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Jouissante glanced back over her shoulder. "If you're not going to pay attention, I shall be forced to gouge out your eyes."
"Please!" Jane gasped.
They came at last to a final landing. Breathless and exhausted, Jane gratefully stumbled to a stop. Jouissante flung open an ivory door. "This is her seat of power—the chancel of the skull."
They stepped within. Cool white light scattered and banished the phantoms.
The walls were lined with ivory chests and the floor had off-white rugs. A low ceiling supported track lighting. A pale wall divided the room into two chambers in such a way that one could look into one chamber or the other, but never both at once. Each chamber had a single straight-backed chair facing the leaded-glass windows that were set into the eye sockets. Jouissante yanked her into the left-hand chamber. "We are standing within the skull of the first Incolore. If you hold very still, you can feel the force of her personality humming deep within the bone."
If so, then Fata Incolore's ancestor had been stranger even than her remains would have led one to think. For an overwhelming sense of the tenuousness of existence throbbed through Jane from all directions. Here, she sensed, nothing very dearly wished to remain itself. It made no matter to the albino maple escritoire whether it held letters or motor oil, stood stock still or burrowed in the earth, screamed for blood in the pouring rain or merely burst into flames. An alabaster crocodile trembled on the brink of flight.
"What—what are you going to do to me?"
"That's what I've been trying to explain to you, small lack-wit. I'm thinking of destroying your gross body and incarnating you in the flesh of a thrush or a wren. With your own wicker cage." She began rummaging through the cupboards. "Or better yet a little pink pig. Incolore could lead you about on a ribbon." She glanced up briefly. "Oh, don't look so! You'd have ever so much more pleasant a life as a pig than a wren. You could be potty-trained, for one thing." Bottles clanked and clattered. "Sit in the chair but don't stare into the window. You wouldn't like what it might choose to show you."
Jane had no choice but to obey, though she did risk one quick glance anyway. The window looked upon an empty room with a lone pair of work boots resting to one side of center. They cast a pale shadow. One lay on its side. Mud clung to its sole. Its laces were filthy. For the life of her, she could not imagine why the window should focus on such a thing. And yet her captor was right. For some indefinable reason, the sight of it filled her with an irrational terror.
"There are two windows in the chancel; one looks upon lies and one on truth. Not even Lesya Incolore knows which is which." Jouissante tipped over a chest. She kicked its spilled contents across the room. "Not here either! Where in the name of Maga Argea can it be?"
Something in the chair or possibly the room itself was conducive to lethargy. Jane stared down at her lap, unable to stand.
"Aha!" Fata Jouissante held up a cordless phone in triumph. Numbers booped. She waited, then said, "This is Fata Incolore. I would like you to send up a pig. Yes. No, the creature must be personable. Sweet, yes. Its disposition is very important to me. No, female."
Listening, Jane knew she ought to be upset. But it was hard to care. The apathy that held her to the chair was spreading through her body. If she didn't do something right away, she'd never do anything again.
In a detached way, Jane's fingers meandered to her hair and combed from it the daisy that Rocket had given her earlier. She looked down at the blossom and closed her fingers about it. Crushing the petals.
"How soon can you have it here? Oh, and a satin pillow too!"
Staring down at her hands, Jane concentrated on Rocket's true name and performed a summoning. She had never tried so powerful a spell before, but she knew the theoretics inside out. Tetigistus, she whispered in the Arctic stillnesses of her hindbrain. Come to me.
Jouissante whirled, phone in hand. "What have you done?" she cried. "You've done something! What have you done?"
Jane smiled vaguely up at her. The summoning had burned up the last of her volition. She was entirely passive now. She lacked even the will to speak.
There was a step on the stair. The door opened and Rocket entered.
He was masterful. Rocket took in the situation at a glance. He acted without hesitation. Striding forward, almost too fast to follow, he struck the telephone from Jouissante's hand. With a cry of dismay, she flew at him, raking her nails across his face, reaching for his eyes. Deftly, though, he seized her wrists, forcing her arms back. She thrust her body forward, striving to reach his jugular with her teeth. This was what he had been waiting for. Briefly, her ear was alongside Rocket's mouth.
"Kunosoura," he murmured in a voice so low that under ordinary conditions Jane could not possibly have heard him. But Jane knew his true name and with it had summoned him. His whispered word went right through her.
Kunosoura. It meant dog's tail.
It was Lesya Incolore's true name.
At the sound, the delusion of Fata Jouissante's persona fled from her face. Features melted one into another, some hardening, others softening, yet others growing sharp and keen. When they were done shifting, Incolore had stabilized as herself once more. Her eyes closed and her limbs went limp. Rocket hoisted her slumping body in his arms.
He gestured with his chin. "Open that door, please."
With the return of Fata Incolore, whatever force had held Jane passive was gone. She sprang from the chair and opened the small door he had indicated.
It took them to a room whose walls were lined with carnival masks. There were no windows. Rocket eased his sister down on a couch. "There's a medicine chest in that cabinet," he said. "When she comes to, we'll give her two of the white pills. That'll be enough."
Jane straightened from checking to see that Incolore was comfortable.
They looked at each other shyly.
"Well," Rocket said at last. "Lucky thing I dropped by."
"Yeah," Jane said. "Lucky."
"I apologize for forcing my presence on you twice in one day, madam. I realize that you don't like me—"
"Look, I like you, okay? I like you fine."
Rocket took a step forward and Jane took a step back. He stopped, looking puzzled. "Then why? If you do indeed like me, why then do you behave as you do? Why do you so consistently seek to put me out of countenance?"
"I don't want you to get caught up in all this shit," Jane said. "That's all. There's stuff going on, and I don't want to hurt you."
"Hurt me." Rocket was the stiffest, most sincere thing she had ever seen. "So long as my honor is unsullied, you may do as you wish with me. Treat me badly if that's what makes you happy. It can't be any worse than the pain of your disregard."
This was getting out of hand. To rein things in, Jane said, in as chill a tone as she could muster, "Your sister's political games have run completely amok, sir. She was going to turn me into a pig." Suddenly the ludicrous nature of it all struck her and she giggled with alarm. "A pig!"
"That was Fata Jouissante," Rocket reminded her. "But you are right to be angry, and if I ca
"Love! For who?"
"Why, Lesya, of course. Poor Jouissante! She lives in dread of that day—and it is coming—when Lesya is raised to the invisible college and becomes a guardian. To be made a guardian is a terrible scandal and as great an honor as one may aspire to. Its prospect arouses everyone involved to extremes of emotion." He shrugged. "Even under the best of conditions, powers play such messy games when they sport at love."