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The Measure of a Man

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"Father!" screamed Bronze, rocking the boat in his haste to sit up, feeling like one who has been long deprived of sleep. "Father!"

He turned his eyes up to the heavens. A play was being enacted there for his amusement. Above, the stars were unwinking, also constant. Suns and worlds by the million. Dizzying constellations, cold fire in every primary hue. As he watched, the sky washed from violet to ebony. A meteor etched a brief, spectacular arc below the great star Luinil and winked out near Nowruz galaxy. The stars were as indifferent to this as they were to wars, crucifixions, resurrections. This pleased him.

The Logarian names that the ancient astronomers had given the heavens made him think. Worlds rose and fell before him. Empires were built across shining sands where forever machines toiled in abstract electronic frenzies. Empires declined, fell, and rose again when their heirs inherited the earth. Wheels that had spun like silent liquid moved more slowly, began to squeak, began to scream, stopped. Sand choked the stainless steel gutters of concentric streets below dark skies full of stars like beds of cold jewels. And through it all, a dying wind of change blew, bringing with it the ghastly smell of winter. Bronze watched as the world kept moving on.

"What is it?" said Tess, her voice dry with concern.

"Another dream," thought Cobalion's disembodied voice. The boat was so small that the god's physical weight would have drowned it. "From what our intelligence is reporting, that's to be expected."

"Intelligence?" said Bronze, his back popping audibly. "Is something going on?"

"Something's always going on," said Tess.

"There comes a rumor from the southeast, as faint as it may be," said Cobalion. "The Association fleet has returned from the battle. I am not yet certain of how they fared, but there is no more Eclipse stronghold on Crescent Island. They all fled before the bombardment began."

"Then will the island be free of enemies?" said Bronze.

"It cannot be said if they left a rearguard or not," said Cobalion, "but we must expect spies, as we always do. That is not the question I had expected you to ask, though." The voice was toneless. "What I am going to say will rock you. It might not even be true, but there's a chance."

"Get on with it, Cobalion," said Tess. "You've been acting strange ever since we got down from the mountains."

"Tess, do you wonder why we're heading for the northwest shore of the island, instead of Murkwater City's harbor? We'll hit no sound port here, only sandbars and beaches. Do you wonder why I set us on this course?"

"I thought we were avoiding the city because it was too dangerous," said Tess.

"The Gym's in the city," said Bronze. "We'll have to go there eventually."

"We're to land on the northwest shore because there is something we have to do there."

"Do what? You're being insane, Cobalion."

"I don't know," said Cobalion. "For every thing I do know, there are a hundred things I don't. You, both of you, will have to reconcile yourselves to that fact. The world has moved on from the days of spirits and gods, we say. It's come back a little, we've gotten a little stronger, we've unfaded for now, but the essential is that this is a world of Men. When our time ended, it went like a great receding wave, leaving only wreckage behind: wreckage that sometimes looks like a Spirit World."

"Well, make a guess!" said Tess.

"Leave him be," said Bronze. "The gods don't guess. But you are being horribly obtuse, Cobalion. I need to get back to sleep."

"Not true, Bronze. Sometimes the gods do guess," Cobalion said, surprising them both. "When guessing's the only thing left, sometimes they do. The answer, the thing Arceus told me to do, is to find some people. The real question is who those people are, and I can only tell you the very vague details. I'm saying that I believe so, so I'm making a guess."

"Well, let's hear the vagueness," said Bronze.

"Again, I cannot be completely sure. This might be some attempt at misdirection by the Enemy."

"But you said that Arceus told you we needed to wait for someone, and Arceus is never wrong."

"What I am saying, Bronze, is that your parents have escaped. Here is the thing you have been waiting for all this time."

...

"Escaped?" Tess heard his slow voice, but there was a frantic light in his eyes. "How? Where?"

"I guess Jake had something to so with it. And if it is true, they should be in the middle of the jungle. How they could make it to us, or us to them, it's impossible to tell."

Bronze felt gooseflesh crawl up his back and down his arms. His mouth was suddenly dry. "Is this it, Cobalion? Will I see them again?"

"Even if I swore in the name of ARCS Elyon, the god of the fathers of Hisui and Logaria, the lord who is the master of the fates of the earth, who rules not only this world but all worlds that I would tell you my answer, it would not make you any closer to the truth."

"It's not like remembering the future, then," said Bronze. "I won't give myself any hopes of that. Not that, not ever, not till it happens. But that's not all, is it?"

The sea-wind was getting stronger, but now there was a warm hint of the scent of land to it. It was dark ahead, and in the distance was a black place where the light of moon and star did not brighten. The electric motor was nearly soundless except for a gentle humming, plodding along the computer's plotted course. The boat had been slowing for the past minute, as if its robot brain was expecting a rough landing.

"No. Remember how we figured out that the Djinn needed the Brick to open the door to another world? Now I'm sure, within an acceptable margin of error, where that door will be: what place in this universe, this material universe that we live in, where the end of earth will be born."

"So where the last battle will take place," said Tess, "the place where the quest ends."

"Yes, the place where the thin fate of this world will be decided," said Cobalion, his voice settling into ritual splendor. "I will now tell you a tale that comes from the time of the Logarians, in the days before they hanged themselves with pride like a noose and disappeared from the earth. They were great men who learned much of the sciences. Tess, there was a time, yet a hundred generations ago, when mankind had achieved enough technical and scientific prowess to chip a few splinters from the great stone pillar of the mind of Arceus Even so, the false light of science (knowledge, if you like) shone in only Logaria and Hisui. Bronze's many-times-great grandfathers conquered cancer, which they called the disease-that-rots, almost 'conquered' aging using methods nearly as bad as the things the Alliance does today, went to space..."

"I don't believe that," said Tess flatly.

To this Cobalion merely laughed and answered, "You needn't. Yet it was so, for I was there. They made or discovered a hundred other marvelous baubles. But this wealth of information produced little or no insight, save what served to corrupt their minds and bodies. There were no great odes written to the wonders of artificial insemination, having babies from frozen mansperm, or to the great engines that ran on power from the sun. Few if any seemed to have grasped a true principle of reality: new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries from Arceus. All the wonder they made was put beyond their comprehension because the Logarians did not care for it, save for the advances in the fields that might lead them to immortality. But then the demon Lucius came, and Tar-Castamir the Golden, the last emperor of Logaria. They learned the dark arts, made furnaces and guns, dreadnaughts and cannons that blew thunder, dabbling in filth, extending their evil beyond all humanity."

"But they fought the Djinn, didn't they?" cried Tess. "Didn't Arceus remember that?"

Every time the story was told, in whatever way, she hoped that it would end differently. But the pages could not be rewritten.

"Yes, they fought the Djinn, but by the time of Tar-Castamir that generation had died and the lords of Logaria and their people were no better than the Dark Lord. Their sin undid all. They broke their minds with perversions, littered the wild valleys with the bones of their slain children offered to Mbelekoro, forced the survivors among their enemies to grind the corpses of their dead families into dust, skinned..."

"Stop it!" Bronze yelled. "What's the point of saying all that? To scare her? Or are you just catching a temper?"

"You were not there," said Cobalion, and the tone of his flat iron voice made Bronze flinch backward. "I was. That should be enough. And it is for this reason and many others, Southstar, that I do not want Logaria to return, not under you or anyone else. But I help you because Arceus wills it. One must have faith."

"So even angels have to stick to their catechisms, eh?"

"Yes, all created beings must. But the point is that I think, I guess, that this portal might be something the Logarians wrote about. I don't guess it goes to a where or when that we would recognize. Some kind of gateway, like a pivot on a teetering board between this world and the one the Djinn wants to get to. And that mean I can find where that portal is. This portal and the realm around it are things far greater than the Un-Cypress or me, or the little fellowship we three have made."

"Are you saying that this portal is not located on the planet?" said Bronze.

"It is not so simple. Space is not closed like a bottle. Some of the ancients believed that the Earth was flat, and that conception of the world is metaphysically the right one. It's the world that I first saw being formed when I was a young brightling. There were points of power standing around the eternal edge of the Earth, connected in pairs. Where the lines crossing the center is the central nexus of all things that happen."

"But the world isn't flat," said Tess hesitantly. "And I don't see any drop-off nearby, that's sure. This portal couldn't exist."

"It does. You are thinking of an actual border, a great chasm with cataracts of water falling forever and ever. That is influenced by apocalyptic Hisuian imagery. The gateway is there and always was. In the past the world actually was flat, for a time, and then the border-portals really could get you to the center, if you just followed them. The world is no longer a disc, but these points still exist, and so does the center."

"Wait," said Tess, wishing she could see Cobalion's face and have something other than a voice to interpret. "First, tell me where the points are and what they do."

"Illix Forest, Viridian Forest, Mount Athras, the Sinnohian lakes, to name only a few," said Cobalion. "Places of great power where the remnants of the past still linger strong. Their roads to the center have been cut ever since the ruin of Logaria, but that middle portal, the place where the Djinn will make the junction between the premodern and the modern, is on the greatest point of power: the point in the center. Bronze, you know where the Golden Company went. You know where the center was."

...

Beulah!

He knew, thinking of Beulah, the paradise of Easternesse beyond the sea, the deathless land of old, Melek Gan-Eden, where Tor and Embla, the Father of Men and the Mother of Women, had been formed by the breath and will of ARCS from the diatoms of dust. New possibilities opened and future-branches diverged. He smelt on the wind a hint of forgotten flowers, grown in grass that grew no longer on mortal shores, something half-immortal caused by the mingling of the undying with a world drowning in mortality. There the Golden Company had gone and returned, there the Logarians had slit their throats to reach, there his thought now turned, a land of gold and the graveyard where all the false dreams of darkened men who feared death and would not wait upon hope rested unquiet. It was utterly terrifying and pleasurable to think that such a place might still be reached, and might have to.

Another idea occurred to him, a very bad idea. "It's in Beulah, then," he said. "Alright. But knowing that doesn't help us. Eden was removed from the circles of the world so that the Djinn or his servants would not be able to find it, if the Legends are anything to quote. If the Djinn can reach it, we've lost. And if we can follow him, then what comfort this that? Would Arceus have the final cataclysm be in a land that has not known death or fear?"

"Beulah is gone," said Cobalion. "There is no way to it save the road through sea and sky, which Arceus alone controls. No, the Djinn and his cattle will not go that way! But the worlds are not closed shut so utterly. Other ways he might find, where his power permits him to go, where the power of the gods is lacking. There is one way that he may enter Beulah, and find the center. If this happens, he will repair the gateway with the Bronze Brick, and then the end will come."

"I will not, in all worlds, accept that possibility," said Bronze. "If the Djinn can defeat the bans of Arceus, to go where he is not permitted, then all our hopes as dust and ash in our mouths. Heaven itself would be built on twigs, God Himself meaningless. What you say is impossible."

"He cannot go the Beulah proper, that is certain," said Cobalion heavily. "But how do you think the Dark Lord built the gateway by the time of the Legends of Arceus in the first place? There are other worlds than this one, there are ways to enter those from this one, and ways to enter this world from others. I do not doubt that if the Djinn wishes to return to the place of his might, he will be able to manage it. Will he wreck ruin in Beulah itself? No; if that is so, then indeed all our faith is for nothing. But reaching the center of power, the place where the foundations of Imbar could be 'knocked away', is that a thing beyond his grasp?"

"Maybe it is," said Tess, snapping her fingers as if coming up with a point. "Cobalion, if he can return there anytime, why hasn't he just sent his armies to carpet-bomb us, take the Brick, and make the sky fall quietly without causing all the chaos he already has? What if he's just lashing out because destroying creation is impossible?" An image of the Dark Lord futility striking a mountain with a hammer while screaming with frustration came upon her, vaguely amusing.

"We in Heaven are struggling every day to keep them from finding you," said Cobalion, "and if they get past and find out where the Brick is, they will carpet-bomb us, you can be sure. And Tess, you may be right. The Djinn could really be boxed in. But even if that's the case, he is still very dangerous, and we won't be able to have a functioning civilization much longer if he gets any stronger. I hope what you say is true, that the old ways are evaporated and kept safe from him, though I do not suspect it. There are none in Deep Heaven who can say now if such a thing might be true. Already many have been taken into your camp. I have not."

"It will be in Beulah," said Bronze with the firmness of an incantation, and Tess knew that he knew. It would be in Beulah, no doubt about it. The surety of the thought, the weight of fate and foresight, rested on his words. He had never been a boy who neglected to understand himself deeply, though he cared not to; the concept of self-consciousness was perfectly familiar to him. But his way was to act, to quickly consult his own interior, utterly mysterious workings, and then act. Of them all, he had been the most perfectly made, a boy whose deeply pragmatic core was encased in a complex box that consisted of romanticism. He took one of those quick looks inside now and decided to tell her everything with it.

Oh God Almighty, he's made a convert of me twice, she thought.

"Enough counsel and excitement for one night," said Cobalion. "It's nearly time to land. I'll tell you what I know about this portal specifically and what I believe will happen in the next month, what I believe is happening still, tomorrow."

With that the voice departed and he said no more.

Tess wrapped herself in a blanket and lay down in the boat. Bronze listened to her fall asleep, lying quietly, his open eyes looking into the darkness long after her breathing had evened out into a single easy note.

It was hard to be Tess, he thought, but there was no terrible purpose for her. There was no fate of empires. That was fine and he wanted to keep it that way. Even in the graveyard that this world had become, it was fine that she should remain less troubled than he.

Enjoy it while you can, he thought, because there is more death ahead. We have come to a stream of blood. That it will lead us to a river of the same stuff, I have no doubt. And, further along, to an ocean. In this world the graves yawn and none of the dead rest easy.

As the lee shore approached with the dawn, he slept briefly, dreaming of his parents and Jake.

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He was the largest creature in the forest which had once been known as the Great Crescent Jungle, and he was the oldest. Many of the huge old mahogany trees that Bronze noticed in the wooded valleys in the mountain clefts had been little more than twigs sprouting from the ground when the creature came out of the dim unknown reaches of the Space beyond Space like a brutal, wandering king.

Once, the Old People, those who had dwelt in Roria before the Logarians came, had lived in the Woods (from time to time archeologists found their leavings), and they had gone in fear of the colossal, undying monster. They had tried to kill him when they first discovered they were not alone in the new territory to which they had come, but although their arrows enraged him, they did no serious damage. And he was not confused about the source of his torment, as were the other beasts of the forest, even the predatory Liepard which denned and littered in the sandhills to the west. No; he knew where the arrows came from. And for every arrow which found its mark in the flesh below his scaly pelt, he took three, four, perhaps as many as half a dozen of the Old People. Children if he could get them; women if he could not. Their warriors he disdained, and this was the final humiliation.

Eventually, as his real nature became clear to them, their efforts to kill him ceased. He was, of course, a demon incarnate, or the shadow of a god. They called him Ir, which to these people meant "the world beneath the world." He stood seventy feet high, and after forty or more centuries of undisputed rule in the jungle while the world came and went and moved on around Crescent Island, he was dying. Perhaps the instrument of his death had at first been a microscopic organism in something he had eaten or drunk; perhaps it was old age; more likely a combination of both. The cause didn't matter; the ultimate result, a rapidly multiplying colony of parasites foraging within his fabulous brain, did. After years of calculating, brutal sanity, Ir had run mad.

Ir had known men were in his shore-woods again; he ruled the jungle and although it was vast, nothing of importance that happened there escaped his attention for long. The Eclipse men who came to use the island, speaking of powers and gods and vast things that Ir cared nothing for, had tolerated him, given him such gifts that he could use, satisfied his desire for sweet meat. Sometimes prisoners were sent to his den and report brought back to the Djinn of what play had been made. Aside from the adult websites, the recordings of the massacres were some of the most popular entertainment among the Alliance staff. The creature Ir reminded the Djinn of his own pet Watcher, a spider-creature that had guarded his greatest secret, now long wounded or dead by the blade of Rei of Hisui, succumbed to a fate unknown in the long years of his absence. Ir knew nothing of it: the Djinn considered him his pet fish, and a fish does not know its owner.

He had drawn away from the newcomers when they arrived in their little boat, not because he was afraid but because he had no business with them, nor they with him. There was some deep peril about them that it preferred not to tempt. Then the parasites had begun their work, and as his madness increased he became sure that it was the Old People again, that the trap-setters and forest-burners had returned and would soon set about their old, stupid mischief once more. Only as he lay in his final den some thirty miles from the place of the newcomers, sicker with each day's dawning than he had been at sunset the night before, had he come to believe that the Old People had finally found some mischief which worked: poison.

He came this time not to take revenge for some petty wound but to stamp them out entirely before their poison could finish having its way with him, and as he travelled, all thought ceased. What was left was red rage, the rusty buzz of the things in his head, the turning things between his ears which had once done their work in smooth silence, and an eerily enhanced sense of smell which led him unerringly toward the camp of the two pilgrims. He could only find the scent of two humans, their sweet man-odors, but there was a third being he would need to watch out for.

The Guzzlord, whose real name was not Ir but something else entirely, made his way through the jungle like a moving building, a black tower with glowing blue eyes. Those eyes glowed red around their edges with fever and madness. His huge head, now wearing a garland of broken branches and fir-needles, swung ceaselessly from side to side. Every now and then he would vomit and sneeze in a muffled explosion of sound and clouds of squirming white parasites would be discharged from his dripping nostrils and mouth. His claws, armed with curved talons three feet in length, tore at the trees. He walked upright, sinking deep tracks in the soft black soil under the trees. He reeked of fresh balsam and old, sour dung.

The things in his head whirred and squealed, squealed and whirred. The course of the Guzzlord remained almost constant: a straight line that would lead him to the camp of those who had dared return to his forest, who had dared fill his head with dark green agony. Old People or New People, they would die. When he came to a dead tree, he sometimes left the straight path long enough to push it down. The dry, explosive roar of its fall pleased him; when the tree had finally collapsed its rotten length on the forest floor or come to rest against one of its mates, the Guzzlord would push on through slanting bars of sunlight turned misty with floating motes of sawdust.

...

Robert and Lily went on through the next day and camped in another field. The edges of this clearing had been formed by dark, sweet-smelling trees that curved around it in a ragged semicircle. To the north, the ground broke off and dropped three hundred feet in a series of crumbling shale ledges and fractured cliffs, like a giant's set of stairs. A clear stream ran out of the jungle and across the center of the clearing, first bubbling through a deep channel in the spongy earth and friable stone, then pouring across the splintery rock floor which sloped down to the place where the land dropped away.

The water descended the steps in a series of waterfalls and made any number of pretty, wavering rainbows. Beyond the edge of the drop-off was a magnificent deep valley, choked with more mahoganies and a few great old kapok trees which refused to be crowded out. These latter towered green and lush, trees which might have been old when the empire from which Robert was sired was yet young; he could see no sign that the jung;e had ever burned, although he supposed it must have drawn lightning at some time or other. Nor would lightning have been the only danger. There had been people in this forest in some distant time; Robert had come across their leavings on several occasions over the past days. They were primitive artifacts, for the most part, but they included shards of pottery that could only have been cast in fire. And fire was evil stuff that delighted in escaping the hands that created it.

Above this scene arched a blameless blue sky in which a few Starly circled some miles off, crying in their rusty voices. They seemed restless, as if a storm were on the way, but Robert had sniffed the air and there was no rain in it.

A large boulder sat next to the stream and they made morning meal and held palaver. Both Lily and Robert drank from the jungle stream, heedless of the organisms and floating eggs that grew into leeches, knowing their Logarian and Hisuian physiologies would keep them alive. There were chips of rocks that washed up by the river bed; each one was heavily flecked with mica, and they glittered like lenses in the warm morning light.

"Last chance," said Robert. "If your stomach feels uncomfortable, even the slightest bit, tell me now. We didn't come here to die from food poisoning."

"What if I said yes?" said Lily, and he saw a sardonic glint in her eye. It was like sunlight reflected off a bar of steel. "Would you bind me up and walk me on a death march to the sea?"

Robert smiled. He had done more smiling this last day than he had done in the five weeks that had come before them. "I can't do that, and you know it. You may slap a child to correct him, or her, but..."

"You know, slapping the kids is frowned on by the better class of people," said Lily dryly.

Robert shrugged. It was hard for him to imagine the non-Arcean psychology; did not the Coda say "Spare not the birch so you spoil not the child"? But things were different outside of Roria, he ought to know.

"In any case, we are not children. It would be wrong for me to treat you as if you were. And if more tests were needed, you passed them."

Lily listened and realized she heard a noise. As the sound got louder Robert also noticed and began to sort them out. One was a low, deep, humming noise. He could feel it in his feet, a faint vibration, as if some large piece of machinery was running in the earth. Above it, closer and more urgent, were crisscrossing sounds like bright scratches, squeals, squeaks, and chitterings.

Robert placed his mouth against Lily's ear and said, "I think there's little danger if we're quiet."

They moved off from the stone for another five yards and then Robert stopped again. He drew a sharpened spear he had whittled and used it to brush aside a branch that lay heavy with sunrise-tinted leaves. Lily looked through this small opening and into the clearing.

A Braviary landed in the dirt, the thing which had been making the noises. Someone was riding atop it without a flying harness or bit; a Kantorim with big, watery eyes that seemed to be at risk of falling from their sockets, dressed in the remains of a grey prisoner's uniform. Robert picked up a sharp stone at his feet and gave Lily the fire-hardened stake, slowly stepping out to greet the man who had escaped with them.

"God, where've you been?" said the Kantorim before Robert could speak. "Do you know what kind of hunt I've been on to find you?"

"I'd wondered where you went myself," said Robert. "We came close to putting a spear in your foolish head."

"Hopefully you'd have gotten a good look at me first," said the Kantorim.

"Here is Robert Tercano," said Robert in the old fashion. "Hail ye welcome; may we do thee good."

"Stephan of Anthien, Gym Leader, master of all the birds in the sky, does thee good," said Stephen. "And if you are Robert Tercano, then I know your son Bronze. He passed through on the day of the battle and fought me manfully."

Robert's lips twitched in a smile. "Sit with me, friend. Together we'll make counsel and long palaver."

"How can I trust you?" said Stephan, and Robert knew that he truly feared for his life.

"It is said in the Hisuian Coda not to swear by Arceus for simple dealings and agreements," said Robert. "A simple yes or no is satisfactory to God. But for you, because you treated my son well, I promise on the powers that sit enthroned in Heaven that I will not attack you."

...

The three sat on the rock again and made talk. Robert and Lily told him their story for an hour and Stephan gave his account of being captured by the Alliance's men. "I feel sorry for the Eclipse soldiers," he whispered. "Isn't that crazy?"

"Not at all," said Lily. "They are creatures of great sadness, I think, in their own strange way. We are going to put them out of their misery."

"I command you on your skills," said Robert. "How did you get that Braviary to fly you?"

"There is an art to calling those sorts of Pokemon," said Stephan. "Noble Braviary, beloved to Rayquaza, speed's wing, ally to the Arceus-friends. I am a changed man." He breathed deep and stroked the Braviary's silky head. "I had fled the battle when I went far, far up into the land. A great waterfall I climbed. I stood on the shore of a pool, a place of great awe in all the worlds. The walls of it go up farther than you can see, and huge and holy images are cut in them: the work of old times, I think. There is the fall called to the ancient Logarians the Mountain of Water. I stood there alone with God, and ever since my heart has been lighter and my thoughts deeper. Then Braviary came to me and carried me food, and also snowmelt from the mountains. I had thought to look for you, not knowing what had happened, and here we are now."

"We need your help," said Lily. "We're heading northwest but it's a slow going. Will you bring us on your Pokemon?"

"Will it bear us?" said Robert.

"I will bring you," said Stephan, "and if a Braviary will fly with a sinner such as I, then it will carry you, even if you were made of stone."

"There is not one righteous man," said Robert heavily. "I made a boy think he had the strength to be king and doomed him to a quest of blood. My wife has fallen into the penalties for schemes that I started. Another boy I fooled: he thought I held some hope for him, but there was nothing but emptiness in my hands. He fought for us so that we may live free and might be dead or worse for the effort."

"Jake would be a madman or their slave if you hadn't given him something to live for," Lily said softly. "And you know I share responsibility with you for everything we taught our son."

"I want to talk with Bronze," said Robert, speaking in a thick voice he hardly recognized as his own. "He's gotten a girl to come along with him, Jake told me. The needs that his age creates I can understand, but she's in mortal danger every second Bronze keeps her around. It's irresponsible. I ought to call him a fool for not turning back and running for the hills when we got taken."

"Robert," said Stephan, "I think your son has moved beyond you and into his own fate."

"No thanks to me," said Robert, realizing this to further disgust. "Me and my lessons. Me and my damn lessons." He turned to Lily. "I tell you, this second Logarian empire seems like a rotten dream. There's a reason that the first one fell. If I had two cents, it'd go and tell our son how stupid he's been, how—"

"How he's no better than his father?" said Lily in that same mild voice. "Your self-beating and your complaints about your son are neither unexpected nor welcome."

The wind had been knocked out of him and he found he couldn't talk. Probably just as well...seems like every time I open my mouth I stick my foot into it.

"Well, no man has become great by losing his first calling," said Stephan. "If what he faced me with was even a tenth of his skill, then he will make the empire again. Good or bad, I can't judge. But it will happen as surely as night follows sunset. Robert, if Bronze is still striving and you're stuck in this gloom, then he is free."

"I wish I had just been a normal father, my wife a normal woman, and my son a normal boy," said Robert, putting his face in his hands. Some tears came, weakly, as if he had little moisture to give. "Oh God, is that too much to ask? I want nothing of this empire. I'd rather grow old. I'd rather see the girls chase after my son. I'd rather be like the chiefs before me who died untroubled. No one needs a Logarian Empire anymore. Why couldn't I have seen that the world moved on? Why didn't I throw the Brick and the Bottle away? Why doesn't Bronze see that what he's doing shouldn't be done?"

"The world still needs Logaria," said Lily. "They just don't know it."

"What have we become?" asked Robert. "What are we anymore?"

"No one knows," said Stephan. "No one in Roria knows."

But I know, father, Robert heard Bronze say, as he knew the boy would. We are still Logarians. However diluted, the blood of Tar-Elrosi and Tar-Silmathrim flows in our veins. I regret nothing of what you taught me: it was all for Arceus. What I do is necessary. We understand the world as it was, not for the way we would wish it to be. We do what the other chiefs-in-exile have feared to do. I set aside my own comfort, safety and perhaps even my immortal soul so that our people can once again take their place as leaders of the world; so that our religion might become dominant and not crushed under the heel of the Djinn. I will do what I have to do to acquire strength and gain victory. The first chiefs were afraid and wanted no new empire, thinking that it would become evil like the first. But we saw through the ways of wickedness and deceit, passed through, and came out virtuous on the other side. There is now another way to breathe back life into the dream that was Southernesse.

"My son, my son, why do we have to live in this time of death?" said Robert, and then tears overcame the last resistance. "I have lost my way. I am less than what I was."

If you are so miserable, than curse God and die, said a voice silkily into his ear. "Renege. Cast away all thoughts of the Empire. Go your way, chief, and begin the long job of saving your soul."

But Bronze had the final say. He gathered himself. Shaken and alone, enwrapt in the darkness, terrified of an ultimate meaning rushing at him, he gathered himself and uttered the final answer on that subject:

"I came into this world alone, and alone I may leave it," said Robert through the veil of his anguish, looking up to the clearing that was by now only a tear-blurred haze. "But I have no more time for foolishness. Arceus gives and takes away. Blessed be He."

And they sat there and did not speak, for they had questions to which was no answer.

...

About this time the Company's boat landed in the dawn. The beach was white but covered in standing stones dyed yellow in seagull guano. In the morning Tess's Gabite had gone out to catch a rabbit and skin it. The meat went into a pot over a fire that Bronze had set up on the shore; an enfleshed Cobalion taught her how to stretch the skin between two different sticks, tying it with bits of hide from Bronze's bag. Later on, after the morning meal, Gabite would begin scraping it clean. At the campfire, Bronze was crumbling some arcane, and no doubt delicious, wood-herbs into the pot.

"Where'd you learn all that?" she asked.

"Father and mother," said Bronze, before moving away from the cauldron and resumed work on cleaning another rabbit pelt, all without looking up. "They sometimes took me out to the hills and I learned the things they had to teach: how to shoot, to fight, to hunt, to gut and clean what they had killed. Even how to stretch, then tan and cure the hides of those kills. There's a bunch of pelts hanging in my room at the house in Mitis Town. Say, I wonder if it's been foreclosed..."

"Not yet," said Cobalion, looking into the forest and listening.

"They wanted me to use as much as it was possible to use so that no part of the animal was wasted," continued Bronze, "how to find north or south by the stars, how to listen to the forest. Before I met you, Tess, I was having a mild crisis of confidence. My training didn't seem to help me survive. But the lessons which are remembered the longest are always the ones that are self-taught. Back when the quest began, there wasn't a bone of king in me, just a pompous, verbose tyrant. I was an arrogant little fool only a while ago."

"And you're not now?" said Tess.

Bronze put down the pelt he was working on and began to laugh. The whole quest, the long, scary, confusing, exhilarating, terrifying, mysterious quest, was condensed in great, roaring sobs of laughter. He slumped, head thrown back, hands clutching his belly, tears streaming down his face. He laughed himself hoarse. He would almost stop and then some line from Tess's past, well-meaning critiques would come back to him and he would be off to the races again. He tried to speak, but laughter pealed out whenever he tried.

"He's gone insane!" Tess cried to Cobalion. "He's gone insane, really! I knew he was going to break, I just knew! Oh, where am I going to go?"

At last the spasms began to taper off to giggles. He wiped his arm across his streaming eyes and said, "I'm sorry, Tess. It's just that...well...you made me realize that no one really can be king. It was all very... very rich...and very sym...sym..."

But he couldn't finish. He doubled up with laughter again, holding his throbbing belly. At last he did become aware that Cobalion was standing by the forest, looking at him with an expression of friendly detachment tinctured with faint curiosity.

"Stop laughing!" Tess said, beginning to giggle herself. "Stop or you'll have a stroke!"

"You're right," said Bronze, controlling himself with an effort. "Yes, I am still very prideful. I am proud of my lineage, proud of what I have lived through and what is to come. It can't last forever, of course. Arceanism is all about realizing that God is infinitely superior to you and abusing yourself before Him. But pride has given people the motivation to do some of the most heroic and glorious things in all of history."

"I hope the laughter has addled your brains," said Cobalion. "Pride is not good, even if Arceus can make good of it, as He always does. You are speaking of dignity, which is a good pride. Hold yourself with dignity, not pride. Pride is for the tyrants. The good king has dignity, but he'll provide for his subjects and not fit them to his whims. A necessary consequence of pride is to disdain those under you."

"Thanks, Cobalion," said Bronze, grinning softly. "I needed that."

When the first Starly rose in the air, cawing affrightedly, he did not hear. He was already thinking, hoping, that he might see another sign before long. Bronze went back to the pelt-work. Cobalion smelled the air.

...

It was an hour later before Cobalion heard the Guzzlord approaching. He heard it before Bronze or Tess did, but not much before: he was lost in that high daze of concentration that accompanies the creative impulse of the gods, and indeed all the Children of Arceus, at its sweetest and most powerful. These impulses were emotions, which he was not familiar with, and usually attempted to suppress them. Now when one had been let through he was a willing prisoner, a duller blade.

He was pulled from his daze not by the sound of falling trees but by the noise of rapid thunder from a storm to the south. He snorted and suffered the sweet humiliation of embarrassment which comes to all flesh: the noise had sounded just like a horse. Bronze looked up, smiling, and brushed hair from his forehead with a grease-covered hand. In that moment, sitting with his back against a tall palm on the beach, his face crisscrossed with opposing beams of green-gold forest light, he looked handsome indeed, a young man with unruly dark hair that constantly tried to spill across his high forehead, a young man with a strong, mobile mouth and hazel eyes.

Then a tree fell close by in the forest, and Bronze was on his feet in a second, the half-cured pelt still in one hand, his knife in the other. He stared across the beach in the direction of the sound, heart thumping, all his senses finally alert. Something was coming. Now he could hear it, trampling its heedless way through the underbrush, and he marveled bitterly that this realization had come so late. Far back in his mind, a small voice told him this was what he got for being distracted.

Another tree fell with a ratcheting, coughing crash. Looking down a ragged aisle between the tall jungle-trees, Bronze saw a cloud of sawdust rise in the still air. The creature responsible for that cloud suddenly bellowed, a raging, gut-freezing sound. Whatever it was, it was huge.

He dropped the pelt, then flipped a Poke Ball at a palm fifteen feet to his left. It somersaulted twice in the air and then stuck in the wood, quivering a moment before releasing Charizard. He grabbed Tess's arm and ran to mount its back.

Stand or fly? But he discovered he no longer had the luxury of that question. The thing was fast as well as huge, and it was now too late to fight. A gigantic shape began to disclose itself in that aisle of trees north of the clearing, a shape which towered above all but the tallest trees. It was lumbering directly toward him, and as its eyes fixed upon Bronze Tercano, it gave voice to another of those cries.

Whispering to Charizard for haste, they flew away from the camp as another tree shook, cracked like a mortar, then crashed to the jungle floor in a cloud of dust and scattered leaves. Now it was lumbering straight toward the beach, some monster he couldn't yet comprehend. Its footfalls made the ground shake. He saw a mouth filled with churning plasma-fire, and pictured his entrails hanging in gaudy strings in its teeth.

"What now?" Tess said, sounding half-delirious.

What will you do, Bronze? Cobalion suddenly asked. Bronze saw a bluish streak running along the coast. Think! It's the only advantage you have over yon beast. What will you do?

He moved Charizard out over the water and looked back at the monster. He didn't think he could kill the thing. Maybe with a huge bomb, but probably not with the Pokemon he had. Even Steelix didn't look a match for this creature. He could keep flying out to sea, but had an idea that the oncoming beast might be able to shoot attacks at him when it wanted to. He guessed the chances of ending up as jam on its feet might be very high if he landed again. And if he was expecting someone to arrive, it would quickly deal with them.

There was another choice. He could fly higher. Charizard's wings had just started flapping when the thing bellowed again, firing something white and hot from its mouth. The energy strike would hit them square-on if the beast hadn't come down with another one of its sneezing fits. It kicked the ashy remains of the campfire into a black cloud and then stood almost doubled over, huge front claws on its huge thighs, looking for a moment like an old man in a fur coat, an old man with a cold. It sneezed again and again and clouds of parasites blew out of its mouth. Hot urine flowed in a stream between its legs and hissed out the campfire's scattered embers.

Bronze did not waste the few crucial extra moments he had been given. He went up higher. Tess was in terror, already convinced she was going to die, but a crazy laughter raved through her head all the same. Been trapped in the sky by a monster. How's that, all you fans watching?

The creature raised its head again, its bleared eyes catching winks and flashes of sunlight as it did so. It reached up with its claws, as if it was trying to strike them with its thought. Then it roared and lashed out two whips of blue fire from its claws. The strikes hit Charizard's belly and made deep wounds, wounds which bled golden, almost resinous ichor. Bronze kept on yanking them up. When he risked a glance down he stared directly into the Guzzlord's eyes. Below its cocked head, the beach had become a target with the scattered smudge of campfire as its bullseye.

Guzzlord uttered a long, purring growl. Yellowish foam, thick with worms, squeezed between its fangs in curdled gobbets. If he had never looked into the face of utter lunacy (and he supposed he had, having been eyeball to eyeball with that man Jonathan Rowell Cypress), Bronze was looking into it now; but that face was, thankfully, a good fifty feet below him, and at their highest reach those killing talons were fifteen feet up from where they sprouted like black stalks.

Mexican standoff, thought Cobalion.

"I don't get it," said Bronze, wondering if the referance meant he was cornered.

Nevermind. We've got to stun it. In thirty seconds send everything you have. I'll put out its eyes. Do you understand?

"May thee fly true," he said, seeing the thing charge up for another blast. Charizard began to groan and sway back and forth like a pendulum. Tess was holding on for her life.

...

Braviary landed at the edge of the beach. Lily stared unbelievingly across the open space. The creature stood by the remains of an old camp. She could see only chunks and sections of its body through the screen of branches and bright green leaves. The Guzzlord screamed like a distraught woman and began shaking its claws; a burning pulse came out of its mouth and went up to heaven. The branches lashed as if in a high wind. Her eyes skated upward through the trees and she saw a dark orange fluttering wildly above. Someone was hugging onto the neck of a Charizard as it rocked and rolled. As she watched, one of the figure's hands slipped and flailed wildly for purchase.

"My God," she murmured, then screamed: "What do we do? It's going to shake him loose! What do we do?"

Robert tried to think about it, but that queer sensation had returned again: it was always with him now, but stress seemed to make it worse. He felt like two men existing inside one skull. Each man had his own set of memories, and when they began to argue, each insisting that his motives were the true ones, he felt as if he were being ripped in two. One wanted imperium and the other cried out for decentralization, a setting aside of the quest of millennia. He made a desperate effort to reconcile these two halves and succeeded, at least for the moment.

That's my son, he thought, and he knew it was so. It would be too much energy to figure out how he could tell. That's my son hanging in the air.

"It's Bronze!" he shouted. "That's Charizard's one of his Pokemon! Must be! But I thought they were—"

"What's the plan?" Stephan yelled.

"Get away, both of you!" he snarled, and then called out aloud: "Shoot it! Shoot it with Braviary, Stephan! It'll turn and charge! When it does, look for something you can hit it on!"

Guzzlord squalled again. Terror suddenly filled Lily—terror and another emotion, one she would never have expected: crushing loneliness. She looked at the Braviary and then across the beach, at the gigantic Guzzlord obscured in the clouds and sprays of green leaves. She looked at the Charizard and its rider, swaying back and forth like a metronome.

"Hold still, Stephan," she said, her stomach thick with dread. "If you don't..."

"Don't worry about me!"

Braviary fired twice, launching two feathers, feathers as hard as steel. The heavy reports cut across the sound of the Guzzlord shaking its arms with heavy cracks like a whip. Lily saw both feathers strike home in the mace-shaped tip of the creature's tail, less than two inches apart. It shrieked in surprise, pain, and outrage. One of its huge front claws came out of the dense screen of branches and needles and slapped at the hurt place. The hand came away dripping golden and rose back out of sight. Lily could imagine it up there, examining its bloody appendage.

Then there was a rushing, rustling, snapping sound as Guzzlord turned, bending down at the same time, ambling on its claws to achieve maximum speed. For the first time she saw its face, and her heart quailed. Its huge mouth was lathered with foam; its huge eyes glared like lamps. Its grossly shruken head swung to the left, back to the right, and centered upon Robert, who stood with his legs apart with Stephan and Lily by his side. With a shattering roar, the Guzzlord charged.

...

Speak your commands, Bronze Tercano, and be true, thought Cobalion.

The Guzzlord came at the three on the shore in a rumbling lope; it was like watching a runaway factory machine over which someone had thrown a huge, black-dyed, moth-eaten snakeskin.

Do not kill with your hand or Pokemon. The one who kills with their hand or Pokemon has forgotten the face of Arceus. Your defend with your mind. You kill with your heart.

"I'll miss! I know I'll miss!"

Then kill it! Cobalion roared. Kill it for the sake of your father and mother!

With Poke Ball yet unopened, he saw Magnezone's attack go home, guided from wielder to target by nothing more or less than his heart's fierce desire that it should fly true. All fear fell away. What was left was a feeling of deep coldness and he had time to think: This is what I always feel when I kill. How can I stand it?

"I am Bronze Tercano and I kill for the sake of my friends," he said, and Magnezone came out and roared in the air.

...

Magnezone's bullet struck the Guzzlord's head dead center and its horns blew into a hundred glittering fragments. A fluid moment later and Cobalion's strike came down on its neck. The head itself was suddenly engulfed in a burst of crackling blue fire which reached out in a net and seemed to grasp the sides of the monster's face for a moment. It rose on its legs with a whistling howl of agony, its front claws boxing aimlessly at the air. It turned in a wide, staggering circle and began to flap its arms, as if it had decided to fly away. It tried to roar again but what came out instead was a weird warbling sound like an air-raid siren.

"It is very well." cried Cobalion, sounding exhausted. "A good shot, fair and true."

"Should we shoot it again?" asked Tess uncertainly. The Guzzlord was still blundering around in its mad circle but now its body had begun to tilt sidewards and inwards. It struck a small tree, rebounded, almost fell over, and then began to circle again.

"No need," said Bronze, kicking Charizard's side, giving it a signal to descend. She felt his hands grip her waist and lift her. A moment later she was sitting on the ground with her thighs folded beneath her. Bronze was slowly and shakily getting off the Charizard, but she didn't see him. She could not take her eyes from the Guzzlord.

She had seen the Wailord off the coasts of Rosecove, and believed they had been bigger than this, much bigger, probably, but this was certainly the tallest and widest land creature she had ever seen if not the longest. It was clearly dying. Its roars had become liquid bubbling sounds, and although its eyes were open, it seemed blind. It flailed aimlessly about the camp, knocking over a rack of curing hides, stamping flat the little pot that had held their water, whipping off trees. She could see the hole in its head. Tendrils of smoke were rising around it, as if Magenzone's shot had ignited its brains.

The Guzzlord wheeled back toward him. Bronze leaped nimbly over charizard's panting head and streaked toward Tess and Cobalion. The monster took no notice, it marched drunkenly to a palm on the very border of the ocean, tried to grasp it, failed, and sank to its knees. Now they could hear other sounds coming from inside it, sounds that made Bronze think of some huge truck engine stripping its gears.

A spasm convulsed it, bowed its back. Its front claws rose and gored madly at its own face. Worm-infested golden blood flew and splattered. Then it fell over, making the ground tremble with its fall, and lay still. After all its strange centuries, the abomination the Old People had called Ir, the world beneath the world, was dead.

.

.

.

"It almost had us," said Bronze. "It was like being on some crazy ride. What a shot! Cobalion, what a shot!"

He was halfway up the beach to the edge of the deep green when it parted and three people came out with a Braviary. He looked at them dazedly. Tess turned to Coblaion, took his neck in her arms, and began to rain kisses on him. She was laughing and crying at the same time. She clung to him, breathing hard, but there was a small, satisfied smile on Cobalion's lips as he watched Bronze go up the strand to see the four arrivals.

Bronze walked up to the Logarian man. There was not yet any feeling.

"I'm here," said Robert. He blinked, drunk-walked over to Bronze, and hunkered beside him. He touched the boy's cheek almost unbelievably, expecting to find smoothness but touched the beginnings of long-term stubble. "I'm here."

"Hi, Bronze," he said. "Good to see you, man."

"Hey," said Bronze. "I had a feeling I would meet you here, but in my mind you were younger."

"I was a lot younger ten minutes ago. Are you okay?"

"Yes," said Bronze. "Some scratches, that's all." He looked around. "You haven't brought Jake." This was not a question.

Lily shook her head. "No Jake."

"Are you followed?"

Robert shook his head. "No. What about you?"

"Nothing. I'm all together again. We both are."

They looked at the same instant, with the same impulse. As Robert swept Bronze into his arms, the boy's self-possession broke and he began to cry, it was the exhausted, relieved weeping of a child who has been lost long, suffered much, and is finally safe again. As Robert's arms closed about his waist, Bronze's own arms slipped about the man's neck and gripped like hoops of steel. Lily kissed him deeply, seeing that Bronze reeked of sweat and rabbit grease. She touched his cheeks, his neck; she ran her hands through his hair. She felt an insane urge to touch him everywhere until she was absolutely sure of his reality.

"I'll never leave you again," said Robert, and now his own tears came again. "I swear to you on the names of all my fathers: I'll never leave you again."

"You won't go this time?"

"No," said Robert. "Not this time, not ever again." But in the deepest darkness of his heart, he thought of their fate and wondered.