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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 re