"Not from you and yours," the slim man said lightly.
Greaves turned to Adelie, who waited, poised, while old Vigil and the young man quarreled. "Tell me the situation," Greaves said.
Adelie's lips parted. But the old man interrupted.
"The situation is that you have been awakened needlessly and would best go back to sleep at once. My daughter and these fanatical sheep—" he waved an angry arm at the standing worshippers—"have forced me to permit this. But in fact Humanity neither needs you nor wants you awake."
"Oh, on the contrary," the young man said. "Humanity needs its gods very badly at this hour. But you are only a man, not so?"
Greaves looked from one to the other—the leather-skinned old man with his mop of ringleted white hair, the young one who was human in appearance but somehow claimed some other status. "Who are you two?"
"I am Vigil, your guardian, and this is—"
"I am Mayron of The Shadows," the young man said, and he held himself as carelessly as before, but his face looked directly into Greaves's. "See my eyes."
There was nothing there. Only darkness speckled by pinpoints of light; thick, sooty darkness like oil smoke, and sharp lights that burned through it without illuminating it.
"Mayron that was First of Men," Vigil said bitterly.