NOTE: This is a romp through Connor’s mind circa "Ground State" in Season 4. I realize that Holtz named the kid "Steven" and not "Stephen," but I like to use the spelling that was current in Holtz’s time. It jars on me less.

When he brought out the rope I waited patiently. I was shivering a little with my feet in the marsh, but I wasn’t complaining. This was our business, his and mine. It was our game, and more. I had a lot of ways of proving my strength and my guts and my imperviousness to pain, but not a lot of ways of proving my loyalty. This was it: my loyalty test. He said it was all about tracking, but we both knew the truth. I had perfected my tracking long ago.

This was about something else. Would I come to him, or would I leave him to fend for himself?

He pointed to the tree, and I waded over and stood with my back against it. I stood rigid, so that the knots would be as tight as they were meant to be. Anything else would be cheating.

He had an ailment called arthritis, and often his fingers were stiff. "Have patience with me, lad," he would say. "It’s been many a year since I could saddle my gelding and ride off to the quartermaster’s house in three minutes flat." Sometimes he would make me recite psalms, or again names of demons with two legs, four, six, and no legs. I was bored, but there was excitement round the edges of my boredom. I was waiting for the moment when he would turn and walk away, leaving me alone.

He tested the ropes first, asking, "Does it smart there?" When I answered, "A little, Father," he said, "Good. I didn’t raise a soft one."

"Not soft," I would say.

"Till teatime tomorrow then, Stephen," my father would answer. "Ta!"

We didn’t have tea–I barely knew what it was– but teatime meant the hour before dark. I didn’t answer him when he said goodbye, and he didn’t turn as he marched off and lost himself between the trees, the scythe hanging loose in his hand. My weapons lay where he’d left them, dry but well out of my reach.

Something grey splashed in the marsh– no legs. I knew there were sluks in the trees. They had sixty-seven legs–I’d counted once, pinning one to a tree before I killed it– and their bodies were squishy and sluggish. You couldn’t exactly see them unless it was dark, or unless you were watching very closely as they slithered up and around a trunk and back down–on your face, if they could manage it. They were intelligent. The first time one tried to get inside me, after I got it down on the ground and put the knife to it, it told me their name. It didn’t speak in words exactly, but it made itself heard. "Stephen not kill sluk. Foul murderer. Kill bad, we good," it said.

It must have known my name from hearing Father call me. I could feel that it wanted to live. It also wanted to crawl inside my mouth and suck my fluids at its leisure, until my skin cracked and I died. It was disappointed, since it thought I looked juicier than any creature it had seen for days. The images it put in my head made me nervous, and I hacked it to bits.

The next time I killed a sluk, I tried to talk to it first. I asked it if there were other demons in the marshes that could speak to me. I asked if it had seen other creatures like me, other human beings. I don’t think it understood my spoken words, but it did answer. It said, "No kill us, foul accursed destroyer. Others of foul murderer’s kind behind great spine two miles to the west."

But it wasn’t very good at hiding its feelings. I could tell that it was trying to be cunning and lure me to a certain ridge of rock, which I already suspected to be a den of sluks. I impaled it, counted its legs, beheaded it, bisected it, and went to tell my father.

My father hit me when I told him that the sluk had spoken to me and I had spoken back. "Never listen to the devil’s voice, boy!" he said. "And if you have, you’d best be ashamed to admit it." He reached for me again.

I was stronger than my father by that time, and I could easily have shoved him against a tree and thrashed him. He was an old man. I saw that he was afraid. I took the cuff without flinching, my eyes on the ground.

He stepped back, his arm still raised. "Blood whispers to blood, Stephen."

That brought the aforesaid blood to my face, and I looked everywhere but at him.

But it was all forgiven, forgiven on both sides when we played our game.

The hardest thing was waiting till the sun was halfway up the sky, in order to give him a sporting chance. After that, the hardest thing was freeing my hands. I worked quickly, glad I had no arthritis, while my eyes scanned the nearby trunks for the shiver of sluks. This was their hunting hour. I was vulnerable, and I couldn’t smell them. They blended into the marsh as if they were one with it, something I knew neither I nor my father could do. We were intruders, and according to the sluks, we smelled like filthy living death. Me particularly.

They had spoken to me since the day of the beating, but I hadn’t spoken back. They had come to know that they could expect no mercy from me, so they mocked me. They told me they knew what trees were, and that the things I called trees weren’t trees. "Dead icicles those, foul Destroyer," they told me. "Trees alive. Hideous living sun-suckers. Never see. It dies here, the foul murderer, it has no home." I wanted to ask them where they’d met these monstrous living trees, but I refrained. I was still worried that I could understand them only because of my demon blood.

Then one day I came back from the hunt early, and I saw my father keeping a sluk at bay with his scythe. I was about to come to his aid, when I realized what he was doing.

"There must be a way, creature of Satan!" he cried, panting and clumsily brandishing his weapon. Luckily, he had caught the thing in the shadow of a seven-foot boulder, where it was visible by its dimly glowing outline.

"What can I give you for safe passage?" he asked, trying to make his voice soft and cunning. "What can I give you to show us the way beyond the veil? The boy and me?"

The sluk must have answered with its usual malicious lies, because my father fell on it and tried to kill it. I dashed out in time to finish it with a clean blow. Our eyes met after that, and I think he knew what I had heard, but we never spoke of it again.

Once I had my hands free, the rest of the ropes took instants. Sometimes I snapped them in my haste. I already had his scent, clean and intact through the trees. When I closed my eyes I could see it, like the blots you see after staring at the sun. (You had to stare for a very long time in my world, because the sun was cloud-wrapped and pale as a candle.) I seized the weapons from the rocky bank, harnessed them to my waist and wrist and set off to find my father.

A few times I had thought about what would happen if I didn’t come for him. He would dig a hole in the earth, and at nightfall he would go into it. For the first night, the second night, maybe the third and fourth, he would make do as he had when I was too young to fight– skulking and scavenging. Then a sluk would make a leap for his face, or a kvaalquitor would creep out of the bush, baring teeth longer than his forearm and churring deep in its scaly throat. He wouldn’t make cover in time, and his aged limbs were no use to him. Anyhow, he was used to depending on me.

And me: where would I be without him? Alone.

I’d thought about that. I won’t deny it. I’d thought about how well I could eat if I only had to hunt for one mouth, and about the pleasant things I could do without him there to quote Scripture and swing his belt at me. But I still came for him: I passed my test. I passed it every time.

Not only because God had appointed him my protector. Not only because I was afraid that without him, I might start talking to sluks for company. Because I loved him.

And yet in the end I didn’t pass. I failed him. Or so I suppose. That’s all I can imagine, knowing that he told me a lie worse than any sluk’s lie. It was made of his flesh and spilled blood, and it was written in his hand in words of love for me. An unspeakably ugly lie. One that I deserved.

* * *

There are people in this world who live in houses with too many rooms for them, like the Bald Warrior and the Chattering Girl, and there are people who have no houses at all. I’ve become one of the houseless ones. I see them moving in messy groups like herd-beasts, and sometimes I follow them to their encampments and lie down near them. They smell of rotten fruit and illness and excrement and the things they smoke. I guess I don’t smell too sweet either.

But I prefer being on my own. Not a guest in somebody else’s house, where you have to wipe your feet and not eat with your hunting knife and say excuse me and thank you. The only chore those two ever let me out of was prayers. It was almost a relief when he came home.

I always preferred to think of my blood-father as a demon, a creature. An it, not a he. If the sluks called me it because I killed so many of them, I figured this was good enough for the butcher Angelus.

But my true father refused to let me. "The creature that sired you is strange and cunning, child," he would say. "It has the wherewithal to behave like a human being, and at times I believe it thinks it is a human being. He may speak to you with words of love and love in his eyes, and when he does, you must not be surprised or deceived. Therefore, honor his human disguise and be on your guard against him."

I obeyed. In my heart, though, I preferred to call the vampire it and creature. It kept my mind in the right place. The creature did look and speak like a human being, but I was prepared for that. What I wasn’t prepared for was its weakness.

I mean that, though it may sound strange.

My true father was a stern man–stern and righteous, like Jehovah in the Bible. He was consistent in all he did and had no patience with me when I came home spitting with anger over a bad hunt or jabbering happily after a good one, or when I was gloomy and wanted to just sit and watch the rain fall. "Quell your moods and steady on, boy," he would say. "Stiff upper lip’s what makes a soldier." We both knew that I was the one who could kill things, but he was stronger in another way. He governed himself with an iron fist. I was reckless and hot-headed and sometimes weak enough to cry over things I could not change. So he had the right to govern me.

I never understood how people could worship Jesus, who was soft and merciful in His love and even doubted the wisdom of His Father on the cross. My father explained that, while Jesus was indeed the son of God, He didn’t live in a hell dimension. In our world, turning the other cheek was the fastest route to becoming offal rotting by the roadside.

The creature that is supposedly my father amazed me. Not right off. The first time I attacked the thing and it beat me down, I was only slightly startled when it spared me. My father had told me how Angelus liked to torment its victims, stalking them and devising new pains for their bodies and minds until they begged for death. I thought that was what it had in mind for me.

"He must hate me," I had told my father, when we reviewed the creature’s unspeakable deeds. "I don’t know why he didn’t drain my blood when I was born. Maybe he was only waiting to gain my trust so he could hurt me more."

"Once he recognizes you, he will look at you with love and take you into his home and try to convince you he’s an angel," my true father had answered, shaking his head. "Call him father when you first see him and watch him go mild as a kitten. He’ll never hurt you unless you menace him with stake or sword. If then."

But I refused to believe it. I had built up Angelus in my mind as someone who was as strong-willed as my father, only bad. Someone who did exactly what he wanted when he wanted, with no respect for anything in heaven or earth. I was almost hoping to see him in action, before I killed him. Little did I know.

What I expected was something like the Satan out of Milton’s story of the Paradise Lost. What I got was a confused man staring at me with tears in his eyes.

Then I knew I would have to focus on the demon, the thing, the creature, in order to kill it. There was no other way. The more human he looked to me, the less I could look at him.

I meant to kill him. I would have killed him. I had the strength for that. My father did me an injustice. My father never gave me half a chance.

"Here, evil wears its true face. But in our home dimension, evil is weakness. Evil seeks mercy. Evil has a human face," he once told me.

I never understood this until I saw Angelus beg me to listen to him. To hear his side of the story. If a strong man begging is an ugly sight, an archdemon begging is even worse.

It’s true that I gave in that time. I listened to him. But you should understand why.

I had recently arrived in a strange land. I had taken my first trophy off a human being. I had become fond of a human girl who seemed as healthy as myself and then, in the space of minutes, fell sick and died. Sickness was unknown to me, except the ailments of age. This world seemed full of it, just as it was full of harsh smells and smoke, and I thought I too might sicken and die with no warning.

All this you would have known, Father, if you had asked me more questions, or if you had given some thought to it.

When I fought with Angelus that night, I slipped and gave him the advantage. When he saved me from the False Healer’s rapid metal projectile, I was not impressed. I thought, as I’ve already said, that he wanted to spare me for a worse fate. So when I listened to his words, it was not of my free will, but because he had slammed me rather hard against a wall. I was not, of course, afraid of him, but I was a little dazed and had to catch my breath before the next assault. So I stood still long enough to hear what he had to say. When I returned to his lair the next day, it was only because you, Father, had commanded it.

Now here’s a hard part, and something that I know looks very bad for me. But I can explain. It’s true, Father, that I fought by the demon’s side, shoulder to shoulder. I know you knew about this, because your handmaid mentioned it to me. She was with us that night in the Den of Iniquity they call a club.

But you have to understand. I’d never had a fellow soldier before. Never a sparring partner–anyway, not since I learned to knock you down. And seeing that that creature and I were fighting on the same side, temporarily at least, what else could I do? Was I supposed to abandon the fight? Or grit my teeth and hate every minute of it? Was I supposed to turn around afterward and stake my comrade at arms? Surely not, Father. Not after you had told me that to kill Angelus just like that, without knowing him first, would be unworthy of me.

All right, all right. I could never argue with you. I know the truth. Firstly (as you would say) I was supposed to kill him, no matter what you said. Secondly, I failed to do so.

So you think my resolve wavered. You think I softened. But do you know what? I would have killed him, soul or no soul. Saving people or no saving people. His death was mine: ordained on the day I was born. There was no need to force my hand.

And do you know what else, Father? He lives. He walks the earth while you rot in it. In the end, the only thing your death could do was make me hate you.

You died so that your lie could live. And it did. I believed it till the creature told me the truth, and even after that, for a while. Do you think I had no suspicions at all? You would be wrong. I may not be as bright as you and your Cambridge chums, but I’m not that thick either.

For example, your handmaid Justine wouldn’t let me question Angelus after we took him. I’d wanted to draw a confession out of him, with pain if necessary. Not because I was in doubt, but because I wanted to know each detail of your last moments, in order to engrave them on my memory. But she said there was no time.

Then there was the matter of the creature’s human minions. I’d consulted with Mistress Justine about how we ought to handle them. My feeling was that if they defended their master after learning what he’d done, they deserved to be killed without trial or ceremony. On the other hand, if they were shocked to hear that Angelus had slaughtered a fellow man, then there could be no harm in telling them we’d disposed of the creature. It was never my choice to live with them and keep telling lies. That was Justine’s brilliant plan. She insisted that we couldn’t kill Bald and Chattering, because of constables and prison– but neither could we tell them the truth, because they would scamper to their master’s rescue.

I trusted and obeyed her because, as you know, I knew very little of this world. I could tell when a sluk was lying to me. But Bald or Chattering or Justine? Never. When Justine vanished, I thought she had died in one of her battles against the forces of darkness. I went on living and lying as she’d told me.

An icepick? Father, I went to a marketplace and asked a man to show one of these to me. It was a small, ignoble instrument. More a tool than a weapon. Not worthy of killing you. To think of that woman’s hand piercing your neck gives me shudders up and down my spine, like watching a grendel feast on carrion. If this makes me weak, I don’t care. If you did, you should have stayed around to keep me in line. Am I responsible for what happens now, for what becomes of my flawed lying soul?

I don’t think so.

Why do I believe him? is what you would ask next. I was the one who called Angelus the prince of lies. Why should I believe anything the creature told me when it came out of the box that should have been its grave? When what it had to tell me was that you, my father, lied to me almost with your last breath?

You think I haven’t asked myself that question?

All I have to say is this. He was haggard and starved, and his words just came. I heard the difference between his words and Justine’s. I believed him.

He told me the same thing: that he had learned to hear the truth or lies in my voice. "The truth has a less nasal sound," he said–almost as if he were glad we had learned this small thing about each other.

I had to pity him then, because you could always hear the lies in my voice. Even when I didn’t know I was telling them. It was another way you were like Our Heavenly Father.

I told Angelus–and I still believe this, Father–that lie or no lie, it didn’t change my feelings. "You still deserved it," I said, meaning what I’d done to him.

"The question is, what do you deserve?" he asked.

Believe me, Father, that time I didn’t expect to be spared. I broke and ran.

Why? you ask. He had spared me once. I knew he loved me.

I ran because I knew you would have killed me if I ever betrayed you the way I had him. You would have been like God smiting a sinner into the deepest circle of hell. And this creature, you remember: it thought of me as its son.

You would have killed me. The Scourge of Europe let me off with a good scolding.

That’s what I don’t understand. If he never loved me, why make a fool of himself with all the talking? Why bother with me at all? And if he loved me, why not kill me that night? Even the best-loved hunting dog gets the noose after it starts biting its master.

You loved me. But then you saw my true face– you said–and you did worse than kill me.

You left me alone in this world, Father. For that, don’t expect to be forgiven.

* * *

So the last test you gave me was the one I failed.

The second-to-last test was the one I passed so long ago–it feels like years now–out on the marshes. I did a stupid thing that turned out to be the end of everything. Instead of going right after you, Father, I took a detour to the spine of rock where the sluks breed. I had, I confess, some very sinful thoughts. I wanted to see what was behind the veil. But I also wanted to please you.

I had been there before, of course, to get a look at their den from the outside. I had meditated ways to flush them out, and observed that they disliked fire lit from the branch of a tree with rippled purple bark, which they thought to be a living creature.

But I’d never known them so frightened and agitated as they were that day. As I approached their lair, I saw the ground blur with their moving bodies. I scrambled up the bank and hastily set fire to a branch of that purple tree, which hissed a little as I broke it.

But I might as well not have bothered. The sluks ignored me, except for one who lobbed this thought in passing: Foul Destroyer! Deep-burrowing magic sullies our den, and it to blame!

Which left me none the wiser. I thought that, since they were deserting their den, I might as well get a look.

I did not rush off and forget about your needs, Father. Knowing which way you had gone, I sped to our nearest checkpoint and carved a message for you on the trunk of a tree, letting you know where I was and when I’d return. I lied about the second part, but not on purpose. I left the carcass of a gavlunk, so that you could eat for at least a few days. I packed the small catapault I had designed, and the wooden stakes I had so lovingly carved.

Then I marched back to the spine of rock.

As I knew already, the boulder was hollow, with a small triangular opening at one end. I had no choice but to crawl in that way, with my knife in one hand and my smouldering branch in the other.

Inside, I could barely see two feet in front of me. I could feel that the rock wall was ribbed, like the inside of a carcass, and some dark, viscous substance came away on my hands. The mud lapped at my chest and smelled more rank than our mud does normally. Slimy things hanging from the ceiling swiped at me and trickled down around my ears. I ignored them.

We feed on our forebears’ water, Disgusting One! The mud is made of our sacred substance! shrieked a sluk that was trying to flee past me.

They were like that, sluks–they weren’t what you’d call friendly, but they were proud, and they always wanted you to know what you were dealing with. That gave me an idea. I brandished the burning branch and asked, "Where’s this veil between us and the other place you’re always talking about?"

That set loose a chorus of scorn and dismay.

It wants to know, foul thing! We live in the veil, we make it, we drink it, Butcher! But it burns us today, it burns with foul sorcery, and we flee into the dry air.

"You make it?" I said.

But I needed ask no more, since I already had the picture in my head, where they had put it. I could feel it pulling at me, too. The thing they called a veil was usually like a mild whirlpool, but today it was a funnelling cyclone. Already it had sucked a bony kvaalquitor toward its maw, and the beast was trying in vain to keep his claws fast in the mud. I almost felt for him.

I felt that terrible deep dark pulling in my bones, and through the sluks I had glimpses of the other world.

It looked like a palace. There were great echoing spaces and hideous colors, sick purples and golds and crimsons that never occur in nature.

The one it seeks is there, the one that engendered the accursed Destroyer, they mocked me.

And I saw him.

You have to understand that since entering the cave I had been in a strange mind-space like a dream. My eyes and ears felt gummed with mud, and I could no longer tell how much time had passed. One part of my mind seemed to hover dizzily above a room in that hideous palace. I could see him–it– striding across a floor with its dark coat billowing behind. The other part of my mind was in the cave. I could still hear the angry sizzle of the branch burning.

I took the torch with me as I plunged deeper, following the pull of the storm.

Meanwhile, I hovered above that room and watched the thing’s minions flank it. I got a look at my enemy’s face. The eyes were small and hooded, and I disliked them. The brow was ridged with worry, like a human being’s–like yours, Father. I knew this was not his true face.

We knew its coming! they keened all around me. We knew as soon as the loathsome magic wormed its way into our den: this brings the Destroyer. We flee, some of us inside and some of us out, but still it comes!

Behind the veil a great light shone out, blinding me. It reminded me of werelight or the Star in the Bible, but unlike the Star, in an instant it was gone.

To me it meant nothing. But the anguish of the sluks only increased. And now the disgusting aspect of Her burns bright! Destroyer on one side, Devourer on the other! She banishes us behind the veil and seals us in this place of death!

And many other things which, honestly, I did not understand. All I knew was that I couldn’t turn back. Even you, Father, were no longer in my thoughts as I caught up with the huffing, growling kvaalquitor that crouched trapped in the maw of that vortex. I reached for my knife.

And just like that, I was behind the veil. The beast was there too, bellowing with rage. The sluks’ voices were gone.

Never in my life, Father, have I been so sure of what I was going to do next. I slew the beast. I approached the one who destroyed you and yours. I raised my weapon. I called out to him familiarly, as if he were in fact my father. So that he would know.

Then everything went wrong. Why do things go wrong, Father?

One choice I made: to turn out of my path that day. To leave the scent that would have led me back to you. I turned away, and you smote me down.

I still cleave to the good, when I feel like it. But not for you, Father. For you this soul is already burning. Go away and leave me in peace.