“It is trapped now,” Suhuy offered. “It can only come and go by reacting with a resident intelligence.”

“The body, with the ty’iga in control, recovered from the illness that killed its consciousness,” I said. “You mean it’s stuck there now for life?”

“Yes. So far as I know.”

“Then tell me this: Will it be released when that body dies, or will it die with it?”

“It could go either way,” he replied. “But the longer it remains in the body, the more likely it is that it will perish along with it.”

I looked back at my mother.

“There you have the end of its story,” I stated. She shrugged.

“I’ve done with this one and released it,” she said, “and one can always conjure another should the need arise.”

“Don’t do it,” I told her.

“I shan’t,” she said. “There is no need to, now.”

“But if you thought there were, you would?”

“A mother tends to value her son’s safety, whether the son likes it or not.”

I raised my left hand, extending the forefinger in an angry gesture, when I noticed that I was wearing a bright bracelet — it seemed an almost — hologramatic representation of a woven cord. I lowered my hand, bit back my first response, and said, “You know my feelings now.”

“I knew them a long time ago,” she said. “Let us dine at the Ways of Sawall, half a turning hence, purplesky. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” I said.

“Till then. Good turning, Suhuy.”

“Good turning, Dara.”

She took three paces and was gone, as etiquette prescribed, out the same way by which she had entered.

I turned and strode to the pool’s edge, stared into its depths, felt the muscles in my shoulders slowly unknot. Jasra and Julia were down there now, back in the citadel of the Keep, doing something arcane in the lab. And then the strands were flowing over them, some cruel truth beyond all order and beauty, beginning to form themselves into a mask of fascinating, frightening proportion.