?"

  "Gladdic, take a look and see if I missed anything."

  Gladdic stood over the bodies, investigating them, then touched them with a few dabs of ether. "They have been purified. Yet I see no shift in our surroundings."

  Dante was pretty sure it was hopeless, but he'd already disinterred them, so he tried a few more tricks before conceding they'd been wrong and covering them back up with earth.

  Gladdic rubbed his stump with his left hand. "How long do you believe they have been dead?"

  "A lot of factors go into a calculation like that. What the winters are like, how voracious the bugs are—"

  "Do not be tedious."

  "No more than five years," Dante said. "Probably just one or two."

  "Yet Talric made it sound as though they had been dead for far longer. Why would he mislead us?"

  "Hang on. Are you saying he poisoned them?"

  "It could be that what we are meant to restore is justice."

  Dante stared to the south. "If he killed them, I don't see why he'd tell us where to find them."

  "Sure," Blays said. "Unless he had the crazy idea that the first thing we did with such news wouldn't be to run off and dig up their bodies."

  "He just doesn't strike me as a killer."

  "Unless he is truly a piece of the workings of Urt," Gladdic said. "Where the truth is so obscured you can stare right at it without realizing what you are seeing."

  On the possibility they were hunting in the entirely wrong direction, they walked on through the woods, eyes open for anything out of place or in need of revival. They looked for signs of other people, too. For Tarlic's memory didn't seem entirely trustworthy, and even if it was, Urt might be using him for purposes unknown to him. They found a few wooden houses and stone fences in modest disrepair, but didn't see any other people.

  They weren't following any particular trail, nor even traveling in a single consistent direction, but they found themselves back at the temple grounds anyway. The sun was about to set and its weak yellow light fought to poke through the gaps in the branches. Tarlic was seated on a mat outside the main building, using the last of the daylight to read a thick folio spread across his lap.

  "You are back?" He looked up, not closing the book. "Did you find what you're searching for?"

  "No such luck," Dante said. "What are you reading?"

  "It is a history. A history of our people. It helps me to remember what was."

  "Can I see it?"

  The man shook his head, almost shivering. "It was left to me. I am its guardian."

  Dante moved toward him, holding out his hand. "But with more detail about what happened to the people that used to live here, we might be able to find our way back to them."

  Tarlic stood, clutching the book to his chest. "Don't you come any closer."

  "I'm not trying to take it from you. I just want—"

  "No! I'm not to let the history pass out of my hands!"

  "All right, all right." Dante held up his hands for peace. "Sorry I asked."

  Tarlic stood in the wan last light, whiskered mouth hanging open, blinking at sudden tears. "I am…forgive me. I was entrusted. I can't recall enough on my own. If the book was damaged, or if it was taken, there would be nothing left of my people at all."

  "Well, have you read anything in it that might help us?"

  Tarlic licked his lips. "No. No, there is nothing that comes to mind."

  Dante thanked him neutrally. They departed the temple, did a bit more discouraged wandering about, then returned to one of the abandoned houses to shelter through the night. It wasn't quite cool enough to require a fire, but there was plenty of wood stacked behind the house and no one around to use it, so they lit one anyway.

  Smoke poofed through the house; the chimney was blocked. Dante used the nether to knock apart the bird's nest that was stuck near the top. Once the air cleared, he pulled up a chair a few feet from the blaze.

  Blays pulled off his boots and socks, wriggling his toes in the heat. "We're not really going to not steal Tarlic's book, are we?"

  Dante gave him a hard look. "I'm insulted you even have to ask."

  "You speak of this like you are about to pinch a loaf of bread," Gladdic said, clearly disgusted. "Yet you intend to take away an old man's last connection to his people. Ones who have otherwise faded from this earth."

  "And?" Blays said. "We can just give it back when we're done."

  "So long as we ensure that no harm comes to the book."

  "What do you think we're planning to do with it, burn it for warmth? Even if we tripped while carrying it and it fell in a puddle of mud that then caught fire and incinerated it, Talric won't even remember it a week later. He'll bounce back in no time." Blays then did a pitch-perfect exaggeration of both the old man's voice and the shivering way he shook his head. "'I seem to recall being sad about something, but I…ah, my memory…ah, look at that pretty bird over there!'"

  "We're just going to borrow it," Dante said. "No harm will come to it."

  "Plus we've forgotten all about the fact he might be a double murderer. If so, taking his book away is a pretty mild punishment."

  Gladdic looked up from the fire and directed an intense look at Blays. "Make sport of him again."

  "'Hi, I'm Dante,'" Blays said without missing a beat. "'I think I know everything. Would you like to hear all about it? Because I'm going to tell you anyway.'"

  "Not him, you fool. Tarlic."

  "'I should like to comply,'" Blays said, pairing the voice with another shake of his head. "'But making fun of a lonely old man is making me start to feel rather mean of spirit.'"

  Gladdic laughed grimly. "Very good."

  "You're a bit sick, do you know that?"

  "I do not laugh at Tarlic. I laugh at our own blindness. Tarlic's memory is not poor because he is old, or because he is trying to recall events that happened in a much-distant past. His memory falters because he is stricken with the grayness."

  Dante snapped his fingers. "The way his head moves. It's not as erratic as the cases I've seen, but he doesn't seem as bad as them in general, either."

  "It further explains why he believes the poisoned man and wife have been dead for an age when their bodies indicate it has been no more than a year or two."

  "The grayness?" Blays said. "Please tell me that's a disease the two of you can cure."

  Gladdic rubbed his chin with his thumb. "Only in its most early stages can it be wholly reversed. However, we may be able to undo some of the damage."

  "To restore him," Dante said.

  "Perhaps more importantly, to restore his memory of his lost people."

  It was dark out, not normally the hour that one went barging in on venerable holy men, but they'd just been talking about stealing the fellow's most meaningful possession, so an unwanted visit seemed almost heroic in comparison. Crickets sang from the grass. The moon was already up, and full, though its light didn't feel quite as welcome since their experience in Silidus' grotto. The eyes of what Dante hoped were raccoons glinted from the trees.

  Tarlic was no longer outside the temple. A bit of smoke was unfurling from one of the chimneys. They passed between the columns holding up the building's front. Moonlight spilled across the floor from clever skylights.

  Though there were plenty of larger rooms in the depths of the temple, they found the holy man in humble quarters. He didn't have a single candle and was using the light of his fire to read a little more of his book.

  He got to his feet. "I am in no mood for visitors. If you have something you need of me, please come back tomorrow morning."

  "Tarlic," Dante said. "My friend and I are physicians. We're afraid you have a condition known as the grayness. Have you heard of it?"

  "Are you calling me diseased? I've asked you to go. Who are you to violate Urt's home like this?"

  "Urt is no longer here." Gladdic loomed over the shorter man. "But we are."

  "I have asked you to leave." Tarlic's eyes darted over his surroundings as if he might be searching for something to strike them with. "Get out. Get out!"

  Dante glanced at Blays. Blays nodded and advanced on the older man. "Pardon me, sir. Would you hold this for a moment?"

  With a deft swoop, he stepped behind Tarlic and snaked their arms together. Tarlic found himself ensnared. He wiggled and thrashed, but couldn't buy himself a half an inch of slack.

  "Get your hands off of me! I have done nothing!" Tarlic's eyes brightened with tears. "You are attacking a servant of Urt!"

  Dante ignored his pleas and drew on the shadows. Beside him, Gladdic did the same. They entered Tarlic's brain.

  "It is there," Gladdic said.

  "I see it." Dante sent a little more nether into the brain's wrinkles. The spots were very small, little bigger than pinpricks, a darker shade than the pink-gray matter around them. "The ether might be better at this."

  "You do not trust yourself to treat it?"

  "I'm saying the ether might be better at this."

  Gladdic smiled. "Then we will see if your premise is correct."

  Dante watched as Gladdic brought the light into Tarlic's brain and settled it over the pinpricks of darkness. This was chancy business. Despite being an organ whose importance might rival that of the heart—there was much argument among physicians on this point—and despite further being immensely rich in blood, the brain wasn't particularly dense in nether, making it difficult to navigate, as its folds and divisions made it the most complicated organ by far.

  Gladdic's expression was so blank he might have been staring out to sea. In that moment, Dante was certain that even if Gladdic were to rupture Tarlic's brain, rendering him a moron, or even incapable of speaking and walking, Gladdic would feel no more than a momentary flash of guilt, which he would then discard as easily as the rind of an orange.

  Then again, perhaps it was that very removal from human concerns that allowed Gladdic to go from one dark spot to the next and erase each one, leaving no sign of damage behind him.

 

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