text: It was Rosh, sure as he breathed. The same pinched face, the masculine confidence, the lanky frame and freckled nose. But she was without one core component, one essential element that obliterated all the rest, and gave away what she really was.
  
  Rosh's ghosts were gone.
  
  She was a blank canvas, a being without a past, without regret. She had left all of that on some other world. She was just a poor copy of the first.
  
  Saradyn drew himself up and felt a smile tug at his mouth. He had feared some other madness, some new trick of Laine's come to rise with his eye, the star called Oma. But this girl was just another of the same foe he'd been fighting for six years – the darker doubles, the shadowy fey who had been encroaching into Tordin for over a decade, maybe longer. The sight Laine gave him made it easy to uncover them. It was his greatest curse, and his greatest gift.
  
  Rosh lay in the dirt outside the ruined church, restrained by two of his men.
  
  "I know what you are," Saradyn said.
  
  She struggled in the dirt. "King Saradyn," she said, "I can explain everything."
  
  "Which world sent you? Was it to destroy me? Because I can't be destroyed."
  
  "Please," she said. "Let me up. I'll explain."
  
  "Saradyn!" Tanays rode over from the other side of the village. "We have one of their legion commanders."
  
  "Who?"
  
  Tanays looked surprised. "I don't know. Natanial recognized her."
  
  "Stay with this one." Saradyn rode over to the edge of the village, accompanied by his page and one of the wind witches. He did not trust that the entire army had slipped his net.
  
  He moved through a scattering of corpses, mostly civilian, but many of his and a few of the Dorinah. That bothered him. His men should have had the advantage here in their own territory, outnumbering this force. But grit went a long way on the battlefield, and the women may have had it in great numbers, being on the losing end of this one. Perhaps his men had gotten cocky. He had long ago learned not to underestimate the Dorinah. They were fueled by witchcraft.
  
  Natanial stood over a body well away from what looked like a final holdout – four women with shields trampled into the dirt, their blood turning the soil to churning mud. A few of Saradyn's men waited around her, some mounted, some not.
  
  He came up beside their catch. She was a filthy creature, scarred to the point of malformation. He kissed his thumb and offered it to Laine, a sign against deformity. Would that he was put down before he looked like that.
  
  "I suggested she may be worth more to us alive," Natanial said.
  
  "Good eye. Bring her with us."
  
  "What of the army?" Tanays asked.
  
  "An army without a head is no army at all. They'll go back to Dorinah, if they have any sense. But put three trackers on them. I want to know where they're headed. It's far too small for an invasion. If they're meeting a greater force, I need to know."
  
  "You don't think she'll talk?" Tanays said.
  
  "Look at her. You think I could do worse to her?"
  
  "You don't recognize her, do you?" Natanial said.
  
  "You know her?"
  
  "That's Zezili Hasaria," Natanial said. "We have her husband back in Gasira."
  
  "That boy becomes more and more useful by the day," Saradyn said. "Rope her up. I have two fine trophies from this venture."
  
  Saradyn sat up with Rosh nearly a week later in a little village outside Gasira. He did not want to wait any longer for her interrogation, as the things she said about fire raining from the sky was scaring his men. Life was fearful enough now without her putting more ideas in their heads.
  
  "How did you get here?" Saradyn asked.
  
  She sat roped to a chair near the fire in the main room of a tavern he had generously acquired from the local inn keep for a reasonable fee. Spring had arrived, but the nights were still cool.
  
  She shook her head.
  
  "I have been more than fair to you," Saradyn said, leaning forward. "Fed you, clothed you, kept my men from you. Things could have gone far differently. I could sell you off as a servant here, or a slave somewhere else. I could use you for any number of terrible purposes. But I am a civilized man. All I ask for is information. Which of the worlds sent you? Is your Empress Kirana or Sovonia?"
  
  "Sovonia is not an Empress."
  
  "Ah, I see," Saradyn sat back. "You are correct. She is not. She is… what, exactly? A seer, a rebel leader? You see, Empress Kirana I understand. I know her motives. She comes from a dying world. But yours is something else, isn't it? You're mere explorers. Parasites. I have even less tolerance for you."
  
  "The transference engines–"
  
  "What are those?"
  
  Rosh bit her lip. He had noticed strange things about this one. She was plumper than the other Rosh, but narrower in the face, her hair longer. Small differences, but they added up. What interested him most was the similarity of names. What compelled one to name these people the same across different versions of their worlds, even when the power structures were so different? What magic was in a name?
  
  "I have pieced together quite a lot in this little backwater," Saradyn said. "That's what one of your other little spies called it. A backwater, like a latrine, and I know there are more of you in my holds, hiding out like rats, ferrying each other information that you can use out here to get people like Zezili Hasaria onto your side. Eventually I will hunt down all of you. But I've known of your presence here since I was a child, since I could see the strangers without… strangers with differences. I saw you and pointed it out when others could not. I will always see you, you understand?"
  
  Rosh stared hard at the floor.
  
  Saradyn turned to Tanays. "Bring in the dogs."
  
  Rosh raised her head. He saw the fear bloom there, like a flower.
  
  "Something you wanted to tell me," he said, "before I leave you with the dogs?"
  
  It was the same for all of them, from that world, this fear of dogs. He had different names for all the worlds – he had identified five of them, so far, and called them by their primary agent, numbered by the frequency with which he ran into members of their respective scouting parties: Kirana, Sovonia, Gian, Aradan, and Kalinda. It bothered him that so many primary actors were women. Why was that? Was there a message in that, something he should understand?
  
  "We use the transference engines," she said. "They amplify the power of the stars, even if they aren't ascendant. They can call to them between worlds. That's where they go when they're not here, the stars. They don't orbit. They blink out. Between worlds."
  
  "That's an interesting theory."
  
  "That's science," she said.
  
  "Science?"
  
  "Science."
  
  "Sounds like witchcraft."
  
  "I have not met one sane person in this world," Rosh muttered.
  
  "You know why you were able to come over now?" he asked.
  
  "We can come over when our… counterpart here dies. I'm an explorer," she said. "A missionary, if you will. You don't need to treat me poorly. If you know what I am, you know that whatever the person you knew did here, I have nothing to do with it."
  
  "And if you and your little explorers take any kind of notes at all," Saradyn said, "you'd know what I do with your kind when I find them."
  
  She had the sense to lose a bit of color; even with her ruddy complexion, he noticed it.
  
  "I think you should consider what you can learn from me."
  
  "What is it you're learning from me?" he asked. "I know you're scuttling all around Grania, not just Tordin. Are you taking sides in this fight? Preparing for an invasion?"
  
  "We are purely here to explore this phenomena. You don't seem to understand how important–"
  
  Saradyn stood. He flicked a hand at Natanial.
  
  "That's all?" Natanial said.
  
  "That's all."
  
  "Seems brutish."
  
  "So is life."
  
  Natanial stepped forward quickly, and before Rosh could utter a single complaint, he neatly snapped her neck.
  
  She slumped forward.
  
  "A waste of my talent," Natanial said. "I'm an artist, not a brute."
  
  "I'll decide what you are."
  
  Saradyn expected a retort, but Natanial said only, "Is Zezili next?"
  
  "No, I'm tired. As I said, it's not worth talking to her without the husband."
  
  Natanial nodded and went to the door. Dayns and Sloe whined outside. Natanial let them in as he left.
  
  Saradyn sat across from Rosh's body and petted the dogs. He stared at her in the flickering firelight. How did one guard against espionage from another world? It was as if some other being had shot down from the moons and started spouting off nonsense about another realm. He had trouble enough reconciling the fact that Dorinah could exist in the same world he did, let alone these aliens.
  
  Dayns whined at him. He stroked her ears. "Hush now," he said. "Have I not kept you safe?"
  
  Safer than he had kept any human being in his care. Rosh's limp head, the lanky hair, reminded him of the day he murdered the Thief Queen, Quilliam. She had been his ward for some years, but he failed at that, and farmed her out, and look what she had become; raised by fools and savages, running off into the woods to join with thieves and miscreants, intent on destroying all he wanted to build here. Who was she, to pass judgment on him? Just a foolish girl like this one. They blamed him for destroying her, but what choice did she leave him? What choice did any of them leave him?
  
  Dayns whined again.
  
  "What is it?" he said. "Come now, we are safe. We're almost home."
  
  Sloe began to bark.
  
  Saradyn frowned at them both and went to the door.
  
  People were coming out of their houses, entering the damp streets; it had rained just that morning. They pointed and gasped at the sky.
  
  Saradyn squinted at them. His vision was blurry. He called to Dayns and Sloe. They barked and ran through the line of figures, dispelling them like mist.
  
  He huffed out a breath. Was he hallucinating an army of ghosts, now? A whole town of ghosts?
  
  He gazed into the sky, and saw Para blazing there on the horizon. What star had those ghosts been seeing? He didn't know. He feared to guess.
  
  He got down on his knees, and raised his hands to Laine.
  
  Saradyn prayed for clear vision, and a gift that felt less like a curse.