Lord Tophet

THREE


At first Diverus walked slightly ahead, and neither of them spoke nor knew if the other’s thoughts tracked anywhere near his or her own.

He strode from narrow lane to narrower alley, his movements sharp, turns brusque, as if daring her to keep up, as if angrily urging her to go her own way, to let him be. It soon became obvious to them both that he would not break into a run and try to get away, nor would she fall back or fail to match his every turn; and so he slowed enough to let her catch up. Yet even when she drew beside him, he continued to walk along as if unaware of her presence until, peripherally, he saw her reach toward him—he thought—to stop him. Instead, she held between her thumb and forefinger a copper coin identical to the one he had . . . or was it his? Now he turned to face her.

“You dropped this,” she said.

He stared at her, anger beneath the gaze. “You stole it while I slept?”

“No,” she replied firmly, “it fell from your trousers as Glaise and Bois carried you to your room last night. I wasn’t about to return it to your pants myself while you were asleep.”

As he reached for it, she closed her other hand over his. He gave an instinctive twitch in response to her touch, but took hold of the coin, and she opened her fingers beneath his and thereby pressed his hand between her two. He didn’t try to pull away. In truth, he didn’t want to. He came to a stop with her.

“Where did you get it?” she asked.

“The fair. The street fair I started to tell you about, where I thought you’d find more stories. Leodora, I—”

“Shh,” she hushed him. “Don’t speak it. I know what’s there between us, the same as you do, but if we say it, either of us, then it becomes something we have to confront and act upon, and I don’t know, Diverus, I don’t know if I’m ready to compound the journey I’m already on with that one as well. I don’t want to risk it.”

He swallowed.

“It isn’t because it’s you, it isn’t that you’re unworthy or anything else that Soter might intimate. It’s because I’m not certain of me.”

“And if you were certain?”

“Then . . . we would have to see,” she answered.

They stood a long while, gazing into each other’s eyes, joined by their hands wrapped around the coin, in an alley lined with empty urns, debris, and rotting vegetables. She could not tell him that her fear arose more than anything from the Brazen Head’s warning, The thing that unites also divides; that to speak aloud what was between them would set in motion some unpredictable destructive force that might sever them forever, an idea she could not bear. So in superstitious fashion she protected herself and him by not voicing anything.

Finally, she slid her hands away, and he lowered his. He said, softly, “I’ll show you where I got it.” They struck out then side by side.

The fair was assembling when they arrived, but they smelled it before they’d even reached Towerside Thoroughfare. Once again someone was cooking the sweet buns that Diverus had purchased, and because it was impossible to pass by the booth and not want one, they bought their breakfast before moving on.

As Diverus had described, the bridge tower was itself an inhabited structure with rows of windows, ledges, and small balconies across the breadth of the span. At the enormous gateway in its middle he drew up. “This is where he came from, the stilt walker who gave me the coin. Out of there.” He pointed into the dark tunnel between the two statues.

“Then I suppose it’s where we’re going,” she replied.

They walked beneath the gate, Diverus keeping his eye on the huge relief figure of the water creature that seemed to be undulating up the side of the tower. As they crossed into shadow, the spiked bottom of the barbican was just visible in its niche overhead. The tunnel floor was wet as well as dark. The grooves between the paving stones glistened with puddled water, the surface sloping on either side of the middle to a wide channel at the edges that appeared half filled with brackish standing water. The smell clogging the air beneath the arched ceiling suggested that sewage from the tower must drain somewhere close by—perhaps behind the various square grilles set in the wall at street level.

Past a pile of what appeared to be panels, poles, and uprights from dismantled stalls, two small fires clouded the air with a greasy haze. Dry sea grass lay in loose patches on the ground as if someone bedded for the night here in the tunnel, but they had gone now. Jars and boxes were piled up against the tunnel sides. Diverus drew Leodora’s attention to a huge figure leaning against one such pile of red earthenware shards. “There,” he said, “that’s the one gave me the coin.”

They walked up to the cowled stilt figure, which appeared to be napping against the wall. The hood was pulled so low that the grotesque masks matching the coin faces could not be seen beneath it. In all likelihood the walker had removed them to nap, but if so, its face in the depths of the cowl wasn’t visible, either.

“Hello?” Leodora said. “Can you help us?” The figure remained utterly still. She extended her hand to Diverus for the coin. He flipped it to her. As it reached the apex of its arc, a gloved hand shot out from the loose folds of cloth and caught the coin. The stilt figure shifted away from the wall and hauled itself upright, so tall that its head appeared to brush the tunnel roof. The scarves draping it danced as in a breeze, as if to bewitch.

The stilt walker lifted the coin close to the cowl. “One of mine,” it said, the voice sonorous but rough, reminding Leodora of the voice of Shumyzin and Diverus of the groan of the paidika gate on Vijnagar. “What is it I can do for you? Is it a story you’re looking for?”

How did it know that about her? “I’m looking for the Pons Asinorum. I think you might be able to help me.”

“No secrets from the storyteller. She wants to know it all.” When the walker laughed, she was surprised the stones didn’t shake apart. The black gloved hand emerged from the layers of cloth again, and the angular figure bent over her. It held something. She reached up to accept it. “I hope,” said the stilt figure, “you are as fearless as you seem.”

She felt a cold thing placed in her palm, and brought it down to eye level. It was a dark stone phial about the length of her smallest finger, but thicker around with two tiny pierced flanges through which a cord ran. The phial might have been malachite; she couldn’t be certain in that uneven glow. One end of it was corked. Beneath it in her palm lay the copper coin.

“One drop upon a dark reflection,” said the figure. “No more. And take care that you hold your destination in mind.”

“A dark reflection?”

“No more,” repeated the figure, and it canted over to the side and returned to leaning against the wall.

“Wait a moment,” she said. “That’s no better than my fool of a counselor. I don’t know what you mean—whose dark reflection?”

Diverus took hold of some of the walker’s blue-and-green skirt material and tugged.

“Hey!” came a cry from farther along the tunnel. “Stop that!”

They turned from the stilt figure. A tall, lithe woman dressed in a dark leotard was approaching them. She balanced something on the top of her head, which proved to be a mask. Another mask dangled from the strap in her hand. Diverus recognized the stilt figure’s laughing face. “You won’t get an answer out of him,” the woman told them, “not without me in there.”

“What do you mean?” Leodora asked.

“I mean, without me he doesn’t walk, much less talk,” said the woman. She was a head taller than Leodora. Cropped blond hair framed her face. She had a broad smile and a gap between her front teeth. “Clererca,” she said. “A big puppet is all I am, really.” She gestured to the stilt figure. “It’s not going to do anything for you unless I’m in there among those scarves.”

“But—”

“Say, you look familiar,” she said to Diverus, then squinted more carefully at Leodora. “By the doors of Janus, you’re the puppeteer. I saw your first night’s show. The very first performance of Jax.”

“That’s her,” Diverus answered.

She clutched Leodora’s hand. “You don’t know how grateful I am—we all are—for what you’ve done. Any of us who wanted to perform—we’ve been exiled to Sacbé for years. You’ve made it possible for us to have lives again in Colemaigne, to have a livelihood.”

Leodora blushed. “Clererca,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“Forgive me, but you say this figure is just your giant puppet.”

“In a sense.”

“He’s not alive.”

“Good grief, no. Not until I get inside him. Here, I’ll show you.” She ran around behind the figure and climbed the stacked pottery shards. “I have to set him down carefully, where there’s a ladder or something I can use.” She pulled up the back of the loose costume. “Has to be high enough to let me stand, you see.” The figure shivered as Clererca slithered through the back of the costume, her head finally poking out beneath the dark cowl. She pushed the cowl back and drew the scowling mask down over her face. The other she hung on the back of her head. Then with both hands she pushed off hard from the wall and came upright. “There we are.” She waved her hands, which were separate from and much shorter than the dangling arms of the figure. She shoved her hands down into the sleeves, and a moment later the stilt figure’s arms waved about in front of it. Each hand held a coin. The figure seemed to bow and extend its arm to Leodora. The fingers parted and a copper coin dropped into her palm.

“What’s he called?” Leodora asked.

“Cardeo, because he lives on the threshold of things.”

“He certainly does that.”

The figure of Cardeo spun about on one leg and now presented the laughing face.

“How do you walk backward that way?” asked Diverus.

“Practice,” she answered. “A lot of practice. I’m sure the great Jax knows what I mean.” Cardeo strode off in the direction of Towerside. “You be sure to find me when you come out into the thoroughfare. Let me introduce you,” she called back. “They’ll all want to meet the girl who healed Colemaigne.”

Diverus walked up beside Leodora. “I don’t understand. She wasn’t in the puppet. She . . . how did it talk to us? How did it move?”

“Edgeworld,” Leodora said.

The word set alight his memory—the memory pulled free by the wraith.

“I remember now. Something happened, I didn’t tell you, I didn’t get to—but I remember.”

“Remember what, Diverus?”

“Fountains jetting out of all kinds of colorful pools. And rainbows rippling on the surfaces of them as if oil had been poured upon the waters.” His eyes closed. “The pavement was smooth beneath my feet, too, and the light, the sky, it was molten gold.” He looked at her.

“Where was this?” she asked.

“In Edgeworld. I can remember Edgeworld now.”

The incredulity on her face caused him to grab her hand and drag her out from beneath the arch. In the street there he turned her and pointed at the sea creature statue carved on the wall above. “One of those came out of the water. Bois and Glaise led me down to it, trying to show me the upside-down place. And they didn’t, it wasn’t there, but I stayed behind. And that came out of the water . . . It did something to me, and all of a sudden I could remember being in Edgeworld. Everything was so queer there. Golden. And this woman spoke to me, guided me about, told me to choose my prize. I can see her hands, long, purple nails curving from her fingers. Her face was hidden, hidden under a mask, or it was a mask with nothing under it. I’m not sure.”

She searched through her own memory for something that matched his descriptions, but nothing did, not even a hint. She gently shook her head, recalling nothing.

Insistently he went on, “There was a cat. A huge cat. It perched on the edge of one of the pools. It had fur so long that it looked like quills, and all different colors flowed across it, the same as the pool. I remember that I went to it. The mask woman said Choose, and I chose it.”

“And when you stroked it, the air filled with music,” said Leodora in awe.

“That’s right, that’s why I went to it. People were stroking it and the music drew me. You saw it, too.”

She squinted, staring hard into memory. “I can—I can almost see it, where I was. Not bright like yours. It was dark. Different. I can’t—it won’t let me see it. But I remember that cat, and someone stroked it and music came out of its mouth, and then they all tried to sing, to harmonize with it. I can almost see them, but they’re gray like shadows. And there’s someone talking to me.”

“Telling you to choose.”

“Yes.” Her eyelids fluttered. “Oh, it’s just right there,” she said, frustration in her voice. “I can almost reach out and clutch it.”

“It was a woman. She told you to pick.”

“No, a man. A man spoke to me.”

“She was, that is—the mask she wore was my mother’s face.”

“Like someone you knew,” she agreed. “I think they trick us that way. The gods can look like anyone they want. They can be anything.” She looked at the green-and-black phial in her palm. “We think we’re acting upon our own whims and choices, but we’re not. We’re guided, ushered through the unseen pattern, some labyrinth or maze—like the world has all its spirals, we’ve each got our own.” She pondered. “Our memories of Edgeworld could be called dark reflections, but you can’t pour a potion on a memory. That can’t be what it means.”

He apprehended where her thoughts had led her, and he looked around as if expecting the answer to present itself. From the booth at the mouth of the tunnel, a large man in a sleeveless tunic emerged, carrying a bucket. He walked to where the gutter began and tipped the bucket, pouring gray and soapy water into it.

“The water,” said Diverus, and he left Leodora and went back into the tunnel. Up the street the stilt walker was gesturing in her direction, but she turned to follow Diverus.

He stood at the side, overlooking the drainage channel there. The water, with bits of debris floating in it, looked black and greasy. When she came up beside him and peered down into it, she could make out both their faces, like flowing apparitions. “Can there be a darker reflection than this?” he asked.

“Water in shadows.”

“Or at night,” he added.

“Should we wait for night?”

“I don’t know. If it was night, would we see our reflections in the water?”

“Not without a torch or a lamp. So then, maybe this is what it meant?” She smiled at him. “Only one way to find out, I suppose.” She made to pull the cork from the phial.

“Only a drop, Cardeo said,” he reminded her.

“I know.” She tilted the phial ever so slightly. A thick drop of glowing blue liquid formed on the lip of it. The drop clung tenaciously as she held the container outstretched over the water.

“Jax!” called a voice, and she glanced up to see the stilt walker approaching along the thoroughfare and surrounded by dozens of people.

Diverus watched the blue drop let loose of the phial and start to fall. He recalled the other thing the figure had warned. “Leodora,” he asked, drawing her attention back to the business at hand. “Where are we going?”

“Pons Asinorum,” she answered as the drop hit the smooth surface in the drain.

“Jax,” Clererca called, but her voice wavered strangely, as if the tunnel was distorting it. Diverus’s hand found hers and gripped her tight as the blackness in the water turned bright and spread with impossible speed between the paving stones, then across them from every direction, congealing into a great oval, like a mirror. From the opposite side of the oval, oriented upside down to them, two faces looked back—ebony dark and with burning red eyes. Leodora thought of the Brazen Head’s riddles, of reflections and of which side one stood upon, and she said, “I want to be on the other side.” Still holding his hand, she placed one foot into the reflection. Diverus yelped as her weight fell through the reflection and tugged him in after her.


They stumbled as if they’d been running. She fell to her knees but stood up again immediately, compelled by fear. She faced a cherubic little man and a tall woman. Their eyes blazed like flames, and their skin was a dull blue. Their hair was black, shot through with oily blue streaks like reflections upon the wings of a raven. Their ears curved to points at the top, and their noses were long and sharp. The man babbled something that sounded like “Kadnari muus kelado pwee.”

She shook her head that she didn’t understand and happened to look up, which must have been down, for there far above/beneath her was a surface of luridly bronzed water. Vertigo rushed over her and she clawed at the air, certain she was about to fall away. Diverus tugged free of her hand and dropped to hands and knees on the metallic street above/below. She knew she must fall. No one could be upside down like this and not fall.

And then the world wheeled about her, the water was flowing overhead, spreading into a burnished liquid sky, and Diverus was kneeling by her feet.

On every span she’d entered there had been a moment of disorientation, of a membrane pierced, where everything was alien and incomprehensible; and invariably that moment yielded to sudden acclimation, to the strange made normal as the newly penetrated world enfolded and welcomed her. This was more expansive a transition than any other in that the world itself turned to give her balance.

The round-faced man grinned. “By your expression I see you’ve adjusted. That’s capital. And your friend—I can’t tell you how rare it is to have two travelers at once.”

“Or really any travelers at all,” the woman added.

“And of their own volition.”

“Hush!”

“Where have we come?” Leodora asked, looking beyond the couple at the intensely colored buildings, which bore striking resemblance to those of Colemaigne.

“Where, she asks,” he said to the woman, who laughed mellifluently and answered, “Nowhere and everywhere. Where you are depends on where you’ve been. We are the Pons Asinorum you sought because that’s the name Colemaigne maintains in its thoughts. But we are known far and wide, as Nazar, as Breasail, as Yggdrasil and TirNaNog and a thousand more besides.”

“How can that be?”

“We’re the world of the timeless, of desire and elusion.”

“It looks very much like Colemaigne. The buildings, I mean.”

“Yes, but that’s also because of how you arrived. Enter from, say, Palipon, and we are an island world full of cells, although ours are open, the inverse of a prison.”

Leodora pondered that. Diverus shook his head in incomprehension. “What’s Palipon?” he asked.

“Would it help,” asked the woman, “if I told you that your upright world is connected everywhere below the surface by us, through us?”

“Connected to what?” said Leodora.

“To everything else, everywhere.” Both of them grinned, and while their demeanor was outwardly gracious and jolly, beneath it lurked the slightest hint of something not quite as generous, as if some darker truth was not being shared.

“But you are our guests,” said the man, “and you must stay. Feast, relax, and please yourselves in our company. Everyone will want to meet you, storyteller.”

Her hosts turned. Leodora glanced again at Diverus. With his head, he gestured at her hand. She surreptitiously showed him the corked phial still clutched there and then slipped it into her tunic.

“I don’t know if we should,” she said. “We have a performance—”

The woman turned back to her. “Oh, but you cannot refuse. You’re questing for stories and we have them, the oldest, the most arcane, the least retold, the original, the consigned to oblivion.”

Over his shoulder, the man said, “We connect everything. We are story.” He looked back. “It’s why we’ve become your preoccupation. The omphalos of your obsession.”

“What you need,” the woman emphasized as she followed the man.

“What I need,” Leodora repeated. Her voice seemed to come from someone else’s mouth.

Diverus urgently said her name, but it barely penetrated. They, these people, had the world’s stories. Many times over the years on Bouyan she had expressed a desire to Soter to travel to the mythical Library of Shadowbridge, there to retrieve all the stories that had ever been; but now she needn’t bother. She could learn every one of them here.

Diverus clutched her arm. She stared at his hand and blinked away her disorientation.

“Diverus,” she said. “Surely we can stay a few hours, hear a few stories before we have to go back. It’s only morning, after all.”

“I don’t trust them,” he said, but smiled pleasantly when the woman looked back. “I don’t trust here. What sort of world can transmute the way they claim?”

She peered once more at the oceanic sky. “One that isn’t real,” she replied, “but let’s find out more first, before we decide. Please? If they have all the stories . . .”

He could not deny her that possibility. He knew how much that mattered, but mistrusted the place all the more that they knew what to say to ensnare her.

Shortly they left the broad bright street of orange, red, and yellow houses for narrower crooked lanes of more subdued and empurpled tones. The street surface remained oddly metallic, with a sheen running through bands of color as if from various alloyed minerals. People greeted them as they passed, and then fell in after them. Glancing back, they found the way clogged with dozens and dozens of inhabitants.

“Does it ever rain?” asked Diverus, watching the liquid sky.

“Of course,” the man remarked. “It falls up from the ground most nights.”

They arrived before a decrepit hovel. The stone walls were cracked, the thatchwork bald in places. Sitting on a stool before the hut was a small fellow with hair and beard of silver. He had a table before him and, on it, a copper pot that he held inverted over some kind of spindle allowing him to rotate the pot, as he tapped at it with a tiny hammer. At their approach, he set the hammer down.

They drew up before him. “My lord,” said the man to the tinker.

“Yes, Archimago?” the old fellow replied.

“Our guests.” He gestured to Leodora and Diverus.

The tinker, hunched with age, stood stiffly, then shuffled forward with his hand out. “My lady,” he said to Leodora. “An honor to meet you. And you, sir.” Diverus gave an irresolute bow.

To Archimago the tinker said, “There’s going to be a feast, then, isn’t there?”

“Well, of course, of course.”

“Ah, and what’s it to be?”

“Boar,” replied the woman.

“Oh. Lovely. Brought back from—”

“Yes. From a hunt.”

“Brodamante, you fill me with rapture,” he told her, and she made a deep and formal bow, her red eyes focused on Diverus as if she was demonstrating to him that this was how one bowed.

She straightened, then asked Leodora, “Is there anything you would like to ask of our king?”

Leodora’s brow knitted. “Do you mean him?”

“Indeed.”

“Oh. Well. How did . . . how did—”

“How did you come to be king?” Diverus asked.

The tinker pressed his hands together. “That is a story. It was time for a new king and as I am sure you know, the old king sends out an army of advisers to find a successor. They have so many questions to ask, a list of them, and they go absolutely everywhere asking them. And it’s finally a matter of who gives the best answers.

“Well, I was here, right here at this table in fact, and was mending Miggins’s kettle, which had a hole in it because he had gone and cut himself and they’d needed a pot to catch the blood in, and wouldn’t you know they picked one that reacted badly to his blood, and it cracked open and so he bled all over the floor anyhow, and now his kettle was in need of mending to boot. And so while I’m staring at it, up comes this fellow in green pantaloons and waistcoat, and he says to me, ‘What do you know?’ And I tell him, ‘I don’t know anything at all for certain. Not a thing.’ And it just happens that was the best answer anyone gave them, and they proclaimed me king. That very same morning. I wasn’t even allowed to finish fixing Miggins’s kettle.”

“That’s mad,” Diverus responded.

“ ’Tis,” agreed Brodamante. “But it makes him the best king. As he knows nothing, he can but listen and decide, unprejudiced by strongly held opinions.”

“But what if his advisers lie to him?” asked Leodora.

The blue people looked puzzled. “Why would they do such a thing?” Brodamante said.

“Greed?” she suggested.

“What an uncommon idea.”

“Yes, unlikely,” Archimago concurred thoughtfully. “We would have to cut off their heads. For a time anyway.”

The old king shook his own head heavily. “Oh, I would hope never to have to decide such a matter as that. Life and death, what business is that of kings? No, no. I have my pots to fix. Much more important. You can’t have a feast without pots. Can’t eat without them.”

“I suppose not,” Leodora agreed.

“Of course not.” And he settled back on the stump beside his table again. “I’ll have to get this one repaired then.”

Archimago’s eyes shifted from the king to the guests. He pressed his hands together and said, “There, now you’ve met the king, we ought to . . .” He stopped as he turned about and found the lane choked with citizens as far as they could see. “Oh, dear. Should have known. We’ll never get through there again.”

Leodora looked back the way they’d come, and just for an instant way off in the background beyond the long and tightly packed crowd, she thought she saw a parade go marching by. She couldn’t be certain—not at that distance—but she thought it looked like the parade of monsters from Hyakiyako.

Archimago, apparently seeing no distant parade, said, “They’ll be wedged in for hours while they try to turn about and go home. Here, you two, follow me this way instead.”

He led them past the old king, who was so intent upon his pot repair that he didn’t seem to notice. Archimago opened a low door into the hovel. They had to crouch to enter. Straightening up on the far side, they found themselves in a large blue-tiled room as big as a palace, complete with a great sunken pool in the middle of it. Squares of lapis formed a band around the lip of the pool. To their left and past the pool, three rows of blue stone columns, nine columns in all, polished and smooth, held up a ceiling that was easily two stories above them. Beyond the columns lay an open courtyard where a fire was burning in a pit. The columns obscured most of it, but the smell coming from there made them salivate. To the right stood four more columns flanking an entryway.

Leodora turned just as Brodamante closed the small door, the interior side of which was bronze with decorations and shapes hammered into it. It had a large middle panel containing a cross-legged figure with long, thorny horns growing from its head.

Diverus commented, “This can’t be the inside of his hut.”

“Who claimed it was?” asked Archimago. “You are correct, not the inside of the hut but it is where we’re feasting over that boar they’re roasting right now. It will take the rest of the citizenry quite a while to get here from where we left them, as they can’t take this shortcut. It’s not allowed them.”

“What is a boar?” asked Leodora.

“A very tasty meat, which comes from much farther away than you have. Brodamante hunted it herself.” He strode over to the pool. “I think you should have a soak before the festivities. We would be most disrespectful hosts if we didn’t allow you that.”

“How,” asked Diverus, “can you have a king that knows nothing?”

Brodamante replied, “Because he has the great wisdom to recognize that he does know nothing, and so, knowing nothing, he listens carefully to all persuasions before ever rendering a judgment. ’Tis the wisdom of innocence.”

“I still don’t see how, if he’s that innocent, there’s anything to stop someone trying to bribe or otherwise persuade his decision in their favor.”

Brodamante and Archimago traded horrified glances. He said, “You have the most barbaric ideas I think we’ve ever heard, young man. Where do you come from? I want to stay away from there.”

“Are such acts common in Colemaigne?” asked Brodamante.

“We wouldn’t know. We’re travelers.”

“Well of course,” Archimago said, as if that settled things, but he shivered as though at the horror of the notion of cheating, and the blue-black hair seemed to curl upon his brow as if alive. “Now, please, we have attendants who will assist you, and you must avail yourselves of our every service while you are guests here.”

“Yes,” said Leodora, “and we do appreciate this, but we also have a performance later this day—”

“Oh, but we won’t keep you all that long. In fact all of Epama Epam will turn out for your performance . . . once you’ve bathed.”

Leodora was certain the name of Epama Epam hadn’t been among those Brodamante had named earlier, and she wondered if that was a different span or still another name for this place that was no place and every place at the same time. She had no chance to ponder it, however, as a cluster of four more of the blue, red-eyed creatures came running from behind the columns. The four wore diaphanous skirts that glittered with stars of gold, and all were naked from the waist up—two males and two females. Each had four arms.

“We leave you in most capable hands,” said Archimago, and he laughed as if at a joke. Then he and Brodamante walked into the forest of columns from which the servants had come.

Leodora’s attendants took her by the hands and shoulders and directed her to the opposite side of the pool. Then they disrobed her. She tried to stop them, but it was futile. One set of hands removed her belt while another unwrapped her tunic, fingers tugging on its hidden ties as if intimately familiar with it. The second attendant knelt and removed her boots and trousers while the first folded up the tunic and set it aside. When they turned away, she looped the phial around her neck again. In short order she stood naked save for it and the pendant. When one blue hand reached for the Brazen Head, she slapped it aside, and neither attendant tried again.

Her attendants led her to the water. There were semicircular steps below her, three of them. She put one foot in, discovering that the water was warm and also somehow oily, buoyant. She drew her foot out, and threads of blue ran between her toes. On each side of her the four-armed female attendants smiled warmly, but their eyes were fierce, eager, urgent. They moved onto the first step with her and gently compelled her deeper, down the next step, the hems of their skirts now immersed.

Across the pool Diverus was likewise naked and no less uncomfortable. He and his two attendants all but mirrored every move. On the second step, he stared back at her with wide eyes, his body lean and, she saw, aroused. The look in his eyes was of hunger, yearning, and fear, as though the emotions he felt shocked him. Those beside him looked at her with hunger alone. They were waiting for something to happen, and all that expectation focused on her. She puzzled as to why.

The Brazen Head spoke up suddenly, the voice such a shock that she nearly stumbled and fell in. “The waters of desire!” it proclaimed. “Of eternity, if you desire that, though I could not recommend it.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“You did, but you didn’t notice. It is no normal pool they wish you to enter.”

The women beside her hissed and said, “Shush!” to the lion.

She stood in the pool to her thighs now, on the third step, and the attendants beside her, their skirts darkening from white to blue. “What if I go in?”

“Then what you desire will consume you. It is the opinion of those around you that you most desire your companion as he does you. Most travelers here arrive alone and are persuaded to stay, by a maiden or a gallant, by beauty or by indulgence upon which they are fixed. But you have brought your own.”

“And the traveler swims in the pool,” she said, “to what end?”

Behind her the girls urged, “Go on. You must. Don’t listen to that.”

“Bliss,” the lion replied, “at a price.”

“Go,” said the attendants. “Swim.”

Even as she hesitated, Diverus stepped into the water.

“Your friend is in. You must join him,” urged the attendants.

“Why must I?”

Diverus swam into the center of the pool. His head went under, and when it came up it was blue, stained somehow by the water. He treaded water as if lost and unsure where to go, turning in a circle until he spied her. Then he swam straight to her. She held her place on the final step even though she was revealed, naked before him. He drew up below the step. His eyes burned into her. “Oh, Lea, I love you,” he said.

“Go to him. Take him,” the girls urged. “He wants you. You’re his desire, all he can see. You feel the same, you know you do.”

The tug of that desire almost drew her off the edge of the step but, tottering, she pulled away from it and fell back, with a splash, onto the second step. The two attendants stood over her. “You can’t, you mustn’t! He wants you. You want him.”

She looked at Diverus, at the passion in his gaze. For her and nothing else. It was love without conditions or limits, and to resist it cut her like a searing blade. All the desire that had twisted inside him and driven him to flee from her, all that he’d held in check, denied, or confessed to himself alone—all of that blazed in his eyes. If she entered the pool with him it would bind them both. With all the passion of a thousand lovers from all the stories she knew, they would be the kitsune and the emperor, Akonadi and the Stone Man, the thief and the princess—the love that lived in dreams, in all of the stories. She would have all of that and more, an eternity of it, and she had only to surrender, let the color of bliss inundate her. Diverus already bathed in it, and she wanted that no less than he.

She could not bear the look in his eyes. It brought tears to her own. She closed them and answered through clenched teeth, “My greatest desire is not to remain here forever!”

The women gasped. “No one refuses,” they cried. “No one can.”

“Enough!”

The word echoed through the hall, off the columns and balconies. Even the water seemed to shiver. The hands let go of her. Leodora opened her eyes.

A figure emerged from the entryway and strode to the head of the pool. Light thrown off the pool danced across his fine red robe, so that it shimmered as if knit of liquid. His features, also subject to the rippling, were so transformed that she didn’t immediately recognize him. Even without the reflected light he had changed completely. His hair had twisted into small spires like points on a crown, like the tips of his ears. His pale gray beard now hung in a row of skinny stalactites, which were mirrored in the smaller spikes that jutted up from his brows. No longer a ragged, simple tinker, he looked like a sea god, majestic, decisive, and terrible.

The attendants, both hers and those of Diverus, retreated from the pool as the king stepped to the head of it. “It’s rare we have guests,” he said. “But far, far rarer is the one who has the will to rove free among us. We know your traveling name and your profession, but tell me, lady, who are you?”

“My name is Leodora. My mother was Leandra. My father gave himself the name of Bardsham.”

The king’s eyes lowered and he smiled. “We know that name.”

“So you knew me only as Jax.”

“Just so.”

“How? Was my coming foretold?”

“Not foretold. Inevitable.” He swept his arm across the pool. The long sleeve of his robe seemed to flutter like a sail after the arm. “You may bathe now in comfort and contentment. No magic of ours will be thrust upon your will in there. It is become a pool of healing.”

She glanced at Diverus, still moon-eyed below her. “What of my friend?”

“Your . . . lover is released as well, although the water has rather swiftly drawn his desire to the surface.” He stepped out upon the water and walked to stand over Diverus. “He is susceptible. Has he perhaps encountered spirits of the water before now?”

“Afrits,” she said. “On another span on another spiral.”

“Oh, more recently than that, I think.” He knelt upon the water as upon a sheet of glass and brushed one slender hand across Diverus’s eyes. Eyelids fluttering, Diverus turned away from Leodora and focused on the king above him.

“Ah, yes, and he’s been to Edgeworld.”

The king of Epama Epam tilted his head and looked past Diverus then, into the distance past the rows of columns. “No conflation of such piquant rarity is possible. This can be no mere matter of destiny.” He rose, and Diverus leaned back his head to follow him. The king gave a flick of his wrist, and Diverus went floating deeper into the pool.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“That we surely have something you need, and our quest now will be to discover it together while you’re here.”

Leodora started to climb from the water, but the king held out a hand to stop her. “No. Swim in soothing waters. Your Diverus is unsorcelled now, although neither you nor I can suppress his true feelings that have emerged. After a time the attendants will bring you robes, and then the feast will go on. Whatever there is to unearth, it shall be found in time.” He walked then across the pool as across a solid surface, stepping up onto the lapis stripe and then out between the columns.

When he had vanished from sight, she stood on the last step and clutched the pendant. “Counselor?” she called to it softly.

“Truth was spoken,” said the lion. “Economical truth.” It went back to sleep.

She glanced around at the attendants, who remained well back, no longer pushy, standing cowed instead, as though she might charge out of the pool and hit them. She could not say why exactly she believed the king, but she did. She turned from them and dove into the blue depths and was not consumed.


Applause filled the Terrestre, but it was not so enthusiastic as in the past—at least, that was how Soter heard it. He got up stiffly from the stool in front of the curtained screen, and turned to Bois. “You did very well. Very well, indeed.” Bois put down the lute and bowed his head. He gestured at the exit from the booth. “No,” Soter told him. “They mustn’t see me. They have to think Jax is still working the puppets, and they’ve seen her, some of them.” Bois tilted back his chin as if to say he understood.

Soter stepped into a front corner of the booth, where he drew back the cloth along the side of one upright and surreptitiously peered out at the dispersing audience. Glaise and Orinda ushered them up the aisles.

Soter stretched, and his spine popped and creaked, and he groaned. “This is too hard on an old man like me,” he told Bois, who shook his head in denial. “We can go out now, I think.”

Orinda met them on the stage. “You did it perfectly—both of you.”

“I’m sure we were adequate at best,” Soter remarked.

“Far better than adequate, you foolish old man. She learned everything from you, which means you’ve as much skill as she.”

He snorted, but Orinda would not let him refuse the compliment.

“She’s more talented than any of us,” she said, “probably all of us put together, but her skill comes from a man who spends half his time arguing with her over what he thinks is best and the other half pretending he has nothing to do with who she is at all. You’d do well, Soter, to inhabit one of those roles and dispense with the other.”

He wrapped one hand about his lower face and gave a small grunt that was part scoff and part chortle. Then he remarked, “All the same, what are we to do?”

She placed a hand on his arm. “We are going to hope they return shortly. If not, we’re going to put on the show tomorrow as we did this one. In the meantime, we cast our nets farther. Bois and Glaise will cover the whole of the span and go on to the next if need be.” The woodmen nodded their enthusiasm and made to set off.

Soter said, “You’ll want to contact Hamen and those underspan dwellers. They seem to hear of everything.”

“That’s a very good idea.”

“Well . . . he seemed a decent enough fellow.” He clasped his head in his hands. “I don’t understand, Orinda. She’s much too careful, too clever. If she went off to gather stories, she wouldn’t forget the evening performance.”

“Of course you’re right. So we have to assume something important or terrible has kept them away, and probably against their will.”

“Tophet’s Agents . . .,” he muttered.

“Oh, surely not. Bardsham is long dead. What could Tophet want with her? Or with you?”

“She’s his daughter. And no one knows for certain that Bardsham died. No one witnessed his death, no one hereabouts. What if Tophet doesn’t know any more than we do as to the fate of Bardsham? Then he might think—”

“If that were true, Colemaigne would right now lie in ruin. We’d be dead and stone, every one of us, exactly as the governor described. That monster doesn’t spirit people away. He punishes them without mercy and sups on their marrow.” Her gaze slid side-to-side watching him, as if she looked for some sign of concurrence in his eyes. “Furthermore, outside of here, how could he recognize them? If he believed Bardsham were on the loose, he would be looking for a man he knows, not a young woman and her beau.”

“Her beau?”

“Oh, dear, do you think I’m blind to love that runs as deep as that?”

“Nonsense.”

She laughed gently, but with a teasing edge. “You know it as well as I. It’s why you object to him so. You think to guard her even from her own feelings. It’s time to stop doing that and let her feel. If you want to keep her affections, Soter, you have to let her take wing.”

He stared into her eyes and his own grew hot. Orinda knew too much of him, nearly the truth of him; but he knew the rest and could never admit it to her. He nodded heavily and swallowed the anguish of tenderness. “I’m sure you’re right about Tophet. But then there is no explanation, is there?”

“None as yet, my dear. None as yet.” She linked her arm in his. “Come with me now. We should eat something before you exhaust yourself.”

He let her lead him through the wings and the hallways. He felt quite suddenly a thousand years old and as helpless as a newborn. Where in all the world had his Leodora gone?


“I believe a story is in order,” said the king.

Leodora, feeling warm and sleepy from the food and drink she had shared with them, drew her legs beneath her and smoothed the dark purple robe she wore. She asked, “And who’s to tell it, sir?” then waved her hands about. “I have no puppets here.”

A few of the dozen feasters smiled. They were all clustered close around the fire.

The king tugged on the sharp tip of his nose and became for the moment contemplative. Then his eyes brightened and he told her, “Hold your hands out thus.” He spread his hands before him with the palms up.

Leodora imitated him. He arose and stepped to the fire pit, where he reached down into the embers. When he turned back to her, his hands seemed to be ablaze. He cupped them and blew into them, a visible breath as if the air had chilled about him. Opening the palms side by side as if reading them, he blew sharply once more and strode up to her. Then, leaning down, he parted his hands across hers; six flames tumbled onto her palms. The flames were colored greenish blue and didn’t burn her hands at all. She moved her palms back and forth, and the fires slid upon them. She glanced up from the magical flames. “What do I do?” she asked.

“Now,” said the king, “you pick a story and hold the image of the characters in your mind. Try it. Pick any.”

She brought her face closer to her hand and concentrated. The most obvious character to imagine was Meersh, and immediately one of the flames swirled and grew, forming into a tall, gangly body in worn loose trousers and a vest, his nose hooked and crooked, his chin sharp, his eyes sharper, and his orange hair a tangle around his head. He looked at himself as if surprised to be there, then at his audience. He stepped to the edge of her hand and stuck his tongue out at them.

The members of the feast roared with laughter, even Diverus. Here was Meersh as only she could realize him.

With a delighted smile she gazed at the king again, and the figure unraveled and shrank to a green flame.

“There you have what will pass, I think, for puppets. Let us begin the storytelling.”

She traded a glance with Diverus and was about to ask them if they would equip him with musical instruments to accompany her, but some instinct prevented her from mentioning his gift. She gave him a smile of reassurance instead. Then she focused on the flames, and settled upon one of the stories she had been performing on Colemaigne. The flame that had been Meersh coiled and shaped into the form of a man wearing a tattered cap, a striped shirt, and loose trousers that fell just below his knees. She looked up at her strange audience and began.

THE DREAM OF A FORTUNE


There once was a poor man who had no hope. His name is recorded as Loctrean, and he lived in an old, dilapidated house in the span of Guhnavra, which lay on a spiral far from here. He lived with his father and mother and sister.

His father was a dreamer, a teller of tales who was very popular at the local tavern because he always had a story and enough coin to buy his audience a round, and if they disbelieved his adventures, the free drink bought their complaisance.

The father claimed to have been a sailor on board the ship of the mythical Captain Sindebad, to have walked in exotic lands, seen impossible monsters, and sailed to the very edge of Shadowbridge and back. “Believe me,” he would assure his audiences, “there is an edge of the world.”

At home he told the same tales to his children, filling their heads with dazzling images, breathtaking adventures, and promises that one day they would all be terribly rich; but when he was off fishing, their mother would say, “The truth is, your father hasn’t been anywhere at all. The only place he’s sailed is inside his head.” The children would have preferred not to know this, but they were children and at the mercy of the adults. Loctrean in particular wanted his father to be the adventurer of those wonderful stories.

His life might have gone on like that forever, except that one evening his father didn’t return from the day’s fishing, and no one knew at first what had befallen him. Eventually, other sailors found his father’s boat and dragged it into the cracked and broken courtyard of the house. The keel had been shattered, a hole punched in it as if upon a sharp point of rock, and the sailors left it overturned there. Of his father they had found no sign. Loctrean overheard the superstitious sailors whispering that the gods had struck down his father for all the lies he’d told, and Loctrean burst upon them, shouting, “He didn’t lie! He did travel far, he did have adventures!” But despite his defense, he was ashamed, though whether for himself or for his father, he didn’t know.

It wasn’t long after that before his mother succumbed to a wasting disease, a lingering, slow, and expensive disease. Paying for her medicine cost the family nearly everything they had. Before she died, she clutched her son close and whispered that she’d lied about his father because she was jealous. “He never took me on a single one of his adventures,” she said, “even though I wanted to go. He hurt me, but he didn’t lie to you.” Now, she said, she was embarking on her own adventure at last. Then she closed her eyes and died.

In short order, then, he lost both of his parents and found himself suddenly an orphan with a sister to care for.

Loctrean inherited his father’s house and the fishing boat, which is to say he inherited debt. The house fell into further disrepair. He couldn’t afford so much as to replace the wine-colored awning over the door, which was too threadbare to keep even light rain from spilling through.

His father’s boat remained in the courtyard. Its smashed planks grew so rotten that it would never be seaworthy again. He felt like that boat, as if a hole had been punched through him, never to be healed.

He could not repair the boat in order to fish, which was all he knew how to do, nor could he afford to buy a new one. There were a few fishing crews on the span but none of them would hire him as they believed he was the same as his father, a dreamer who would be a danger to the others who sailed with him. Even the kindest of them explained to him that they couldn’t take such a risk.

The only good news came when his sister married a neighboring grocer. The grocer made just enough money for the two of them and had nothing left over to help with the debts their father had left, but at least his sister was looked after, and Loctrean took solace in that.

He accepted that he was going to lose his father’s house and there was nothing he could do about it. He determined that he must sell the property for whatever he could get, pay off all the debts, and use whatever was left over to start again somewhere else.

The night he made this decision, however, Loctrean’s father appeared to him in a dream. “You must close up the house,” said the vision, “but not sell it. Then travel to the span of Perla. There you will find your fortune.”

“So it’s true, you are dead,” Loctrean said sadly.

“I drowned. It wasn’t any fun.”

“And how is Mother?” he asked.

“No longer in pain,” his father’s shade replied. “You were a good son to her. A good brother to your sister, too.”

“Thank you,” he said, and a longing to embrace his father welled up inside him. He wanted to reach out and hug the man, but in the dream he seemed unable to do anything but stand and observe.

“Never mind all that,” his father admonished him. “Just wake up and go!” With that the dream ended, and Loctrean awoke.

Well, he thought, I suppose it’s no worse an idea than what I was going to do. I wish, though, I’d asked him to tell me one of his stories. That would have been nice.

As instructed, Loctrean closed up the house, and with his remaining coins he set out for Perla.

Perla was an ancient town built upon a broad peninsula of land that jutted off the side of a span far removed from Guhnavra. It wasn’t even on the shore; to get to it, a boat had to sail up a dark and forbidding river. Perla had a reputation as a dark place, surrounded by marshes and swamps, ghostly lights, and thieves who preyed upon the spans above. The air was tinged with the stink of sulfur long before the city came into view. Loctrean couldn’t help but wonder why his father was sending him there of all places, or even how his father might have been familiar with it. Still, he could not imagine refusing to obey the wishes of his father’s shade, and he booked passage on a ship that took him as far as the nearest spiral; there he had to sign on as a crew member to make the remainder of the journey. The captain of that ship worked him hard, too. He learned to tack and wear, to sound depths, and even to bake biscuits for the crew. There was no job aboard ship that he didn’t learn before they had reached the mouth of the Black River.

The smell of the noxious city arrived long before they caught sight of it. Upon both sides of the river, strange lights danced in the mists. Some of the crew cowered at the sight of them, but Loctrean was unimpressed. He’d heard of far scarier things at his father’s knee than bobbing lights in the fog. Besides, his father’s ghost had told him to go to Perla, and so he remained confident that no harm would come to him on the journey. There was a reason he was here, and he must find it.

Once the boat arrived and tied up at the wharf, Loctrean took his leave.

Of course he didn’t know what to do now that he had arrived. His father had not been specific at all about what to do once he got to Perla, only that he should go.

He walked the whole length of the city, and as anyone who’s been there can attest, it’s a long, narrow place, trapped between the swamps and woods on the one side and great hulking piers of the spiral on the other. Loctrean walked to the far outskirts of Perla without discovering anything. He was penniless and hungry, and had no idea what to look for or where to look for it.

A rain began to fall. First there was a drizzle, and then the skies opened up and a torrent poured down as if upon him alone.

An ancient, domed fane stood at the edge of the city there, on the last street before the city wall. Multiple rows of columns lined the front of the old temple, all of them gouged and pocked from centuries of bitter sulfurous rain. Loctrean hid beneath the roof that the columns supported, and while there he looked inside. The interior was dark and quiet and cool, filled with still more slender columns like a forest thick with trees. Small rugs were strewn everywhere. No rain dripped there. In fact, dust hung in the air. No one was praying or attending. He couldn’t fathom to what deity the fane had been built in the first place—all icons and statues seemed to have been removed, or stolen—but it was dry and offered protection from the rain. He found a secluded alcove, curled up, and went to sleep. He hoped his father would show up again and tell him what to do.

Instead, while penniless Loctrean slept, a group of thieves crept into the fane. They had been coming there nightly for weeks. Each night they chiseled and loosened the mortar around a stone that, once removed, would give them access to a usurer’s shop that abutted the old temple wall. The moneylender was a true fiend but known to be enormously wealthy. The thieves intended to kill him and rob him of his obscene fortune. The previous night they had succeeded in removing the large stone on which they’d been working for weeks, lifting it from the wall of the fane. Now they worked even more cautiously but urgently to remove the smaller bricks from the wall of the adjoining house. What they failed to take into account was the usurer’s penchant for staying up late into the night to count his fortune. He had blacked all the windows where he kept the money so that no one could see inside. To the thieves it appeared that he’d retired for the night.

Thus the evil usurer, sitting in the very room they intended to plunder, was alerted to their intrusion. He blew out his candle and waited.

At last, the thieves removed enough smaller bricks in his wall to allow one man to slide through. Triumphantly, their leader insisted he should have the first look, and he stuck his head into the hole, only to find a cackling madman awaiting him, brandishing a scimitar.

When his feet frantically kicked out, his friends hauled the thief back into the temple only to discover that his head had been lopped off. Even as they stared in horror, the alarm was sounded. The usurer had rushed into the street and bellowed for the police. The thieves dropped the corpse of their leader and fled.

Poor Loctrean awoke to their commotion. He stumbled from his alcove just as the authorities arrived.

“Here’s one!” shouted a deputy, and the police fell upon him and beat him senseless. Of the gang they found only the headless body.

They dragged Loctrean to the jail and threw him inside. He lay battered and bleeding upon his cot that night, and thought, This is not what I came here for.

The following day he was hauled before the chief magistrate. Bloody and bruised, he could only insist that he knew nothing of any robbery beyond what they themselves knew. The usurer of course demanded his execution on the spot, but that only infuriated the magistrate and swayed him toward more leniency than he might otherwise have shown his suspect.

“If I were a thief,” Loctrean explained, “would I have waited to be captured, sir? Did you capture any others of this gang waiting in the dark? Any who still had their heads, I mean. Why would I have lingered?”

The magistrate sensed that he was hearing the truth. “What were you doing there, then?” he asked. “No one has worshipped in that temple for years.”

So Loctrean explained his situation, his poverty, and how his father’s ghost had appeared in a dream and advised him to seek his fortune here.

“You mean to say you sailed all the way from Guhnavra because of a dream? You’re crazy, do you know that? Acting upon such things. I myself was visited just the other night in my dreams by a woman who told me she knew of a house where a great treasure lay buried.”

“Did you find the house?” asked Loctrean.

The magistrate sighed. “You haven’t been paying attention, have you? The woman and her treasure aren’t real. In the first place, such a house doesn’t even exist in Perla. It looks nothing like houses here. It was a square-topped place, with an old purple-striped awning and a rotted boat in one corner of the courtyard and a dried-up, broken old fountain in another. Crumbling old place, the sort of thing one sees only in dreams. Furthermore, and even more ludicrous, she insisted that the hidden treasure had come from the legendary Captain Sindebad. Well, I mean, really. It’s a fairy tale, isn’t it? Something recalled from my childhood no doubt and brought back by some turnips or bad beer.”

Excitedly, Loctrean asked, “This treasure, where was it hidden?”

“How should I know that? I woke up, didn’t I? Haven’t you heard a thing I’ve said, this isn’t . . . oh, never mind.” The magistrate saw that the matter was hopeless. He had a simpleton here who could neither have robbed the usurer nor comprehended that the world did not operate via magical dreams.

“Listen, the best thing you can do, fellow, is go home and stop attending to these fantasies. Learn a trade. Establish yourself.” He took out a small purse and placed two coins on the table. “Here,” he said, “because we beat you and I’m certain you’re innocent. Naïve, gullible, but innocent. Go home, my friend.”

Loctrean thanked the magistrate and limped stiffly out of the police barracks.

He used the coins to buy part of his passage home on the same ship that had brought him. As before it wasn’t enough, but the crew were happy to have him because his cooking had proved better than anyone else’s. All the same, they taunted him. “Didn’t find that treasure after all?” they asked. “No magic beans, no djinn in a bottle floating in that foul river just waiting for you?” He hardly paid them any mind, because he was fearful that something might have happened to his house meanwhile. However, it awaited him as he had left it, save for a few more rodents as tenants in the growing holes of its walls. The awning had finally split in two and hung down in shreds.

Loctrean entered the house and began searching everywhere. The woman in the magistrate’s dream—surely it was his mother—had said that the treasure was buried, and he pulled up every stone in every room only to find dirt or sand or mice beneath. Exhausted, he went out and collapsed in the courtyard against the boat.

From there he found himself staring directly at the fountain pedestal. Hadn’t the magistrate made mention of the fountain?

He got up, and even as he did, the stones beneath the fountain cracked, and it tilted slowly to one side.

Loctrean climbed over the retaining wall and into the dustbowl that had once been a shallow pond. He grabbed the canted pedestal and began wrenching it back and forth until it came away completely.

Pushing it aside, he stared into a dry hole where, presumably, water had once upon a time been channeled. He knelt and then lay amid the rubble and reached his arm down into the hole. His fingers touched the sides of a cloth bag. He caught hold of it and dragged it up onto the stones. It was heavy and thick, the neck tied with a cord. The outer layer of cloth had frayed, but there were at least two more layers beneath that one. He heard the coins before he saw them. When they spilled out, they were so big that he couldn’t circle his fingers around them. They had strange writing on them, and faces of some other span’s gods or emperors stamped onto one side. Loctrean had never seen any coins like them. One bag, he thought, must be worth a fortune. He lay on the tiles again and reached into the hole, and his fingers touched a second bag. He drew it out, and this one contained gems: rubies and sapphires, diamonds and emeralds. It was a fortune for a king.

Kneeling there in the dust he praised his father for telling the truth, even though no one had ever believed him. He had sailed with the mythical Sindebad. Here was the proof.

That night Loctrean had another dream. In it his father apologized for not telling him about the fortune years earlier. “I kept it hidden,” he said, “because I wanted you and your sister to grow up unspoiled by riches, to know what it was like to have to work, to earn your way, the way almost everyone must. I wasn’t supposed to have an accident.”

After that, Loctrean saw both his parents from time to time in his dreams. His mother would tell him some incredible tale of the afterlife—how grapes grew as big as her head or animals talked—and his father would explain, “She’s lying. It’s nothing like that at all here, let me tell you.”

Loctrean paid off his debts. He had the house refurbished from top to bottom, and hung a bright new awning over the door. He bought a fleet of fishing boats, but left his father’s decrepit craft in a corner of the yard as a shrine. He showered his sister and her husband with gifts and ensured that they would never want for anything.

Eventually he sailed back to Perla on the very same ship, which he now owned. He cooked for the crew because by now he liked doing that. In Perla he gave the dismayed magistrate a generous sum in thanks for showing him compassion, adding, “Had I not listened to you, I wouldn’t have found my fortune.”

When finally he married, he doted on his wife, keeping her and their children happy every day—mostly by telling them fantastic stories of the glorious adventures of their grandfather, who had sailed to the ends of the world and faced every peril imaginable. And if the children didn’t believe him . . . well, it hardly mattered, after all.



Leodora sat back and the shapes of the flames on her palms unwound from the figures of a family and back into dancing green fire once more.

Diverus watched as the gathered feasters pressed fingertips together in front of them and hummed as they bowed to her, their faces lit with delight, their red eyes glowing with rapturous wonder.

The king of Epama Epam said, “Ah, that was quite . . . exquisite.” He waved one hand over hers, and the flames evaporated. “Your reputation is well earned, storyteller.”

“Thank you,” she said. “And your puppets are the most unusual I’ve ever seen.”

“Yes, but what else would you expect from the world that threads all worlds?”

She laughed at that, then tilted back her head as she stretched. Overhead, the ocean sky had grown darker and the sparkling upon its surface turned to stars. “We’ve missed our performance,” she said, mostly to herself, so that Diverus barely heard it. Her brow knitted as if puzzled by the indifference with which she realized this.

“Surely you can afford one or two,” said the king.

“You don’t know Soter,” Diverus replied. He hid his concern, stretching as if he had just awakened.

“Perhaps not, but now as you say you’ve missed the performance, you might as well settle in and enjoy our company. The night in Epama is nascent, and there are too many stories you still want to hear. That I know for certain.”

She nodded in a dreamy way. “You do owe me some in return.” To Diverus she added, “We can’t very well leave without the stories, can we? If we’ve sacrificed a performance, we deserve our reward.”

“There, it’s settled then.” The king grinned. He called for wine.

Diverus scanned the faces about them, all of the sharp features crinkled with friendship, smiles split wide to display teeth as white as clouds on a clear day. Nowhere was there a member of the court not expressing unbridled joy or radiating pleasure. It enticed, caressed, soothed, and he could not help immersing in it as in the pool where he’d swum. Yet beneath the camaraderie lay something undisclosed, something he was sure he would recognize were he only able to clear his head and distance himself from them enough to deliberate. It was a disquiet he could not even express to Leodora. Something essential was being stifled.

She, like a cat, stretched out before the fire, her eyelids heavy, her smile soft and smug. She took the tall-stemmed glass of wine when it was handed to her, sipped, and then said, “Tell me stories, then. Lots and lots of stories.”

“Aeternalis,” promised the king. The alien word reverberated through the columns; and despite being on his guard, Diverus sank back and gave himself up to their stories.


“She’s dead,” Soter bemoaned. He clutched his head in both hands. His ring of hair stood up in tufts and swirls, making him look mad. He sat on a wide settee painted so as to seem feathered, a prop he’d dragged from one of the Terrestre’s storage rooms to a spot beside the puppet booth. “It’s from a play,” Orinda had told him, “about a young queen who is sent to her doom by a jealous adviser.”

“I would prefer to find no irony in that,” he’d replied.

Beside the settee stood two small blue faience amphorae, most of their former contents now residing inside Soter. “Everything I did to protect her . . . all for naught. Lost.”

Orinda sat facing him. In the light from the lamps at the front of the stage she appeared both regal and grave in her long robe and gold sandals. She had been forced to cancel that night’s performance because of his unraveling. She didn’t begrudge him the crumbling of his will. He was right to worry.

In the week since Leodora’s disappearance, the audiences had fallen off appreciably, and she suspected that word had spread that the great Jax had vanished and left her troupe to cover for her. A night or two without a performance would not harm anything—the citizenry was too desperate for stories now—but if it continued much longer than that, who knew what would happen, or if the theater could open again.

“What about the street performer?” she asked. “Surely that was a clue.”

“The stilt walker?” He pushed his hands over the top of his head, his chin almost against his breastbone, and looked at her through his brows. One of Hamen’s people had stumbled upon the stilt walker at a street fair two days earlier. “She claims only that she spoke to the two of them, but that when she went out to tell everyone in the street that the famous Jax was among them, Leodora didn’t follow her. She went back into that tunnel.”

“The one to Sacbé.”

“And they just disappeared there. Never came out.”

“But surely that means they’re on Sacbé.”

“So one would surmise, yet nobody there that Hamen’s folk spoke to ever saw her or Diverus emerge at the other end.” His eyes closed. “No one. Whatever happened to her, I tell you it happened in that tunnel. In darkness. Has to have done.” He grabbed for his cup of wine. “Gods, I am cursed!” Then he slumped sideways on the divan.

“That’s not so, Soter.”

He came alert angrily. “It isn’t? The gods paired me with Bardsham, didn’t they? I was doing all right on my own. I could spot a mark half a span away, size him up before he set eyes on me. I could tell you how much his purse would have and reel him right in. Practically had to stop him from handing it to me, every coin.”

“You were a thief?”

“Thief? I was an artist. I could convince princes to offer me the jewels right out of their crowns.”

“How?”

“By promising them more. Always more.” He drained the cup. “Everybody always wants more.” He lifted the nearest blue amphora and tipped it. When nothing came out, he grabbed the one beside it, which also proved to be empty. He glowered sullenly a moment, but then pointed at them and gave a mad laugh. “You see? My point exactly, isn’t it?”

Bois was standing across the stage. Orinda gestured toward the empty jars, and he nodded and scurried off.

Soter watched it all, his head tilted.

“So, you were doing well when Bardsham found you,” Orinda prompted.

“Oh, better than well.” He broke off speaking, his brow furrowed. When he focused on her again, it was with a suspicious look. “I’m wondering, as you’ve never said, there’s something I’m curious about.”

“What would that be?”

“Why is it that, if everyone else who crossed the bastard Chaos’s path was turned to stone, your two actors were only turned to wood and got to keep their lives?”

The question seemed to catch her entirely off guard, and a look of fear crossed her face before she regained her composure, forming a brittle smile as she tried to laugh away the question. “Why,” she said, “distance, I’m sure. Some fluke, some accident of his attentiveness.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think that’s likely, now, is it?” He sat up, now suddenly quite sober in his actions and his gaze. “Distance had nothing to do with it. People under the span were turned, too. Leodora saw them. There aren’t any others like your two anywhere hereabouts, are there? Tell me, do they wonder how it is they survived, Orinda?”

“What is wrong with you, Soter?”

“I’m cursed by the gods, just as I said. Here I was thinking from the moment you took us in that you and I might share a bed one night, that we two might find one another’s company . . . amicable. But my dearest Orinda, there’s a nagging question no one has ever answered.”

She cleared her throat. “What’s that?” she asked, her voice barely louder than a whisper.

“Who told Tophet the Destroyer where we had gone? The Agents did come after us, to Remorva and then straight on to Emeldora. I wonder, as I always have, who set them after us in the first place? A lot of spans out there, a lot of spirals unfolding across the sea. Scattered islands, too. We were lying low, and then hardly showing ourselves. But they reached Emeldora not four nights after we did. No happenstance that.”

“It must be,” she offered, “that they asked along the piers, asked the boatmen, who would have identified a group such as yours.”

“Boatmen along the pier would have had no cause to lie to them. But the Agents never came looking after Bardsham’s little girl. Didn’t know she existed. Wharf rats would have given her up, no reason not to. If they’d been asked. If there’d been a need to ask them. Someone who cared about the girl, though, might not have mentioned her, even to save two members of her own troupe.”

“Soter—”

He held up his hand to silence her. He was wincing, as if pained. When he opened his eyes again, he didn’t look at her but off in the distance at some memory. He displayed his hand with its missing fingertips. “He could be very persuasive.”

“The Agents were going to kill them,” Orinda explained. “Both of them.”

“I’ve no doubt of it,” said Soter. “The wonder is, really, that once you’d told them what they wanted, Tophet didn’t kill ’em anyway.” A crash followed upon his words, from the rear of the theater. Bois stood there, his expression an admixture of horror and outrage. The faience amphora he’d been carrying lay shattered on the floor, broken blue glass and wine like pooling blood. He turned on his heel and vanished into the wings.

Orinda cried, “No, wait, Bois!” as she climbed to her feet. She gave Soter one final helpless glance before hurrying after the wooden man.

Soter sank into a heap on the settee. There was no triumph in the learning of Orinda’s complicity. His own overshadowed it completely.

“Cursed,” he repeated. “As if it matters anymore.”


Late into the night the storytelling unfolded. For every story Leodora told, she heard a dozen new ones from the people of Epama Epam. She learned of the Green Snake’s terrible revenge, of the Milkbird that fed the starving, of the Armless Maiden and her hands of silver, of so many more stories that Diverus lost count and the details bled together. Each one seemed to carry her farther away from the desire to leave this wonderful place. In return she told them the story of the Fatal Bride and then how Meersh had lost his toes. As with human audiences, these people championed Penis at the end of it, while the flames danced merrily across her palms. Eventually, she admitted that she was surfeited with stories and one more would make her explode. Besides, she was exhausted, and she begged that they let her rest awhile.

The king commented that they had not yet determined what story she needed to hear, and that it was possible they might have to give her every story they knew in order to find it. It could take a long, long time.

Without hesitation, Leodora answered, “Then I’ll stay here until the discovery is made.”

This shocked Diverus. It was impossible she could feel that way.

The king took Leodora by the hand and led her and Diverus back into the forest of columns, turning to the side in the midst of them, emerging in front of a row of cerulean curtains. He parted the curtain directly before them. Behind it was a small chamber, the floor of it a thickly padded mat covered in blankets and pillows. A brazier to the side burned with a sweet, intoxicating incense.

“Here,” said the king, “you and your consort may retire at any time.”

“I’m not her consort,” protested Diverus.

“As you say,” the king agreed, though his tone suggested anything but agreement.

“Why do you think I’m her consort?”

Leodora tugged at his arm. “Diverus,” she entreated.

“You must remember, I’ve seen your true self, revealed by the waters of our pool. You could not take your eyes from her. She was everything in your sight, she was your world, your intoxication. You displayed love of the greatest depth. Whether you wish to acknowledge it or not is of no consequence to me, but it ought to be of appreciable interest to you.”

“Your pool was a trick, a magic.”

“A magic that plucked upon your heartstrings. Not all tricks are necessarily lies.”

Leodora curled up on the bed and pulled a pillow to her belly. “Diverus can pluck the heartstrings, too,” she mumbled.

“Certainly yours,” the king said. “Now rest awhile, and we’ll continue.”

Leodora only murmured, but Diverus met the king’s genial red gaze defiantly. “What has to be done to learn the reason why we were directed here?”

“I assure you, it’s a story you need, but I cannot tell you which one.”

“Cannot or will not?”

The king smiled tolerantly. “Perhaps, when she awakes,” he said, “we can take steps to identify it. I know, young man, that you think me scheming against you both. Please don’t deny it. I knew it when first I met you, and the episode of the pool supports your suspicions. I cannot deny what took place. We have our scripts to live by as you have yours. Ours is a retreat from the world, and we must by nature try to draw visitors in. We thrive upon them. Had you both welcomed the nepenthe offered by our waters, we would not now be speaking thus, and you would be contented, happy, and at peace forever.”

“But at the cost of our will?”

“Which you would not have missed.” The king smiled. “Sleep now. You can doubt me more ably once you’ve rested.” He stepped back and let the curtain fall.

Leodora was already soundly asleep. Diverus knelt, then lay down at her side. The brass pendant was draped across the pillow she clutched. He stared at it, wondering what it might tell him, and whether it would respond to questions that he wanted answered.

He sighed. Without awaking, Leodora reached over and put her arm over him. In her embrace, Diverus lay beside her but could not fall asleep. Her touch galvanized him. He stared instead at the pendant and resisted the desire to clutch her to him, sleep, and wake in the darkness of early morning, to make love. It was what her “consort” would do.

Had she entered the pool with him, even now he would be living out that desire, but it would all be a lie, and he didn’t want her if it was a lie. It seemed to be the nature of this place—this Pons Asinorum or Epama Epam or whatever they called it—that every truth encompassed an untruth. Misdirection defined their nature, and what should he have expected of a world where the sea became the sky, flowing forever overhead? He needed one reliable answer—to know the nature of the cached lie underpinning all that had been explained. It would not come from the king or his people. They would act according to their script, just as the king had intimated—which Diverus took as another truth cloaking another lie. Leodora had fallen under the spell of stories and would petition to remain until the essential story had been told, assuming there was one. How long might they keep her here, promising to find the essential tale, trying another and another like sweets offered from a tray, each sapping her will a little more, until everything of her former life was forgotten and remaining here was all she would ever want? He knew this because what he had felt in the pool was not only to bind to her but to live here with her everlastingly, and while that spell no longer bound him, its memory served as sufficient tocsin. Having been under their sorcery and then released seemed to give him a kind of immunity, although that might be only temporary. He might go to sleep now and wake up as dazzled as she. He wished desperately to leave before that happened; but she would not go with him, and if he left her behind he would surely never see her again. She would never go.

She rolled onto her back, and the pendant slithered up the pillow, coming level with his eyes. As it did, its own golden eyes opened and contemplated him. He realized that Leodora could not have roused it.

He sat up. “Will you answer me?” he whispered.

“Naturally,” it told him. “So long as you are in her dreams.” Then it became inanimate again.

With great care, he knelt and worked the necklace and the Brazen Head over her face and up above her hair, but he needed to lift her head to release it altogether.

Slowly, he slipped his fingers into the tangled fall of her hair, edging them beneath the back of her head. Ever so slightly, he raised her head up. She murmured his name, and both of her arms circled his neck. At the moment he drew the pendant free of her hair, her lips met his. She kissed him deeply. He tasted the wine on her breath and the tip of her tongue. She let go of him and sank back. Her eyes had opened a little, and now rolled up as her eyelids closed. She moaned softly, body shifting, and then lay still, her arms and legs pushed apart as if open to him. He ached to continue, to follow her desire—if only he could trust that it was hers. Instead, he made himself roll away, with his back to her, and then lay still, the Brazen Head clutched in one hand. He waited while her breathing settled, softened, became slow and regular. Then he rose and crept out beneath the blue curtain. He peered in each direction. There was no one to be seen anywhere among the columns. He scurried across the cold stone floor and ducked behind the nearest pillar.

The liquid sky above was still dark and shot with stars. Firelight flickered from the distant feast and from torches beside the still pool of nepenthe.

Diverus stole from column to column until he had reached the far side, near the tiny door where they had entered. No one was about there, either. He crouched against a column in the last row and held up the pendant so that the brass head dangled before him.

“All right,” he said. “Tell me.”

The eyes opened. “Your deepest desire is to know if she loves you.”

“I would hear of that, but not now. Not—”

“I couldn’t tell it to you anyway,” the head interjected.

That brought him up short. “What do you mean?”

“She loves stories. All else must needs occupy a second place.”

“I don’t care,” he answered, and for that moment he believed it. “I want to know how to get her away from here. I want to know what this place is about and how to find out why we came.”

“Time,” it replied. “Time is no more.”

“I don’t understand you. How is time no more? Here? Everywhere?”

“Here is everywhere. Your eyes play you as false here as does your heart. The rising and setting of suns and moons is illusory. You cannot trust what you know. What you sense. What you want.”

“I realize that,” he answered impatiently. “Why do you think I’m holding you? Why do you think we’re talking?”

The lion’s muzzle flexed as if perturbed, as if it might shut its eyes again.

“Please,” he implored. “What’s being withheld? How do we get away from here?”

“She needs one story for the battle to come, but be assured they will not serve it up until the day of that battle.”

“And how long till that day?”

“Forever, if you remain here. This world is its own spell, enchantment concretized. They don’t lie as you think of it, they merely act from the quintessence of that artifice.”

He thought about that, about the pool, about her. It seemed a fine distinction that carried the same result. “If we’re safe from this battle here, then why shouldn’t we stay?”

“However long she remains, it won’t matter. Her enemy will devour steadily everything else, encroaching span by span, until all but this interstitial world is lost, and no one who leaves it will ever return. Then you are as prisoners of nonexistence.”

“How do we leave here, then?” he asked. “How do I convince her to go?”

The lion gave him a look as if it thought him imperceptive. “You seek escape from the wrong source, from inside their spell. Use your own formidable powers, Orfeo, if you want to change the script.” Then it closed its eyes and was silent.

The name it had spoken shook him to the bone. He slid from his crouch and as he sat, the chain of the necklace slipped through his fingers and the pendant clattered to the stones, and with it the second object, which he’d taken off her accidentally, the two cords intertwined. It lay in his lap but he was oblivious.

In all the time that had passed, he’d not heard that name—not since before she had been wrapped in her winding sheet and cast into the water, a corpse that had taken his identity with her, snatching away the self she had gifted him with but that he could not hold on to.

His true name had returned.


A tickle about her neck woke Leodora, fingers in her hair. She opened her eyes and his bottomless black ones were right beside her, watching as if Diverus could not see enough of her, as if even as she slept he had watched; and she was reminded of a time she had done the same beside him.

She could not be certain what it meant, his closeness. Was it in the aftermath of some welcomed intimacy? But no, she still wore the purple robe from the feast.

The feast.

Her mind tumbled with a riot of images drawn from all the stories she’d heard last night: the clever Green Snake swallowing its larger adversary, the boar, with jaws that hinged impossibly wide; the melancholy maiden who sacrificed her hands to save her father and nearly lost her whole body as well; the girl whose feet were snagged by a seemingly innocuous loaf of bread that dragged her down into an infernal underworld; the king who turned all that he loved into cold metal; the conniving girl who drowned her elder sister to gain her sister’s privilege only to have the sister’s ghost return and denounce her through the strings of a harp. These and more clamored for her attention, too many to contemplate but still not enough, never enough. Stories filled her and she hungered for more, and they had them all.

“Are we starting again?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

As she sat up, his fingers threaded through her hair, and her pendant slid into the front of her robe; its chain caught around the back of her neck. His hand withdrew.

“I’m going to perform with you this time,” he said. “Accompany you. I want to.”

“It’s my turn to tell them another then?”

“Your turn,” he agreed. Then after hesitating as though making up his mind, he added, “We’ll miss another day’s performances if we linger.” His eyes, almost sly, watched her.

“It’s only another day.” She would have missed a week, a month, if it meant more stories from these dark creatures.

He nodded slowly, as if she had confirmed something for him. “You’ll tell them to let me play this time, yes?” he requested.

“If you wish.” She rose and stepped over him, out the curtain and toward her passion.

Fire still burned in the feast pit beyond the columns and she started toward them without thought, drawn by what they promised. She looked at her palms, already imagining the flames dancing there, taking shape. They would want a story. Which one should she tell them? One they hadn’t told her. Turning back, she asked which he thought would be the best.

“Tell them of how the zmeu stole the sun and moon.”

“Isn’t that one they told me?”

“It won’t matter,” he promised, and she tried to understand that.

When she reached the fire, it was as if the feast had never stopped. All the people were still there. The king rose to greet her, and her attendants scampered out from behind the columns to assist her as if she were old and frail and had forgotten her way. Diverus, in his green robe, shrugged off the hands of his attendants and sat next to her. He stared at her solemnly until she remembered his request and to the king said, “He’s going to accompany me for the next story.”

The king arched one brow. “Oh. You have another one to tell us.”

“Yes.”

“How does he accompany you?”

“On musical instruments.”

The king leaned around her. The coils of his hair were sharp as knives. “He seems to have arrived without them,” he said, and the feasters laughed.

“I’d hoped you would be able to provide me with something appropriate,” Diverus responded. “You seem to be a musical people.”

The feasters laughed again, and the king nodded. “You’ve read us well enough, young man. What would you play upon?”

“Oh, a harp would be nice. Anything else you might have. I’m very partial to the shawm as well.”

“Multitalented, are you?” He gestured to the attendants to go retrieve what Diverus had asked for. “This should make for a very interesting telling then. Tell me, what story will you play out?” he asked Leodora.

“It’s—”

“We can’t reveal that,” Diverus interjected. “It’s more effective if it’s a surprise.”

She caught something in his voice, but she couldn’t say what it was—some lilt she felt she ought to have known, which she might have identified if her head weren’t spinning with stories. She lifted a goblet of wine and sipped while she waited for the next thing to happen.

The attendants returned with a small four-stringed harp and a lacquered shawm. The king turned from the fire with flames upon his palms again.

Diverus tucked the shawm in his belt and picked up the harp. She paused to watch him, recalling how remarkable his music was. It seemed to be an ancient memory.

He brushed one hand across the strings. His eyes closed and he began to pluck a dancing tune, a reel. It began slowly, softly, but his fingers moved faster and faster. The nearest feasters leapt to their feet and began to dance. They wore expressions of surprise, as if the desire to dance belonged to their feet, which hadn’t told their brain. They pranced and stepped, skipped and swung about, spinning in time with a music that seemed to have taken possession of them. The king, although he restrained himself from joining them, couldn’t keep from performing a small jig in place. Like his citizens, he seemed amazed, and his red eyes narrowed as he stared at Diverus, as if he thought he should be able to identify what was happening. Leodora wondered when her story was supposed to start.

Then all at once Diverus lifted his hands from the harp. The dancers swayed, stumbled. A few of them collapsed. Those farther away were laughing, thinking the whole thing a delightful jape.

Diverus inhaled deeply. His eyes opened. He looked at her and smiled as he set down the harp and picked up the shawm. Pressing the reed to his lips, he stared sharply at the king.

The song that emerged from the shawm was the very essence of grief. More painful than anything she had ever heard him play in the paidika where he had caused patrons to burst spontaneously into tears, it personified loss and longing, the threnody of an empty soul.

This time even the king collapsed beneath its weight. The flames on his hands hissed and turned to smoke. She looked around in wonder as people dropped to their knees and began to wail, to clutch at their bosoms, to claw at the stones.

Then at the highest note, Diverus broke off playing again. He drew the reed from between his lips, and surveyed them.

“Diverus, what are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m bidding them good-bye” was his reply. “Aren’t I?” he asked the king.

The king pressed a hand to his breastbone, reached the other, trembling, toward them. “I—I—” he tried to say.

“Release her from the spell of this world of yours, or I’ll play all of this tune and not one of you will survive it.”

The king shook his head and Diverus put the reed to his mouth again. He raised the shawm like a weapon, taking aim. He played one simple verse and one of the four-armed attendants who’d pushed him into the pool fell dead beside the king, tumbling into the fire.

Diverus lowered the shawm. He stared at the king with disgust. “I know it’s your world that enchants, not you. You merely act your parts, as you said, expressions of the enchantment. But you can shield the spell, as you did for me. You have that power, don’t you?” When the king said nothing, he reluctantly lifted the shawm again.

“Wait!” cried the king.

Diverus waited.

“You have only to depart and it will pass, she’ll come to herself again. We mean no harm, we only worship her skill. She is as a goddess to us.”

“And to me,” Diverus said. He kept the shawm but reached out and took her hand. “Come with me,” he said.

The king called, “Tell me, please, who you are.”

Diverus glanced over his shoulder. “My mother named me Orfeo,” he replied.

The king’s molten eyes enlarged with recognition. “We know this name and the skill bound to it,” he said.

“Then perhaps one day you’ll tell me of it,” replied Diverus. “But that will not be today.”

The king bowed his head and stepped aside.


Leodora witnessed all of this as if watching a play in some strange language, understanding and yet unmoved, untouched by the events and portrayals. She let him lead her from the feast, into the grove of columns to the heart of them where it was always dark. He let go of her hand and took the goblet from her other. He poured its contents on the stones and smashed the goblet. “Here,” he said, and handed her the shawm.

From around his neck he removed a cord and on the end of it a small phial. She tilted her head. The green-and-black phial seemed familiar. Reflexively, she touched the chain of her pendant.

He tipped it and a drop fell from it into the wine covering the floor. After capping it again, he reached toward her with it. “I’m sorry, I took this while you slept.”

She lowered her head as he slipped the cord over it, although uncertain why he was apologizing to her. At her feet, the wine rippled and seemed to reflect a different place.

“Come on,” he said, and held out his hand to her as he stepped into the liquid. She reached out but handed him the shawm. When he tugged, she let go and he fell into the wine as if into a hole.

“Diverus?” she called, and leaned over the dark pool. “Diverus.” It was dark below. As dark as a prison cell. She remembered Brodamante saying that from Palipon this world would look different. As she stepped into the pool of darkness, she wondered how.

Stumbling, she came up immediately against a wall of rough stone.

When she turned around, a creature with huge dark eyes, a long snout, and a woman’s body clothed in rags was crouched in the corner opposite, watching her. A wig made of skinny black beads hung off her head, around her prominent ears.

The creature rose. She tried to speak, showing small sharp incisors and larger teeth at the sides of her mouth, top and bottom. Her words were strange, raspy, a language full of clicks and odd breaths. Leodora understood none of it. But when the creature stepped forward, her ankle rattled, and Leodora realized that she was wearing metal cuffs and a chain.

Behind her, a small barred window revealed a row of flat-roofed buildings with trellised windows some distance away and bluish with twilight. This wasn’t where she’d intended to come at all. The woman said something urgent.

Leodora turned to leave, but no passage remained behind her. Instead she faced another stone wall, a dirt floor, and a small, thick door banded with metal. She was locked in a cell in a place she’d never been before, and Diverus wasn’t there.