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wants to talk.”
    Instantly, Sawyer ceased protesting. He sank to the floor and put his face close to Finn’s. “Go ahead, Finn,” he whispered.
    With great difficulty, Finn Markham managed to shape the words and force them past his dry parched lips. “Sawyer—keep your promise. The promise that you made on Thoska-Roole. Don’t let them cocoon me, Sawyer!”
    Sawyer couldn’t answer. He couldn’t let his mind take the next step and the next. He couldn’t allow himself to act as the instrument of his brother’s death. He couldn’t imagine what his life would become without his brother. But neither could he imagine his brother wrapped and hanging and waiting.
    â€œSawyer, please—” Finn grabbed his brother’s arm and held on tightly. For a dying man, he still had surprising strength. “You promised me!”
    The tears poured down Sawyer’s cheeks. “I know, I know. Oh, God, Finn! I don’t want to do this!”
    â€œYou must—”
    â€œI know—please forgive me.”
    â€œI love you, Sawyer. Please give me peace.”
    â€œI love you too, Finn. Listen to me—” He sniffed, gulped, caught his breath. And in that moment, something happened to him. He reached inside himself and found an inner resource of strength that he had never known before.
    He got angry.
    He held his brother’s hand and looked into his eyes and he said, “I promise you that this crime will not go unavenged!” And this time, when he said it, the words had the resonant and terrifying ring of true conviction—this time, the words sounded like the death knell of the Regency. “I will not rest until I have destroyed the Lady Zillabar, and if necessary, the entire goddamned Vampire aristocracy!”
    The other men in the room stared at Sawyer, astonished. They stood around him in a respectful circle, their eyes bright with the shared glow of his vision. His declaration sounded like a hundred thousand other desperate declarations made against tyranny—but he spoke it with the kind of resolve that troubled the sleep of tyrants everywhere. He spoke it as a man with nothing left to lose.
    He looked down at Finn again for some sign of acknowledgment, but his brother had lapsed back into unconsciousness.
    William Three-Dollar came over and pulled Sawyer away. “He needs his rest, son. Leave him for now.”
    Sawyer shook off the TimeBinder’s large bony hands and sank to his knees next to his brother. He buried his face in his hands and began to cry again, great heaving sobs that left him out of breath and gasping.

Burihatin
    The tangled web of otherspace unfolded, shimmered, solidified, and begat a golden starflake of light.
    The vessel sang as it spun gracefully toward the distant globe called Burihatin. The Golden Fury called to her sister ships across the emptiness and she listened for their echoing cries. Then, at last, satisfied, she turned on her axis and dove downward toward the huge ringed world below. The starship still had many long hours of deceleration ahead. First she had to match orbits with the giant planet, then she had to match the orbit of the fourteenth moon.
    Burihatin had an ethereal beauty. Not quite large enough to have ignited and become a star in her own right, she still loomed bright and golden. She radiated more heat than light; she gave off a lustrous warmth. The great planet swam brightly through the dark sea of space with her large family of satellites, circling gracefully around her.
    Forty satellites orbited Burihatin, some small enough to leap off of; others massing larger than some nearby worlds. More people lived on the moons of Burihatin, than on all the other planets and moons circling Burihatin’s primary. The giant ringed world reigned as a star system in her own right, coopting even the authority of her primary.
    The starship began correcting her trajectory to bring her into a