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Come to dust

Sandra McDonald

         Author's Notes:
         This is it - part three of a trilogy that began with "Lay Down Your Sword" and continued with "Share the Disaster." Other story references include "Seeds" and "Choices After Evil," but you shouldn't have to read any of them to read this one. Special, extraordinary thanks go to the many great writers and editors who helped me with this, including (alphabetically!) Sue Factor, Cindy Hudson, Lisa Krakowka, Angela Mull and Rachel Shelton. Without their help I would be lost. Special thanks to Janine Shahinian for her wonderful support, and Janette Zeitler for being my very first beta reader. :-)
         The Highlander concepts and characters belong to them. Original characters and plot belong to me. Debates about free will, who should win, what the Prize is, etc obtained in part by lurking on the wonderful Highlander Discussion List, made possible by Debbie Douglass. No infringement of individual views intended!
         This story is being posted in groups of four or five parts each.
         In the end there can be only...more author's notes. Enjoy!

         Richie Ryan stood silently in the middle of a decimated village one bright, sunny day at the beginning of summer. The ancient Amazon jungle filtered the sun into a green glow that gently touched the shattered roof of the Friendship Hall and the old beams of the dojo. With a sadness that cut deep into his heart he remembered the children who had played in the village square so very long ago. The adults who had strolled hand-in-hand. Long, sweet nights of music and love with a woman in his bed. Cheating Poker Night, as Duncan and Methos tried to outdo themselves with underhanded plays. Time and vengeance had brought him a small measure of peace, but he knew that a good part of him had died with all of his friends on the day Sanctuary burned.
         Richie let his gaze rest on the small white cross that marked where a pile of bones had once stood. It had taken him days to dig a pit to bury the charred and weathered skeletons he'd found in the square and in the houses. Hard to believe it had been over thirty years ago. Richie didn't remember much of that day, but he knew he'd done all of his digging and collecting and burying with a ceaseless stream of tears down his face, and blisters that ripped and healed, over and over, on his hands.
         The surrounding jungle pulsed with chirping birds, clicking insects, and the push of wind through leaves. The village lay utterly quiet at its center, a cemetery of dead friends and buried hopes. Richie had been back once every decade since the horror. He didn't know why he came back, or what he expected to find. He'd long ago accepted that Duncan and Methos were both dead. In thirty years of world travel he'd never heard a rumor of them. In thousands of scanned Immortal minds he'd never met their images. Coming back had become a tribute of his love and respect for both of them. They'd taught and shaped him, and whether he lived or died on the day of the final Gathering would be a tribute to their tutelage.
         Richie didn't have to close his eyes to see the shadows of the final Gathering in his mind. The vision came day and night, without summoning. Two men, on a scarred and battled plain. Himself and Valery Constantine, the man who had murdered Sanctuary.
         He couldn't let his thoughts dwell on Valery, because that would attract the other Immortal's attention. Valery's power was almost equal to his own now, and was not a thing to be trifled with. Richie rubbed at his temples, a habit he'd developed in the Paris Demilitarized Zone.
         He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. His pilgrimage was over. The village couldn't hold him anymore. He turned and followed a long-overgrown path past the crumbling houses into the jungle, west towards Connor's Falls. He hiked slowly, listening to the jungle's heartbeat as if it were his own, enjoying the sweat on his back and solid ground beneath his boots.
         At Connor's Falls he stopped to rest and admire the millions of rushing gallons of water that flooded down the cliff-face. Mist rose pleasantly to cool his face. Richie had arrived early for his rendezvous, and decided to climb down to the waterfall's base. He and Jenir had hiked there dozens of times, and he found their old trail with little difficulty.
         Halfway down he felt the faint frission of another Immortal. It wasn't the true buzz of a living Immortal. But just as he could scan minds now, and call forth visions of what the future would bring, he could sense things beyond the abilities of his fellow Immortals. Richie scanned the gorge and riverbed but saw no one but himself. At the bottom of the trail, where Connor's Falls thundered and smashed into worn tons of rock, the buzz grew stronger. A memory so old it might have been a dream worked its way to the top of Richie's memory and he frowned, suddenly cold despite the heat of the day.
         Several minutes later he found the half-concealed entrance into the subterranean caverns beneath the cliff. He took a rope from his backpack, knotted it firmly around a boulder, and rappelled down into the dark, damp confines of the first cave.
         He'd died here once, shattering his spine and skull in a fall from above. While dead he'd dreamed of a man buried alive in an underground river. No other Immortal dreamed while dead, but the Quickening Richie had taken from Xan made him special in more ways than one. He'd dismissed that dream as a nightmare, and buried it so deep he never expected to remember it.
         Until now. Until he wound his way past jagged stalagmites and tiny crevices and stopped at the banks of the underground river he'd never really believed existed. Lantern in hand, he peering down into slowly moving water, and spied the coffin that lay deep below on the rock riverbed. The preternatural buzz from its dead occupant - a buzz no other Immortal could ever sense, except for perhaps Valery - sounded like a dull roar in his ears.
         Richie probed, molding his mind to the shape of the form entombed below. A vision came to him of a solid, sturdy man with chiseled features and long dark hair -
         "Oh, Mac," he breathed.
         His knees went out from under him. Richie sagged to the cold, damp rock and dragged in a few sharp breaths. He had to rest the lantern on the ground, for fear that his badly shaking hands would knock it into the water. He'd never, ever, expected to find Duncan MacLeod again. The hope of the first few years after Sanctuary's destruction had faded into grief and then, finally, acceptance.
         Richie squeezed his eyes shut and channeled all of his power into summoning forth an image of what had happened in this cave thirty years previous. Through a shimmering haze he saw Mac walking in the jungle. No sound came, but Mac seemed to be singing and weeping at the same time. The Highlander came down into the cave, ran his smooth hands over the plastisteel container, and pushed it into the water.
         Richie saw Duncan talking to someone who wasn't there. The vision slipped, and it took everything he had to haul it back into focus. For a moment, Richie thought he saw Tessa. Then Duncan was gone, into the river, sealing himself inside.
         The vision slipped away. Richie heaved in a chestful of air and focused on the underwater casket in white-hot fury.
         "You did this to yourself?" he nearly screamed.
         No one answered.
         Richie wanted to punch something. Or someone. Namely Duncan MacLeod. Of all the selfish, horrible things to do - seal himself up here, run away from everything, make Richie think he was dead and gone forever - Richie buried his face in his hands. The Duncan MacLeod he'd known and loved could never have been this cruel, this cowardly.
         He realized he was crying. Richie wiped angrily at the tears. The Immortal corpse entombed below didn't deserve to be wept over. Duncan MacLeod was dead and would remain dead, until someone saw fit someday to release him from his watery, self-imposed grave.
         He had just decided that someone would not be Richie Ryan when the buzz of two Immortals reached him. One buzz he easily identified. The other was more elusive, and came from someone very old. Richie went back through the caverns to the entrance and hauled himself, hand over hand, up the rope to the outside world. The sunlight momentarily blinded him, and the roar of Connor's Falls thundered in his ears, but it only took a second to fix on and identify the battling figures high above him on the edge of the gorge.
         Methos, the oldest living Immortal, someone else Richie had believed dead.
         Darien MacLeod, adopted son of Duncan MacLeod, and one of the men who'd destroyed Sanctuary.
         He shouted at them to stop, but there was no way either Immortal could hear him at this distance. So Richie did the next best thing, which was to fling his control into their minds and force them to drop their swords. At one time the effort would have taken everything he had and left him in the grips of a fierce headache. Now it was as easy as snapping his fingers.
         As soon as he was sure they couldn't kill each other before he reached them, Richie started up the trail.
         Someone, he thought grimly, had some explaining to do.

         Ancient South America - Unknown Future

         Duncan MacLeod rested in icy darkness without pain or fear or suffering. Sometimes memories came to him like slowly swirling snowflakes. He imagined he was standing in a vast, wild meadow in the deepest part of the night. The snowflakes drifted peacefully down, bringing him the smell of the Highlands after rain, the soft glow of the Roman skyline after the age of electricity, the thunder of hooves as he raced a lover through the thick forests of Normandy. People came to him as well, those he'd loved and lost, their faces gentle and eyes forgiving.
         Sometimes he thought he could feel a cold breeze pushing at his hair, but it was only icy water across his corpse in the underwater coffin he'd entombed himself in.
         Always the snowflakes dissolved away to nothingness, leaving him in silence and darkness.
         At some point in the long forever of his rest - he had no sense of time, and didn't want one - he grew aware that he was not alone. Someone stood above him, on the bank of the underground river, gazing through the dark water to Duncan's coffin. How he knew, or who his visitor was, he couldn't have said.
         For the first time in a long time Duncan felt a flicker of desire to live again - to speak, to breathe, to feel the press of human flesh against his own. But he was dead, trapped by his own design, and the desire ebbed away on the currents of water and remembered pain.
         His fellow Immortal, whoever he or she was, eventually went away.
         Duncan MacLeod rested.


                                                    ***


         Freezing water spasmed up through his lungs and out of his nose and mouth. He heard a horrible screech as his body tried to suck in air. Duncan panicked, flailing legs and arms wildly, fighting against his own muscles as he vomited more and more water. His body convulsed with deep, racking shudders. Freezing, wet, agonized, he finally slumped in helpless exhaustion.
         He'd been reborn. He was alive.
         A teenage boy with red and blue hair and a pierced upper lip crowded into Duncan's vision. The teenager sat crouched on his haunches, silverish eyes focused on the Highlander. A yellow battery lantern beside him shed the only light in the underground cavern. The kid's clothes hung damp on the narrow bones and skinny body, and he probably had never bathed in his life.
         "Yam jenarie," the boy said, and Duncan realized the he was actually a she. "Senta getcha byshay."
         Duncan struggled to steady his breathing beneath the residual fire in his chest. Part of the reason he was freezing, he decided, was that his clothes had dissolved. He lay naked and nearly rigid on the hard wet rock, muscles straining against unknown weeks, months or years of disuse. His fingers and toes tingled painfully, his stomach ached with soreness, and his head felt stuffed with ice. Or maybe it was his ears, not his head, because he didn't understand a thing the girl said.
         "What?" he demanded, his voice so hoarse he barely recognized it.
         "I... am. . . Jenarie," she said, clearly making an effort to speak more precisely. "Sent to . . get you . . by Shay."
         "Oh," he coughed. His body was slowly recovering, but he felt exhausted and could honestly say he never wanted to experience that particular rebirth again. Slowly, against bones and sinew that threatened to snap under the strain, he hauled himself upright. The world grayed out for a minute, then brightened again.
         "Jenarie," he said, experimentally.
         "Me," she said proudly.
         "You were sent by Shay?"
         "Yay."
         He guessed that meant yes. Duncan fought down a violent shiver. "Who is Shay?"
         "Friend of you," she said with a scowl. "You Duncan MacLeod of the clan MacLeod."
         With her accent it came out as Doonkin Magloud Offa Clan Magloud, but he got the point.
         "My friends are all dead," he said. Surprised, he realized there was no pain associated with his memories of Sanctuary. The images lay in his brain, whole and intact - falling rain, a slaughtered village, Holland's cold and lifeless hand. But time, it seemed, could heal even the worst wounds. Or bury them so deeply, like sediment in a river, that he couldn't feel them anymore.
         A nagging sense of forgetting something important gnawed at the back of Duncan's skull. He ran his hand through his sopping wet hair and let his eyes roam the cavern. He saw no sign of the container Methos had ostensibly fashioned ostensibly for the Methos Chronicles.
         Methos. Dead. Richie - dead too. Duncan realized what it was he'd forgotten. His legs weren't strong enough to hold him up yet, so instead he crawled to the edge of the riverbank and peered down. Instead of water he saw dirt. The coffin he'd laid in for however long sat at the bottom of a newly dug trench. Jenarie's shovel rested nearby. Perplexed, Duncan looked at her.
         "Where's the river?" he demanded.
         "Wha' river?" she asked.
         It must have dried up. The water he'd expelled from his lungs had been trapped in the sealed coffin with him. Duncan shivered, wondering exactly how long he'd laid dead, and then ignored the creaking of his muscles and bones as he lowered himself down into the dry bed and then the pit.
         Richie's rapier and his own katana lay just as he had left them inside the coffin. The stainless steel of both weapons had not rusted. Duncan gathered them both and hauled himself up to where Jenarie crouched, watching with narrowed eyes. The exhausting effort left him shaking on the ground. God, he was cold. And tired. And confused. Who was this strange little girl, he wondered. Who was this Shay person, and how had he or she known to send someone to free him? No one could possibly know what he'd done to himself.
         Jenarie had gone to quite some effort to unearth him, but he didn't feel grateful. He hadn't asked to be saved. Now that he was alive and physically miserable, he wasn't sure he wanted to be back. The long, dark sleep of death had been easy, quiet and comfortable.
         "Hungry?" Jenarie asked.
         Duncan shook his head. "No. But do you have any water?" His nose and mouth felt full of river slime, and more than anything he wanted a stiff belt of Scotch, but water would do under the circumstances.
         Jenarie frowned at him, as if he were breaking some taboo, but then grudgingly handed over a long cloth canteen. The lukewarm water inside tasted metallic and flat. Duncan handed back the canteen, shivered violently, and gestured towards the dark green rucksack by her feet.
         "Any chance you brought some clothes?" he forced out past chattering teeth.
         Jenarie didn't understand what he asked, so he rephrased it twice and pointed to her own clothes before they reached some semblance of understanding. She had indeed brought clothes - a rough pair of black trousers, crudely constructed shoes, and a thin jersey that stretched tightly across his back and shoulders. She watched him dress as if seeing naked men was nothing new or exciting, and he wondered if they had privacy in her culture.
         She apparently decided he was recuperated enough for the next stage of the rescue plan. Scooping up the lantern and her pack, she announced, "Sent to get Doonkin. Go to Shay now."
         She stood, and the top of her wildly colored hair reached to the level of Duncan's shoulder. Quickly and confidently she moved out of the cavern and through the narrow passages. Still stiff and sore, and extremely tired, Duncan struggled to keep up with her. Something had changed while he was dead, and he finally recognized the absence of water or humidity. It took everything he had to climb the ladder into the blinding light of day, and Jenarie had to help him with a guiding hand to a clear spot amid the jagged rocks.
         Duncan covered his eyes with his hands. The burning sunlight seared through his skull, blinding him. He heard nothing but Jenarie, his own breathing, and the wind. The thundering roar of Connor's Falls had disappeared. The air smelled acrid and irritated his nose, and the heat relentlessly sucked moisture out of his skin. Several minutes passed before he could force his eyes open with a hiss of pain. He looked for where the waterfall had been, and saw instead the horror that had been wrought.
         The waterfall and river had both vanished. The only proof they'd ever existed was the riverbed of thick, cracked dirt that trailed off down the gorge like a destroyed road. The steep, gorgeous cliffs still stood, but the lush and ancient jungle that had coated their tops had vanished into thick brambles of bare branches and gnarled roots. Duncan clearly remembered the global warming catastrophes of his centuries, but the deep and ancient jungles of the Amazon had been mostly unscathed in his time.
         Duncan rubbed his eyes several times, trying to erase the horrible vision, but reality persisted.
         "What year is it?" he asked Jenarie, when he could trust his voice.
         She didn't understand, or pretended not to understand, 'year.'
         Utter hopelessness stole over Duncan and he could do nothing but sit, trying not to see the disaster all around him. He must have been dead for centuries for this kind of change to occur. He decided he wanted nothing more but to go back to his coffin, seal himself inside again, and go back to the darkness. But Jenarie dragged him to his feet. He saw now that her hands were deformed, fingers fused to one another, and leathery skin tumors coated the back of her neck. Her teeth were half-rotting stumps, and she smelled of sickness and death.
         "Gotta getta boat," she told him, scowling. Then, maybe aware her pronunciation was slipping, she carefully enunciated, "Take you to Shay."
         Whoever this Shay person was, Duncan reflected, he or she had no right waking him from his grave. Someone had some explaining to do. Reluctantly he nodded to Jenarie, and braced his weary shoulders against the journey to come.
         They set out through the thick heat and dust, Jenarie leading, Duncan following. He saw no birds or insects. Saw no signs of life - not even grass. The sun disappeared when thick gray clouds rolled in, but the awesome heat radiating from the dirt beneath his shoes continued unabated. Jenarie set a brutal pace, obviously accustomed to the aridity and temperature, but Duncan had to stop several times for water or to ease his protesting muscles.
         By twilight they'd covered six miles, and Duncan's feet were blistering faster than they healed. Jenarie provided small, hard bars of food for dinner. They tasted like sawdust, and hit the inside of his stomach like rocks. She produced two thin blankets for bedrolls, lit a fire from an artificial fuel container completely unfamiliar to Duncan, and then crouched by the flames with a short dirk in her hands.
         "I protect Doonkin Magloud," she announced.
         "Thank you," he said, although he didn't mean it.
         He kept a careful distance from her and dozed off after several hours of tossing and turning. After a bitter breakfast of Jenarie's artificial food they set off again, and by noon reached the ocean's edge and the boat waiting to carry them away.

         Jenarie's boat was well-anchored in a sheltered cove. She waded out to it while Duncan eyed the sloop doubtfully. It barely looked seaworthy. If it had ever been painted, no trace remained on the scarred wood. The mainsail had been patched, repatched and patched again in several places, and the jib looked even worse. The chocks were rusted and missing in several places, and although the lines seemed sturdy, he couldn't help but wonder at Jenarie's ability to work them with her fused, deformed fingers.
         Jenarie glared at him suspiciously from the deck. "Whatcha waiting for?"
         Duncan reminded himself that after so many unknown years of being entombed underwater he had very little to fear from drowning at sea. Gingerly he waded through the afternoon tide and hoisted himself onboard, ignoring the warning creak of wood beneath his feet.
         "Does this boat have a name?" he asked.
         Jenarie began hoisting the anchor aboard. "Yay," she said, brow furrowing in thought. "Shay name it. I forget."
         "You forget? Did Shay teach you to sail, too?"
         Jenarie either missed or ignored his sarcasm. "Yay."
         Duncan went below deck to see how many inches of water were already flooding in. He found a hot, musty cabin with two berths, a small freshwater still, provisions of manufactured food bars, one crate of electronic junk, and dozens of tiny prayer wheels. A few shirts and trousers of doubtful cleanliness hung on hooks above the berths. A tiny galley had once occupied the aft part of the cabin, but the sink had rusted clear through and the stove had been ripped out years ago. A latrine under the bow consisted of a plank bench with a hole suspended over the open water. The sloop wasn't taking on water, at least not yet. It obviously wasn't the Queen Elizabeth, but then again, maybe nothing in this century was.
         It took Duncan five minutes to determine that Jenarie neither needed or desired his help sailing the ship. She didn't have the natural skills of a sailor, but she worked the sails and lines with a grim determination. Duncan sat on the deck and watched her, glad for the rest, and even gladder to leave the wasted land behind them. Jenarie's southern course paralleled the shore. Duncan asked her how long the journey would take, but she didn't have a good grasp of time.
         "Days?" he asked. "Sun comes up and down? Moon in the sky?"
         Jenarie's face screwed up in puzzlement. "Takes as long as it takes."
         "Do we have enough food to get there?"
         Understanding lit up her eyes. "No," she smiled. "Not enough food."
         Duncan failed to see why this would cheer her up. "What are we going to do for food?"
         "Half food."
         Duncan went down and counted the food bars. If she seriously intended for them to eat only half a bar for each meal, they would be at sea for over a month. Half a bar per day stretched things considerably, but his stomach ached at the very idea.
         He would have to catch fish to make up the deficit. Jenarie refused to believe that anything pulled from the sea would be edible, but after some grumbling found him some string and wire. Duncan busied himself with his newfound goal and trailed the line for several hours without success.
         "No fish?" Jenarie asked finally, offering proof of a somewhat limited sense of humor.
         "No fish," Duncan admitted. "But there's always tomorrow."
         The sky shaded towards sunset, and the breeze picked up a little in the mainsail. For a long time Duncan just sat on the deck, listening to the creak of the ship's beams, the flap of the sails, and the peaceful slosh of waves. The brown coast slid by to starboard, showing no signs of life. If he closed his eyes he could pretend it was any century. When he opened them, he clung to the small hope there might be something in this one that he could call his own.
         When nightfall came Jenarie seemed ready to hunker down and keep watch through the night, which Duncan said was ridiculous. She didn't understand what ridiculous meant, so he tried 'silly' and 'stupid' instead. Her face darkened, and he hastened to recover. "We'll take turns," he said. "You, me, you, me."
         "Can you?" Jenarie demanded.
         "Can I sail? Of course." He stretched the truth a little. "I sailed with men who invented sailing!"
         "Can you sail this boat?"
         Duncan spread his hands. They could see each other clearly in the starlight. "Yes," he said. "I can sail this boat."
         She made him explain all the rigging and sails. Duncan obeyed, but he rapidly grew annoyed at her skepticism and started to deliberately use words outside her vocabulary. Jenarie stood her ground, though, and made him explain everything to her satisfaction before retiring, reluctantly, to the cabin.
         Duncan took control of the boat with a profound sense of gratitude at having some time to himself. He could see that a long term voyage with Jenarie was going to be an ordeal in and of itself. He stretched his sore muscles, surprised at his lingering weakness, and ignored the rumbling in his stomach. Half a food bar had proven to be the ration for dinner, and he knew it wouldn't be any better in the morning.
         He stared at the stars, remembering the names and shapes of southern constellations. If they'd changed position ever so slightly, he couldn't tell. Maybe not too much time had passed after all. He thought of the stars hanging over Scotland, and ached to know if any long-lost descendants of the clan MacLeod still roamed the Highlands there.
         Somewhere in the world another Immortal might be looking up at the same sky, he thought with a pang of loneliness. Chances were, it would be no one he knew. Almost everyone he'd ever known was dead. He would never forget the night in Switzerland when both Amanda and Connor had been killed. His mind could still conjure up the horrific memory of Amanda's small wrists tied behind her back, her headless torso. Could bring back the anguish of Connor's head in the mud, far from his neck. He would always carry a small scar in his heart that marked where they'd been carved away from his life, although the actual devastating grief had finally faded.
         Sanctuary should have been a fresher wound, but it seemed almost as far away as Switzerland. Death had brought him distance. Holland's lifeless hand protruding from a pile of corpses, Richie's fallen rapier - they could have been visions from an old nightmare, but he knew he wasn't that lucky. They were gone, too, torn from his life and love.
         The more he thought about it, though, the more he realized he hadn't actually seen any trace of Methos in the devastation. The chances of the oldest Immortal escaping the slaughter seemed extremely slim if not downright impossible. Even if he'd been captured instead of killed, his captors would probably not have let him live long. He might have been tortured, like Richie at Versailles, and that could be a fate worse than death.
         Still, if Methos had somehow survived, maybe he was this mysterious Shay who had sent Jenarie for him. Duncan wanted to believe that, but couldn't. For one thing, Methos could not have known that Duncan had entombed himself in the underground river. For another, he would have made the hazardous journey himself, instead of sending a sickly mortal girl to do his work.
         The only person who could have known what Duncan had done was his adopted daughter Debra, whom he distinctly remembered leaving in the ruins of Sanctuary. He'd found her in the jungle, having apparently just given birth despite the fact Immortal women couldn't get pregnant. He still didn't understand how it had happened, but the ramifications were astounding. If, given certain conditions, Immortal women could bear children, and this was the way Immortals propagated, then there would have been a time when he'd had a natural mother too.
         Excitement over remembering Debra and her baby couldn't dim the shame of what he'd done, though. Ruined by grief, unable to contemplate anything beyond complete and total anguish, he'd abandoned her, killed himself and welcomed the darkness.
         Duncan dropped his eyes from the stars to the ruined coast, but there was nothing to see.


                                                    ***


         Duncan and Jenarie quickly settled into a routine that didn't make the voyage go faster but which did give it some structure. They traded watch every six hours or so, giving the other a chance to sleep. The cabin was stifling and hot at night, stifling and even hotter during the day. The half-rations left them both hungry and irritable. The water from the distiller produced less than a litre per day, not nearly enough given the blistering heat, and obviously not enough to wash by. Duncan fished for hours, but caught only dead seaweed, warped plastic, and occasionally some gelatinous masses of deformed fish eyes and bulbous flesh.
         He'd hoped to improve Jenarie's English skills but she didn't want her skills improved, and grew short tempered when he tried.
         He kept bumping his shins against the crate of electronic junk in the cabin, and asked her one day what it was. If she didn't have a good explanation, he was going to throw it overboard.
         "I told you, Shay senda to you," Jenarie answered crossly. She looked even thinner than she had when they'd first met, and had developed a hacking cough that spoke ominously of inner problems.
         "When did you tell me?" Duncan asked.
         "Way back when, we get on boat, I say Shay send it to you."
         "You did not!"
         Jenarie insisted, "Did too!"
         After ten minutes of arguing about it Duncan surrendered. He went down to the crate and called up through the hatch, "Well, what is it?"
         "Don't know!"
         Duncan poked his head back up into the sunlight. "What did Shay say it was for?"
         "He said, give Doonkin Magloud!"
         Duncan kept his temper by counting to ten silently. Then he said, "How does it work!"
         Jenarie glared at him. "Ask Shay!"
         For three hours Duncan played with the assorted parts on the cabin deck, trading the horrid heat against the risk of losing something overboard. Six of the parts were identical metal cases vaguely reminiscent of 8-track tapes from the 1970's. Each was marked with a writing he didn't understand. The cases fit into a slot on a larger piece, roughly the size of a car battery, and that battery-sized piece hooked into a twelve-centimeter aluminum rod with a three metre cord attached. At the end of the cord was a smooth oval of metal, like a polished pebble.
         The battery sized part had a number of cryptically encoded buttons, none of which did anything. No matter how many times Duncan dismounted and reassembled the pieces, the equipment remained inert and lifeless.
         "You're sure you don't know how to work this thing?" he asked Jenarie, at least three times, until she threatened to kick it overboard and send him in after it.
         He spent nearly two whole days tinkering with it, growing more and more convinced the mysterious Shay had sent him a piece of crap. His final attempt to make some sense of it involved sticking the metal pebble in his ear, as if it were a tiny speaker. All it produced was earwax, which he closely inspected with some interest - and then screamed and fell back as the pebble whipped up and attached itself to his left eyeball.
         Jenarie's feet pounded down the ladder and he heard her cry out in her native language. He groped frantically at the controls, able to see only out of his right eye. His left eye didn't hurt, exactly, but it wasn't comfortable, either. He pushed one of the buttons -
         - and the cabin vanished, instantly replaced by an open field of grass and wildflowers, aching blue sky above, fresh air that smelled of summer, laughter - Richie and a woman sitting in each other's arms in front of him, Richie smiling, saying "Turn off that thing, Debra," Debra standing beside Duncan, her auburn hair stirring in the breeze, her smile wide and crooked, her saying, "It's for posterity," Methos behind Duncan, quipping, "Posterity who?"
         Duncan whirled, the grass soft and scratchy beneath his invisible feet, sun warming his face, sensations toppling over each other with dizzying speed in a contest to dominate his mind. Debra and Methos stood so close to him that he could almost touch them -
         "I'll erase it," Richie threatened good-naturedly.
         The woman in his arms twisted to gaze at his face. "Don't you like home movies?" she teased.
         "No," Richie smiled, and kissed her.
         "Me neither," Methos said, dropping to a blue blanket and rummaging idly through a picnic basket. "My nose always looks bigger than it is."
         "Your nose is - " Debra started, and then the sunny field disappeared.
         Duncan sat rigidly in the rematerialized confines of the hot, swaying cabin, yanked from the past with a force that made his teeth ache. Jenarie, fumbling over the equipment, snatched at the piece that had disengaged from his left eye.
         "Stop!" Duncan said, grabbing her hands. The field had seemed so real - had *been* so real - that he had couldn't accept it was gone. Richie, Methos, Debra - all *alive,* all laughing and having fun -
         And Richie and Methos were both alive. The thought of it sent twin shivers of hot and cold raising through the skin of his whole body, raising goosebumps and driving tears from his eyes.
         "Okay?" Jenarie asked, peering at his face. "Doonkin okay?"
         "Fine," he muttered, covering his face for a moment. "Just leave me alone."
         "But what it does?" she persisted, touching the playback machine.
         "Don't touch!" Duncan ordered, slapping her hand away. She might activate some kind of erase mechanism, or break the whole thing beyond repair. Jenarie hissed, hurt flashing in her eyes, and then stomped up the ladder cursing him in her native tongue.

         Duncan regretted for a moment that he hadn't been more gentle with Jenarie, but regrets could wait. He turned his attention back to the machine. With just a little apprehension he brought the metal pebble back up to his left eye and let it suck itself against his cornea. The far right button on the machine swept him from the sloop's cabin back to the brilliantly clear summer field.
         " - bigger than you think," Debra continued, "but then, so are other parts of you, my dear."
         As if Duncan wasn't even there, Debra MacLeod walked through him and settled herself down next to Methos. Her long bronze skirt pulled up over finely woven sandals, and her yellow vest contrasted nicely over her tanned arms and golden bracelets. The woman in Richie's arms - she bore a resemblance to Debra, although her hair was darker and face thinner - wore a similar shirt, colored green. Richie and Methos both wore loose tunics of blue and gold, respectively, belted over brown leggings and sandals.
         Methos and Debra traded small, tender kisses that inspired some old paternal feelings in Duncan. She was his daughter, after all, and although he never worried about her sex life he knew more about Methos' habits than he cared to admit. He turned to Richie and the other woman. Richie seemed content to stretch out beneath the sun, his body loose and limber. The woman played with the strings of his tunic.
         "What time do we have to get back to meet the Dureen ambassador?" the woman asked.
         "No talk about work," Richie reminded her.
         "Richie's right, Mairi," Methos said. "No talk about work."
         "Fine with me," Mairi said lightly. "You three want another border war, just go ahead and annoy the ambassador."
         The conversation shifted to topics Duncan didn't understand, about borders and ministers and trade negotiations. He was still too enraptured by the reality of the playback to worry much about ambassadors anyway. He could shift his gaze, but when he looked down at where his body should have been, there was no sign of it. His senses all worked fine, but he guessed that was just the machine communicating directly to his brain. He moved his arms but they didn't appear in the field or anywhere else he could see.
         Tentatively Duncan groped until his hands found the playback machine, and he experimented with the unseen controls. One button rewound the scene like a video tape.
         "Turn off that thing, Debra," Richie smiled.
         "It's for posterity," Debra returned.
         Methos quizzed, "Posterity who?"
         "I'll erase it," Richie warned.
         "Don't you like home movies?" Mairi teased.
         Duncan's heart ached at how real they seemed - and at how happy they sounded. Had there been such a thing as happiness after Sanctuary?
         With more experimentation he found that he could freeze a scene, forward through it, or jump to the next session. After the picnic came a long entry set in a vast royal hall, with a crowned Debra perched upon a throne before a crowd of mostly female counselors, ambassadors or attendants. Mairi stood at Debra's side, ready to advise or receive commands. Hindu mandalas, or wheels of life, lined the edges of the room, while prayer flags entreated the gods. The court spoke a hybrid of Spanish and English, mixed with some Euro-Chinese mishmash that had been popular before Sanctuary. The clothes and jewelry in the hall were more formal that what Duncan had seen in the field, and the overwhelming perfume of the woman next to him made Duncan turn his head.
         After that came a small courtyard, hot and glaring in the mid day sun. Two figures slashed swords at one another - Richie and Darien. Duncan's blood chilled instantly. He'd disowned Darien centuries before Sanctuary, and had cursed the day he was born. Both Richie and Darien wore grim looks of concentration and ruthlessness. Richie scored a slice across Darien's shoulder, but over-reached a few seconds later and exposed his side a fraction of an inch. Darien took immediate advantage of the weakness and plunged his blade into Richie's side, bringing a spurt of bright blood.
         "No!" Duncan yelled, but found he had no voice in this recording. Richie staggered and went to his knees in the dust, his face betraying shock and pain. Darien crouched beside him, entirely unsympathetic.
         "It's that same mistake again," he said. "You're not learning."
         Richie tilted his head up, dragging in air. "Yeah?" he gasped. "Well, you always lift your right shoulder too far when you block. Signals your move to your opponent."
         Surprise swept through Duncan. Even as he struggled to understand that Richie and Darien were not enemies - Darien, the thief, drug addict, murderer - he heard Mairi's amused voice behind him.
         "Aren't you two done playing yet?" she asked.
         Darien glanced up. His voice came mildly, but his eyes were hard and flint-like. "This is not playing."
         "Hurts too much to be play," Richie agreed, dragging himself to his feet. Darien didn't help him. Richie glared at where Duncan stood. "Why are you taping this?"
         "To show you your mistakes," Darien said.
         "Turn it off," Richie ordered, and the scene vanished.
         The next scene showed a formal dinner presided over by Debra and Methos. Duncan watched the two of them stay close to each other, sharing occasional whispers and secret smiles. He'd never seen Methos look so happy or satisfied. Duncan learned that he was the Prince Consort to Debra, who was Empress of Tey. He'd never heard of Tey, but judging by the wealth in the room, it was a rich state.
         After the dinner came a private party in Debra's chambers, celebrating some treaty. Then a surprise birthday party for Methos, at Midsummer. A musical performance - Mairi on a harp, playing softly and sweetly in a room full of candles and shadows.
         Then Debra, sitting on a golden throne, her hair pinned up with diamonds and rubies.
         "Dad," she said, looking directly at him, "if you're watching this, I'm probably dead. I made these tapes for you, to show you what happened after you left. I hope we meet again, but if we don't, remember how much we loved you."
         Duncan bowed his head and accepted his daughter's gift across the gulfs of time and death.


                                                    ***


         Empire of Tey - 2978 A.D.

         Richie Ryan stood on the open balcony of his room, watching the morning light play across the tiles of the palace's western courtyard. The rock gardens and arid landscape lay quiet for the moment, safe for a short time at least from the bustle of another day in Tey's capitol city. He liked this time of day best of all, when he could pretend he was alone in the world and no line of headhunters existed outside the gate waiting to kill him.
         Darien's voice sounded reproachfully behind him. "You didn't sleep again."
         Richie didn't turn. "I'll sleep later," he promised.
         Darien made a faint noise of disbelief. The adopted son of Duncan MacLeod came up to the railing beside him and they stood, side by side, enjoying the faint breeze. Darien was taller by a few inches, and had died his first death at the age of eighteen. He was dark- haired and dark-eyed, the object of adoring whispers and giggles from the palace girls, but he never gave himself to anyone. He was silent now, and Richie knew he could stay that way all day if necessary. He had the greatest patience of anyone Richie had ever met. He just disconnected himself, went to a place where thirst or pain or distractions didn't matter. Richie envied that in a way, but he knew the price Darien paid for the disconnection.
         "I don't like Debra's tapes," Richie finally said.
         Darien stared down at the plaza, his face impassive. "You think she's making them for my dad?"
         "Maybe."
         "She doesn't want to believe he's dead," Darien said. "She saw him walk away into the jungle and disappear almost four hundred years ago. He could still be alive."
         Richie, who had never told anyone where Duncan was or what had happened to him, merely asked, "What good will the tapes do?"
         "If he ever shows up he'll know what he missed." Darien quirked an eyebrow. "You don't think he ever will, do you?"
         Richie could see many things in the future - horrible and wondrous events both, sometimes clear, sometimes cloudy, juxtaposed against each other in a dizzying mosaic. He could almost grasp Tey's future, a darting silver fish that always slipped out of his hands and left them bleeding. He'd once thought his precognition was firm, but lately he'd been unsure. Sometimes he saw things that didn't happen after all. To keep from inspiring or panicking his friends he rarely shared his precognition, and had long ago decided to keep quiet on the issue of Duncan MacLeod.
         Darien could read Richie's silences as well as Richie could read his. He wondered what it was like, to have to deal with not only the awful present but also the awful future as well. They had once shared an awful past together, in the horrid PDMZ. They had survived, just barely, both losing parts of themselves to the destruction.
         The other destruction had come later - in Valery's pits, to Darien's limbs and mind. Richie had saved him from that, dragging what little bits and pieces of him that remained from the darkness and into daylight. For that reason if no other Darien slept outside Richie's door each night, took on any man or woman foolish enough to come for Richie's head, and would die for him when the time came.
         A knock on the door interrupted Darien's thoughts. Mairi came in, trailed by her entourage of servants. She'd dressed in a satiny blue gown that revealed the milk-white swell of her breasts and the smoothness of her neck. She'd always been more showy than her adopted mother Debra, who'd been given the newborn in the ruins of Sanctuary by Duncan. She was also more drastic and daring than Debra. No one had told her she was pre-Immortal, but she'd suspected enough and gambled enough to drown herself in a river at the age of twenty-five to preserve her beauty forever.
         "Mother wanted me to remind you about the breakfast for the Ra'born priests," Mairi told Richie.
         He snorted lightly. "What makes her think I'm any more likely to attend this one after skipping the last thousand or so?"
         "Hope," Mairi smiled. She came to him and planted a kiss on his lips. "How did you sleep?"
         "Fine."
         Darien rolled his eyes and left without another word. Mairi gestured for her servants to leave as well. When they were alone, she ran her hands up Richie's chest and pulled his head down for more passionate exchange. She began ushering him towards his sleeping mat, on the center of the floor.
         "I wish you'd get a real bed," she growled.
         "There's nothing more real than the floor," Richie murmured, feeling his skin warm beneath her expert touch. They had been casual lovers, off and on, for decades. He loved her sometimes, but doubted if she'd ever loved anyone besides herself.
         Tey had not been built on love. Richie was one thousand and four years old, and many of those years had not included love in any of its many guises. Sometimes he just took what he could get.
         He let Mairi tantalize his senses for an absurdly long time, passive beneath her complete control, and then began to slowly assert his own desires as she dragged groans from him. Mairi liked to play rough, but today she seemed to be in a generous mood and even interested in his pleasure. She let him wrap his limbs around her smaller frame and shudder to a climax inside her, his skin slick, his breath ragged.
         When they were done she lay against his chest, her fingers playing with his curly chest hair. "You're just like gold," she murmured. "Richie, are you happy here?"
         His happiness had never been one of her concerns. Richie stroked her forehead and wondered what she was scheming. "Happy enough. Why?"
         "I've never seen the world," she said in a quiet voice. "Only this city. Everyone comes here, to bow at Mother's throne, but I never go anywhere."
         Richie, who'd seen far too much of the world to miss it, asked, "What do you think you'd find out there that you can't find here?"
         "I don't know," Mairi confessed. She lifted herself up on one arm and fixed her blue-green eyes on him. They shimmered the color of a Caribbean bay, back before the oceans had started dying. "Richie, I want to leave. Leave this palace, leave Mother's influence, leave Tey - leave all of it. Will you come with me?"
         Richie let himself think about it for a full moment. "No," he concluded.
         "Why not?"
         "I don't want to."
         Mairi's voice became harder. "You can't stay here forever, being pampered and protected like some Immortal god."
         That was unfair. No one pampered Richie Ryan. He allowed no servants, mended his own clothes, fixed his own meals, did his own dishes. In a palace of over five hundred rooms he kept mostly to his own nearly-empty chamber or to the dojo, practicing with Darien or Methos or any of a dozen other Immortals on Debra's staff. Sometimes he went down and spent hours in the underkitchens, helping fix meals, a hobby that drove Mairi nuts but which reminded him gently of a dead French woman and a time when he'd been young in a city by the sea.
         Mairi's words amused him more than anything else. Sometimes she was extremely transparent, and his perception had nothing to do with his extraordinary abilities.
         "You can go," he urged. "No one keeps you."
         Mairi scowled, "But you'd stay, letting Darien fight your battles for you."
         "Darien makes his own choices."
         "You don't stop him."
         "To stop him I'd have to kill him myself," Richie said truthfully. "But this isn't about Darien. If it's your heart's wish to go see the world, go see it."
         Mairi sat up, retrieved her gown from a heap on the floor, and slipped it over her shoulders. "I'll be late for breakfast," she said curtly, and swept her hair back into a jeweled clip. She leaned over and kissed Richie perfunctorily, with cool lips. "I'll talk to you later."
         When she was gone Richie dozed off in the sunlight and breeze, and only woke from hunger around noon. He slipped down through the whitewashed halls of the palace to the controlled chaos of the kitchens. Steam billowed from mammoth pots as a dozen belligerent chefs bullied flustered assistants. He made himself a lettuce sandwich and claimed a stool near the open hearths, which was where Methos' assistant Neisthet found him a half hour later.
         "What is it?" Richie asked, noting the alarm on the younger Immortal's face.
         "Darien!" Neisthet gasped. "He's taking on a challenger who came for your head - and he's losing."

         By the time Richie reached the northern courtyard the battle had already reached a bloody zenith. The challenger was a six-foot four dark-skinned man with arms that looked like sculpted ebony and a scowl that would have terrified most men. He'd scored a dozen hits on Darien's arms, chest and thighs that left Duncan's son stained dark red. If Darien had managed any blows against the challenger, they didn't show.
         Richie stood rock-stiff, resisting the screaming internal urge to stop the fight with a pulse of his will. Methos, who'd been watching silently with mixed emotions, said, "Darien's not going to win."
         Richie knew Methos had never forgiven Darien for his crimes, and the ancient Immortal wouldn't exactly weep if Darien's head rolled across the courtyard. But Richie would weep. He worked hard to keep the anguish from his face, in case Dari saw him and considered it a vote of no-confidence.
         "Of course I'll lose one day," Darien had said to him once, long before they made their way over long and arduous roads to Tey. He'd smiled ever so slightly across the flickering campfire. "I'll be happy when the time comes. Won't you?"
         The challenger brought his sword down in a two-handed arc that could have split Darien in two. Richie could tell Darien was so exhausted he could barely lift the blade, but somehow he deflected the aim of the blow. A curious twang cut through the air as his sword snapped. The challenger's weapon carried downward, deflected but not defeated, and nearly severed Darien's left arm from his shoulder. The challenger yanked his sword back, leaving the shoulder hanging by thin shreds of sinew and flesh, and then turned to fix a ferocious smile on Richie.
         "You're next," the man promised.
         Darien's right hand lifted with the broken part of his sword and stabbed up into the challenger's rectum. The man stumbled and fell with an agonized grunt, and Darien ripped back the jagged steel with a length of bowel attached. He plunged it into the challenger's spine, instantly paralyzing him.
         Richie dashed to Darien's side and caught him as he began to topple forward. Hot blood flowed from his torn shoulder into the dust. His face was shockingly white, his skin icy cold, his body shivering violently. Richie held him tightly, overcome by a giddy sense of relief.
         "I can't believe you stabbed him in the asshole!" he said.
         Darien's words were slurred and barely audible. "I knew where it was... used to be one, remember?"
         "Used to be?" Richie laughed.
         Darien choked and slumped against him, dead.
         Richie squinted against the glare of the sun to focus on Methos. "Take him away," he pleaded. "Take him to my room."
         Methos made a face, as if squelching his own distaste, but signaled the servants anyway to come forward and take Darien from Richie's embrace.
         "Bind his arm to his shoulder," Richie said roughly, "don't let it fall off."
         Methos kicked the dead challenger lightly. "What about him?"
         Richie took in a shaky breath. "I'll deal with him."
         "You can't possibly intend to take him on yourself!"
         "You want to?" Richie asked, standing.
         Methos' response was instant and fierce. "Do I look like I've suddenly become suicidal?"
         "Do I?" Richie asked. He looked down at the challenger. It would be so easy to take the man's head while he was dead, but it went against everything he believed in. "Someone comes to Tey to fight, they get a fight. That's how we live. I'll try and talk him out of it, but he probably won't listen."
         Methos folded his arms. "He got his fight, Richie. Take his head now."
         "When did you become so ruthless?"
         "Long before we ever met. Richie, he's better than you are."
         "Maybe," Richie agreed wearily. He needed to meditate for a moment, to compose himself and find his own center before engaging in the fight. "There's one way to find out. Do me a favor and don't watch."
         "Why?"
         Richie wiped his eyes. "I remember everyone I ever saw die," he said slowly. "If I die, I don't want you to remember me that way - falling into the dust, my head somewhere else."
         For centuries Methos would remember the sight of Richie standing calm and braced in that dusty, blood-drenched courtyard, ready to take on his fierce challenger.
         They looked at each other. So much remained unsaid, but much more was understood.
         Methos left him standing in the heat of the noon sun.


                                                    ***


         Methos didn't go back to his own chambers, where he and Debra shared an opulent canopy bed surrounded by a thousand fresh flowers replaced daily from Tey's hydroponic gardens. It wasn't that the opulence bothered him - he'd long ago stifled any qualms about being the Prince Consort of the Tey Empire, basking in the lavish attention of the court while the world outside continued to slide into self-destruction. He just thought there was somewhere else he should be. He went to Richie's room, where Darien had been laid out on fresh sheets. Neisthet sat cross-legged on the floor - Richie still didn't believe in chairs - his beautiful Egyptian features fixed with puzzlement.
         "After all he did," Neisthet said, indicating Darien's corpse, "why does Richie love him so?"
         Methos settled down beside Neisthet. He phrased his next words carefully, aware of the irony of defending Richie's allegiance.
         "You know that Darien was one of the Immortals working for Valery Constantine, and helped slaughter Sanctuary. Valery arranged for Richie to be kidnapped, not killed, and brought him to Paris to face Darien in the ruins of Notre Dame. He thought it was amusing, to force him into fighting on Holy Ground. They waged a vicious battle, intending to kill each other, but before they could finish they were attacked by the blood-scavengers of the PDMZ - the Paris Demilitarized Zone."
         Neisthet suppressed a shudder. "Children tell horror stories about the blood-scavengers."
         "As well they should. They were a filthy, terrifying group of murderers and sadists, maybe the worst this planet had ever seen. They lived in the ruins of Paris and cannibalized each other. Richie and Darien were both wounded and captured. When they healed, the scavengers realized what they had on their hands. Remember, the United Nations and Interpol had always officially denied the existence of Immortals. They commissioned a ten year Special Investigations Division - SIDI - who shut down the Watchers, killed Immortals like Felicia Martins, and spent millions of dollars proving Immortals didn't exist. The same thing happened in the United States once, with Project Blue Book in the 1950's and 1960's."
         Neisthet was only ninety years old, and the United States was just another ancient civilization to him. But he was perceptive enough to say, "Are you going to tell me Richie and Darien became best friends escaping from the PDMZ?"
         Methos shook his head. "It's not as simple as that. They were forced to band together to escape, but Richie still hated what Darien had done in Sanctuary. Darien hated everyone, and had ever since he'd left Duncan MacLeod's home at the age of fifteen. But of course, part of Richie still remembered bouncing Darien on his knee, and Darien had always been jealous of Richie and Duncan's relationship. When they finally reached the PDMZ border, after weeks of hardship and trial, they chose not to fight as Valery wanted but to instead part as enemies."
         Methos took a minute to gather the next part of the story. "For a year Richie eluded Valery's grasp. He made it as far as Oregon, where Valery ran a prison camp, and freed the Immortals he'd imprisoned there. But he was caught. Valery had already found Darien, and for betraying his orders, he sentenced him to be tortured to death over and over again for ten years. Every kind of torture, and every kind of death - fire, drowning, poison, disembowelment, exposure, hunger, thirst - over and over again. Richie and Valery fought, but neither won. Richie escaped and took Darien with him."
         Methos stopped. He knew a little more of what had happened, but had sworn to Richie a solemn vow never to repeat it. Darien had needed years to recover from what Valery had done to him. For a very long time he'd depended entirely on Richie for shelter and food and protection. He'd killed himself dozens of times, throwing himself from the turret of the Irish castle Richie had claimed for a new home. Methos had never consciously realized it before, but in many ways Richie had done for Darien what Gregor had done for Richie, so many centuries previous, on the top of a Swiss mountain.
         With a slight chill down his spine Methos remembered the dangerous and nearly suicidal rescue mission he, Duncan and Ceirdwyn had mounted at Versailles in 2431. Felicia had been killed minutes earlier, strapped fully awake and helpless to an operating table as a machine severed her neck, millimeter by millimeter. They'd already cut away her legs and arms, to gauge the Immortal healing process. Scientists monitored from behind shatterproof windows, waiting to gauge the exact moment and force of her Immortal death.
         Richie, howling with rage from where he lay strapped on the other side of the room, had taken her Quickening. The electrical grid at Versailles blew out, along with windows, wall supports, computers, and lights. The rescue had only been possible in the chaos that followed, but the man they'd unstrapped and carried away had been only the empty husk of Richie Ryan. He'd needed four years of tender care in the Gethsemani monastery before he could even remember his own name.
         Gregor and Richie. Richie and Darien. Circles upon circles, spinning through centuries. After Gethsemani had come Sanctuary, deep in the heart of the equatorial jungle, a sixty three year long dream that had shattered and burned under Valery's fist.
         After Sanctuary had come Australia. Methos' foot ached at the memory, but he ignored it. The pain was a ghost, insubstantial and fleeting. Valery had imprisoned Methos in the ruins of the Sydney Opera House. In his nightmares he could still see the rusting hulk of its frame, perched on the harbor in a ruined city. The fortified harbor had kept the rising seas from destroying Sydney, but the airborne ebola virus had devastated its people. Valery had left him sawing through the manacle on his right ankle with a rusty file, all the while feasting on loathsome rats and drinking acid rainwater. He'd finally taken more drastic action. He'd smashed his right foot and ankle into a boneless, shapeless mass of burning agony and dragged it through the cruel metal circle while trying not to black out from pain.
         His screams had echoed through the rotting walls, past a thousand moldy seats where audiences had once sat, up through the dark rafters and shattered windows, and out through the holes in the roof to the summer sky. It was one of the worst things he ever did to himself, but he survived. He'd saved part of the chunk of concrete he had used as a hammer and four centuries later wore part of it as an amulet, held around his neck by a slender black cord.
         "Methos?" Neisthet's voice brought him back to the present. Methos blinked, taking a moment to remember where he was. Richie's sunlit room. Darien, dead and handsome, like a stone statue.
         "Sometimes I get lost in the past," Methos confessed.
         Neisthet smiled. "I wish I could commiserate, but I don't have much of a past to get lost in."
         The sky outside crackled with a sheet of white hot light. A Quickening was loose - a very powerful one, by the look of it, and by the hum of power that rose in Methos' own blood. Richie's balcony faced the wrong direction and although he was fairly sure Duncan MacLeod's old student had won, a terrible doubt rose in his head.
         Darien's returning hum of life snapped Methos' attention from the end of the Quickening. Darien blinked groggily as he sat up. "Who?" he rasped, as supernatural thunder died away. "Who won?"
         Methos met and held his gaze.
         "I don't know," he admitted. For once they held common ground, where the past mattered less than the future.
         "I'm sure it's Richie," Neisthet said confidently. "I'm sure he'll be here at any moment."
         They waited, watching the door, to see if Richie would return to them.

         Off the coast of ancient South America - Unknown future

         First Jenarie kicked the recorder. Then she shut it off, bringing Duncan rudely back to the present. One moment he was watching Methos splash his way through an indoor fountain towards his elaborately wrapped birthday present, and the next he was in the sweltering cabin of Jenarie's sloop.
         "What?" he demanded.
         "Your turn," she spat, squeezing past his cross-legged position and flopping onto her berth.
         Although he wanted nothing more than to stay with the recordings, Duncan knew he'd been abdicating his share of the work lately. He reluctantly climbed up the ladder and into the fresh air of late afternoon. The fresh air - well, fresh compared to the cabin, if still a little more acrid than what he was accustomed to - caught him by surprise. He hadn't realized how stifling and fetid the cabin was.
         For several weeks he'd spent every waking hour either sailing the sloop or journeying through the past. His dreams were full of images from Debra's tapes. Angered at his obsession with them, Jenarie had practically stopped talking to him. Duncan didn't care. Neither the sloop or anything in it seemed as real to him as the roughly forty eight hours of memories Debra had saved for him.
         Many of the passages were legislative sessions, formal occasions of state, birthdays, weddings, tournaments, swordplay, and picnics. The recurring cast of characters included Debra, Methos, Mairi, an Egyptian named Neisthet, young Immortal students under Debra's tutelage, and the most painful image of all, Darien. Richie only appeared in handful of scenes, including the gut-wrenching duel with Darien in the courtyard, and was inexplicably missing from the later recordings.
         Debra's personal entries to him came frequently, sometimes for hours but often just for minutes. She told him all about her empire of Tey, which stretched across most of ancient Argentina. She fretted over court intrigues and sometimes worried aloud about Mairi's naked ambition. She spoke with love about Methos and Darien.
         "He's not the younger brother I remember," she said. The tape had been made one evening in her private chamber, a room of gold and white filled with flowers. She might have just come from an official function, because her crown was still atop her slightly disarrayed curls. "Dad, I don't know if you will ever believe this, but he didn't kill Mom. He told Richie once that he did, but he swears it was an accident. He blames himself entirely, but never meant for her to come to any harm."
         Duncan had never forgotten the sight of his first wife, Rachel MacLeod, laying in a broken heap at the bottom of the hardwood stairs in their Helensburgh home. She'd been almost eighty, but through the miracles of twentifirst century plastic surgery looked much younger. Darien had run away three years earlier, succumbing to the despair and violence that had marked him since he was a toddler. He'd come home to steal money for drugs, and argued with Rachel. Duncan had only seen the aftermath - the broken angle of his beloved's neck, the horror etching Darien's face. He'd driven Darien away that night, never to see him again.
         For centuries he'd carried a locket with his children's faces hologrammed inside. Josef had been killed at thirty-two, in a hovercraft accident, and failed in battle three hundred years later to a woman in Crimea. Sean and Rebecca died late, each in their forties, and Duncan lost track of them in the centuries before Sanctuary. Brilliant, eccentric Marcus went to live on the moon, and died in an atom-explosion that never let him achieve his Immortality. Julie hated her Immortality and let herself be killed at the tender young age of seventy five. Colleen loved swordplay and learned at her father's knee, but had turned to such viciousness and crime that her sister Debra had taken her head. Little Connor's death climbing Mount Everest in 2210 had been the hardest of all his children's deaths, because his body had never been recovered from the icy slopes. Then there had been Darien, and the heartbreak of Rachel's body at the bottom of the stairs.
         After Darien he'd vowed never to raise another child again. He'd kept that vow, even though it had caused a twenty-year rift in his marriage to Holland when she'd decided to adopt a baby discovered in the jungle.
         Debra continued, "Dad, I know you'll probably never see this recording. I'm going to entrust these memoirs with the priestesses, who will keep custody of them as long as some fragment of Tey remains. I'm not naive enough to think we'll last forever - America only lasted seven hundred years, after all - but I hope we'll meet again one day. If we don't, and if you should run into Darien instead - give him a chance."
         Maybe he had been wrong. Maybe Darien had redeemed himself, and could be forgiven. After all, he was probably his last remaining son -
         Duncan's thoughts skidded to a stop. Darien might be his last surviving *adopted* son, but that didn't mean he didn't have natural offspring. If Debra had somehow conceived and delivered Mairi outside Sanctuary in a miraculously short time, there was a good chance the father was Immortal too. Hadn't one of the other male Immortals in the village come to Duncan, bringing a tale of seduction and strange behavior? Peter's parents had undoubtedly been Immortal, a man and woman from inside Sanctuary's compound. The only way around that, he theorized, was if Immortal woman somehow could spontaneously reproduce, maybe carrying both eggs and sperm inside.
         Duncan MacLeod had never been a chaste man, neither with mortal nor Immortal woman. He couldn't even begin to count the number of times he'd made love to Holland. Then there was Amanda, off and on for centuries. Amanda's mentor Rebecca - he couldn't remember exactly when or where, but she had smiled and pressed his hands around the curve of her hips. Kristin, in every conceivable shape and position in her fifty-room French chateau. Gina, if just barely before Fitzcairn came blundering in. Loretta, Alys, Isobel, Guenevere -
         Good Lord. He could have fathered hundreds of children.
         Duncan thought back to Debra's entry about Darien. She hadn't referred to Richie at all. He'd already developed the haunting suspicion that Richie had died at some point. Debra never dated her appearances, but by watching the mortals in her court he'd guessed at a few centuries passing. Richie disappeared after the first few years, never to be seen or referred to again. Duncan didn't dare to hope for much, but he refused to grieve again just yet.
         He did pray, every day, that the existence of the tapes and Jenarie's custody of them meant Methos or Debra might somehow still be alive. Jenarie's native tongue sounded like a dialect of Debra's court language, as if she came from a remote corner of the Tey empire. And Argentina could not be far from their course...
         Duncan shivered in the strengthening breeze. The sky was rapidly clouding over and the seas rising with whitecaps. When the rain started lashing down he took a good look towards land, and saw a threatening reef between the sloop and coast. He lowered the jib and changed course to steer the boat between the roll and swell of troughs. Jenarie woke and stumbled to his side as the ship shuddered and heaved beneath them.
         "I remember ship's name!" she yelled over the growing wind.
         "What is it?"
         "Tight anick!"
         "Titanic," Duncan growled.
         The cold rain soaked them both, and for all their efforts the sloop began taking on water faster than they could bail it out. Duncan lowered the mainsail and threw down the anchor, but it was too late to save the ship. The mast split in half and crashed down into the deck, smashing off half the bow.
         "We'll have to swim!" Duncan yelled.
         Jenarie's face blanched as lightning lit up the sky. "Can't swim!"
         "You'll learn!" Duncan ducked down into the cabin, tossed back and forth like a rag doll, and somehow managed to grab a rucksack. He stuffed their remaining food supply inside, and Debra's recordings. The idea of leaving the playback machine tore at his heart, but he would never be able to swim with it. The ship rolled dangerously to port, water smashing down the hatch, and he heard Jenarie scream.
         "I'm coming!" he shouted. The heaving cabin threw him against the bulkhead and he cracked his head on a beam. Staggering with pain and the lurch of the deck, he somehow made it up the ladder, grabbed Jenarie, and jumped into the water.
         The combined cold and storm nearly drowned them both in the first few minutes, but Duncan grabbed hold of a storm-tossed plank from the bow and used it for buoyancy. He remembered how a pre-Immortal Richie had once dragged him across the English Channel, and drew strength from that earlier ordeal. The water sucked them through a cut in the reef that tore at Duncan's legs and back, but shore wasn't far. By the time he recognized the feel of ground beneath his sandals Jenarie had swallowed half the ocean and was working on the other half, but she was alive.
         He sheltered her with his cold, sodden body on the exposed beach until the storm cleared. He finally slept, from sheer exhaustion, and woke at dawn to find Jenarie gone.
         Duncan sat up groggily, coated with salt and sand, his muscles stiff and protesting. The beach was a rocky, inhospitable stretch lining a dead forest of bleached trunks and crumbled branches. Some wood and lines had washed up on the beach, but most of the sloop had apparently crashed itself to pieces against the reef.
         Too late he remembered what he'd left in the cabin - his and Richie's swords. Duncan cursed and lurched to his feet. Maybe they'd somehow made it to shore. But an hour's search turned up nothing, and dashed all of his hopes. The swords were the last remaining pieces of his old life that he'd been able to claim. Now they were gone, sunk to the bottom of the sea, and he was an Immortal without a weapon.
         By the time Jenarie returned he'd managed to work himself into a foul mood, but hers was even worse.
         "No water," she announced, showing him the drained canteen she'd found in the small amount of wreckage. Her eyes gazed at him, flat and hard and despairing. "We's got no water, Doonkin Magloud."
         "We'll be fine," Duncan assured her, although he didn't believe a word of it. He tried to remember how long it took to die of dehydration. He thought three days, but in this blistering climate, maybe only two. For him it was no big deal, but Jenarie was not Immortal and never would be. "How far is it to Shay?" he asked.
         They'd worked on at least improving her concept of time. After some thought, Jenarie held up all of her seven fingers.
         "We'll find water," Duncan promised.
         The first day proved him a liar. The only water to be found was the thick, briny ocean, and they'd lost their distiller. When they settled down for the night both of them were suffering from intense thirst, parched throats, and swollen tongues. They didn't even try to eat the food in Duncan's sack. Duncan attempted to build a campfire for light and comfort, but the wood was so dry it turned to ash beneath his fingers before he could even get a spark.
         Luckily the night wasn't cold. Duncan curled up in a hollow carved from the beach sand, lulled to an uneasy sleep by the pounding surf. He dreamt that Amanda came to him, her lips pressing against his chest, and was beginning to enjoy himself until he opened his eyes and found Jenarie straddling him.
         "Why?" he asked, his mouth dry from more than thirst.
         "Doonkin Magloud lost in past all the time," she chided. "Never see here and now. No water, soon I die. No wanna die alone."
         "You're not going to die," Duncan promised. Despite his own misgivings he put his hands around her slender frame. She moved to an inner rhythm of her own, only gradually letting him make himself a part of it. He couldn't help but think of Holland, who was still the wife of his heart, but he stayed mostly in the present for Jenarie's sake. He enjoyed her hot tightness clenching around him, the manipulation of her hands, the groans she dragged out of him. In return he gave her part of himself, forgetting for the moment the condition of her skin and teeth, the sickness leeching from her pores, the wildness in her expression.
         When the world stopped exploding he wrapped her in his arms and murmured her name, over and over. For all he knew, there was no Shay. For all he knew, they were the only people left in the world, lying on that beach, and without water one of them would soon die forever.

         The world swam out from beneath him. Duncan closed his eyes but refused to stop his feet. Jenarie leaned heavily against him, able to stagger but do nothing else. They had been walking for hours beneath a sun determined to fry the skin off their bones. Mirages shimmered in front of Duncan's eyes. Sometimes he thought he saw Sanctuary. Other times he thought he saw Darien beckoning him on. When it got so very bad he saw Tessa, he realized he was walking with the dead.
         At some point he collapsed. Jenarie lay against him, her body scrawny and filthy, her chest barely moving with the slow intake and exhale of hot air. The sun burned out Duncan's eyes, and he crumbled into dust. Then something trickled into his mouth, bathed his cheeks and chin and forehead, and he opened his eyes to see Jenarie laughing over him. He'd never hallucinated while he was dead before, and found the experience unsettling.
         "Water, Doonkin!" she exclaimed. Beyond her silhouette, the dark sky hung heavy with stars. "Diga gave me water, say go to Shay!"
         What mattered more than her demented rambling was the canteen overflowing with water in her hands. Duncan drank deeply, choked up some of it when his stomach revolted, tried it again at a slower pace. He only stopped when he guiltily realized he was draining almost all their newfound supply, but Jenarie laughed at his concern.
         "Diga say he get us more," she rejoiced, flinging herself into his arms. "He save us, every day!"
         Duncan let her celebrate for awhile before trying to wrangle out a coherent report. Jenarie couldn't give one. She insisted that a powerful god named Diga had raised her from near-death and taken her into the dead forest to give her the water of life. Duncan surmised that Diga was a powerful god in her mythology, but that didn't explain whose hands had filled the canteen and from what source.
         In the morning Jenarie insisted on drinking all of the canteen and leaving it behind, for Diga to fill in his magnificent benevolence. Duncan thought it was one of the craziest ideas he'd ever heard. She insisted and finally persuaded him. The canteen reappeared later that day, hanging off a rock in a clearing, filled with cool, clean water. For six days the ritual continued, and no matter how hard Duncan tried to sense another Immortal or sight their benefactor, he couldn't.
         Diga didn't bring them food, and Duncan could feel himself wasting away in the face of their meager rations. He gave what he could to Jenarie, retaining only as much he absolutely needed to keep his legs moving and his body from fainting. She grew even thinner as the days progressed, her face and arms shriveling. The days passed in a hot, wearisome blur, with little or no conversation passing between them. Just as Duncan began to believe they were lost Jenarie found the landmark she'd been looking for - a wide, dry riverbed that turned north into the continent.
         On the eighth day they stumbled onward until dusk, and came to a village clinging against an old, weather-worn hill. Duncan stopped at the sight of it, flooded with both disbelief and relief. His eyes felt suspiciously wet, but he told himself he wasn't going to cry. The village was nothing more than a collection of a dozen or so tin roofs and woven huts, lit by three tiny fires and heavy with the smell of human waste. Debra's palace in Tey had been the height of extravagance and splendor, but this wasted collection was the loveliest sight he'd ever seen.
         He went to his knees, content just to look at it, while Jenarie stumbled down the hillside. Duncan heard a few voices drift up through the darkness in a language he didn't understand, but the tone of rejoicing was clearly recognizable. It had been almost two months since Jenarie freed him from his underwater tomb. He hadn't really wanted to come here. He wanted the past, which was nothing more than a handful of battered cartridges in his sack. But this was the world he had to live in, if he could ever muster the strength to go down the hillside.
         The warning buzz of another Immortal hit him. It had been so long since he'd felt it that for a moment he was transfixed with the sensation, savoring the upsweep of tiny hairs on his neck and surge of adrenaline in his blood. He had no sword, but even if one was thrust into his hands he doubted he had the strength to lift it. He focused on the figure coming up the slope, suspended between hope and fear, and when the Immortal stopped they studied each other by the last light of day.
         He was of medium height, lean and sinewy, with hair grown past his shoulders and a face was lined with hardness. He wore torn clothes that needed patching, and his hands were stained with grime. He gave Duncan a long, appraising look that spoke of great weariness and even deeper sorrow. Duncan felt the scratchiness of his own ragged beard, his own wasted body, and for a moment marveled that they could even recognize each other in the quickly falling darkness.
         Incredibly, Shay's mouth twitched a little as if he were attempting a smile. "Mi casa - "
         "Don't say it," Duncan warned. He put all of the strength and regret he had left into the next word. "Methos."
         "Duncan."
         The Highlander pulled himself upright. He felt the world sway out from under his legs and Methos grabbed him, wrapping him in his arms before he could fall. "Steady," the ancient Immortal warned. "You've come all this way, it would be a shame to faint now."
         "I'm not going to faint," Duncan protested, but the world was swimming away quickly, and he held to Methos for dear life. After a few chancy moments he was able to stand straighter, but needed Methos to help him down the treacherous hillside and into a hut at the center of the tiny village.
         Duncan stumbled to a dirty mat in the center of the earthen floor, and took in deep breaths to quell the spinning in his stomach. Methos pushed a cup of something brown and sour into his hands. "Try it, it's not so bad," he said.
         It wasn't bad, it was awful. Duncan drank it anyway. The hut steadied a little. Light came from a small lantern in the corner. String around the ceiling's edge held a number of odd items, including torn pages from books, strips of film, electrical wire, rubber belts, and metal bracelets. Two pillows sat propped in the corner, over which hung two dresses on a peg and a collection of colorful scarves.
         Methos sat next to him. They stared at each other for a few awkward seconds, each trying to decide what to say. Finally Duncan asked, "What... year is it?"
         "I'm not quite sure," Methos admitted, his face clouding. His English was tinged with the Tey dialect. "I think... it's about 4512."
         "4512?" Duncan asked in disbelief.
         Methos nodded uncomfortably. "Give or take twenty years. I lost my chronicles some time ago."
         The number spun in Duncan's brain. He'd been underwater for nearly two thousand years. The environmental devastation he'd witnessed made a little more sense now, but two thousand years was too large a number to fit comfortably into his brain. He had so much to ask, but one question overrode everything else. "What about everyone else? Debra? Richie?"
         "Well, that's not an easy thing to answer."
         "Methos - "
         "Debra's gone," the ancient Immortal said softly. "Almost a thousand years now. I'm sorry. I wasn't sure if I should send you the tapes... they may hurt you more than help you, Duncan. But she always wanted you to have them."
         Debra had been Methos' wife, Duncan remembered now. And as fresh as his own grief was, he could see it mirrored in the ancient Immortal's eyes.
         "Maybe we should talk about this in the morning," Methos suggested. "You're exhausted, and should rest - "
         Jenarie's arrival interrupted him. She wrapped her arms around Methos' neck, speaking rapidly and with sorrow, and buried her head in his chest. "Shay," she murmured, and Duncan hadn't heard her sound so bleak since their first morning on land without water.
         "Shay," he repeated, holding her closely. After a moment he broke away and said to Duncan, with a little flush, "Shay means beloved spouse."
         "She's your wife?" Duncan demanded.
         "For five years," Methos said.
         Duncan thought back to their time together on the beach, and decided discretion would serve a good purpose now. But something must have registered in his face, because Methos said, "Did something happen between the two of you?"
         Where discretion wouldn't serve, maybe gallantry would. "I suppose it was my fault," Duncan said, studying the depths of his cup.
         "Not very likely," Methos said. "Don't worry about it, Duncan. Jenarie never has been shy in her affections. Come on, let's get you settled somewhere else for the night. You'll be quite safe. Sleep as long as you want."
         In another hut Duncan stretched out on a thin mat and let his mind veer toward numbness. Just before he went, though, he cracked open his eyes and said to the departing Methos, "What about Richie? Is he gone too?"
         "No," Methos said.
         At his side, Jenarie rattled something off in her native tongue. Duncan clearly heard the name Diga mentioned. Methos looked thoughtful for a moment. Fighting off encroaching sleep, Duncan demanded, "Diga? What about him?"
         "It's short for Gravedigger," Methos said.
         "Gravedigger?"
         "It's what Richie thinks of himself as. Gravedigger for the world."
         So Richie *was* alive. Duncan couldn't speak.
         "Get some sleep, Highlander," Methos said softly. "We have a lot to talk about tomorrow."


                                                    ***


         Methos had been doing so much in the village for so long that it was hard to stop, even though mostly everyone was dead. He'd finally found a purpose to his life, and it didn't come from being a pampered Prince or perpetual graduate student. Tending to dying mortals was not glamorous work, nor was it easy. But in helping them die he helped himself live. He had emptied his life of vanity, possessions, greed or worry. It had taken him nearly eight thousand years to find and commit to this rightfold path, but now his path was ending and his obligations to the Game were re- emerging.
         He tried to imagine what it must be like for Duncan, to land in the middle of all of this, and told himself he'd have to go easily with the Highlander. Events that were fresh in Duncan's mind were ancient to Methos. He'd loved Debra, but after a thousand years she had faded in his mind and memory both. Tey, which Duncan must have lived in for hours on the sloop Titanic, had been trampled to dust soon after Debra's death. Richie was a name that hadn't been spoken for hundreds of years to the man calling himself Diga. And Methos - well, no one called him Methos anymore. They called him by his current name, Kobol, or in Jenarie's case, Shay.
         Now that the end of the world was fast approaching he found it hard to cling to any one name at all. He was Methos, Shay, Kobol. He was Adam Pierson, Henry Cole, James Powell, Jacques leMon, Aaron Klein. He was hundreds of different names, in thousands of lover's beds, having lived through the entire history of the known world. America, Rome, Crete, Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Assyria . .. he'd seen them all. He was Etros, and he'd made a promise that he was bound to keep in the very near future.
         The village was deadly quiet in the afternoon heat. The last time he'd checked on Duncan, he was still sleeping. He would need his strength for what was to come. He would need knowledge and composure and all the confidence he'd ever had in order to do what was needed to keep the Prize from going to Valery. The task was intellectually simple, but would be emotionally devastating unless handled right.
         All Duncan had to do was first kill Richie.
         Then kill Valery.
         Simple.
         Methos tried to clear his mind of the worries that came with the plan, but told himself sternly it was the only way. He just needed to convince Duncan of that. Richie would help with the convincing as well, once he dragged his butt out of the ruined countryside and down to where Duncan could see what had become of him. Methos knew that Richie thought of himself as Gravedigger, and didn't entirely disagree.
         He sighed, tracing a well worn circle in the floor of his hut. Everything was circles, turning in other circles, the galaxy spinning, the universe waiting to be reborn. When he felt an Immortal buzz approaching he looked up to watch Duncan come in, still looking groggy and disoriented. Duncan plopped himself on the sleeping mat, and leaned as if he was going to tip over and go right back to sleep.
         "You shouldn't be up yet," Methos chided.
         "Wanted to hear the whole story," Duncan muttered. "Is there anything to eat?"
         "Not a lot," Methos said. "We sent most of what we had with Jenarie, for the two of you."
         Duncan blinked once. Then he blinked again. "Most of what you had? But what about the people here?"
         "They've been starving to death," Methos said quietly. "They sacrificed themselves because I asked them to, so you could be brought back."
         "Methos - " The word came out a strangled whisper. Duncan asked, accusingly, "Why?"
         "Because you're the last hope this world has, Duncan MacLeod. There are only a handful of Immortals left. Four, to be exact. You, me, Richie and Valery Constantine."
         Duncan shook his head. "Did you say four?"
         "Four," Methos repeated firmly. "Valery's the man who slaughtered Felicia Martins. Who ran SIDI. Who destroyed Sanctuary, and Tey, and every last civilization on earth. Who is largely responsible for the state of the world you see outside, although Richie shares part of that blame."
         Duncan held up a hand. "Wait," he begged. "It's too much. More slowly. First, where is Richie?"
         "Out there somewhere," Methos gestured vaguely towards the hills.
         "And this Valery?"
         "He's on his way. I can... feel him coming, from a great distance. He'll be here. The Gathering is upon us."
         "Oh," Duncan said.
         Methos knew he'd gone too fast. He tried to recoup the damage. "Duncan, I'm sorry. Many things have happened while you were gone. More things than I have time to tell you about. Tey rose and fell. Other civilizations toppled into the dirt. There were wars, plagues, famines, natural disasters, and one very large unnatural disaster. You missed them all. But now you've come back, and there are just the four of us."
         "I won't kill you," Duncan swore fiercely.
         Methos laughed without humor. "I don't count, Highlander. My role is just to judge at the end of the final battle."
         Duncan squinted at him. "Judge what? And why? Who says?"
         "It was a promise I made a long time ago," Methos said. "When the world was green, and I was young, and two men met in battle."
         "Two men... " Duncan shook his head. "I don't understand."
         "The Prize, Duncan. The final Gathering. It was last waged over seven thousand years ago. And I...well, I won it."
         "You won it," Duncan repeated skeptically.
         Methos nodded.
         "Well, then, why don't you just tell me all about it?"
         "I will," Methos promised. "But first let me tell you what happened the last time Richie and Valery met in battle."

         Eastern Asia - 3800 A.D.

         Mairi, standing over her mother's headless corpse with a bloody sword in hand, turned to him and gloated, "You're next, Methos."
         Then she chopped off his head.
         Methos jerked awake with a startled yelp. For a moment all he could do was cough raggedly in the face of the campfire and hunch deeper into his sleepsack. Of all the places in the world to hide from Valery's henchmen, they had to pick the one place on earth that was still bitterly cold in winter. There were reasons he'd never wandered through Mongolia, and one of them was howling down his neck with icy force.
         Richie, keeping watch on the other side of the fire, poked at the burning embers with a pointed stick.
         "Nightmare about Mairi?" he asked.
         Methos asked curtly, "Do you *have* to read my mind?"
         "I didn't read your mind. You said her name in your sleep."
         Methos pulled the sack tighter and muttered, "Sorry."
         Richie warmed his fingers by the flames. "Do you ever wish you'd taken her head?"
         "It would have been easy to," Methos admitted. "But Debra wouldn't have wanted it. Mairi challenged her fairly and Debra accepted it."
         "Practice that line for another three centuries and you might start to believe it."
         Methos sat up grumpily. He'd been in a bad mood for weeks, ever since they'd landed on the coast of New Korea chased by Valery's assassins. "I suppose you've gotten over Darien's death as well," he said testily.
         Richie didn't answer immediately. Then, with a rare crack of vulnerability, he admitted, "I don't think I'll ever get over Darien's death."
         They sat staring at the fire, lost in memories of fallen friends and lovers. Methos knew that mortal outsiders - and even some Immortal insiders - often didn't understand that sorrow was the price of joy. Nothing lasted. The happiness he'd enjoyed with Debra could never be overshadowed by her death. But on cold winter nights in Mongolia, tired grief was an easier companion to summon than memories of bliss.
         "Methos, can I ask you something?"
         "Hmm?"
         "Did you and Debra have children in Tey?"
         Methos took his time answering. "What do you mean?" he finally hedged.
         Richie's blue eyes took on a slight twinkle. "I mean, birds and bees, stuff like that. You know, that other sword you carry? It's good for something, you know."
         Methos contemplated smashing a snowball into Richie's smirking face but restrained himself. "Thank you for the information."
         Richie lifted his eyebrows.
         "Yes," Methos sighed. "I'm sure we did, at least twice."
         "Only twice?"
         "I have the theory that Immortal woman aren't reproducing at the rate they once did. Before it might have been a hundred years between births, or at little as ten years. But to my observation Debra went into her Mothering stage only twice in seven hundred years. I think as the end draws nearer, fewer new players are being added to the field."
         Richie's smirk disappeared. He never liked talking about the end. He asked, "Doesn't it bother you that you don't know where those kids are? Or if they even survived?"
         "And I know it doesn't matter," Methos said. "Richie, you're not supposed to know where Immortals come from. No one is supposed to. It throws the Game out of whack. Incest, patricide, you name it."
         Richie didn't seem too bothered by the idea. "I figured out that the women are driven to get rid of the babies as soon as possible after birth. I was found in a rest stop in New Jersey, for heaven's sake. Peter was found in the jungle. What happens to the baby pre- Immortals who die? What if we hadn't found Peter? An Immortal newborn would drive anybody nuts."
         "You haven't figured it out?"
         "If I'd figured it out, O Mighty One, I wouldn't be asking."
         "Well, it's more birds and bees stuff. A pre-Immortal has to experience a certain event before the chemical and hormonal surges activate the Immortality latent in his or her DNA strands. If she or he hasn't, then they don't become Immortal when they die. It's rare, but I've seen it happen."
         "A certain event?" Richie asked. "Like what? Puberty?"
         "Almost."
         "Then what... oh, no. Not that."
         "Yes," Methos said. "Orgasm."
         Richie stared at him.
         "Think about it," Methos said. "Who's the youngest Immortal you ever met? It's why there never were any Immortal infants or toddlers, and very rarely any Immortals in their early teen years."
         "Whats'-his-face," Richie answered. "The short kid. Tried to kill everybody. Duncan fell for the act hook, line and sinker. You're telling me that kid had already - by the time he was killed he'd already... Methos, that's disgusting. He was like ten, or twelve."
         "In some cultures, at different times, ten was an acceptable age to be married," Methos said dryly. "Besides, I have a theory that pre- Immortals have very strong sex drives."
         Richie snorted. "*Immortals* have very strong sex drives."
         They sat looking at the fire, thinking private thoughts. Richie sighed, and Methos asked him what was the matter.
         "I'm just thinking about the ones who die," Richie confided.
         "They die, but they never really go away," Methos murmured. "Darien, Debra, Neisthet, Amanda, Duncan . .. "
         "Duncan's not dead."
         Methos wasn't sure he'd heard correctly. "What?"
         Richie repeated his words.
         Methos stiffened, the cold running down his back completely unreleated to the weather. "Explain."
         "The morning after Sanctuary was destroyed he sealed himself up in an underwater coffin in the caves beneath Connor Falls. You remember the caves?"
         Methos turned the revelation over and over in his mind. "How you do you know? Your powers?"
         "Partially." Richie poked at the fire, sending up a shower of sparks. "I found his body. Remember the day we met again? I thought you were dead, you thought I was... and I came out and found you and Darien about to take each other's heads off. He'd come to pick me up, and you'd come to make a pilgrimage to Ceirdwyn."
         "You knew where Duncan was all this time and never told the rest of us? Debra had her priestesses search all over the world for him, convinced he'd withdrawn from society after Sanctuary. I figured he'd lost his head to someone, and we were never going to find out what exactly happened. But you've known all this time?"
         "Duncan made his choice, Methos. If I'd told you, or Debra, or Darien, you would have dug him up."
         "Maybe, maybe not. You never gave me the choice."
         "It's not your choice to make."
         "But it's yours? You just decided not to tell anyone? To keep it a secret from his friends and family?"
         "Yes," Richie said simply, without regret.
         Methos sorted through his own anger and hurt. That Duncan wasn't truly dead, Immortal-fashion, gave him a queer feeling. He'd accepted that he must be dead a long time ago, despite Debra's hopes. He remembered the Highlander as vibrant, brave warrior with a high sense of honor. They'd shared many good times, and Methos had secretly hoped that Duncan would be one of the final contenders for the Prize. But all that had ended thirteen hundred years earlier, and much had happened since. He couldn't even remember the sound of Duncan's voice.
         Still, that Richie hadn't said anything to him - that hurt. Richie had known what Duncan meant to him once. Hell, Richie and Duncan's own relationship should have made him want to free his old teacher.
         "He *saved* your life," Methos accused.
         "And took his own."
         "What if he's changed his mind?"
         "How do you change your mind when you're dead?"
         Methos ignored that last part. Maybe there was more to Richie's motives than even Richie understood. Duncan's death and entombment kept his safe, after all. Safe from Valery, who'd tasked himself with driving Richie to both mental and physical destruction. Safe from sorrow and grief. Methos asked, "Why are you telling me this now?"
         Richie shifted uncomfortably. "I once thought I knew exactly what was going to happen. In Sanctuary there were always visions, just little things at first, but windows to the future. I saw two men fighting the last battle for the Prize, and I knew, I *knew,* it was going to be Valery and me."
         Methos stayed silent. He'd had his own visions.
         "Over the centuries, though, the visions began to cloud even as my mental powers increased. I couldn't see Valery's face, couldn't see my own. Even now I can't tell who's there. Sometimes I think it's Duncan and Valery. Sometimes I'm afraid it will be Duncan and me. Maybe that's as good a reason as any to leave him buried."
         The burning logs snapped, startling Methos for a moment. Richie's face tightened and Methos knew the younger man was about to berate himself. "I shouldn't have taken Xan's Quickening," he said. "I never wanted his powers to control people or see into the future."
         "Someone had to kill him. Duncan and I were both busy."
         "Then Valery killed Labarna, and we both became freaks together."
         "You're not freaks," Methos said sharply. "Your abilities - and his - are unique, and dangerous, but not unnatural."
         "You haven't always thought that way."
         "Richie, you say your vision has become cloudier over the centuries. By the same token, my perceptions have grown clearer. It's like I've been traveling in a dark tunnel for over six thousand years, being propelled towards the final light, and as I get close I see more what's around me and behind me. The tunnel isn't empty. There are markers, and signals, and obstacles.
         "After six thousand years, it's normal to forget things," Methos continued. "I don't remember Alexa's face, but I remember I loved her. What was the name of Darius' church? Beats me. Duncan's fiancee, the one who was shot? I have no idea."
         Vexed, Richie said, "Methos, you're talking about *details.*"
         "I'm talking about holes in my memory, Richie. Half the reason I rarely share witty stories about my past is because I don't remember most of it. Not only have I forgotten things, but I've forgotten what I've forgotten. Only recently have vitally important things begun to re-emerge - about the Gathering, the Game, the Prize, why we're here. About who sent us."
         Richie met his gaze squarely. "You know all that?"
         Methos shook his head. "Not all of it. But I'm beginning to remember. I do know that sometimes I have visions of two men fighting, but it's not the future - it's the past. My past."
         "How can that be?" Richie asked, but stiffened in warning before Methos could answer.
         Methos listened to the wind and the pop of the fire and then heard, ever so slightly, the scrape of assassins against ice. Before he realized what was really happening, Richie whipped out his sword and lopped off the head of a dark shape hurtling over the slope. Sparks exploded across the ice, momentarily blinding Methos. Before he could grope for his own sword something heavy and snarling knocked him to the ground, fangs snapping with deadly force. The first hot tear of flesh and blood from Methos' throat sent him sinking into shock. His hand scrabbled desperately for his sword, but agony ripped up his groin and belly and legs as the robot wolves tore into him, silently and viciously.
         His last dying vision was Richie, falling under the wolves, his blood drenching the snow. When he snapped back to life some time later, Methos was bound into immobility in the freezing, dim and lurching hold of a transport pod.
         He heard the hum of a nearby Immortal and craned his head to see Richie bound beside him in the meager light shed by the emergency lights over the securely locked hatch. "Richie?" he asked.
         A groan came from the younger Immortal.
         "Are you awake?" Methos pressed.
         "Awake," Richie mumbled. "Not...enjoying it."
         The vague, slurred quality of Richie's words alerted Methos to something wrong. Although he was tightly hogtied, his clothes stiffened with blood and gore, he twisted to his side to closely inspect Richie. The younger man was similarly bound, but an intravenous collar had been fastened around his neck, pumping him full of sedative. He was drooling on the deck, and his eyes were unfocused.
         Methos' heart sank. Valery was taking no chances that Richie might muster his powers to bend the transport pilots to his will. Still, he asked, "Can you concentrate?"
         "Mmmm?"
         "Richie, concentrate!"
         Richie shuddered, as if fighting the drugs in his body, but then slumped in misery. "Tessa," he managed hoarsely. "Her name was Tessa."
         Methos struggled against his bonds, but they consisted of double- locking chains and manacles and the task was hopeless. For a long time all he could do was stare at a tiny porthole in the hatch and watch the sky lighten. Richie mumbled to himself for a long time before slipping into unconsciousness. When Methos twisted to touch his face, he found it as smooth and lifeless as ice.
         The transport shuddered and dipped. Methos tried to push away images of fiery crashes. Flying was almost unheard of in this century, because of the electro-magnetic-pulse bombs that had ruined the atmosphere for radar, sonar, satellites or other forms of radio telemetry. Valery's' pilots were flying line-of-sight, by the seat of their proverbial pants, and were barely managing to keep the decrepit old ship in the air.
         Methos lost track of time, and died of hypothermia at least once before they landed. Once the ship was on the ground both he and Richie were manhandled out to a sunny landing spot cleared from a winter field. Methos' whole body screamed against the tight constraints and he blanched at the sight both he and Richie presented - covered with blood and gore and dried body fluids, helpless prisoners of Valery's mortal henchmen. After a short and agonizing ride over bumpy ground in an ancient combustible- engine vehicle they were taken into a military bunker buried deep in the ground.
         Methos lost Richie when the guards dragged them to different rooms. Methos steeled himself not to cry out as his legs and arms were finally unbound. He lay weakly on the cold tiled floor, his muscles numb or in spasms. He offered no protest as the silent men pulled him to a shower that reeked of disinfectant and hosed him down with lukewarm water. The hard brushes and harsh soap they used scraped his skin raw, but he refused to even whimper.
         Naked and dripping wet, he was taken down a seemingly endless set of stairs to a windowless room of four black walls, a black grilled deck, and a smooth black overhead lit by one recessed light. Methos almost protested the lock of manacles around his ankles, but kept silent with a supreme act of will. Staying still after the door closed and the light went out took everything he had in him, and the pain of driving his fingernails against his palms.
         He stood in the darkness, the silence, feeling the unforgiving steel around his ankle, terrified at what Valery might be planning, frantic over what might have happened to Richie already.
         Then a flurry of rats swarmed his naked legs, and he began screaming.

         Richie knew he was being drugged, but he didn't worry about it. He floated, linked to reality only intermittently by the chains on his wrists and ankles, and stared at the ceiling above his cot. The cell had no windows, and he'd lost track of time. He remembered a shower and dressing in new clothes, but maybe those events had been hallucinations. Sometimes someone lifted his head and forced him to drink water, but he was never fed. The guards changed him as if he were an infant. He spiraled through the centuries, dizzy with memories and dreams that shifted against each other with maddening swirls and changing patterns.
         The guards came and freed him. They took him through a maze of corridors to a mammoth, empty missile silo still marked on the wall with ancient Russian signs. They sat him on the concrete floor and took off the collar. He rubbed at his neck gingerly, cold in his thin shirt and trousers, and only gradually came back to himself.
         He remembered the wolves in the wilderness, killing him in the snow. He remembered seeing Methos' body being tossed like a torn rag doll between two of the ferocious robots. A transport pod. Richie wondered where his best friend was now, in what deplorable condition. He stretched out his extrasensory perception in all directions and shifted through the feedback that came. He was underground, in a place of old death manned by heartless men and women, ruled by a soul marked with darkness -
         Richie lurched to his feet and snapped around as Valery slammed down on his thoughts like a ten-ton weight. They glared at each other across the space of the missile silo, enemy to enemy.
         "It's been a long time," Valery said grimly, with a tiny bow of his head. "Welcome back to my embrace."
         "Fuck you too," Richie said.
         "I should have known you'd be profane, not original."
         "You should have known better than to bring me here, soliciting for your own destruction."
         "You have no sword, Richie. No back-up. No resources. No hope."
         "Against you there's always hope."
         Valery smiled. "Ask me where Etros is."
         "Methos."
         "Same person."
         "Where is he?"
         "Waiting. Just as I waited for even one of my challengers to take you down inside your golden walls of Tey. Just as I waited for you to present yourself like a man against the edge of my blade."
         Although inside he was icy and shaky with fear, Richie allowed himself a small smirk. "Last time I broke your blade, Valery."
         "I remember," Valery said tightly.
         Amid the fires of a burning prisoner camp in Oregon, they'd clashed and battled and barely walked away alive. Richie hoped this meeting, too, would end with swords, but Valery seemed to have another agenda. He forced the issue. "So give me a sword and I'll beat your ass again."
         "Not so quickly. I have a proposition for you, first."
         "To go into business together?"
         "We'll track down and kill every remaining Immortal, then fight fairly for the Prize."
         "And I would be willing to do this because... ?"
         "Because I would spare Methos for you. Keep him safe and comfortable, until the end."
         Richie's eyes narrowed. He'd seen Valery's hospitality. He'd barely survived it once, in Versailles.
         "You might just volunteer," Valery added. "Why don't you go see him, and then decide?"
         Two of Valery's guards arrived. Richie went with them down five levels to a locked room at the end of a stark passage. An armed guard at the door motioned for Richie to pick up a covered tray of food.
         "It's dinner time," the guard said flatly.
         The first thing that hit Richie when he walked inside was the sour smell of filth and waste. The overhead light was barely illuminated, keeping much of the room in darkness. Richie put down the tray and edged towards a shape huddling against one wall.
         "Methos?" he asked. "Is that you?"
         The shape retreated with a clink of chain to one of the corners. Richie caught a flash of bare skin, dark hair. "Methos, it's me, Richie."
         He edged closer and closer to the shivering huddle, and then crouched to his level. Cautiously, slowly, he placed his hand against Methos' bare back. "Methos, it's me. I'm here. Talk to me."
         "Rats," Methos gasped, in a strangled voice. "Rats . . everywhere."
         "There are no rats," Richie soothed. He knew the ordeal Methos had endured once in a Norman fortress, kept in darkness with rats. He knew rats had overrun the Sydney Opera House while Methos was chained there. But there were no rats here. Slowly he took Methos into his arms, anchoring him to reality, rocking him slightly. "Sssh," he said as the ancient Immortal struggled to calm himself. "I'm here."
         Richie couldn't tell how long Methos had been locked in the cell - by the length of both their scruffy beards, a matter of days - but it was obvious he hadn't been fed or washed. He retrieved the food tray and coaxed Methos into slowly sipping a flask of water and eating chunks of hard bread. The smell of the bread made Richie's stomach growl, but he ensured Methos ate first and then took what was left.
         A rolled up bundle on the tray proved to be some clean clothes and a key to the manacles on Methos' ankles. When Richie freed the locks, he saw circles of dried blood and torn skin. He said nothing. Methos sat silently, having retreated into silence, and fumbled at the clothes so badly that Richie had to dress him. His eyes were rimmed red and swollen, and he probably hadn't slept more than a few minutes since they'd been taken prisoner.
         Richie pushed down a wave of pure black hatred at Valery. He was trying desperately to shield his thoughts and emotions from the other Immortal, and knew that the fury leaking through would just amuse him. He had to fight constantly to keep Valery out of his mind, like trying to deny the roar of an airplane engine in his ears. He wondered exactly how long he could keep up the effort.
         "What does he want?" Methos asked in a shaking voice.
         "Me."
         "No."
         "With you as hostage."
         Methos gripped his arm and met his gaze for the first time. "No," he hissed. "If it comes to that, you kill me."
         "I don't have a sword," Richie said helplessly.
         "Maybe you don't need one."
         The portent of those words hung heavy between them. They sat side by side on the grilled deck, pressed together for warmth, horribly aware of the probable future.
         "Did they hurt you?" Richie asked.
         "No more than what you see."
         "He didn't... "
         "No." Valery hadn't raped him. But both knew it was a possibility, given what had happened to Richie in Versailles, Darien in Oregon.
         When the door clicked open they were blinded by the bright hallway lights. They were taken roughly back to the missile silo by a phalanx of guards. Valery and a woman waited for them. She stood five foot eight, skinny but strong, with curly black hair pinned atop her head and an excited flush to her cheeks. She'd dressed all in black, and seemed poised to leap and wrestle Methos or Richie to the floor. But she wasn't Immortal.
         "Fernanda, meet our guests." Valery's eyes didn't waver from Richie's face. "What have you decided? Join me, or let Methos pay for your stubbornness and defiance until you cave in?"
         Richie let his gaze fall to the sword in Fernanda's hand. "You need him," he said as a last-ditch effort. "You said so yourself."
         Valery's gaze slid over to Methos' grimy form. He agreed, "I need him, but that doesn't mean I can't play with him."
         Richie didn't need to look at Methos to feel the hatred and fear pouring out of him. Methos knew what Valery could make of his prisoners. He'd helped haul Richie's shattered soul up a Swiss mountain. He knew some of what had happened to Darien, as punishment for sparing Richie's life. He'd heard Debra's horrific recounting of the carnage that had been wrought in Sanctuary.
         But Methos hadn't fully endured Valery's sadistic attentions yet. Being chained in the Sydney Opera House or imprisoned in the darkness here was just the beginning. Richie had been destroyed, and only Gregor and the monks at Gethsemani had given him the strength to come back to reality. Darien had been stripped of all reasoning and intellect, reduced to a whimpering animal driven by fear and pain. Richie could not, would not, let them do that to Methos.
         He calculated how long it would take to cross to Fernanda and wrest the sword from her grip. How long it would then take to whirl and sever Methos' head with one swift blow.
         Let Methos be destroyed in mind and body both, or keep him safe by joining faces with Valery and trust the man's word. All Richie had to do was surrender his will, honor, pride, life.
         "I'll join you," Richie said.
         "No!" Methos growled. Fernanda's sword swept up and the tip pressed against Methos' chest. He swept it away with a snarl. "Don't even think about it, little girl."
         Richie repeated, loudly and clearly, "I'll join you, if he comes to no harm."
         Methos grabbed Richie's arm. Richie shrugged him off, and the guards dragged Methos back a few feet despite his struggles. "Who do you think you are?" the ancient Immortal demanded. "Who are you, to sacrifice yourself for me?"
         Richie said, "I'll do it."
         Valery gloated and commanded, "Then kneel before me, puppy."
         "Richie - " Methos hissed.
         "No," Richie said, fixing on him with an odd expression of love and defiance. "Don't stop me."
         The first time they'd ever met, Methos had come to Seacouver to warn Duncan about Kristin Gilles. The Richie Ryan he'd found was a man barely out of his teenage years, an immature combination of lust, reckless judgment, bull-headedness, raging hormones, and enormous potential. The Richie Ryan before him was his dearest friend on earth, and the depth of the sacrifice he was making shook Methos to his core.
         He couldn't stop him. Wouldn't stop him. But he didn't know if he would ever forgive him for making the sacrifice, either.
         Richie read the surrender and helplessness in his eyes and turned back to Valery. Part of his brain had already numbed in the face of what he was about to do. Another part had splintered off with a fresh, hot whiteness that made his hands shake.
         He tried to conjure forth images of love and strength, but he was alone in this, completely alone, and went to his knees before Valery Constantine.
         He saw the flash of Fernanda's sword arching towards his neck a second too late to hurl himself away. Heard Methos' shrill cry of warning even as the razor sharp steel cut into his neck. Valery had wanted his head from the very beginning and unless something impossible happened, his life would end in a matter of milliseconds.
         So Richie did the only thing he could.
         The impossible.

         Tey homeland - 4512

         "What did he do?" Duncan demanded.
         Methos swept a hand at the devastation outside the tent. At the ruined wasteland and gray sky. "All this. He unleashed all the power he'd taken from Xan, and threw it against all the power Valery had taken from Labarna, and for a few seconds..." He stopped for a moment, marshaling the memories. "Fernanda disappeared without a trace. Literally vanished into thin air. So did her sword. From an entirely subjective point of view I'm not sure what happened next, but to me the ground shook, the sun blacked out, and the whole of reality shifted a few inches off center, if that makes sense."
         Duncan chilled at the idea. "And when it was over?"
         "When it was over, Richie and I were in the middle of nowhere. Somehow, as an act of pure survival, he'd flung us halfway across the planet to somewhere he felt safe. Richie had a migraine for a month and every bit of his power had been burned away, like the circuits on an overloaded electric board. The same thing happened to Valery, or so we found out later through mutual enemies."
         The middle of nowhere turned out to be the outskirts of ancient Seacouver. Methos and Richie took shelter but soon discovered that the influence of Richie and Valery's supernatural battle had extended worldwide. Entire nations had disappeared as if they'd never really been there. Continents had been wiped clean of vegetation. Sudden volcanic eruptions, tidal waves or pestilence had descended in seconds.
         "And everyone we met seemed... I don't know. Changed. Off center. Like they had just woken from some awful nightmare, and couldn't remember what it was like to walk in daylight. I think it was about then that Immortals stopped procreating completely, because I've never met a young one or pre-Immortal since then. That was over five hundred years ago, and mankind has just gone downhill since. There are no more nations. Just tribes of villagers, gradually dying out from famine and sickness. They're ninety nine percent sterile, and I haven't seen a child in nearly fifty years. I swear there are maybe only a few thousand mortals left in the world, and three fighting Immortals."
         "You said that before. Tell me why you're not fighting. Why you don't have to. You certainly had to before."
         "In the middle of Richie's battle with Valery that tunnel in my mind became brilliantly clear, if just for a few seconds. I can't remember it all, but what has stayed with me is not what's ahead, but what's behind. And it turns out the tunnel isn't so much a tunnel as an inner tube. A circle, going around again. Where we are going is exactly where we've been."
         Duncan gave him a perplexed look. "Two thousand years ago you weren't this mystical, Methos."
         "Two thousand years ago, we weren't in the final days of the Gathering," Methos retorted dryly. "Do you remember when we first met? You were adamant the days of the Gathering were at hand."
         "You didn't disagree."
         "But what made us believe that?"
         Duncan thought back to the twentieth century. Paris, Seacouver, an antique store and dojo, people he'd loved and people who'd died. "I'm not sure."
         "Did someone put an announcement in the Immortal classifieds?"
         "No," Duncan admitted. "It was just a feeling . .. a gut instinct. I remember having it before - in Spain a few times, in Japan one year - but I thought it was just my youthful inexperience, and I ignored it."
         "The trouble with little voices in your head is sometimes they're your instincts, and sometimes they're schizophrenic hallucinations. But in this case, your instincts were right. There was a mini- Gathering of sorts during the 1980's and 1990's, centered mostly in the United States. But it wasn't the final one, and by far not the first one of its kind. Often when there's a region of overpopulation, violence or turmoil in the mortal world, it's mirrored by a mini- Gathering somewhere. Then heads roll, the balance evens out, and things gradually settle down again."
         "Are you saying Immortals function as some sort of safety valve?"
         Methos nodded. "By personifying the forces of the human psyche, expressing the deepest desires of the group mind, we vent the world and keep it in balance. Most of the worst conflicts or wars in mankind's history came at a time when there weren't enough Immortals for the valve to operate properly."
         Duncan sighed. "This is your great theory, is it? I remember we used to spend hours and hours in Sanctuary, debating free will and the purpose of the Game, but I never thought you'd come up with something like this."
         "There's statistical evidence that proves it. Or there was, at least. The Watcher databases, graphed out to show population and beheadings against the backdrop of world events, showed the statistical deviations and norms."
         "The Watchers," Duncan murmured. "You know, we used to joke that you probably started them."
         Methos laughed ruefully. "No, I didn't, but I know who did. Her name was Cassandra, and she grew suspicious of her daughter's marriage to a merchant of Athens who carried a sword and kept numerous late-night appointments. Cassandra witnessed a few Quickenings, found out about Immortals, and tried to tell people. Most people wouldn't believe her. A few did. So they founded a secret society of Watchers as a way to keep track of Immortals - partially from curiosity, but also as a way to snatch up their assets when they died. Cassandra was an immensely practical woman."
         Duncan squinted at him suspiciously. "How do you know all that?"
         Methos' cheeks colored slightly. "I was the merchant of Athens."
         "You mean to tell me that - "
         "Yes," Methos said. "My mother-in-law started the Watchers."
         After a moment, Duncan said, "I don't believe you."
         "I don't blame you," Methos grinned. "But it's the truth. Come on, let's go find Richie."


                                                    ***


         "The circle goes around," Methos said as they climbed a rocky hill an hour later. "Immortals personify the deepest forces of life and give balance to our cosmos. We had the key all along, Duncan, but we never realized it."
         Duncan stopped for a moment on the steep slope. Hunger and thirst gnawed at his concentration, and his head still swam from everything Methos had told him that morning. "Huh? What key?"
         "There can be only one. There can be only *one.* One what?"
         "One Immortal," Duncan answered.
         "One *one.* The One."
         "One what?"
         "Just One."
         Perplexed, Duncan asked, "Did you ever hear of an Abbot & Costello routine called "Who's on First?"
         Methos gave him a tolerant look. "The One that can be explained is not the One. It's... everything. And nothing. Defining it changes it. Attempting to define it insults both the One and the human intellect."
         "And this One...what? Determines everything?"
         "Yes and no."
         Duncan felt his jaw clenching. "So why does it make us kill one another?"
         "Because the One is wonderful and terrible and magnificent and greedy and generous. It is as sadistic as Valery, as loving as Darius, as sly as Amanda, as noble as you, as cynical as me. It manifested itself into the spirits, animals and peoples of the earth, and off-shooted Immortals to keep the balance. As long as we fight each other, the One is maintained. But if the ratio falls to pieces, the whole thing becomes undone. And when the day comes when there are only two fighting Immortals left, the Game ends. Whoever wins - well, he or she determines the shape of the next circle. Just as I shaped this one."
         Duncan had almost had enough of Methos' odd mysticism. "I don't believe you're God, Methos. That you created the heavens and earth in seven days."
         Methos' face reflected an inner calmness that Duncan's scathing words could not touch. "No, the planet stays. It is the One's playing field. But perhaps beyond the One...no, I won't speculate. I was a young man born late in the Game roughly nine thousand years ago, to a civilization that didn't even have written records. Through amazing fortune and luck, and not inconsiderable talent with a sword, I was the last Immortal standing at the time you would perceive as 3000 B.C., although I did have to do some mucking about with time later. I claimed the Prize, and all the power that went with it. I kept the world much the same as it, was with just a few minor changes. Now we've come full circle, to another end of the Game, and the circle is about to be shaped again."
         The ancient Immortal's voice took on a cold, hard edge. "Understand this, Duncan. If Valery wins the Prize, all the power of the One will be at his disposal for a few seconds - the same power that started the Big Bang and manifests itself in our Quickenings. He'll be able to do whatever he wants with this planet. He might create a civilization of horror and pain where everyone is subjugated to him as lord master, and rule by the hand of terror. He might rampage through the course of human history, installing himself as emporer of the earth during some other period of time. He might raise volcano's, break off mountains, send tidal waves to shatter the coasts. He'll do whatever he wants. Although to the One it would last only those few seconds, here on earth his reign would last thousands of years. To the mortals beneath him, it would be hell incarnate."
         "Can he get rid of Immortals? Dissolve the safety valve?"
         "No," Methos said. "Immortals will eventually be born into whatever world he creates. Valery will have no choice about that, and he won't be able to stop the gradual return of free will either. But he will shape the world both mortals and Immortals live in. When *you* win, Duncan, you can use the power of the One to reshape the world you once loved, or make a new one free of Valery's tyranny. You can clean the oceans, restore the forests, give mankind the opportunity to start over - "
         "Maybe I don't want to," Duncan interrupted. "Did you ever think of that? I don't see how having to save the world is that much of a Prize, Methos. Maybe I just want to create a little castle somewhere where I can drink Scotch all day and sleep with my harem. Maybe I want the antique store back, with Tessa at my side. Maybe I want Fitz and Amanda and Connor alive again, and not buried in the dirt. What do you say to that?"
         "I say, it's your choice."
         Duncan felt like throttling him. "Why me?"
         "Because the alternative - "
         "I mean, why not Richie?"
         Methos didn't answer, only blinked as the presence of another Immortal invaded their minds. Duncan and turned and squinted across the waste to the lone figure that had risen against the clear gray sky. Richie Ryan still looked nineteen years old, frozen in youth, but the expression on his face and set of his eyes made him anything but young. He stood tall and strong, wearing a variety of knives, dressed in the dusty clothes and body paint of Diga, the wasteland god Jenarie had raved about.
         With one look Duncan knew why Methos was so insistent that he fight Valery, not Richie.
         Because in Richie's left hand was a broadsword, huge and flecked with blood.
         And where his right hand should have been was only bitter air.


                                                    ***


         "Skittish?" Methos asked.
         Richie awkwardly sheathed his sword. "Old habits," he said flatly, without a trace of humor. He came down to their position and faced the two men. He looked neither pleased nor dismayed to see Duncan up-close, after following him for over a week. He carried instead an air of total indifference, as if Duncan was a stranger who'd come late to a party that was already over.
         Duncan had watched him approach with torn emotions. Elation, of course, at seeing Richie alive and not in a recording. Shock at his missing sword hand. Dismay at how worn and beaten he seemed, carrying defeat in the set of his shoulders. He didn't know what to say, and the flatness of Richie's expression daunted him.
         "Duncan," Richie said, with a tiny nod.
         "Richie," Duncan managed.
         Formalities done, Richie moved past him and down the slope. "Jenarie's okay?" he asked Methos.
         Methos followed. "As well as can be expected."
         "The rest?"
         "Going quickly."
         Duncan tagged behind Richie and Methos, observing as they fell quickly into the verbal shorthand of friends who'd known each other for a long, long time. He realized with a pang of jealousy that they'd known each other now for four times as long as he'd known either of them. He was an outsider to their relationship, a man who'd died and stayed behind, and the knowledge made his chest hurt.
         At the village, Richie went into each of the huts. Duncan followed the first few times, watching Richie clasp the hands of the dying villagers and offer words of support in their own language. The stench and filth drove Duncan outside, to watch Methos and Jenarie harvest the last scraps of plants from the garden. Methos had a separate garden for beetles and worms, and Duncan watched with growing dismay as Jenarie made up a cauldron of worm stew for dinner.
         When Richie was done with his rounds he came out and stood staring at nothing in particular. "It's almost time," he said to Methos, with Duncan just a few feet away. "Should we wait for them to go?"
         "Go where?" Duncan asked.
         "To death," Richie said patiently, as if he were not only a stranger, but also a child. "I thought Methos explained it all."
         "He's resisting," Methos said.
         "Resisting what?" Duncan asked.
         Richie answered, "You don't have a choice, Duncan. I can't possibly win against Valery with only one hand. You'll have to take my head. How about after dinner?"
         "No," Duncan growled. He paced a circle around Jenarie's worm stew, while she sat on her haunches and watched the men argue. "Number one, I am not going to stand here and casually discuss taking your head, Richie - "
         "Diga," Richie supplied helpfully.
         "And two," Duncan continued, in a scathing voice, "I don't buy anything about mini-Gatherings or circles or shaping the world, whatever you want to call it. I think both of you have gone a little nuts, maybe bush crazy, who knows what - "
         "Resisting," Richie said to Methos. "Definitely."
         "I'm not doing it!" Duncan insisted.
         Richie gazed at him for a long moment, his expression somber. "Then Valery wins," he said. "Then everything we ever did was for nothing."
         He walked away, leaving Duncan to consider those consequences.

         "How do you know?" Duncan asked from where he reclined on the floor of Methos' hut, fingers laced behind his head. Evening had fallen outside, plunging the village into near-complete darkness. Duncan still found the absence of crickets or other night life disturbing, but he'd grown more or less accustomed to it on the hike from the shipwreck. Methos had just come back from his evening rounds of tending to the dying, and stripped off a shirt that reeked of filth and vomit. He pulled another down from a hook and smelled it experimentally while half-listening to Duncan's rationalizations.
         "How do I know what?" Methos asked. He wondered where Jenarie was. She'd used up most of her strength and health bringing Duncan back, something the Highlander didn't seem to appreciate. All the villagers were dying, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He took the second shirt, wadded it into a ball, and threw it into the corner.
         "How do you know there aren't other Immortals around? Dead and trapped somewhere. Entombed at the bottom of the sea in sunken submarines or ships. Buried in deep graves by superstitious medieval villagers."
         "Frozen on the slopes of Mt. Everest?" Methos added caustically. He relented when he saw Duncan wince. "Sorry."
         Duncan remembered climbing Everest to look for Little Connor's body, but it had been a hopeless task. The only trace of him had been his ice ax planted below Hillary Step, above a seven thousand foot fall down the Southwest Face of the mountain. "I'm just saying , how do you know?"
         "There may be. But if there are, there's no way to find them. They're not Players anymore."
         "You could have left me where I was," Duncan said.
         Methos studied the tips of his fingers. "I would have left you, if an Immortal hadn't come along and taken Richie's hand four months ago. He was the one who wanted to send Jenarie, not me."
         "Why Jenarie, and not yourself?"
         "Because if she failed, I could always try after her. But if I failed - if I died somehow on the trip before I freed you - there would be no second chances. Valery would take Richie's head, and the world would fall to darkness." Methos smiled faintly. "Besides, you know how much I like the water."
         "You don't think Richie can take Valery?"
         "With one hand?" Methos snorted. "Duncan, they were somewhat matched before, even though Valery's so much older. But now... "
         "Answer the question."
         Methos pulled on the least grimy of all his shirts and belted it loosely with a belt woven from ancient computer cables. Carefully he said, "I think Richie believes he can't win. And that's more important than actual skill."
         Duncan studied the patterns of the woven ceiling. Holes let in the darkness of night. "I just think . .. "
         "What?"
         "I think he deserves the right to win the Prize."
         "This has nothing to do with rights, Duncan. Now is not the time for your personal feelings to interfere with what has to be done. If Richie loses, Valery will shape a world of ceaseless horror."
         "And if he wins?"
         "He won't, not the way he is now!"
         "And I will?" Duncan sat upright, his hands spread in frustration. "I have nine hundred years of practice under my belt. He has what - four thousand? Five? He's been practicing probably every day for the last two thousand years. I've been out of the Game. He'll probably slaughter me faster than anyone else."
         "So you have no interest in facing Connor's killer?"
         Duncan's heart almost stopped. "Connor's killer?"
         Methos' eyes took on a narrow slant. "Surely you realized he's the one who killed Connor in Switzerland. He told Richie so, and described the fight to the very last detail."
         Duncan didn't speak. He remembered finding Connor's body in the rain. He remembered trying to put his clansman's head back on his neck. "Valery killed Connor," he said dumbly.
         "Yes." Methos crouched beside Duncan. "Does that steady your resolve? Duncan, Richie can't win against Valery. He doesn't believe in himself anymore. He's just waiting for the end. You - you can take on Valery. You have the skill, the drive, the need. Fortify yourself with Richie's Quickening and then go kill Valery. End this all."
         Duncan shuddered at the thought. "I can't kill Richie."
         "He wants you to. He knows it's what's best for all of us."
         "You put yourself at the end of my sword once, determined that I should take your Quickening and beat Kalas. I refused. It would have been practical, but it wasn't honorable. I won't kill a friend to defeat my enemy."
         Methos' answer came sharp and clear. "So you let your enemy defeat you instead. The same argument I used then applies now. Richie doesn't have the passion to kill Valery anymore. It's been carved out of him, and he knows it. You have the passion, and you can win."
         "I haven't lifted a sword in months!"
         "Then you'd better start!" Methos rose and paced the tiny confines of the hut. "Do you realize how much these people have given up for you, MacLeod? They gave their food. They let their priestess go off on a suicidal mission to dig up a man in a cave. You've been given the chance to make everything right at the end, but you won't take it because you think it somehow soils your sense of honor! Let me tell you, there is no honor left. We're at the end of everything. It's you or Valery."
         Duncan's defenses crumbled beneath the passion in Methos' voice, the hammering strength of his conviction. Weakly he tried, "Why do I have to kill Richie first?"
         "Will you kill him after?" Methos asked. "Will you be able to take his head, when it's just the two of you left to fight?"
         "I don't know," Duncan said.
         "Take the strength of his Quickening. He's killed hundreds more Immortals than you have. I don't think Valery can defeat the both of you, fused into one body. Let it be the body with two good hands, fueled by the passion of revenge."
         Duncan took a deep breath. "Before I do anything, I want you to tell me first whether or not he's my son."
         Methos stared at him for a few seconds, then threw his hands up in exasperation. "You're worried about whether or not he's your son?"
         "He could be, couldn't he? He was born in 1974. I don't remember much of the seventies - something about Nixon and disco - but I could have slept with Amanda. Or Grace. Isobel, Susanne, Angelina, Christine, Rebecca - "
         Duncan stopped.
         "Rebecca," he said. "The hair - "
         "Duncan," Methos said, determined to divert the conversation, "what if Richie is your son? Does it matter? Would it matter if I told you that Valery is your father?"
         The floor seemed to shift under Duncan's haunches. "Valery?"
         "Yes, Valery."
         Duncan felt like a glacier, breaking off with mammoth force into small and fragile pieces. "Valery is my father?"
         Methos folded his arms. "Could be. Who knows? It doesn't matter, because I'm just trying to make a point. If Richie were your son, or Valery your father, it wouldn't change anything. You know what you have to do."
         Duncan looked away, "There must be another way."
         "No," Methos said, and this time he let a trace of his sorrow leak through his words. "There is *no* other way."


                                                    ***


         They had, at best, two more days of food. The nomads who'd settled and built the village near an old military bunker had whittled down the war rations from inside to just the crateful they'd sent with Jenarie. Now they were too ill to move again. Two days of food, and that was all. To wait beyond that point would only weaken Duncan when it came to the final battle, and he was forced into action. He spent the first day denying to himself what had to be done, but nevertheless swinging and parrying a sword borrowed from Methos. He and Methos practiced the length and width of the village, for hours on end. When Duncan's muscles screamed for rest he stopped for a short time, then resumed as soon as he could. He needed to be as good as he could be. He needed to be able to win.
         Two thousand years of death hadn't done him any lasting damage. The long weeks on the sloop had restored his strength and flexibility, although he'd lost weight on the half rations. His body remembered how to fight but his mind had grown lazy, and Methos scored hit after hit that Duncan could have once parried. Blood swelled beneath the cuts and slices the ancient Immortal inflicted on Duncan's arms and thighs.
         "You could have practiced on the boat," Methos grunted, as their swords clashed in the dust of the hot afternoon.
         "You could have at least told Jenarie I would have to."
         "Since when does an Immortal need a reminder to practice?"
         "Maybe I had other things on my mind."
         "And maybe you still do!" Methos' sword took a chunk out of Duncan's side and he went to his knees, overwhelmed with the hot pulsing pain. "Concentrate. You have to win."
         "I am concentrating," Duncan growled, and somehow found his footing again.
         Richie showed up in the evening, still carrying the same distance and flatness he had the day before, as if Duncan was someone he didn't particularly remember. He watched the fight silently, with folded arms, and then went on through the huts to the deathly ill villagers. Three of the twelve had died during the heat of the day. Methos and Duncan paused from their work to help take the bodies out to shallow graves. Jenarie had to be helped back to the village and to a sleeping mat. Her breath rasped through her chest, her skin was hot and dry to the touch, and her eyes weren't entirely focused when she fixed on her husband and mumbled in her native tongue.
         Richie must have understood the words, but his face betrayed nothing. Methos cupped Jenarie's face and spoke softly to her. Richie looked at Duncan and said, "Let's go."
         They went outside into the early evening. The setting sun, playing with the gray sky, reflected a wide band of purple on the edge of the horizon.
         Duncan didn't think pleasant conversation about the weather would work with Richie, so he dove straight in instead. "How did you lose your hand?"
         Richie gazed at his arm, at the shirt tied off at forearm level. "An Immortal about four months ago. The last one, in fact, not counting four of us. I got cocky, he got lucky."
         "I'm sorry."
         "Not your fault," Richie shrugged. "Just happens."
         "You've always been able to fight with your left hand too. We both can."
         "I can fight," Richie agreed. "I can't win."
         He started walking away from the village. Duncan stayed where he was. After a minute, Richie turned and looked back at him expectantly. Duncan followed, and they left the village to go up the hills at its southwest border. The air was very still, and although the view wasn't spectacular, Duncan caught a glimpse of ocean in the very far distance, a thin line of silver blue.
         "You stopped appearing in Debra's tapes," Duncan said. "I thought you were dead."
         Richie shook his head. "Debra's tapes?" He thought back. "Oh, those things. I'd hoped those were lost in time. Yes, I stopped appearing. I told Debra I didn't want to be a part of them, and asked her not to speak of me."
         "Why not?"
         Richie's answer came back slowly. "I guess part of it was to punish you. You made your decision. Seeing how it was, reliving it through technology as if you were really there - it's kind of like cheating."
         "You knew where I was."
         "Yes."
         "And why I did it."
         "Knowing why you did it didn't make it hurt any less," Richie said. Then, as if he'd said too much, he turned and gestured towards a boulder on the side of the small clearing they reached. "I thought those might be useful."
         Duncan gazed with surprise at his katana and Richie's rapier. "Where did you... the shipwreck? You recovered them?"
         "Before you two awoke that morning," Richie said. "They came over the reef, not too much worse for wear."
         Duncan lifted his head. "I'm not ready."
         "You can't delay this."
         "Yes, I can," Duncan said. "Talk to me."
         "We have been talking."
         "No, I mean really talk to me. You're just saying words, and have been since yesterday."
         Richie's face tightened. "What do you want to hear?"
         "Something real. Anything real. Let the real Richie out."
         "The real Richie isn't the man you remember," Richie said. "Don't expect me to be like I was. Young, vulnerable, stupid, everybody's favorite charity case - "
         Duncan hit him. His hand went flying before his brain actually registered it, and the sound of the slap rang through the air like a crack of thunder. Richie stared at him, eyes widening, cheek turning red.
         "My friend Richie wasn't stupid," Duncan said fiercely. "He wasn't a charity case, ever. I won't let you speak of him that way."
         Richie pushed him with his one hand. The stump below his right elbow jerked also, as if remembering it had once owned a hand. "You lock yourself away and throw away the key, and leave us to pick up the pieces. Now you're back, and you think you know what's going on. But you didn't live through it, Mac. You don't know what's happened."
         Duncan didn't back away. "So tell me!"
         "I can't! It's too much! Two thousand years doesn't collapse into a nice, short speech. You missed everything. Tey, Oregon, Mongolia - Darien and Debra and Mairi - two thousand years of wives I loved and lost, two thousand years of the world falling into ruin, two thousand years of everything."

         Duncan closed the few inches between Richie and himself. "So I missed it! Why does that make you so mad? *I* missed it. Not you!"
         "You abandoned us!"
         Duncan didn't answer. Richie's voice had broken, and with it the mask of blankness he'd been wearing. Richie pushed Duncan back with a poke. "You could have stayed! You could have grieved with the rest of us! Do you think it was easy for anyone? Methos lost Ceridwyn, I lost Jenir, I saw all their bones piled in the rain -" He gasped raggedly for air, and gulped out. "You left! And you didn't have to!"
         "Yes I did." Duncan grasped Richie by the shoulders, trying to force calmness into him. "I had to, or thought I did. I couldn't think. I saw Holland's hand, and then my brain just shut off. All I wanted was someplace dark and quiet, where there wouldn't be any more pain."
         Richie turned away and rubbed at his face with his dirty hand. "Did you find it?" he asked, his voice barely audible.
         "For awhile," Duncan said. "But it was a coward's way. It was cheating. And if I could turn back time, I would change it all."
         The purple in the sky was fading fast. Purple was a royal color, Duncan thought. For kings or princes. He waited for Richie's shoulders to stop shaking. The younger man - or older man, depending on how they looked at it - calmed down, but spoke with the weight of centuries in his words.
         "Mac, I can't win. I can't save the universe like Methos wants me to. I can't be the hero this time. You were brought back to fight the fight I can't win. You were brought back to win the Prize, no matter what the cost."
         Duncan put his hand on Richie's shoulder. They stood in the darkness, side by side, surrounded by the dead and merciless world.Richie Ryan spent his last night of life sharpening and cleaning his sword. He didn't want Duncan to dirty his own in the morning. He welcomed the task because it gave him something to do, something to focus on. Certainly his mind was too keyed up to sleep. Duncan had tried to get him to return to the village, to spend the night in the company of those who loved him, but what Duncan hadn't understood was that Richie needed to be alone. He'd been solitary now for centuries, living on the outskirts of civilization. The wide open earth had become his home, and only in its quiet and slumber could he find his own peace of mind.
         He thought of everyone he had ever been - Richie Ryan, Bill Powell, Antonio Augello, Tho Vindat, Owen Caine, Pierre duLac, Jason Sanger, Diga, plus any number of temporary aliases - and what he'd done with his life. He knew Methos had achieved an inner peace with himself and his purpose in life, but Richie felt no such crowning knowledge. He'd raced motorbikes, been a cop several times, owned vast corporations, journeyed to the very same moon that hung overhead now. He had been a prince of Tey on Mairi's arm, and the only true friend of Darien MacLeod. He'd help destroy the world. He had lived the bloody life of an Immortal, caught in a Game he didn't understand, moved on the board by forces he couldn't fathom.
         And tomorrow his very good friend Duncan was going to take the head Richie offered, in a last ditch effort to stop Valery Constantine's bid for the Prize.
         He wished he had a woman to lie with, to hold and smell and touch, for this one last night. He'd been married eleven times, twelve if he counted the illegal one in Rio, but only one came to him now. He wouldn't let himself dwell on how she had died. Instead he focused on a summer's eve so many centuries ago, on a waterfront pier at the edge of Brighton, England. The sky stretched endlessly before them, the ocean rolling in waves towards the unseen France, and from far behind the lights and sounds of the arcades seemed muted by the golden light of twilight. Felicia slipped a gaudy plastic ring from a gumball machine around Richie's fourth finger and said, "Husband."
         Richie tied a knot of ribbon around her finger, and said, "Wife."
         Two days later they'd returned to Paris. The following night, six SIDI officers arrested them at the curb of Felicia's flat on Rue leMon, imprisoned them in a Versailles laboratory, and began to dissect her for science while he watched helplessly. They hadn't even had time to tell any of their friends they'd married each other.
         Richie decided he would not let his last night on earth be spent dwelling on the horror of Felicia's death. Instead he finished cleaning the sword and put it aside carefully. Then he stretched out on the ground and dug deep, deep inside himself, to a core he wasn't even sure existed anymore. He conjured forth the memories of a houseboat in Seacouver, and the silvery white stars Felicia had painted above her bed to remind her of the skies over New Amsterdam in her youth. The way her eyes had softened and shed tears as they married each other on the Brighton pier, with no ministers or witnesses or bouquets. Her laughter as they'd once drunkenly climbed up the outside of the old wooden Prater Wheel in Vienna on a postcard-perfect New Year's Eve. He remembered the silkiness of her dark hair, the soft curves of her lips, the tough and brazen way she wouldn't put up with his crap.
         Oh, Felicia, he thought. Maybe tomorrow I'll see you again.
         Alone in the world, his arms empty without her, Richie Ryan went to sleep.
         And woke to the fall of rain against his face, the thunder of a Quickening in his ears.


                                                    ***


         Jenarie j'M'Hardin, last priestess of the Tey, knew that she would be dead before dawn. She felt the shadow of death moving slowly across her soul with each faltering breath from her lungs. She rejoiced in the upcoming passage, but at the same time was loath to leave her Shay behind. He lay slumped against her right thigh, his hand loosely curled in hers, eyes pressed closed in exhaustion or prayer. The goddesses had granted her these last few minutes of lucidity, a window back into the living. She had to make good use of them.
         She loved every inch of her husband's narrow face - the high cheekbones, small and clever-looking eyes, alabaster skin. She loved the man himself - his quiet and unassuming nature, his devotion to the duties he took on without question or complaint, his grace and intelligence and wit. She knew that he had lived a very long time, and had been in the world when it was green and whole. She knew that he carried secrets. But more than anything else she knew that in the end he was a man like any other, who needed to be held and loved in the deepest parts of the night, and she grieved because when she died there would be no one left to hold him.
         She had missed him more than words could describe, all the way to Doonkin's enchanted cave and back. Her stomach had ached with the loss, although in hindsight maybe the pain had been just the final breakdown of her worn, tired body. Shay had told her about the women he'd known before and she'd imagined them as sleek and smooth as he was, beautiful and healthy in the age before the poisoned sky and earth. She'd been jealous of them, although she'd never met them. She would match the three twisted fingers of her right hand against the five perfect ones of Shay's, and wonder why her ancestors had thrown everything good away.
         The voyage had been hard. Going to the cave had been lonely and frightening. Coming back with the so-called great warrior Doonkin Magloud, who'd been enchanted and buried by an angry god, had been worse in some ways. Doonkin had been on the boat but not actually with her. He'd become obsessed with the machine Shay had sent. Jenarie was left mostly to herself after that, to steer the sloop along the jagged coast and worry about her husband and village. Towards the end she'd been sure she wouldn't make it, but wanting to see Shay again had given her just enough strength.
         Jenarie's lucidity started slipping at the edges. The goddesses were coming. She tightened her hand on Shay's. His eyes blinked open, and he lifted his head with a wince.
         "I have to leave you," Jenarie whispered in Teyish, and raised her trembling hand to touch the smoothness of his cheek. "My dearest, it's almost time."
         "No," he said, automatically. "Not yet."
         Jenarie smiled. "It's all right. They're waiting for me. Mother and father, and the fairest Queen of all, Debra."
         Methos carefully smoothed away strands of hair from her forehead. The moment always came when he denied Death, tried to bargain with it, tried to wish it away, but he'd never won even an extra second of life. "Darling," he said, his voice beginning to choke.
         "I'll wait for you ahead," Jenarie promised. She could feel her body moving now, although to her eyes it stayed perfectly still. Deep in her chest, an invisible glow began to burn.
         "I love you," Methos whispered, kissing her forehead, then her lips. His vision had blurred. "I won't be far behind."
         "I know," Jenarie said. The glow absorbed the air in her lungs, the words forming in her throat, but she found a tiny shred not gone yet and said, "I love you too."
         Jenarie j'M'Hardin, last priestess of Tey, gave herself to the light.
         Methos wept silently over her, his shoulders shaking slightly. He had hoped, this close to the end, that there might be some mercy from pain. She hadn't been the prettiest woman he'd ever married. Helen of Troy had been that, and worth every inch of trouble later on. Jenarie hadn't been the smartest, either, or even the nicest. But from the day she'd set eyes on him she'd seen through all his masks and guises and loved him for who he was. He hadn't needed to pretend with her, or tell lies. He hadn't had to do anything but love her, with the hard-won struggles and joys love entailed.
         Now her face lay empty, her eyes unseeing, and Methos wept. The pain went very deep, a knife driving into the muscles beneath his ribs, his head numbed by the tiny, icy seed of dark grief in his brain. He held her hand as the heat of her internal furnace dissipated, as the skin cooled and tightened. She looked utterly peaceful. She looked like the most beautiful woman he'd ever known, Helen be damned.
         He realized another Immortal had come into the hut, and turned his swollen eyes to Duncan. The Highlander stood in the doorway, respectful of the dead, his eyes fixed on Jenarie's face.
         "I'm sorry," Duncan whispered.
         "I know," Methos sniffed. He reached to Jenarie's eyes and carefully smoothed her eyelids closed. One minute a human, the next a corpse. "It's never enough, is it?"
         Duncan did something he hadn't done in a very long time - made the sign of the cross - and then left Methos to grieve with Jenarie alone.
         It was one of the last mistakes Duncan would ever make.
         So was not taking his sword.

                                                    ***


         Sleep had been impossible, of course. He'd put himself down on the mat but only tossed and turned for hours, thinking about everything he and Richie had talked about. Duncan knew in his head what had been done. Richie's and Methos' logic had finally won through. He'd given his word he would take Richie's head, if Richie still wanted him to in the morning. Then he would find Valery Constantine and kill him. Simple plan. So why couldn't he sleep?
         Easy answer, Duncan reflected grimly as he wandered through the village. Who could sleep the night before he had to kill his best friend? He and Richie had talked for several hours after dusk - about Darien, about Methos, about Tey and everything that had happened since - but the conversation inevitably circled back to the problem at hand. Or the problem of no hand, as Richie put it.
         Duncan knew what he had to do. But knowing had never made it easier.
         When he'd been very young, it had been easy to accept with blind faith that the mission of Immortals was to kill or be killed. He had been a warrior, after all, a man born to the rough wilderness and fierce battles against both men and nature that was as much a part of the Scottish Highlands as heather. The late Renaissance gave him the ideas of free will and independent choice, but he rarely applied them to his condition. Only in Sanctuary, when discussions of Immortal free will versus their nature raged long into the night, did he begin to actual question whether or not the Prize existed, and the purpose of the entire Game.
         Methos seemed to have found some answers. But he had no proof. Maybe he'd been as shaken up mentally as the rest of the world had been after Richie and Valery's epic psychic struggle. Maybe he was a raving lunatic deep inside. Duncan didn't think so, but he was sure that he didn't want to kill Richie and find out that in the end it had been all a hoax, or some cosmic joke.
         Have faith, Methos had said. Richie later echoed the sentiments. But faith was hard, and Duncan had learned the hard way that faith didn't always save the day.
         "I remember the first night we met," Richie had said earlier that night. "I was a cocky street kid looking for an easy robbery, and you and Tessa were making love in the back. You scared the shit out of me. And you said - I've never forgotten this - "It's not over until I take your head." Kind of prophetic, huh?"
         Duncan wandered out of the village, up the slope, and back along the plain he and Jenarie had so recently crossed. A full moon was arcing downward in the west, and the first faint light of dawn had begun to brighten the east. The quiet world seemed very still to Duncan, as if poised on the edge of a great and ominous occasion. He sat on the hard ground and tried to meditate, to still the crazy circles in his mind, but found it impossibly hard. He decided to return to the village and help Methos with Jenarie's body, but then paused as the sense of an Immortal came to him. Good. Richie would help Methos with his awful grief.
         But the Immortal who came to him wasn't Richie.
         Duncan stared at him. Through a momentous effort he kept his face blank, although his guts twisted instantly into writhing snakes and sent his heartbeat soaring with adrenaline. The Immortal facing him was handsome and sturdy, appearing no older than Duncan himself, but wore the dusty clothes and tired look of a traveler at the end of his journey. He also had a sword, and a smile that had nothing to do with humor and everything to do with evil.
         "Duncan MacLeod," the man said. "And here I thought you weren't playing."
         "Have we met?" Duncan asked.
         "Perhaps. My name is Valery Constantine."
         Duncan pretended to think about it. "Oh, yes, I remember you. You sold me a cart and a mule in Rome, back in 60 B.C."
         "You weren't even *alive* in 60 B.C., puppy," Valery said.
         "Then maybe it was 1968, and a Volkswagen. It's hard to say. Don't you find yourself forgetting things all the time?"
         "I haven't forgotten how to fight," Valery said. "But you seem to have forgotten your sword."
         And with that, Valery lunged towards Duncan's unprotected body. Duncan ducked and knocked the sword aside with his right hand, losing most of his fingers in the process. His brain didn't even register the pain or streaming blood. With his left hand he swung around and knocked Valery hard against his temple, sending him careening off-balance and the sword clattering against the rocks. Duncan hurled himself on top of Valery and they rolled, punching and battling, across the barren, blistered plain.
         For a moment, when Valery first appeared, Duncan had considered fleeing. He was supposed to take Richie's Quickening first, *before* he fought Valery, in order to maximize his chances of winning. But then he'd remembered this was the man who'd slaughtered Connor MacLeod on a mountainside and Felicia Martins in a lab, who'd done atrocious things to Richie and Darien and Methos all, who'd ordered the destruction of Sanctuary and Duncan's beloved wife Holland. This thing - this abomination, this personification of evil - deserved destruction, and deserved it now.
         Call it pride, call it ego, but suddenly Duncan didn't see a need to take Richie's Quickening after all. He would win or lose on his own merits, not by murdering a friend.
         He hadn't lied to Methos - he'd done nothing with his sword all the weeks at sea. But he'd done kata on the unsteady deck of the sloop every night while Jenarie slept, practicing his balance and strength. Kata, of course, were at their roots secret routines to disguise methods of attack as dance or ritual. He used the same punches and blocks now to drive his good fist into Valery's body, to snap his head around, to shatter his nose and right kneecap.
         In the end, it was almost anticlimactic. Valery's skill had always been with his sword, not his fists. He went down under Duncan's blows, totally outmatched by the Highlander's skill and controlled fury. Finally he was nothing more than a whimpering ball, curled up on the ground beneath the rapidly lightening sky, and Duncan raised his sword over his head.
         "Do it," Valery rasped through broken teeth, a ruined jaw.
         "For Connor," Duncan said steadily. "For Holland and Amanda and Felicia. For Richie and Darien both. May you rot in hell. There can be only One, and thank God it's not you."
         With all the power he could muster, Duncan MacLeod swung down the sword and severed Valery Constantine's neck.
         And that was the last mistake he ever made.Part 12
         In 1952, under the name of James Powell, Methos had sought access to the libraries of the University of Notre Dame by taking a job teaching a graduate seminar. His department's chairman had pressured him into also assisting the understaffed track and field department, whose budget and manning had been slashed in favor of the football team. Methos never understood that particular American passion of human carnage known as football, but he understood running. He remembered how fast his best athletes ran, and thought he'd never be able to match their speed - but he finally did, on the last morning of his life in a village in ancient Argentina.
         He'd been sitting woodenly by Jenarie's body, emotionally exhausted, when he heard a sizzling sound rip through the air. He stumbled outside and realized that, incredibly, it was raining. Torrential, whipping rain, unlike anything he'd seen in centuries. He reached the top of the slope and watched in horror as a bolt of white-hot Quickening threw itself into the pre-dawn sky. A figure on the hill took the power back through his outstretched arms, and his screams cut through Methos' clothes and skin and muscles to his very bones. He ran towards the plain faster than any Notre Dame track star ever could have, and then screeched to a halt when he recognized Duncan as the victor.
         Valery lay decapitated in the mud, his battered face marked with an almost comical look of surprise. Duncan collapsed to his knees as the last of the Quickening dissipated. Violent shudders worked their way out of his overtaxed body as the water ran through his hair and across his bloody hands. He lifted his eyes to meet Methos' gaze and said, wearily, "It's done," before dropping his sword with a sigh.
         Methos couldn't get past the vision of Valery's severed neck, from which blood still oozed. The man had been a dozen times worse than Kalas, and no one would grieve his passing. But he'd represented the balance of darkness on the scales, and that was a passage worth noting.
         Yet the Game wasn't over. Not while Richie and Duncan both lived.
         The rain eased into a gentle shower. It had been so long since Methos had seen it or felt its touch that he threw back his head and let it fall against his face. After centuries of dryness, rain. After centuries of struggle, Valery Constantine had been defeated.
         Duncan stayed where he was, letting the water come down to his hair, his shoulders, his bloody hands. When Methos looked down, Duncan was holding aloft his right hand, and the perfectly healed once-inch stumps of four fingers.
         "Ironic, isn't it?" Duncan asked. The Highlander pulled himself upright, exhaustion showing in every movement, and said, "What happens now?"
         Methos wished he could change the answer, but couldn't. "You know what must come next."
         "What if we choose not to fight?"
         "Then the world stays in limbo. You can wander the continents, and you'll never find another soul. You can try for a thousand years, but you'll never get another plant to grow. Duncan, this is the way it must be. We all know it."
         Duncan's face showed the war of emotions in his chest. "I don't know if I can," he said softly. "Methos, don't ask me to do it."
         "I'm not the one asking," Methos said. The rain had grown colder against his skin. "Do you think I want to see it? Do you really think I want to watch?"
         The answer came back soft and regretful. "Then maybe you shouldn't."


                                                    ***


         Richie woke, crankily wondering who had turned on the dojo showers and why he'd gone to sleep in one. Then he realized the tiny flecks of wetness on his face were truly raindrops, and that a Quickening was lighting up the sky to the south. He sat up, gripped by an icy awareness of something terribly, horribly wrong. He couldn't believe that Duncan and Methos could have come to blows, and that left only one other option.
         Sword in hand, he raced to where the Quickening had been. By the time he arrived the rain had eased into occasional sprinkles, and the sky had lightened to steel gray. Thunderheads rolled against each other high above, churning the gray with deeper streaks of black and blue. Richie sensed a static charge building in the air, like a massive, unseen Quickening drawing its force together from the four winds. Duncan stood over Valery's body, his face drawn with exhaustion and resignation.
         "You killed him," Richie said, staring at Valery's body. It sounded stupid to his own ears, but they were the only words that would come.
         Duncan didn't answer.
         Richie's thoughts smashed up against each other - images from Versailles clashing with a pile of charred bones in Sanctuary, Darien's broken body pulled from a pit in Oregon slamming against Methos in the ancient Soviet missile silo. He had prepared himself for centuries to fight this man, and had lost all hope along with his right hand just four months earlier. Now Duncan had waged the fight instead, throwing the last minutes of the Game into stark uncertainty.
         "Are you all right?" Richie asked.
         Duncan nodded wearily. "Fine."
         "What happens now?"
         Duncan's eyes were cloudy and red. "I don't know."
         "Methos - "
         "Left," Duncan said. "He went to bury Jenarie. He said he didn't want to bear witness to what we have to do, because he loves us both too much."
         Richie closed his eyes for a minute. Jenarie's death didn't surprise him, although it hurt in an unexpected way. Methos' surrender in the face of what had to be done was more unexpected, but Richie couldn't blame him.
         "How do you want to do it?" Richie asked. "I was going to... " He had to stop, because now that death was so near he wasn't sure he wanted it. He hadn't realized, until then, that dying took a special courage of its own kind. His hand went clammy, and his stomach churned. But he wouldn't be a coward in front of Duncan, who would always be his first teacher. He just wished his voice would stay steady. "I was going to just put my neck to your sword. We could do that."
         Duncan shivered. "I don't know that I can - "
         But he would, Richie knew. Duncan MacLeod had always had two Achilles' heels - chivalry and duty. He would do what his obligations demanded. And he'd earned the right, not just by taking Valery's head but by giving Richie the life he'd had. Without Duncan's intervention so many thousands of years ago, Richie would have been lost - lost to the bitter emptiness his childhood had wrought, lost to the opportunities Tessa and Mac had opened for him.
         Duncan deserved the Prize. Richie would not battle him for it.
         Richie offered Duncan his sword. Duncan opened his mouth as if to protest, but then took it and carefully laid Valery's aside.
         Richie went to his knees in the mud.
         He promised himself he wouldn't flinch or shy away. Out of the edge of his vision he saw Duncan raise Richie's sword with his undamaged hand. It seemed there would be no words in the end. No last endearments. Richie let his gaze drop to the ground, and saw a broken piece of metal jutting jaggedly from the ground. It was the silver buckle of a computer-cable belt Richie had given Methos as a birthday present fifty years earlier.
         Richie heard the hiss of Duncan's sword and threw himself to the side. He rolled in the mud, scooped up Valery's sword, and stood with one swift movement.
         Duncan smiled at him. "Change of plan?" he asked, mocking in his voice.
         "Maybe," Richie said warily. "Where's Methos?"
         The smile turned into a smirk. "Couldn't be here. Sorry. Talk about a surprise, huh? I caught him completely off guard."
         Duncan's sword whipped forward and slashed at Richie. He parried it easily. The steel sparked angrily. He backed up a few inches, as Duncan circled around him.
         "Tell me what happened," Richie said, although he had a fairly good idea. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. Cancer didn't go away, it went into remission. On the other hand, in defense of Duncan, the One probably needed to maintain balance to the very bitter end, and they'd been fated to come to this since the moment the cycle began.
         All the rationalization in the world couldn't erase the devastating knowledge that this Duncan before him was one he hadn't seen in thousands of years. A Duncan who had raped a housewife, killed Sean Burns, and prepared to go on a bloody rampage. A Duncan who had tried to take Richie's head in the dojo, and come very close.
         A Duncan who'd been exorcised in a magic spring in ancient France.
         A Duncan wrought by a Dark Quickening.
         Richie would have burst with frustration, if he'd had the time. After all this, after everything they'd been through - the One had a sick sense of justice, he decided. But he was too busy blocking and ducking a sudden flurry of blows to worry more about it. Duncan leveled a high, hard blow that nearly tore Richie into two pieces. Blocking it sent a solid slam of pain up his arm and to the base of his skull. Duncan followed with a thrust that caught at Richie's right side and slid along his ribs. Richie retaliated with a swipe that took off a chunk of Duncan's shoulder, and then a jab that drove deep into his thigh.
         Wounded, bleeding, they circled each other for a minute. Richie was breathing hard, and Duncan had broken into a sweat.
         "Not as easy as you thought it would be," Richie said.
         "Not as easy as last time," Duncan agreed. "But you're not the man you were then, either."
         "Neither are you."
         "What did they do to you in Versailles, Richie? Or should I say, Jason? Anything bad? Anything cold and revolting, that can still make you sick to your stomach with the memory?"
         Richie shut him up momentarily with an attack that went deeper than expected, furiously driving Duncan back in the gently falling rain. The next blow was easily parried, and Duncan's sword caught Richie's for a moment before slipping down and slicing open Richie's left thigh from groin to knee. Richie couldn't block the agony that drove into his leg like a missile. He fell back in the mud and Duncan tried to hammer him with a blow. Richie rolled, his leg screaming at every nerve in his brain, and weakly managed to block the next blow with an arm rapidly turning numb.
         Outraged at both the pain and the prospect of losing, Richie used his left foot to catch Duncan with a kick that shattered his kneecap and drive him away. Duncan cursed as he limped backwards. The wound in Richie's leg began to heal, giving him a tingling preview of relief to come, but he had to fight the urge to black out. He staggered upright, clenching the sword with his hand, and brought it around with a blow that should have taken Duncan's head. But Duncan threw his steel upright at the last minute, and Richie's blade was turned back.
         "You can't win," Duncan gasped, although some of the certainty had left his face and the smirk had long since faded. He favored his right leg as his left one healed. The static in the air had built up along with the winds buffeting them from all sides. Something was happening on a plane other than the one they existed on, Richie knew. But he was too bloody and tired and at risk of defeat to care.
         Still, he spat out at Duncan, "You're the one who can't win. You're too out of practice."
         "I have Valery's Quickening," Duncan growled. "And Connor's. They were far better fighters than you can ever hope to be, puppy."
         Duncan hurled himself forward with a flurry of deadly blows that forced Richie into a retreat. Richie's left arm was nearly all numb now, and the weight of his sword seemed impossible to lift. His legs had turned to rubber bands, barely able to support his body and unsteady with their footing in the mud. He couldn't see for sweat in his eyes. He couldn't drag enough air into his lungs to keep conscious.
         It was true that Duncan now had Connor's Quickening inside him. And Valery's. And thousands of other men and women's, those who'd died at the edge of their respective swords. Richie did too. It was true that Duncan had taught him everything he'd need to know in his first few decades, but Richie had learned from other teachers as well. It was true that it was no sin to fall to an enemy greater than himself, no shame in true defeat.
         But Richie Ryan would not be defeated today.
         Gathering everything he had into one blow, he feinted right, sidestepped Duncan's block, and in one final, perfect second of timing and skill plunged his sword up and through Duncan's stomach, skewering his diaphragm and lungs. Duncan hung impaled on Richie's sword for a long moment, their eyes locked on each other. Duncan's expression turned from surprise to pain and the slack-jawedness of death.
         Richie yanked out his sword. Duncan remained standing, held aloft by some incredible stubborness, his face white and lax with one tiny drop of blood at the corner of his mouth. .
         "Thank you," he whispered.
         Richie took off his head.Richie sat for a long time in the mud, positioned between Valery and Duncan's bodies. The rain gradually stopped and the sky cleared to a brilliant blue sheet from horizon to horizon. The static remained, so strong it made the hairs on Richie's neck stand up, but the winds died to a gentle breeze. The injuries Duncan had inflicted healed, seamlessly folding back into his body. He felt no different now that he'd won the Prize - no physically different. Inside he was numb with grief, and tired of everything, and ready to just go to sleep for two thousand years like the Duncan he'd loved once had.
         Gradually he pulled himself up and went in search of Methos. He found the ancient Immortal's body wedged behind some boulders, half-buried in a shallow grave. His neck had been snapped, and a short dagger thrust into his chest. Richie pulled the knife out, freeing it of muscle and flesh, and then went back up the hill to Duncan's body.
         He wondered if at the end it had been the true Duncan who had whispered his gratitude. It might have been a ploy of his darker self. It didn't matter. Richie arranged the body so that it lay flat, arms folded across the chest. Putting the head back near the neck was one of the hardest things he ever did - the feel of Duncan's hair entwined in his fingers nearly broke him down. The sun was so bright he could barely see anyway, and the tears didn't help.
         He felt Methos' return, and heard his footsteps, but didn't turn from staring down at Duncan. Methos' hand came to rest on his shoulder.
         "You defeated him," Methos said.
         "Yes."
         "It wasn't really him."
         "Wasn't it? Wasn't it a part of all of us?" Richie asked. He wiped his eyes clear and turned to the last Immortal who'd won the Prize. "Why did you come back to this? You could have chosen anything, but you stayed and tasked yourself with staying until the very end."
         Methos smiled gently. Richie noticed vaguely that his skin was clean of mud or blood, as were his clothes. Methos said, "Because I loved it. I loved the people, I loved their passion, I loved their quest for knowledge. I loved their music. I even loved their beer."
         "But you chose to block your own memories from yourself. . . you chose at some point, not to know."
         "There are some things you shouldn't know, if you want to live a happy life."
         "What if you'd been killed?"
         Methos face blurred in Richie's vision. He wondered why the sun was so bright. The answer that came was, "I wouldn't have been killed. This was all predestined."
         "Do we have free will?"
         "Can you believe that free will shapes destiny, and destiny shapes free will? The circle goes around."
         The sunlight was inside him now, warming his body, filling his heart with unexpected brightness. Richie couldn't see anything but the light. He reached out with an unseen hand and felt Methos close on it, one last touch before the end.
         "Do I have to stay and judge?" Richie asked.
         "Not unless you want to."
         His sense of self dissolving, Richie managed one last question. "So now I chose?"
         "Now you're judged," Methos' voice answered, and the light took him.


                                                    ***


         For everything.
         For the joy he'd bestowed, and pain he'd inflicted. For the good deeds he'd managed, and the wrongs he'd committed. For every killing he hadn't walked away from, even when he could have. For breaking the rules. For being cruel. For being kind. Richard Ryan stood before Methos in the Light and relived his life through the eyes of those who'd known him, each overwhelming detail stripping him further and further from his own ego. Thousands of memories poured through him like a mammoth waterfall toppling off the highest cliff known to mankind. Each droplet glittered with a crystalline image of the life he'd led, and the lives he'd taken.
         Darkness.
         Purgatory, limbo, as the One held him in abeyance.
         And then a greater wholeness taking him in, the waterfall again, the brilliant light of creation. This time the thunder and force came from every Immortal who'd ever lived and whose Quickenings had become his, and then those few Immortals whose Quickenings lay dormant in the earth or in its seas. He expanded. He had no size, he had no shape. He was the memories - billions of shimmering droplets, made of water and sweat and tears and amniotic fluid, everything running back to the sea, and he was One.
         And he saw the whole of everything, understood what Methos had tried to tell him in the confinement of words and intellect, acknowledged that the knowledge wasn't meant for limited minds to understand, and accepted the moment of choice.
         The universe was his to shape, for whatever purpose, and the judging had given him perspective.
         He flitted backwards through time, fixing details here and there, taking the knowledge he had and reshaping it into a world of sunlight and ocean, sky and earth. Because he was the One, he knew that a balance had to be maintained. For every joy there was a sorrow, and for every just moment there came another moment of unfairness. He understood their need. He also understood there was a grace in not knowing, and granted himself that mercy.
         He breathed life back into the world.
         And then he joined it.


                                                    ***


         Sunset, on a waterfront pier at the edge of Brighton, England. The sky stretched endlessly before them, the ocean rolling in waves towards the unseen France, and from far behind the lights and sounds of the arcades seemed muted by the golden light that came with the end of the day. Tessa slipped a golden circle around Duncan's fourth finger and said, "Husband."
         Afraid his trembling fingers would drop his gift, Duncan carefully place a diamond ring on Tessa's finger, and murmured, "Wife."
         "By the authority of the powers vested in me, I now pronounce you man and wife," Father Darius announced. He'd known Duncan since the antique dealer was just a lad, bouncing on his parents' knees in Darius' Scottish shires. He leaned forward with a conspiratorial look on his face. "Although to make this truly legal, we're going to have to do it in a church."
         Duncan and Tessa were too busy kissing to listen.
         Only two witnesses marked the marriage, and they clapped now with enough enthusiasm to make up for a church full of people. Richie Plainfield, thirty-two years old and beginning to gray at his temples, flung seed at his father. His mother, Rebecca, who'd raised Richie as a single mother in England and then sent him to meet his natural father when he was eighteen, kissed both the bride and groom.
         "Well, it's about time," she smiled. "Here I thought Duncan would never get married."
         "Well, you thought wrong. Besides, they say life begins at fifty," Duncan said warmly, and then kissed Tessa again. She beamed as the radiant bride, her hair done up in Helen-of-Troy curls, her simple white dress fluttering in the sea breeze.
         "Although even I was beginning to have my doubts," Tessa agreed, and wrapped her arms around Duncan's neck.
         Richie shook his father's hand and kissed Tessa. The sun slipped down beneath the horizon with a sudden flash of clear, crystalline blue, unlike anything he'd ever seen before. "Did you see that?" he asked.
         "What?" his parents asked.
         Richie didn't answer. The blue left him with an unexpected feeling of joy that went deeper than anything he'd ever felt before. In that moment he knew everything would be all right. He knew that there were forces at work just beyond his grasp that had suddenly smiled on him, but when he reached for them they retreated in bliss. Duncan's hand came to rest on his shoulder. "Richie? Are you okay?"
         "Fine," he said. "Everything's . .. fine."
         The wedding party decided to head back to their hotel up the street. Richie excused himself and lingered behind, strolling in the sand with the cuffs of his trousers rolled up to his ankles. A woman far down the beach caught his attention as she bent to the task of packing up an easel and watercolor painting. She had dark hair, cropped short, and a shape that stirred in him emotions he'd clamped down since the break-up of his last relationship. He thought about going to her and introducing himself, but he'd never really been good at that without making himself look like an idiot.
         He went up the boardwalk instead, to a pub with the lager advertisement "Take Courage" hanging above its door. The bar was half-crowded, and a vidscreen above the liquor bottles showed the daily news recap.
         "Citing not only the agency's lack of progress but also strong supporting evidence of official misconduct, Interpol today closed down its Special Investigative taskforce on Immortals and arrested its chair, Val Stine. Immortal have apparently been officially relegated back to the same mythical status accorded fairies, elves, trolls, witches and hobbits. Back to you, June."
         The female newscaster sharing the anchor desk smiled at the camera. "Well, I for one never believed in Immortals. Who wants to live forever, anyway?"
         "Newscasters drive me nuts," a voice said behind Richie, and he turned to face the dark-haired woman from the beach. Up close she was even prettier than he'd first thought - about his age, lithe and strong, with a strong hint of humor to her eyes. She had an American accent, and wore a print-colored dress.
         "They drive me nuts too. Who could ever believe in Immortals?" He held out his hand. "Richie Plainfield."
         "Felicia Martins. I saw you on the beach. Getting married?"
         Richie laughed. "No. My dad did."
         "Glad to hear it," she smiled. "Buy you a drink?"
         "Only if I can buy you one back," he proposed.
         They took two stools at the bar. The Welshman next to Richie put a five-pound credit chip down next to his drained glass of ale and slipped off his stool to leave. "Excuse me," he said as he accidentally brushed Richie's right arm. He was Richie's height, with a narrow face and high cheekbones, and an intelligent glint to his eyes. Abruptly everything faded away - the pub, the conversation, his sense of self - in favor of the man's eyes.
         For just one moment Richie was struck by the incredible sensation that he knew the man. It went stronger than deja vu, went deeper than any casual encounter - for a moment he swore he *did* know the man, that they'd once been intimate friends, that something wonderful and horrible and profoundly inexplicable had separated them.
         "Do I know you?" Richie stammered.
         The Welshman quirked an eyebrow. "No, I don't believe so."
         The feeling cleared from Richie's mind just as quickly as it had come. He realized Felicia was giving him a curious look. That the Welshman meaned to pass, and that there was no recognition in his eyes.
         "Sorry," Richie said.
         The Welshman smiled and left.
         Richie and Felicia turned to each other and conversation, and began to fall in love all over again.
         And outside, a graduate student named Adam Pierson strolled along the pounding surf under the wide open sky, whistling a song by an old rock group called Queen.