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It had been almost a month since the pirate’s visit when a storm finally swept over the mountains. Garak watched it come in from his bedroom window, his heart in his throat, his mind on the dagger buried in the soft earth of his greenhouse. Would Koschei know where it was? His life was bound to that blade, and now it lay within the castle that answered to Koschei’s every whim and where he knew every inch and every movement within it. If he did, he would hide it again, and Garak’s chance would be gone. Garak wasn’t sure whether to dread that or hope for it, but it seemed the likeliest outcome. What would happen to Garak, after that, was rather less clear. Some part of him, the part that still believed that the face of Koschei’s he had seen was the truest one the Deathless had, almost hoped that he’d be given safe passage to leave, once Koschei knew what he had done. The rest of him knew better. And yet, he had not fled. Not because of the wolves, or the bears, or the dangers of a man alone trying to navigate these mountain passes in winter, but because he had needed to see Koschei again, more than anything, and that ridiculous overpowering sentiment had undone him. There was nothing to be done about that now. About any of it. Even if Garak tried to flee now, before Koschei arrived, he would never make it out of the shadow of the Chernosvyat in time to escape whatever revenges Koschei would bring down upon his head for having uncovered this last secret, most dangerous of them all. All Garak could do was wait, the dagger’s hilt still crusted with earth in places from where he had dug it out of the greenhouse flowerbeds, just in case.The storm was nearly deafening by nightfall, lighting flashing in sheets around the castle, the thunder so loud it seemed to split the heavens. It was nearly overhead now, the whole castle wreathed in storm and fury, and for all he knew that the Deathless’s return could only bring about the end of all this last year had given him, everything in Garak thrilled a little at the sound of each roll of thunder, every hair standing on end with anticipation. Koschei must be in a real fury, to have created such a storm as this, and yet Garak wanted nothing so much as to see him again, one more time, before it was over. This last year had weakened him beyond all understanding, he knew it, and resented it, and yet he could not resist it either.It was almost a relief when the great double doors slammed open with another crash of thunder. And there Koschei stood, silhouetted against the lightning, appearing for a moment somehow taller than he had done before, his feathered cloak streaming out behind him. He took one step, and then another, and then, without any warning, toppled to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut.A year ago, Garak would not have hesitated. He had killed helpless men before, on Tain’s orders, and not lost a moment’s sleep over doing it. It would be the easiest thing in the world to drive the knife in, see the betrayal, the hatred in Koschei’s golden eyes as the life drained out of them, and return to Cardassia with the dagger as proof that he had done all that he could. Instead, the dagger clattered, forgotten, to the floor as Garak rushed to him, and it was- it was weak, it was sentimental, it was everything he had ever been warned against, and yet Koschei could not, must not die.When Garak tried to roll Koschei onto his back, his hands came away sticky with blood, which had soaked through shirt and jerkin and surcoat, so much of it that, if it were not for the irregular rise and fall of Koschei’s chest, Garak would not have believed anyone could survive such a loss. The blood was crusted on his skin, too, the smell of it thick enough to choke on, matted in his hair. His eyes moved fitfully beneath their lids, and his skin was for once not furnace-hot but cool and clammy, without the odd roughness Garak had grown almost used to whenever he touched him. Sparks of blue-white light crackled for a moment around Garak’s fingers as they brushed against Koschei’s skin, trying to manoeuvre him, and Garak let go with a muffled curse. He needed to see what the damage was, and to get Koschei comfortable, and even if he was quite sure he could lift Koschei at need, he didn’t know if that would jar anything that might prove fatal. Garak had not thought it was possible for anything to kill the Deathless but his dagger, but then, he’d never thought injuries as severe as these were possible either. There was no help for it. He hadn’t wanted to try this before, but it seemed he would have no choice.“Bring us to my rooms,” he said to the castle at large, as firmly as he could manage. “Now.”What happened next was difficult to properly describe, as if Garak were at once moving and standing still. Or as if he were standing still while the castle rearranged itself around him. There was a sound of grinding stone, and an odd, vertiginous feeling, as if he’d stepped out onto the ramparts of the castle and stared down into the chasm below, so great a drop that after a while there was nothing but blackness. And then, abruptly, he was in his own tapestry-strewn bedchamber, with Koschei bleeding not onto hard flagstones but onto the fine Cardassian rug that had been his first real gift to Garak when they married.Slowly, labouriously, Garak heaved Koschei’s limp body onto the bed, the bone arm dangling limp as he laid Koschei out atop the blankets and began carefully peeling away the layers of silk and fine wool and leather. It was slow work. The velvet cloak was only incidentally spattered with blood, the purple surcoat beneath it soaked through, and the hideous orange silk shirt beneath that was a dead loss. Under other circumstances, Garak might even have been thankful. Not now.Stripped to the waist, Koschei was thinner than Garak had imagined, all those nights in the darkness, imagining what that gold-flecked skin looked like beneath its layers of protective clothing. Every rib was clear and defined, the bloodstained skin stretched taut over the bones, his flesh-and-blood arm hardly more solid than the arm of bones. Except – Garak might not have seen the skin, but he had felt it, and Koschei had been whole and strong before he had departed. What had happened since he had been away?He called for a bowl of hot water and a cloth, and they appeared. Koschei did not stir or struggle as Garak cleaned away the blood on his skin. It would have been easier if he had – not the task itself, but the fear of what came next, the awful stillness of Koschei’s body. He was still breathing, but that was the best that could be said. When the blood came away, though, Garak saw another change. Koschei’s skin was not golden, did not have the same eerie sheen to it that once it had, the same odd, gold-flecked quality. It was a warm brown, and smooth and soft to the touch, as if it belonged to an ordinary mortal man – the merchant’s son, perhaps, that the fairies had claimed…no. No. Even when he had believed the worst of Koschei, Garak had never imagined that particular story true. He didn’t know why – he had certainly committed acts as terrible, in Tain’s service – but the thought that Koschei, who had raged over children bought and sold for their parents’ wishes, could have taken a child and hollowed it out to serve as a vessel for himself…it was unthinkable. Or it had been.Koschei was weakly stirring by the time Garak had finished, and after that terrible stillness it was a desperate relief to see. The relief was short-lived – an awful sort of spasm seemed to come over Koschei just then, his whole body twisting, his back arching, his face contorted with pain. Garak tried to hold him down, keep him still, prevent him from worsening his injuries, even without any outward signs of a wound on Koschei’s body except the sudden appearance of humanity, but his efforts were fruitless.“Deathless?” he probed, “Deathless- Koschei, can you hear me?”The golden eyes flickered open. They, at least, were still the same, but strangely unfocused,“Elim,” Koschei croaked, his voice like a rusty hinge, and then his eyes sharpened, seeming to fix on something past Garak’s shoulder. “…the dagger,” he said, “It’s here. How-?”He coughed blood and fell back again in another awful convulsion, his eyes rolling back into his head. Garak stared down at Koschei in alarm, less for the dagger’s sake – he’d always known it would be a fool’s errand to hide the thing in Koschei’s own castle – than what this might mean.He had never seen Koschei injured, or even sick. He had hardly believed such a thing was possible, and yet there lay the proof. The Deathless was vulnerable, maybe even mortal, and Garak could not shake the feeling that the pirate had something to do with this. Had this been the result of the failed summoning? Or was there something else at work here – could simply removing the dagger from its hiding-place have done all this? He did not know, had not, at the time, thought to ask – oh, Tain would despair of him, if he could see how far Garak’s skills had declined in his exile. But if the dagger truly was Koschei’s life…then, would he not want it kept close in his convalescence, however ill-advised it might be to be alone in the same room as Garak and the one weapon which might prove the key to killing the Deathless once and for all. Koschei did not stir as Garak left the room and made the long trek back to the entrance hall, where he had dropped the dagger in his haste to get to Koschei’s side. It had been a foolish gesture – if the dagger indeed contained Koschei’s life, it could not be treated so cavalierly – but at the time, it had seemed…unimportant, somehow. He did not know when he had become so weak.Koschei was lying still when Garak re-entered the room, but stirred at the arrival of the dagger, his golden eyes just slits of glowing gold in the dark of Garak’s bed.“…how…?”Garak smiled. “You really ought to be more careful with your hiding places, my dear,” he said, setting the dagger down on the beside table, within easy reach of either one of them. “Why else did you think I was sent here? It was Tain’s idea, at first, to send a man to the Land of the Black Sands in search of it, but since he found no sign of you there…”Koschei gave a harsh, scratchy, painful-sounding sort of laugh that left blood on the whiteness of his teeth.“Koschei – what is this? What can I-”“No help for it,” Koschei forced out, his breathing laboured, his voice rough. “Just- Have to wait it out. The curse…protects itself. The host…”He grit his teeth as another convulsion gripped him, and Garak reached out to steady him, heart hammering, desperately, irrationally afraid.“You won’t die,” he said, more to reassure himself than anything. “As you keep reminding me, you can’t. And that means, this is curable. There has to be a way, there has to- Koschei! Talk to me!”It was a useless plea, and they both knew it. Garak forced himself to calm, fighting back a wave of terror that scared him in itself – when, when had he become so attached?“What host, Deathless?” he said, smooth as silk, his fingers gripping so hard at the sheets it hurt.Koschei’s eyes had come unfocused again. He did not seem to see Garak, or the canopied bed, or the room beyond it. “There was a boy,” he said, and his voice sounded strange and distant.Garak’s heart twisted in his chest. “A merchant’s son?” he asked, dreading the answer.“Yes.” Koschei laughed wetly, and more blood bubbled up between his lips. “Strange – I don’t remember his name.”“I’d heard he was a simple child,” Garak tested, the awful detachment of the torture chamber falling over him once again, feeling oddly uncomfortable, unaccustomed, after so long away from the work.Koschei’s face twisted. “Simple. Half-wit. Sickly. Father despaired…took him into the desert, brought him to the cave.” His eyes were fever-bright now, unseeing, every breath a painful, rattling thing.“And what was in the cave?”“…horrors.” Koschei’s voice was barely more than a whisper now. “Gold, first. I remember…more of it than he had ever seen, and every brass ring of it cursed. I thought at first he might be there to steal it…then he led me down into the darkness beneath, and I saw…”Koschei’s hand of flesh twitched spasmodically, gripping at the sheets, almost tearing them.Garak swallowed, frightened now in a way he could not explain or justify, even to himself. No-one knew where it was the Deathless had come from. It seemed that he had always existed, a horror in the shadows at the edge of the world that might offer damnation or aid…at a price. Over the last year he had come to know Koschei the man, with his fastidious ways and wry humour and appalling taste in everything from clothes to books. Garak had almost forgotten what manner of monster it was that he was bedding.“What did you see, Koschei?” he forced himself to ask, soft and insinuating, the tone that had always found answers in the dungeons of Cardassia.Koschei made a low, keening noise, his unseeing eyes wide. “So long,” he mumbled, the words hardly decipherable through the slurring of his voice, and when Garak took his hand he found it burning with fever. “So long down there in the dark…was it ten years, or a thousand years in the pit? Buried alive- No. No. Please…”He gave an odd sort of choking gasp, twitching and shuddering through another convulsion.“Thought it was just a bundle of rags at first…didn’t look human anymore. Wasn’t. Not anything like…if I’d known…Father gave me the dagger, said…I didn’t know. I didn’t-” Another long, shuddering breath. “I. It hurt. The dagger…no pain in the word like it. Flesh and soul and magic…It screamed. Oh, gods, how it screamed. I remember…I remember it. The feeling as the knife went in. I could barely lift it…Father held my wrists, guided my hand, told me not to cry…all I had to do was kill it, and I’d be right-”Garak’s fingers knotted themselves in the bedspread to still the shaking of his hands.“…Mother ran out to us, when we came back. Crying. They…” Another awful, choking cry, and Garak laid a hand over Koschei’s flesh-and-blood hand.“Just sleep,” he said, and cursed himself for a fool.Garak did not need to empty out the basin of bloodied water himself, or dispose of the ruined clothes, but he did it anyway. He needed something to do just now, something to distract him from what he had heard.It should not matter. Cardassia was what mattered, Cardassia and all the good that Koschei’s power could do there, instead of being wasted on some pathetic little toy-village in the high mountains, cloistered away from the world. And yet-What was Koschei, truly? The simple child who had gone into the desert, or the monster that child had found in the dark? Found and killed, if he was to believe the Deathless’ story, and Garak- Garak had heard enough confessions now to know truth when he heard it. Perhaps he was both at once, perhaps he had never been either. Garak did not know. It should not matter which he was, and yet, somehow, it did. And though Garak would kill him in a heartbeat to save Cardassia…Cardassia had been saved, by Koschei’s hand, and Garak did not believe he would threaten it. Tain had believed Koschei’s power, even unused, made him a threat to Cardassia. Perhaps it did. Cardassia had enough enemies that one of them might well decide to call on the Deathless for protection, one day. And, Koschei being Koschei, he would likely grant it. For Cardassia’s sake, he had to die-But, if that great power was a threat if turned against Cardassia, how great an ally would the Deathless prove, if he could only be persuaded to take their side? Garak had never been used to seduce an ally to Cardassia’s service – his charms had not been so great as all that even when he’d still been young enough to be appealing – but then, hadn’t Koschei wanted him from the first, though Garak could hardly credit why. He thought of an army come from the south, to turn Koschei out of his castle and lay waste to all that was his. He thought of officers and lords and princes turned into beasts, and common soldiers turned loose to make their own way home. He thought, too, of the pirate’s love, whoever she had been, whom Koschei had transformed. Which was the truer face of the man? And, in the end, did it matter? His orders had been clear – Koschei was to be bound or killed, and the power he held was too great to be permitted to exist outside Cardassia’s service. Tain could feel nothing but contempt for an agent who failed him so. And yet…and yet.When he returned to the bedroom, Koschei’s eyes were open, and widened a little as Garak entered the room.“…I didn’t expect to see you again,” he admitted, his voice still hoarse and breathless, his golden eyes shining as if Garak had presented him with the best gift he could ever have hoped to receive.Garak blinked unconcernedly at him. “Where else would I go?”Koschei stared at him for a moment, open-mouthed, then gave a short, pained, mirthless bark of laughter. “I- I suppose that is true.”It was strange, seeing him like this. All Koschei’s expressions and odd tics and foibles, mapped onto a purely human face. Somehow, Garak had grown used to gold-flecked skin and glowing eyes and teeth just a little sharper than human. It seemed strange to be here, in his own bedroom, talking to an ordinary mortal man, the only sign of Koschei’s true nature the eerie glow of his golden eyes.“So,” Koschei said after a moment. “You know it all.”Garak was about to voice a denial, but then- Then his eyes fell upon the dagger, sitting innocently at the foot of the great bed, and he shook his head.“I know enough,” he lied, and picked the dagger up, his eyes never leaving Koschei’s. If he had not been so close an observer of the Deathless’ habits this past year, he never would have seen the flinch Koschei gave at that, the panicked way his eyes flicked from the dagger to Garak’s face, and the way his whole body stiffened as if preparing itself for a blow.Garak smiled, wide and merciless, and offered the blade, hilt-first, to Koschei.Koschei stared at it, uncomprehending, his golden eyes vast in his thin face.“…I don’t understand.”Garak’s gaze did not falter. “You knew what I was doing here from the moment I arrived,” he said, without heat. “You knew what I had come for.”“…yes.” Koschei’s voice was barely more than a whisper. “But I never imagined you’d find it – how? I was so careful-”“Not careful enough, it seems.”Koschei laughed again, and the sound was worse than tears would have been. “I should have known,” he said, with a wry, pained smile. “I thought…perhaps I wouldn’t mind, if it was you. But-” he drew in another long, pained, rattling breath, and the fingers of his bone hand, so long immobile, seemed to twitch for a moment, for all that the arm had lain limp and dead since Koschei’s return. “You know, then? What it does?”“I know it is the only thing in the world that will kill you,” Garak said simply. “That is correct, is it not?”“If only that were all!” Koschei’s eyes closed, and he fell back again against the pillows, the fit of new strength that had come over him waning quickly. He did not convulse, this time, but for a moment, his skin seemed to ripple, one moment brown, the next its accustomed shimmering gold. Whatever it was, it passed quickly, though Koschei was breathing more heavily when his eyes opened again, and there was blood shining wetly on his lips.“No!” he gasped out, when Garak went to steady him. “No. It won’t-” Another long, shuddering breath. “If you know what that dagger is, you know there’s no cure for this but time.”“What happened?” Garak asked, jerking his hand back before they could touch.Koschei coughed blood and scowled, “Fairies,” he said. “Knew I was coming. Normally I’d be a match for them, but- Not this time. I don’t know what they…” another awful fit of hacking coughs, and his teeth were stained red when he spoke again. “Don’t know how they knew I’d be there.”Garak froze.The fairy. He had told her of Koschei’s appointment at the turn of the year and thought nothing of it. Had he done this? Garak was not accustomed to feeling guilt – but then, he was not accustomed to making mistakes, either. And he had not imagined the tiny, twittering creature that had talked to and about Garak as if he were some simpering abducted maiden to be any threat to the Deathless’ power. What else had he been wrong about?“Stripped the magic out,” Koschei said, apropos of nothing. “As much as they could. But the curse goes deeper than that. Turned inward…it was all I could do to get back here. The winds wouldn’t answer me, no magic left for anything but healing…”If he had been mortal, he would have died before Garak saw him again. If he had been mortal, they should never have known one another at all. The thought should not have hurt Garak in the least, and yet it did.He pushed the thought aside. There were other concerns yet.“You mentioned, before, that killing you would not be the only use of this…item,” he said, glancing down at the dagger that still lay between them.Koschei snorted. “I’m sure you already know them all,” he said, despairing.“Perhaps. You’ll tell me.”Koschei’s eyes fell again to the dagger. “Do I have a choice?”Garak smiled, “Of course. How could I, a simple tailor, force the Deathless to do anything he did not wish to?”“You have the dagger,” Koschei said. “You tell me.”The room was silent for one long moment and then, at last, Koschei looked away.“…don’t kill me,” he said simply. “I- I know how that sounds, but…you don’t know everything. You don’t know what it will mean. Why-” he convulsed again, another rippling wave of gold washing over him, and was still. “The curse- It rebounds on the one who breaks it- That was why-”Garak was silent. That, too, was a skill the torture chamber had taught him. Sometimes, silence was worse than any question, any taunt.Koschei drew in another shallow, rattling breath, and sighed. “That was why my father wanted it,” he admitted. “Why he wanted the dagger in the first place. A way for him to finally have the son he thought he deserved.” A sharp, bitter laugh. “I suppose he got that, for a while. A twisted, monstrous thing that dogs barked at in the streets when it walked by them! That summoned storms and raised dead things and didn’t know how men breathed until they stopped doing it!” Koschei’s voice was sharp with loathing, as Garak had never heard it before, and Garak’s heart gave a quite unaccustomed twist in his chest. “Yes,” Koschei said in a voice rendered strange and foreign with bitterness. “I could say that he got what was coming to him.”There was- Garak was not much given to pangs of conscience, and truthfully never had been. All the same, there was something terrible in the twisted smile on Koschei’s face, the way he had, quite unflinchingly, just called himself a curse upon the father that had made him what he was now – and made him so at no small cost to Koschei himself, unless Garak missed his guess.“That’s what the dagger’s for,” Koschei said, nodding at it. “It kills the host, but the curse…” He sighed, and for a moment almost looked his age. “I’m not sure there is an end to that.” His mouth twitched. “You’d never be rid of me. I’d be in your head, behind your eyes, and there’d be nothing to root me out but time. You can’t…you can’t imagine, what that is for a child of six to bear.”“…which are you, then?” Garak asked, transfixed and horrified and fascinated all at once. “The child or the thing from the cave.”“Both. Neither. I don’t know.” Koschei looked away. “Maybe there wasn’t enough of that boy after only six years to stand up to that- that torrent of other people’s voices, always whispering inside his head. And such voices-” he shuddered. “Khan conquered all the Seven Deserts and ruled them as despot for three centuries before he was caged. Rothbart turned young maidens into swans for refusing his advances, and that curse didn’t break even after he was safely dead. Carabosse-” he broke off. “I was three hundred years old by the time I learnt to block them out, but they’re not gone. They never will be. Some day I expect some hero will kill me too, and then- Then the world will suffer for it. It doesn’t matter what they want in the beginning. I wanted to do good too. All the power in the world at my fingertips and I wanted to make things better-” He laughed, sharp and mirthless. “And instead, I destroyed it all.”“…the world seems…remarkably intact, considering,” Garak probed cautiously, and sat at the end of the bed by Koschei’s feet, keeping the dagger between them.“You don’t remember it any other way,” Koschei said miserably. “How would you know? It’s taken centuries to claw back even this much – if I had only left well enough alone, who knows what the world would be now?”Garak had no answer for that – he had no notion, honestly, of just how old Koschei was. The stories of him went back centuries in Cardassia alone, and the Deathless rarely troubled the Seven Deserts now – guilt, Garak supposed, or simple unwillingness to return to a homeland that, for all intents and purposes, no longer existed. But that was beside the point.“You seem to have held out well enough,” he said instead. “I never heard that you were a conqueror.”Koschei snorted. “I do my best to keep it in check. I might not be able to help being a monster, but I can limit how far it goes. It’s taken centuries to learn even that much control. Sooner or later it’ll slip, and I’ll be caged in turn. I know what I am. Oh, gods, Garak, you’ll never know how much I hate daylight!”That awful, despairing cry cut Garak to the quick. It shouldn’t have done. He had known men’s despair before, had created it as often as not and not regretted it for a moment. Sentiment, nothing but the basest sentiment-“If all these people were as powerful as you, it’s a wonder they were caged at all,” he said, and his voice did not shake and his gaze remained steady. If there was, perhaps, the slightest hesitation in his voice, Koschei did not seem to hear it.“We’re always caged.” Koschei’s voice was leaden now, all the fight gone out of it with that last, awful cry. “It’s part of what we- part of what I am. I always lose the dagger, no matter how well it’s hid.” He nodded to the blade, sitting innocently there on the bed between them, and Garak wished more than anything that Jones had just left well enough alone, not forced him to make this choice. “I always hide it, and it’s never enough. I’m always bound. I’m always enslaved. I always die, in the end. I’ve already done all of this, and I’ll do it again. How do you think you get to be deathless? You live the same tale, over and over and over again, until you’ve worn a groove in the world, so that even after I’m gone, the tale will continue, and someone will have to get up again, to play my part and say my lines. I’ve had- longer than I ever thought I would. But I always knew the story would catch up with me in the end.” He looked Garak in the eye now, and it was terrible. “I almost thought I could bear it, if it were you that bound me. But I can’t- I-” He screwed up his eyes against the light, and all at once Garak realised that he was shaking. “Elim. It will destroy you. You and Cardassia both. Please.”It was a terrible thing, to hear the Deathless beg.“Is that what happened in Irem?” Garak asked, struggling for equanimity. It meant nothing, could mean nothing, was only the desperate pleading of one more condemned man-“You know about that?” Koschei gave a faint tired smile. “Why do I bother asking? Of course you know.”“I know a little,” Garak allowed. “Enough to pique my interest.”Koschei’s smile twisted somehow, and there was an awful depth of bitterness in that look. “What shall I tell you, then? How every time I healed a man by magic, every time I cleansed a well or regrew a limb or saved a life, I failed to see it? All magic has its price, and I- I thought I’d paid it. I didn’t realise they had to as well. I didn’t-” he closed his eyes, and his face was a mask of pain. “I didn’t stop. I drew attention. The Caliph…took notice. I was so proud-” The word was spat out, acid, Koschei’s face twisted with disgust. “-I never looked back to count the cost. What was it to me if my patients were…changed…after I healed them? What did I care that every one of them looked back, in the end, and thought it would’ve been better if they’d died then in that illness than accepted the help I offered? I should have seen!”“But you didn’t,” Garak prodded, sickly curious.Koschei slanted a look at him, “…no.” He drew in a breath, and this time it hardly rattled at all. “I didn’t. Worse- The Caliph brought me projects. Plague came to the city, and I healed it – not the way I had done before, the way any man might, but with magic. Drought came, and I created an oasis in the heart of the city, so the streets of Irem nearly flowed with water. I had never built with magic before, but the Caliph had me create a wall of brass around the city, so tall and so thick that armies could break on it and leave the city untouched. I was young. Foolish. I thought I could do anything, and so I did.”Until…There would be an ‘until’, Garak knew. There seemed no way to avoid it, with these sorts of stories, but, even knowing that, everything in him thrilled at the thought of what these things would mean for Cardassia. Protection from famine, from drought, from disease, from invasion…this was what Tain had wanted. This was why it was so vital that they succeed. All the same- It was easy, sometimes, to forget just how powerful Koschei was, when he stayed locked in this out-of-the-way castle, using magic to brew cups of tea when he could have boiled the seas.“It started with the water,” Koschei said dully. “Reports came back from the lower city, claiming it was poison. I thought at first someone had tried to use the stream as a sewer, cleansed it and thought no more about it until the next day dawned and everyone who had drunk the water I’d cleansed was dead or dying.” He closed his eyes. “The rest…didn’t take long. I’d made myself…too integral, I suppose. Meddled too much. The crops were kept from failing by my magic, the water kept clean, disease kept at bay, the very walls of the city were of my making…it was too much. I’d done too much.” He gave a hollow smile. “It’s a basic law of magic – all things have their price, and we had gone too long without paying it. I’d gone too long without paying it. It was my mistake, but the people of Irem paid the price.”Garak almost didn’t want to hear it, wished more than anything that he could stop, could turn away- He could not.“I tried to heal some of them, where I could. Herbs did nothing, tonics did nothing, magic- magic only made it worse. They died, or seemed to die, as other men, but then rose up again, dead and rotting and-” Koschei broke off. “And everywhere they went, the plague spread. It was- It wasn’t an earthly plague, just like the water held no earthly poison. I must have conducted a hundred tests, looked for a hundred solutions, but that- There was nothing natural about what happened that day. By nightfall, half the city was dead or dying, and there was nothing I could do to stop it!” By the end of that Koschei’s voice had risen to something like a snarl, and his eyes were unfocused, distant, seeming to stare at something far farther away than the wall of Garak’s luxurious bedchamber. “Even the air was poisoned. By morning, I was the only living thing beneath the sun.”Garak’s skin crawled. He could almost picture it – the towers of Cardassia fallen, the air a choking fog, people crying out, confused and in pain and desperate- and a very young Koschei in the middle of it all, trying hopelessly to understand what he had done, and why it had failed.“You know better now,” he said, though it did not convince him. “The village down in the valley does not seem to have suffered a similar fate.”Koschei gave a bitter little snort. “They pay their price every day. Fealty. Service. Bending the knee to a monster in exchange for a few magical trinkets, a few petty tricks they might have achieved without relying on the likes of me.”“Might not another kingdom? Cardassia-”“Would not bow to me willingly, and forced submission would not do at all.” Koschei’s voice was weary. “If it were that simple, Khan would still rule the Seven Deserts, but it isn’t, and even if it were…setting out to conquer the world seems a rather backwards way to avoid doing any more harm.”The most alarming thing was, Garak thought Koschei could have done it, if he’d really set his mind to it. A man who could turn back an army with a wave of his hand, who could draw up water from the desert and cure plagues and create wonders as casually as another man might swat a fly…the world should consider itself fortunate he had never turned to conquering, for Garak did not know how anyone might have withstood him.“So,” Koschei said into the silence. “Now you know. I hope I haven’t shattered too many of your illusions.”Garak stood, and saw Koschei’s eyes widen, his limbs jerk and twitch in sudden panic. He felt, abruptly, very old, and very tired. He had forgotten his age, in truth – forty was as much as some men ever got, and Garak was well past that, but living in this castle, with this man, had made him feel…young, perhaps, though only ever by comparison – but now…now he felt like he might as well have been a grandfather.“Sleep, Koschei,” he said, and picked up the dagger again. “Just sleep.”Koschei fell like a puppet whose strings had been cut, and the look in his eyes was worse than if Garak had stabbed him in the heart. Garak stood over his husband’s prone and helpless body, a blade in his hand, and knew, with a certainty that went down to the bone and the marrow, what he had to do.When Koschei woke, Garak was gone from the room, and the Chernosvyat stood still and silent. Two daggers lay on the bedside table, side by side – the old, hated dagger with its twisted blade and blood-stained cuneiform and, beside it, a knife with a hilt of fingerbones, and a blade as sharp as the east wind.Koschei struggled upright, half-ran, half-dragged himself to the window and looked out-But of Elim, there was no sign.