First Chapter

Ioli

N one knee beside the shielder's body, Ioli reached tentative fingers to slide her eyelids down. The irises were a vivid cerulean, set in pale skin under blue-black bangs. It was sad to shutter them. Worse to leave them staring.
      "Did you see that?"
      The younger girl. He saw the tic in the muscles over her cheekbones without raising his gaze. As if her skin, stretched tight by hunger, kept trying to shrug back into place. It gave a blinking, dazed impression, made worse by a perpetual gape. He didn't remember her name, though the Greasehair had told him. She'd been the last to join them. He didn't remember the others' names, either, the older girl who wouldn't stop laughing and the boy who kept running off and coming back. Now they were the only ones left.
      "I saw it," he said. There were six people alive wearing colored bands, and four with no bands on them, and two bladed, and then us. Now we're alive, and those dozen are not.
      "I mean, did you see it? Do you see this?"
      Those dozen, and dozens more already dead. Carnage was everywhere. Bones were everywhere. Bodies in all stages of decay. He'd seen it all earlier. He saw it now without looking. Looking made him dizzy. He swallowed his gorge against the stench. Whatever madness claimed this place, it kept the bonefolk off. No corpse had been passaged here since the war of the coast began.
      The corpses were whole. Animals and weather had scattered some of the oldest bones, but even those showed no sign of violence. No nicks from blades, no dismemberment. Berserker palsy, walking marsh fever? They'd had touches, and mages. No illness came on so fast that touches couldn't cure it. Injury, then? A skull cracked open when a fall bashed it on a crate, a fall taken in a headlong, blind-terror dash for safety? The way they looked at the sky, ducked down, covered themselves, hid behind things when they could...they were terrified. Hearts could fail so fast no mage or touch could save them. Terror strong enough, suffered long enough, might do that to the strongest heart.
      I'm not a seeker, Ioli thought. I'm not a mender. I don't solve mysteries. I don't care what happened.
      The other girl had paused in her incessant giggling. Her eyes went wide and her hands came up to cover her mouth. "We didn't do this, did we?"
      It was hard for Ioli to speak before he was ready. It wasn't complete in his head yet. He didn't like saying snatches and fragments. He grated out, "It was an illness of the mind. Our minds are different. That saved our lives."
      The girl pressed her lips together hard, then burst out laughing. "Different!" she cried. "Different!"
      Ioli dug nails into his palms. She had the blue glow. She was like him. She shouldn't make him speak before he was ready. He hated people laughing at him. But she wasn't laughing at him. She was laughing at a world so mad that it was the only response she could give. She wasn't like him, not at all. No more than the boy was like him because they were boys.
      You bleeding walleyes, the shielder had said. Puking useless walleyes. And, Go. Before it stains you. There was nothing they could do here. They were visants, good for nothing but seeing truths that made people hate them. They couldn't do things, like touches or mages, make or heal or ward. They couldn't make sense of things, like menders or seekers or scholars. They couldn't fight like shielders or build like crafters and they even made animals skittish. They were useless, here as everywhere else, and they should go, now, quick, before none's-land stained them.
      The younger boy, the one who could never bring himself to run away, was trying again. Creeping from bank to tuft to crate to tent. Mumbling to himself. Ioli felt his light; it was dark in hue, darker than the one girl's robin's-egg and the other's evening sky. Ioli would have seen him anyway, from the edge of his eye, but anyone looking toward him would have noticed him, too, because he hid so large and mumbled so loud.
      The gaping girl whirled toward the hideabout boy. "Do you see that?"
      "Yes, I see it!" Ioli shouted, starting to rise, and the insides of his head turned upside down and his stomach lurched, and he sat hard on the waterlogged ground, between the shielder and a fly-haunted corpse.
      Being here was like being blind. Like waking up in someone else's body. He didn't feel right in it. He didn't know how to move and do and be in it. At home, he could see. Interpret his surroundings without thought. Here there was so much to watch that he couldn't see at all. Distance was an assault. The jungle was a close, crowded place, a place with heights and depths. This flat land under flat sky had only extent. It made him close down into himself. To stand and look around was too much effort. He wanted to hide, cling, burrow. He would fly free in the windless air, nothing to anchor, nothing to orient; he would be crushed under the heavy plate of sky, consumed by the unspeakable sea. How did the sky stay up with no great trees to support it? What kept the sea at bay? Why didn't the expanse of landscape curl up into itself? Earth and air and water were incomprehensible in this configuration. They made no sense.
      He looked at the shielder. He felt all right when he looked at her. She had lived in this landscape for a long time. It was as familiar as her own limbs. She had seen things that he could not see, and seeing was the only thing he did. She'd died before he had a chance to learn them through her eyes.
      The girl he had shouted at was poking him, then dancing away. At the next poke, he flung out a spastic arm, but failed to hit her. She took it for response, and said, "Maybe if we stay here long enough, we'll start seeing things too."
      The hideabout boy crawled out from under a stained canvas tarp and hid behind Ioli.
      No, he thought. We won't. They were immune to the delusions that killed these people. Because they were visants.
      He looked at the shielder's corpse as if it might tell him something, but it was cooling and still. So wrong, that stillness. He averted his eyes to a collection of bones sunken into the marsh in the shape of a human body. An older death than hers, and not so hard to look at.
      She could have conquered her fear of the delusions. She had started to reach for something. Someone she thought was standing by her. Someone not him; he was on the other side and past arm's length. She had reached for that clarity. The bluesilver light had flared in her—very dim, nearly below the threshold of sight, but visible. She had denied it. Let her splayed hand fall limp. Denied him, too. Ordered him away. That was when the convulsions took her. She'd gripped life so hard that it killed her. She'd driven her light so deep that delusion had claimed her. Her body had reacted so plausibly that he could almost see the weapon she believed had pierced her, and he had never seen a blade or anything else kill a person.
      At the last, just before her eyes glazed over, he'd seen the glow again.
      As death dissolved her will, her thought, the bluesilver glow had surged.
      Knowing wasn't thinking. Knowing wasn't feeling. Knowing wasn't figuring-it-out. Knowing wasn't even seeing, not really, not completely. Not the way people said. What Ioli could do, what Ioli could know, there was no term for. It was a wordless thing. It couldn't be explained. It couldn't be described. It couldn't be taught.
      It couldn't be forced. Pressing your mind against a thing made it slip away, soap clutched too tight. Concentration brought you down to a point, made you dense and hard and tiny. Knowing was suspension, dissipation. Knowing was a mist of awareness hanging in the air.
      The shielder had glanced inland from time to time. What had she been looking at? Or for? Folk spoke of a threshold, as if they knew how close they could come to the coast without tainting themselves. As though there were some kind of wall, invisible but sensible.
      Looking at the sunken bones, with the shielder's body at the edge of his vision, he knew. "We have to close the ranks," he said, raising his head to the others so abruptly that they flinched. "We have to tell the shield to either side that this section has failed!"
      The older girl looked at him google-eyed and then laughed so hard she had to hold her belly, as if her guts might burst out. He wanted to shake her, give her a slap, and was appalled at the impulse. No wonder visants were scorned as idiots. Some of them were. He got to his feet, fighting vertigo, and snatched at the scared boy's sleeve. "You." He tried to make his voice like the shielder's, full of menace and command, a voice you obeyed. He cleared his throat hard, pushed authority through it: "Go Heartward. That way, along the maurside. See? Tell them the shield here has failed. Tell them they're all dead. Tell them they have to close ranks. Do you understand? Do you see what's needed?"
      The boy cowered away, elbows up and forearms pressed to his ears, hiding, blocking out Ioli's words. I can't see you I can't hear you I can't see you I can't hear you. Ioli recognized himself in that, and bit his lip as the boy wrenched away to clamber behind a listing catapult.
      "I see," the gaper offered. Her mouth fell open again after she said it. Possibly her mouth just never closed. Her dark eyes were grave and committed.
      The other girl pointed Legward and turned a tear-streaked, beaming face to him, as though her gesture indicated something so funny she couldn't even speak.
      "Yes," he said, "go that way, give them the message. Close ranks."
      "Ranks!" she gasped, hands flying to cover her mouth, as though he'd uttered an obscenity. Then she erupted into laughter that sounded like pain.
      "Yes. Ranks. Close ranks." He had to raise his voice to be heard over her hilarity. "Send more shielders, whatever they can spare." Send more shielders to their deaths. But they'll die where they are just as surely. And that's their sworn duty. To protect. To be a human shield.
      Suddenly dead serious, the giggler said into a shock of quiet, "Two leagues, two miles, half a nonned feet each way Legward. Two nonned nonned steps for us, two nonned nonned steps back for them. Maybe more Heartward. Not in time." Done with her gleaning, she began to laugh again. "It won't be in time!"
      Herded here by Fyldur Greasehair, they had passed several downleg shieldposts. Her visant's eye would have gauged the distance to every one, down to the fingerwidth. "Go anyway," he said. "It's all we can do. Go on, both of you. I'll see if I can find help inland." Become a procurer, like the Greasehair. That was worse than summoning shielder reinforcements. That was pulling the unstained over the threshold. But the shield could not be allowed to fail. He had pledged himself to that when he went with the Greasehair.
      Where was the Greasehair? Where was he when you needed him? Maybe he'd gone to get more people, effectual people, not visants but mages or touches or blades, people who could be of some help, if only to become fodder for madness.
      He wasn't here now. Ioli would have to go for help himself.
      I don't want to save the world....
      "Go," he said, and the two visants took off at their best pace in opposite directions, leaving only him and the hideabout boy.
      Ioli tried to turn toward him, but the boy kept moving to stay behind his back. Over his shoulder, Ioli said, "I have to go too." After a moment, he added, "We both have to go. You can't stay here. They'll want to use you, any others who come, and neither of us is any use here." He could feel hesitation like heat against his spine. Then a hand took hold of his tattered tunic sash. To make sure Ioli didn't trick him and turn him out of hiding. "I won't hurt you," Ioli said. "But I can't take care of you." He felt the smaller visant shrink further, but couldn't tell what it meant. Ioli wished he would let go. He didn't like being hung on to. Gritting his teeth, he said, "I can't help you."
      The hand slid away. When he turned—slowly, because he didn't mean to scare or trick—the hideabout boy was gone. His dark blue glow was like a scent with no obvious source. For the first time, he'd actually managed to hide.
      "I'm sorry!" Ioli called. "I'm sorry I'm not the kind of person who could look after you! I hope you'll be all right!"
      There was no answer. Only birdchatter and seamurmur, the grainy hiss of loose sand through cordgrass, the hollow sound of distance and vastness, as though only he remained in all the empty, alien world.

The salt marsh was a blur. Details refused to cohere. He could focus on immediate things—the flooded ditch, the vole's burrow, the tree whose unique shape could restore lost bearings—but he could not hold all of it in his mind at once, and so he could not let it fall below conscious thought.
      All right, then. Be conscious of it. But walk. Move.
      He made his way, step by concentrated step, to where the shielder had looked every time she glanced back. He didn't feel any difference there, even when he was well past the point where her eyes had focused. With each step he got a little better at the marsh, a little less hobbled by unfamiliarity, but it granted him no more sense of delusion's boundary than he'd had of delusion itself. With each step he could hold one more blade of saltgrass in his mind without thinking on it. With each step the weight of flat sky infinitesimally eased. It helped to leave the sea behind. The sea was more than he could bear. Here, a little inland, at least most of what surrounded him was based in earth, not water. The tendrils of sea that came in were not so vast or unpredictable. Earth held them in their place. He could treat them like swamp rivers, and navigate among them. It didn't turn his insides over to see a lone saltmonger plying his trade on the water's edge.
      What did turn his insides over was the choice he had to make. Procure the man, conscript him into none's-land, lure him or coax him or bully him over the threshold, to hold the line until the shield closed ranks?
      He stopped, uncertain. He dared not go much farther inland; he'd lose sight of the coast entirely, and never know when the ranks had closed. But the girl had told the number of steps to the nearest shieldpost. It would take the rest of the day to make all those steps. He didn't have to choose this one. He could go on—to one of those sod cottages up there, with smoke rising from their chimneys. Give them his news, ask for their aid, let them take the burden of choice, of sacrifice, upon themselves. He was no talker. He would never talk anyone into exile. But he could tell them what he knew and let them choose.
      The saltmonger started to raise a hand in greeting, then frowned and let the hand fall. He didn't sniff the air, but he might as well have. He could scent the stain of exile on Ioli as though it were the rankest midden runoff. He hefted his tool, considering whether to send Ioli back coastward, considering whether it was his place to bother with runaway exiles. He decided that Ioli was too far away to be herded, and glanced back toward the cottages on firmer ground. Someone there would catch him. He was too old-boned to hare after deserters, too busy earning a day's honest living to chase down cowards.
      Ioli had never been scorned as a coward before, for all he'd run from his own village into self-imposed exile in the jungle. For more than a breath, it made him reconsider his decision to overlook the old saltmonger. He might walk right up and tell him the truth—dare him to prove how brave he was when the safety of his own land was at stake, when there was no shield there anymore to sacrifice itself that he might stand in contempt of it. Would he have the courage to sacrifice himself like that, if forced to the choice?
      The saltmonger twisted and let out a shriek.
      No, no, Ioli thought. Seeing what, knowing how, not yet arrived at why.
      Cottagers were stopping their work, calling others out from inside, pointing. Consternation, not fear. Curiosity merging into concern. Not terror. Not the horror that twisted the face and body of the saltmonger as he raised his ineffectual tool against some phantasm Ioli could not imagine.
      The man thrust forward and upward with the dredging tool, then swept the air before him. He was a wiry old man, strong with a lifetime of work, and fierce, but his old heart would not withstand this sort of battle. Ioli's foot came down, his other foot went past it, he was moving toward the man to tell him no it isn't real don't fight it don't harm yourself, moving to reassure, his arms opening with some notion of capturing those wiry limbs and holding him still until the assault abated. Something, he must do something. The man was flailing, panting. Too many threfts between them.
      Two of the cottagers set off running. One to aid the saltmonger, one to intercept Ioli, because as far as they knew he was the cause of this, and good folk reacted to emergencies, good folk took action, good folk didn't cower in their jungle trees and say I don't have to save my neighbor today.
      Ioli ran, too. He was closer to the saltmonger. In the space of six running steps all of his guilts swept through him. His cowardice. His anger at an old man who was fighting now for his life and defense of his home as bravely as ever any bladed shielder had.
      The marsh betrayed him. A sunken wet spot sucked his leg down. He went to his knee. Grass sliced his hands. His palms slapped flat onto a surface of muck. His own struggle to rise drove him deeper into the sinkhole. He could only watch, trapped, as the old man fought the phantasms. The man shouted over his shoulder for the cottagers to take cover in their homes.
      The two would-be rescuers stopped halfway. Confusion. Indecision. Continue forward, or go back as ordered, defend their families closer to home? They looked to each other for guidance, failed to find any. "Go back!" Ioli yelled to them, despairing. He knew they would not heed him, and they did not.
      The old man went down under a flurry of invisible attacks. He twitched, moaned, then was still. His heart had given out.
      The rescuers were still threfts away; Ioli could not gauge the distance, but they were far enough that the delusion had not affected them. They were reacting to the incomprehensible behavior of the saltmonger, the tainted stranger's shout. They were safe, where they were. Far enough inland to be safe.
      "Go back," Ioli moaned. He could not push or draw good living souls into this madness. He slowed down, extricated himself from the morass, scooted back onto solid ground. All the while watching the rescuers and the cottagers beyond them as if his will alone could keep them from crossing the invisible line.
      As if watching, alone, could ever do any good, had ever done any good.
      He nearly cried when the rescuers, a solid young woman and limber young man, went still in shock, faces drained of blood, jaws fallen slack. Their dawning horror was so genuine that Ioli, even knowing better, nearly twisted to look over his shoulder at the sky. He would see nothing there. Whatever they saw, hurtling toward them, doubled the man over and then knocked him onto his side in a writhing ball, and drove the woman to the ground.
      Tended ground. Inland ground the delusions of none's-land had never touched. The madness was moving inland.
      Ioli gained his feet and walked to the edge of the tended beds. He walked between them with as much care as he could, not sure where he could step and where he couldn't. He had to try to help. He was helpless, but he had to try. If he could save these two, if he could save one of these two...
      He made it to the woman, but she was dead before he turned her face to the sky that had not attacked her.
      He stood on shaky legs to wave the cottagers off. Back! his desperate arms said. Back! It's not safe here! Two men caught another man in their arms and hauled him away from an attempt at rescue. Ioli turned, and stumbled, and crawled to the young man, who lay on his left side, curled around his middle. Blood dribbled from the corner of his mouth. His eyes, when Ioli knelt beside him, were terrified and pleading. He did not know if Ioli was friend or foe. "I want to help," Ioli said. Oh, he was not good at words. The young man scented the taint on him, but it seemed to make him hopeful, as though Ioli, experienced in battle, might help him survive this. To his senses, the taint would seem salvation now that he realized the war had overflowed its banks.
      Ioli could do nothing. The young man died curled against his thighs, on a gush of blood and the reek of effluents.
      Helpless. Useless. Every movement a supreme effort, Ioli sat the dead man up, leaned down to take him over his shoulders. The cottagers were digging in, putting their panicked energy into collecting makeshift weapons and sandbagging the field's homeward border. Making a new, inland shieldwall, Ioli saw as he began the agonized trudge to bring the first of their dead to them. The only thing he could do. Fetch the dead, like a boneman.
      He stopped in his tracks when the first of them pointed past him.
      They all covered their heads at the same time, then looked behind them at their homes. One ran to fetch a bucket; another followed; a water brigade formed. They began drenching their sedge-thatched roofs. Roofs that stood serene and untouched by flame. In their world of blooming delusion, balls of fire had set their homes ablaze.
      It should have been ludicrous. Ioli should be laughing the way the giggling girl had laughed, uncontrollably, past articulation. He understood now why she had laughed, just as he understood why the gaper had gaped and the hideabout boy had hidden. In a moment of queerest clarity, he understood why folk gaped at visants, and laughed at them, and avoided them. To ordinary, common folk, visants' words and deeds appeared as mad as these, because they were reacting to things that ordinary, common folk could not see.
      He laid the heavy body down gently and girded his resolve against despair. He could see himself chasing just behind the inland-sweeping boundary of none's-land, crying out that it was not real, crying out not to let it kill, always too late, always unheeded, always in vain. He was not a seer of futures, he didn't think any visants were, but that future was clear enough in his mind's eye. Even if he outran the front of it to bring advance warning, nobody would believe him.
      He turned one last time toward the coast, wondering if he might better serve by going back and convincing the shield of what he knew. Then he turned again. The shield had held for three years; these cottagers might hold for long enough for him to convince them. They had seen the effects of delusion from the outside. Forearmed, they might fight them off from the inside, with someone to make it clear to them. They'd seen him try to help the old saltmonger, wave them back from the danger, start to bring their dead to them. They'd forgive him the stain because they'd be stained now, too; none's-land had engulfed them. They might heed him. He might be able to make them see.
      He stood for a long time, unable to decide which course to take. He watched them fight their fires and win. He watched with increasing hope as they mimed a successful defense against impossible odds. They were beginning to think they might survive till nightfall. They were beginning to believe these weapons didn't always kill them. That was a foothold. That was a grand foothold from which to persuade them that what killed them wasn't the weapons but their own belief that they were dying.
      He might have a chance.
      They faltered. They let their weapons drop. They stood up behind their sandbagged wall and looked about in wonder. He almost broke into a run, to warn them—sometimes the assaults subsided for a while but they must not lose vigilance—and nearly barked a laugh. The insanity of it! Entering into the delusion. Warning them that the things that weren't happening had only seemed to stop but might soon start not-happening again.
      They turned in bewilderment to their whole, unscathed cottages, touched wet thatching that flame had never touched, ran hands over solid walls they must have thought were breached.
      Their sight had cleared, all of its own. Could ordinary folk summon immunity to the madness? Could others learn it?
      He turned reflexively back toward the coast, as if to compare in his mental landscape the two different scenarios, the cottagers recovering versus the shield failing. Looking for the similarities, looking for the differences, as if he would find them in the blank flat distance of the marshland itself.
      And then he saw.
      Small human forms, just at the limit of vision in the coastward direction. What he took at first for an enormous, walking tree draped in vines like something out of his jungle home. Flaming balls and spiked iron whipchains arcing high into the sky. It's got me, he thought. I stayed too long, and now I'm seeing things. But the weapons arcing into the sky were on a seaward trajectory. The monstrous walking jungle tree was the rigging-draped mast of a ship. The human forms were the shielders the ship had delivered, in half the time it would have taken for them to take all the gaper's steps.
      The shield had closed ranks.
      He looked at the cottagers again. Looked down at the dead young man he'd laid on the ground, at the dead young woman, the dead old man. Too late for them. Death did not ebb like madness. But the cottagers were free of it now. And running toward him, and their dead. Taking him in hand. Wailing over their loved ones. Treating him roughly, demanding explanations they did not believe when he gave them. "Those are the weapons the outerlands send," he said, "weapons of delusion, weapons of madness, and what kills you is your own fright of them," and they thrust him loose in response, shoved him off and his taint with him, told him to go back to the shield, take his mad visant ravings and leave them to make sense of the terrible palsy that took their folk.
      Ioli went off as he was told. They were coarse, not cruel. They didn't vent their grief and bewilderment in more than harsh words and a shove or two. But he stayed, for a bit. Hidden off to the side. Watching the shield reassert itself in the distance, with its missiles of spike and flame, the drifting smoke of its incendiary powders, the distant sound of orders shouted over an imaginary din. Watching the cottagers react to none of it, as they piled their sandbags off to the side in the event of flood come storm season, returned their sometime weapons to their toolsheds and forges and hearths. Watching, as dusk came on, the green glow of bonefolk feeding, passaging the three bodies to some otherrealm for safekeeping against no one knew what day.
      Before he lost the light, he found his landmark tree, a twistedness in the gloaming, and climbed it, handhold by weary handhold. The night wind blew the clouds to sea. It was Candlenight tonight, a time for spirits to roam, and nearly the spirit days, with the moon carved to a sliver by the darkness; in the Toes, tomorrow would be the start of winter. Up here, he didn't know, except that it was harvestmid, and would remain so until Longdark.
      Sound carried clearly from shoreward in the nighttime quiet. Catapults sang thunder. Ranks of bows twanged in a humming unison. The sky lit with unnatural fire. The screams began.
      Hidden in his alien, inadequate tree, Ioli looked out into darkness and distance.
      The shield had closed the gap, and the delusion had dissipated as though it had never been, save for the bodies of the three its first shock had taken, and those the bonefolk took, though they'd left three years' worth of dead to weather and wildlife less than a mile coastward.
      The shielders were taking an arrow for Eiden Myr.
      All fighters vowed to stand between the enemy and their home. All fighters vowed to die for Eiden Myr. This was more than that, different from that. Had they brought it on themselves through some perversity of the stained? Had they manufactured the deaths they'd promised? No; the cottagers had fallen, the saltmonger had fallen. The delusions were no doing of the shield.
      Ioli remembered when the first mirages were reported. A dozen years ago, just after the revelation of touches and the rebirth of magelight—just after Jhoss n'Kall had betrayed the visants. Ioli had been a boy then, but tellers told the stories around every village fire. On the coast of the Fist, a young shielder girl saw a ship that never made landfall; her commander saw invasion that never arrived. In the Fingers, a pair of boys saw banks of oared vessels rowed by monsters. Nonneds saw the tall black ships with black silk sails come at the mouth of Maur Lengra belching fire. Every village on the Sea of Charms saw the fleets that massed there, the gleaming blades of their prows, the bone white of their hulls, their jeering, deformed crews.
      None of them real, none at all, at least not real enough to threaten, always veering off as though at the last moment Eiden Myr had moved. Seekers were wild with theories, menders wild with frustration; scholars could find nothing like it in the old records. The sightings continued, unexplained except as shared hallucination, and neither touches nor mages could heal madness.
      Then the attacks began.
      They did not come from the mirages. They came from nowhere, or otherwhere, all at once. No ninemile stretch of coast was left unscarred.
      No ninemile stretch of coast was caught unguarded. The shielders had maintained their posts since the magewar. They evacuated the shoreline. They reinforced their emplacements and called up their reserves. In response to siege, they built siege retorts. They mobilized with astonishing speed.
      Such speed, Ioli realized, that no one had understood that the attacks were only on their minds.
      The shield had waited twice nine years to fight. The shield expected to fight. Everyone expected the shield to fight. The shield fought, and did not yield. It gave no ground, no matter the losses. It held the line.
      The leader of his fallen section of shield had kept glancing back, as at a threshold.
      Inlanders conceived the border of none's-land as a point of no return: cross it and you were tainted, stained. That repressed visant shielder, from her viewpoint on the far side, conceived the border of none's-land as a threshold of safety.
      All fighters were trained to stand their ground. If the monstrosities on the mirage ships ever landed, only the shield would stand between Eiden Myr and their blades and fangs and claws. But the missiles of delusion were aimed at the coast. They ravaged where they fell and did not pursue. Why not fall back beyond their reach?
      The shielders stored materials beyond the threshold—Ioli had seen that. In their delusion, crates stacked far enough back were left unscathed in each attack. They tethered their riding and draft animals there. But the shield never fell back.
      There could be some obvious reason he failed to apprehend. He was not a shielder. He was not a mender or a scholar or a seeker. Perhaps some mender, even some visant, had calculated the arc of attacking missiles and determined that the shield's archers and catapults could reach the missiles' point of origin only if positioned at the sea's edge. Perhaps their delusions sometimes included attacks that blades and arrows could parry; that would be a crueler weapon, teasing them with intermittent victories.
      Or perhaps their shielder honor forbade it. Perhaps their training instilled in them such pride that even to think of yielding became anathema.
      Perhaps some shielder, at the outset, in the first days of the war of the coast, had designed that training with full awareness, realizing what Ioli realized now: The shield created none's-land, and maintained it. If the shield fell back, the threshold would go with it. The attacks would follow them inland.
      The shield here had failed, and the attacks had come inland, mind by mind, seeking consciousness, seeking sentience and warping it. When the shield re-formed, the inlanders' delusions evaporated.
      The attacks stopped at the first minds they found. As long as the weapons of delusion found minds to harm, they sought no further.
      The shield must hold, or village after village would fall to delusion, until Eiden Myr was ravaged from coast to coast. It would be worse than giving ground to a berserker horde. A physical enemy could be routed. This enemy could only be appeased.
      Shielders did not come in infinite numbers. They were dying too fast for replacement. As the ranks of those stained by previous battles thinned, as procurers drained the land of those who could be coaxed into exile, the well of sacrifice would run dry.
      His section of shield had fallen. Other sections would follow. The shield could not hold.
      Those weapons had to be stopped another way.
      Ioli slept in his bent tree, and at dawn, with the bent moon still hanging in the Headward sky, he climbed back down into the world, to save it.