World's End

Page 130

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"What do you mean?" The more I know about Song, the more I will know about what she has really done to me.

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WORLD S END

He shrugs impatiently. "I told you. The Lake does crazy things. It sucks you up and spits you out some other time. It makes things change so you can't find them. Look around here--" He waves a hand, covering an arc of jumbled ruins. "Only here it's better now, since the Lake has her. She takes care of us." He strikes his chest with a huge hand. "And I take care of her. I get rid of anybody tries to do anything wrong with her." His eyes gleam with fanatical promise. "But she said let you alone . . . for now."

"What does it want with her?"

"You tell me!" he snorts. "You tell me, pilgrim. What does it want with you? What does she want with a limp

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one like you? Did she have you?" He stares me up and down, eyeing the painted whorls that cover my skin.

Echoes of lust and sudden shame burn inside me, fire and ice.

He reads the answer in my face, and his own face fills with sullen envy. His hands clench. Even he is afraid to touch her. . . . And now I recognize the real source of her power. Her magic is just a game; even her sibyl's blood is nothing but a symbol. All her power over them lies with the Lake, in her control over it. But Goldbeard doesn't understand the Lake's power any more than I do.

She said I'm the one who was supposed to understand. But I don't understand! I feel my concentration dissolving like bubbles in an undersea swell of futility.

There is someone else I need to ask Goldbeard about, something else I need to know. And he can tell me, if I can just hold on. . . .

By the time I recapture my drifting consciousness he is gone, and I am standing alone inside a crowd of rattling blue ghosts. They hover in the air; they seem to be doing something technical

... I can't find the strength to wonder what it is. I push through them as if they

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aren't there, and move on aimlessly into town.