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scroll of dor-Sefrith. He handed it to the Magic Man, who delicately opened it and stared, breathing, “You have found it. Oh, Ronin—!”
    He gave Borros several moments before he said, “Now you must tell me what it says and why it is so important.”
    Borros looked up at him, the flame from the swinging lamp reflecting in his eyes, turning them colorless.
    “But you see, Ronin,” he said in a tired voice, “I do not know.”
    There was a time—he could actually force himself to remember that far back in the dim and cloudy past, though he rarely wished to—when Stahlig, the Medicine Man, was not a part of his life.
    He had fallen down half a flight of stairs, choked with rubble and debris. Exploring. As he had come to a landing, something had shot across his path, tiny nails clicking industriously, and he had lost his balance, tumbling down the Stairwell.
    He might not have been hurt at all if it had been clear. But he had fetched up against a fallen girder, twisted and red, his leg slamming into its side where it lay slashed through a rent in the outer wall. Perhaps he passed out from the pain. Eventually, he got to the Medicine Man on the next Level, limping and crawling because no one was about to help him.
    His left leg was broken but he was young and strong and Stahlig knew his business. It was a clean break and with the white end protruding through the torn flesh appeared worse than it in fact was. The bones knit perfectly but that became secondary to him. Stahlig talked to him while he went about setting the leg. That was what interested him, intrigued him, what, ultimately, caused him to return to Stahlig’s med rooms whenever he was able. The Medicine Man had no reason to treat Ronin in a special way, yet he did, recognizing somewhere within him a potential others would not.
    The two became friends and the reason did not matter at all, at least to either of them. That did not mean that it did not go unnoticed in some quarters of the Freehold, noted, written down, filed away for future use.
    We accepted each other, Ronin thought as the ship rocked beneath him. And now you have joined so many others who have known me and because of it have died.
    Outside, the wind was rising, plucking at the rigging in mournful melody.
    “You do not know?” echoed Ronin without emotion. “What have you done to me?”
    Borros put the scroll back into its hiding place in the hilt of Ronin’s sword. He rubbed his eyes.
    “Sit,” he said, and put his hand on Ronin’s shoulder. “Sit and I will tell you all that I do know.”
    In ancient times, when the world spun faster upon its axis and the sun burned with energy in the sky, when multitudes of people roamed the surface of all the planet and, beneath their feet, the land turned from dirt and high grass plains as they walked, to fields of rowed food plants green and golden in the sunshine, to arid deserts smeared with low-growing flowers of many hues, to steep windswept steppes and mountain ranges blue with haze, when high-prowed ships from many nations plied the seas in search of trade with new lands, then Ronin, then we were known by another name. We were scientists and then our work was highly empirical, our theorems coming almost exclusively from the forebrain. Are you familiar with the word ‘empirical’? Ah, good. Methodology was our watchword, this strict Catholicism a firm and supportive base for our work.
    But times changed radically and the world of the ancients was disappearing. In that interim period, the world was seized by a progression of natural cataclysms. The continents broke apart and fell away to be replaced by others, rising steamily from beneath the boiling seas. As you may well imagine, many people died but, perhaps more importantly, at the same time the laws that had heretofore governed the world of the ancients were overthrown and destroyed. Others came into being.
    The inconceivable had occurred; by what means it is impossible to say, nor is it