Julya Daggeron. His mother. How many years had it been since he ran away from home? Twenty? He had not seen her since then. Gorgosa was a big place, even in little Yarruk, and it was easy to disappear without a trace, to become just another mask in the dance of mummers, another shadow in a street of cutthroats, another desperate soul in the city of the lost. He had thought running away from home had been his liberation, but increasingly he wondered whether that was true. Ylia and her annoying inquiries had him questioning his truth.

  No man, he realised, could ever have power over their mother. They exerted a supernatural force on their children. They were suns, possessed of a mightier gravity than any planet. By leaving her, he had tried to break free from her orbit. But this was foolishness. She remained with him, no matter how deep into the Great Dark he ventured. The anger he felt at her betrayal still blazed, hotter than the day he had spied her in that darkened room. And yet, he felt other things too. Relief. Remorse. A life expanded now before his eyes, glimpsed only as it died. He saw in her face—and the grief welling to the surface of her proud features—all that he had lost and sacrificed by taking the road he had taken. Things could have been different.

  “Telos…?” Her voice was hoarse, as if she feared that in speaking above a whisper he would vanish, a phantom.

  Telos’s friends and her companions watched in dumbstruck silence. No one could have predicted such a reunion. Nor did any of them know which way it was going to turn. Would accusations start flying, or would peace be reached?

  Telos and Julya were both still hesitant, like animals that’d encountered each other in the wild. Silence expanded between them—like the gulf of years that’d separated them. At last, Telos mustered his courage to break it.

  “What are you doing here, Mother?”

  Julya let out a bitter laugh at that.

  “Not looking for you, that is a certainty. I suppose I came here…” She swallowed. “Your father is dead, Telos.”

  That was a blow, more obliterating than when Telos had struck the Winedark Sea. His mask cracked yet further and tears flowed.

  “How—”

  “Grief, Telos. He never got over losing you.” Her voice had a cold edge. Steely. His mother had ever been the stronger willed of the two. Telos loved his father, but he was a quiet man, content to be a shadow even in his own home. Telos had learned much from his father. The ways of stealth, and moving unnoticed, and of ingratiating oneself into communities, these were from his father. But where stealth failed, his mother had provided the fire to fight—or to mock.

  Telos now felt the consequences of his actions closing on him like a mailed gauntlet. How could he have not realised what leaving would do to his quiet, loving father? How could he have been so selfish?

  “I’m sorry…”

  Julya laughed, and the cruelty of the laugh was another hammerstrike, but one he felt he deserved.

  “It is a little late, Telos. All has been lost. Family, fortune, happiness. You asked why I was here. I am here because I have nothing left, nothing except to prove myself in one last adventure. I am not dead yet, though my time is coming…”

  The woman before him might have been in her sixties, but she looked as far from death as possible, flushed with health, stern as steel, wiry and with the energy of a coiled spring like her son. But he knew her meaning. She would not live forever. And if truly his father was gone, and the fortune lost, then he saw the sense in coming here, in making one last gambit. His mother was not one to rot away, or to marry for money. No, she had come here to roll the die, and maybe win a bit of glory at the same time. He admired her. He missed her.

  He hated her.

  “I left because you betrayed me, Mother. You betrayed my father, my family. You made me realise I was living a lie.”

  Julya actually sneered.

  “A lie? There was no lie. Your father knew. It was an agreement we made when he determined he no longer held interest in me.:” She sniffed. “You were always more alike than you realised. You kept your hearts behind closed doors.”

  “You were the one who hid everything behind a closed door, Mother!” Telos had not meant to raise his voice, but the men either side of Julya twitched, and Ylia flinched by his side. He hated how he sounded like the petulant seventeen-year-old he had been. Surely, being remade the gods should have changed that? But such was the power of parents to drag their children back to immaturity, to strip their egoistic illusions away and leave them infants again. He wondered whether Beltanus had been the same with his mother.

  Julya sighed.

  “I wounded you. There, I said it. I wounded you. I can admit it. Can you now admit you wounded me?”

  Telos froze. The tears were coming thicker, hotter, more agonising. Yes, he could admit that. He nodded slowly. The steely mask of Julya Daggeron likewise broke and her tears renewed as well. She opened her arms and for once Telos did not plan, think, or scheme, but simply allowed his body to carry him forward into his mother’s embrace.

  She held him in a grip so tight it might have crushed the air from his lungs were he not enhanced; he held her too him and sobbed, and cared naught for the uncomfortable eyes on them.

  Time slipped away while they hugged. Reality left. There was only a feeling of warmth, and a wrong righted, and the lingering grief of a tragedy of that which could not be undone. But there was comfort, still. And love. So much love, that he had repressed all his long life. He wondered if he could ever stop crying, such was the overwhelming flood of love that now bled from him.

  At some point, they parted, and she held his face in her hands, studying his features.

  “You have been changed,” she whispered. “It is not just that you are older… Something has happened to you.”

  He reached up to clasp her hand in his, and she saw the fingers threaded with silver, the gleam of metal and magic that dwelt below the surface of his skin.

  “There is much you need to know,” he said.

  “I’ll get the drinks,” Ylia said brightly.

  ***

  They sat, all together: Telos, Ylia, Jubal, Qala, Julya, and the six explorers who were part of her team. Urgal lay beneath the table, gnawing on a bone of dubious origin. Twelve, in all.

  They talked. And talked. Julya told Telos of his father’s final days, the vicissitudes that’d taken their manse and fortune from them, which mostly amounted to the political machinations of King Gilgamon against the Old Families. Telos in turn told Julya about his adventures over the last few moons, with much help from Jubal, Ylia, and Qala.

  Julya was fascinated by Jubal. She said that when she was a little girl, a theront boy had often come to play with her. He came from over the fields, and bore the same bull features as Jubal, though he was white, not black. One day he went away, and she did not know why. Only in later life did she realised what’d happened. She called it “the silent massacre”.

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  Julya also immediately intuited who Qala was. She did not even try to hide her wonder.

  “I’d worried you were keeping rough company,” Julya said to her son, grinning. “But it seems you can still ally with nobility when occasion calls.”

  Telos grinned in return.

  “I’m not an entirely lost cause, Mother.”

  Julya looked sadly at him.

  “No. You are definitely not.”

  They told her of the Daimons, The Nergal, and what they must do. The six men with her were disbelieving, but Julya cut them off.

  “My son is many things, but not a liar. It was because he could not lie that he left. We must believe his words, and weigh them carefully.”

  “But what proof do we have that he is some kind of half-god?” one of the men—Jacinth, he’d called himself—barked irritably, clearly growing weary of stories and reunions.

  “Can you pass me your sword?”

  Jacinth froze. His eyes glanced at Julya and she nodded.

  Jacinth handed the blade over.

  Telos glanced around to make sure no one was really watching their table. Certainly, they had drawn some eyes, with their dramatic entrance and the presence of Jubal. But now, conversations were returning to their normal rhythm, and focus shifting back to the humdrum affairs that governed survival on the frontier.

  In one motion Telos bent the sword’s steel as though it were a vine, forming a knot, and passed the blade back to Jacinth, whose eyes bulged out of their sockets. The others stared at him. Even Julya looked surprised. She gave a little cough.

  “Well… Ahem… I think that proves it, don’t you?” she said.

  Jacinth nodded silently. His astonishment was still overriding his annoyance at losing a weapon.

  “The Kwei-Shin put their faith in Telos,” Qala said. “We must now do the same. Impossible though it may seem, your son is the key to victory over the Daimons.”

  Julya sniffed.

  “I hardly think it impossible. I always knew he was destined for greatness. I had just hoped that I would be at his side when it happened.”

  Tears glistened in her eyes again. Telos reached over and clasped her hand. They were so alike, he realised. He had god-strength, but she had a different calibre of strength altogether.

  “Maybe you can be,” Telos said. “We are heading deep into Memory in search of the Nergal. You could come with us.”

  Julya smiled at that.

  “You would bring your mother into danger?”

  “I didn’t mean—you wouldn’t have to—”

  She laughed, clearly enjoying toying with her son.

  “I jest, Telos. I know there are battles to come in which an old woman will have no place. But we can accompany you on the way. Indeed, we can perhaps be of some assistance…” She made a motion to one of the men—Heploss. He scowled.

  “I do not think we should show them, m’lady.”

  “Nonsense, Heploss. This is my son.”

  Heploss kept his voice lowered, “But no one else has discovered…”

  “Nonsense!” she snarled again. “Give me that.”

  She filched a roll of parchment from his inner pocket with the speed of a pickpocket. Telos couldn’t help but grin. Why was it the nobility made such natural thieves? He supposed at its root, thievery was the ability to recognise opportunities and act on them with speed, and being a great aristocrat was no different.

  Julya rolled the parchment out across their table. It was a map of incredibly intricate detail, especially as Telos had always been told that Memory was largely uncharted.

  “What Heploss is unwilling to divulge is a new lead on the location of the Shadow Market,” Julya said. “An old friend of your father’s, who has sadly passed away, bequeathed this to me on his deathbed. Why, I am not entirely sure. He wanted me to have it for his sake, I suppose.” She sniffed again, this time to hold back grief. “Anyway… It is a marvellous map. He made it. But the fevers of this place did for him. We intend to locate the Shadow Market. And who knows, it may be a good place to start asking questions about your… weapon.”

  Telos nodded, and was about to speak, but he saw Ylia staring at the map, a look on his face of discomfort, maybe even fear.

  “What’s the matter, Ylia?”

  She swallowed. “It’s just… My father. He went in search of the Shadow Market too. It changed him. I never knew who he was before that, but sometimes, I felt as if I saw glimpses of that man… It is not a holy place, Telos. I… I have this feeling of foreboding.”

  Telos nodded. He understood. This journey would dredge up memories for her. Her father had come here as a young explorer. And now your mother is here too. What a weird coincidence.

  But he was beginning to believe there were no coincidences. If Nereth could manipulate his Fate, then there was a greater Destiny at hand, a path laid before him. He knew not why he had been chosen. Danyil had explained it was his ability to adapt, but that was not the whole story. Fate had marked him, long before he had seen Nereth bathing in the pool, before he had seen Danyil burning in the fire. He’d known it from childhood, he realised. There had always been this hovering spirit over his life, a sense that one day, he would be called. Leaving home had been part of answering that call, but not the full story.

  He had felt Nereth’s hand on his life less these last few moons. He had expected disaster to strike Hope’s Sojourn as they crossed the sea, but they had made it to Memory without major incident. He wondered, in part, whether that was because in his heart of hearts he did not want to go to Memory. Nereth had told him the curse would stop him getting what he wanted, so perhaps that was part of it.

  Whatever the reason for the lapse in her aggression, rather than relieved, he felt more anxious. Was the goddess saving up some horror to unleash on him at the worst moment? Was reuniting with his mother only a prelude to greater loss and disaster?

  You cannot think like that. You must venture on, regardless of the risk.

  “Ylia,” Telos said, realising he had been silent for many moments, and not answered her statement. “I’m sorry if this is bringing up the past, for you.” He glanced at his mother. “It seems to be the hour for ghosts from our past to appear.”

  Julya slapped him. It actually hurt. Gods, but his mother was strong.

  “I am not a ghost!” she said, haughtily.

  Telos laughed.

  “No, Mother. You are very substantial indeed.”

  Qala and Jubal were both laughing.

  “Don’t you two laugh!” Telos quipped. “You’ll be next if Fate keeps this up.”

  “Well, if I meet my brother somewhere in the jungle, it shall make my life a lot easier,” Qala said.

  “That’s dark…” Ylia said. But she was grinning.

  Qala shrugged.

  “Sometimes, you will find things on the Way. They are sent their to aid you. One is a fool to ignore them.”

  Qala looked pointedly at Telos, and he glanced at his mother. She smiled, and he felt a strange rightness about everything. Perhaps Qala was right. His life had been marred by the vicissitudes of Nereth, but clearly, there was some other force at play, a positive force, dare he say it. His bad luck was being matched by the good. He knew not where this luck came from, but it seemed some guiding hand wished to deliver him—and the planet—from the clutches of death. If it was a god, then it was an invisible god, a different kind of god to the charismatic, larger-than-life figures of the Nilldoranians. This was a god that permeated all.

  Telos pushed aside thoughts of religion and rose. He extended a hand to Julya. The woman in the tavern had started singing a new song, jauntier than the last. It was still no jig, but it would have to do.

  “Come, Mother. I wish to have a dance with you. We can see if I remember the courtly steps.”

  Julya looked at him in utter perplexity and astonishment. Then she burst out laughing. She took his hands and rose with him.

  “In some ways, you have not changed Telos. You still insist on the element of surprise at every turn.”

  Telos grinned.

  “What is life without a surprise or two? Come, my feet must caper!”