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They were untouched. Now you know all there is to know, Snake said, sinking to one knee as though
worshipping. There was no one there to worship but Nathan Stack.
“Was he always mad?”
From the first.
“Then those who gave our world to him were mad, and your race was mad to allow it.”
Snake had no answer.
“Perhaps it was supposed to be like this,” Stack said.
He reached down and lifted Snake to his feet, and he touched the shadow creature’s sleek
triangular head. “Friend,” he said.
Snake’s race was incapable of tears. He said, I have waited longer than you can know for
that word.
“I’m sorry it comes at the end.”
Perhaps it was supposed to be like this.
Then there was a swirling of air, a scintillation in the ruined palace, and the owner of the
mountain, the owner of the ruined Earth came to them in a burning bush.
AGAIN, SNAKE? AGAIN YOU ANNOY ME?
The time for toys is ended.
NATHAN STACK YOU BRING TO STOP ME? I SAY WHEN THE TIME IS ENDED. I
SA Y, AS I’VE ALWAYS SAID.
Then, to Nathan Stack:
GO AWAY. FIND A PLACE TO HIDE UNTIL I COME FOR YOU.
Stack ignored the burning bush. He waved his hand, and the cone of safety in which they
stood vanished. “Let’s find him, first, then I know what to do.”
The Deathbird sharpened its talons on the night wind and sailed down through emptiness
toward the cinder of the Earth.
22
Nathan Stack had once contracted pneumonia. He had lain on the operating table as the
surgeon made the small incision in the chest wall. Had he not been stubborn, had he not continued
working around the clock while the pneumonic infection developed into empyema, he would never
have had to go under the knife, even for an operation as safe as a thoracotomy. But he was a Stack,
and so he lay on the operating table as the rubber tube was inserted into the chest cavity to drain off
the pus in the pleural cavity, and he heard someone speak his name.
NATHAN STACK.
He heard it, from far off, across an Arctic vastness; heard it echoing over and over, down an
endless corridor; as the knife sliced.
NATHAN STACK.
He remembered Lilith, with hair the color of dark wine. He remembered taking hours to die
beneath a rock slide as his hunting companions in the pack ripped apart the remains of the bear and
ignored his grunted moans for help. He remembered the impact of the crossbow bolt as it ripped
through his hauberk and split his chest and he died at Agincourt. He remembered the icy water of
the Ohio as it closed over his head and the flatboat disappearing without his mates’ noticing his loss.
He remembered the mustard gas that ate his lungs as he tried to crawl toward a farmhouse near
Verdun. He remembered looking directly into the flash of the bomb and feeling the flesh of his face
melt away. He remembered Snake coming to him in the board room and husking him like corn from
his body. He remembered sleeping in the molten core of the Earth for a quarter of a million years.
Across the dead centuries he heard his mother pleading with him to set her free, to end her
pain. Use the needle. Her voice mingled with the voice of the Earth crying out in endless pain at her
