Sea of Silver Light

"I know that story," Florimel said abruptly. "It was one of Eirene's favorites. From the Gurnemanz collection."

"You know it from a German book?" Martine said, surprised. "But it is an old French fairy tale."

"What's that?" T4b asked.

"A f–fairy tale. . . ?" Martine was stu

"No," said T4b disgustedly. "What's that?"

He was pointing at a mound of snow perhaps a thousand meters ahead of them, one of the outriders to the cluster of snowy hills Paul had seen earlier.

"It's a pile of snow." Paul said it a trifle rudely, but he wanted to hear what Florimel had to say about the story. A moment later he was startled and embarrassed to see the glint of something that was not snow or ice. "Good Lord, you're right, it's a tower. A tower!"

"What, think I'm blind, me?" T4b growled. A moment later he frowned and turned to Martine, "Didn't mean no slapdown."

"Understood." She frowned into the distance. "I p–per–ceive no signs of life at all. I ca–ca–can barely sense that there is anything there at all beside ice and snow. What do you see?"

"It's the top of a tower." Paul squinted. "It's . . . very narrow. Like a minaret. Decorated. But I can't see anything of what's underneath. Damn, this current is slow!"

"A minaret, yes," said Florimel.

"Maybe this is the Mars I visited before," Paul said excitedly. "That strange sort of late-Victorian adventure world. It had a lot of Moorish-looking architecture." His gaze slipped to the countless miles of deadening white spread over both sides of the river. "But what happened?"

"Dread," said Martine quietly. "The man called Dread has happened to this place, I would bet."

They were all straining to see something now, all except for Martine who had let her trembling chin sink to her chest. As they drew closer to the great mound of snow and its single protruding spire, Paul saw something on the bank beside them, a much smaller shape half-covered by white drifts. "What the hell is that?"

T4b, who was leaning so far out of the boat the little craft was tipping to one side, said, "It's one of those Tut-Tut and the Sphinx things, like—you know, that netshow for micros? That animal they ride with bumps?"

Paul, whose grasp of popular culture had been diminishing rapidly since he left boarding school, could only shake his head. "It's a sphinx?"

"He means a camel," Florimel said. If she had not been pressing her teeth together to keep them from chattering, she might have laughed. "It is a frozen camel. Did they have camels on your Mars?"

"No." Now that they were closer, he saw the boy was right again. The dead camel was on its knees at the river's edge, teeth exposed in a hideous grin, the skin stretched so tight on its neck and head that it seemed mummified, but it was definitely a camel. "We must be in Orlando's Egypt. Or something like it,"

Martine stirred. "That man c–called Nandi. If we are in Egypt, p–p–perhaps we could find him. Orlando and Fredericks said he was the Circle's special expert on the gateways. He might be able to help us reach Renie and the others."

"If he's here, gotta be a popsicle," T4b suggested.

"Ancient Egypt with minarets?" asked Florimel sourly. "In any case, I have changed my mind about trying to outlast this cold. So let us head toward that tower or none of this speculation will matter, because we, too, will be . . . popsicles."

"We'll have to paddle with our hands," Paul said. "We'll have to get there fast or we'll all get frostbite."

"We will take our hands out in turn to warm up," Martine said. "Two paddling, two warming. Now."

For a moment, as he plunged his fingers into the dark river, Paul felt nothing but clean chill, like an alcohol-swabbing before an injection. Then his skin began to burn like fire.

It was only snow and not ice they had to kick through to reach the open arched door of the building beneath the looming, white-shrouded tower, a piece of luck for which Paul was terribly grateful. Within a few moments they were standing in a decorated antechamber, painted head to ceiling in a beautiful, elaborate scarlet, black, and gold fretwork of repeating shapes. They did not stop to look, but continued forward, bending over the freezing hands they all held pressed against their bellies.

Three more doors and three more decorated chambers led them to a smaller room whose walls were lined with shelves full of leather-bound books, and the glorious discovery of a tiled fire pit and a stack of wood.

"It's damp," Paul said as he stacked logs in the fireplace with clumsy, stinging fingers. "We need something to use as kindling. Not to mention a match."

"Kindling?" Florimel pulled a book down from the shelf and began tearing out pages. It seemed somehow sacrilegious to Paul, but after a moment's consideration he decided he could live with the feeling. He looked at a page and saw that it was in English, but English rendered in a spidery print that had the feeling of Arabic script. As he crumpled pages and arranged them around the wood, he saw a pretty lacquer box tucked into an alcove in the tile on the outside of the fireplace. He opened it, then held it up. "It's flint and steel, I think, and thank God for that. I wish !Xabbu were here. Anyone else know how to use this?"

"We did not even have electricity at Harmony Camp until I was ten years old," said Florimel. "Give it to me."

Perhaps a quarter of an hour passed, the sound of clicking teeth gradually subsiding, before Paul was willing to take his hands away from the wonderful heat of the fire. After a bit of exploration he turned up a storeroom full of soft rugs which he and the others wrapped around themselves like cloaks. Warmer now and feeling almost human, he picked up one of the discarded books and opened it.

"It's definitely supposed to be Arabic—this book is dedicated to His Majesty the Caliph, Haroun al-Rashid. Hmmm. It seems to be a story about Sinbad the Sailor." Paul looked up at the shelves. "I think this is a library of the Thousand and One Arabian Nights."

"Ain't spending no thousand nights here in this popsicle pit," T4b said. "Lock that. Lock that tight."

"That's just the name of a book," Paul told him. "A famous old collection of stories." He turned to Florimel and Martine. "Which reminds me. . . ."

"I said I could not remember the story," Martine began.

"But I said I could." Florimel pushed herself back a little way from the fire. Bundled in the stiff carpet, and with the makeshift bandage covering her eye and a large portion of the side of her head, she looked more than ever like some medieval hedge-witch.

Which is fu