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I heard the sailors whispering among themselves with fear in their voices, and the soft sighing of knife blades clearing well-oiled sheaths. I called to them that there was no reason to be afraid, that these were my ghosts, and not theirs.
The voice of the child Severa cried, “We’re not ghosts!” with childish scorn. The red eyes came closer, and again there was the scrape of terrible claws on the stone floor. All the rest fidgeted in their places, so that the chamber echoed with the rustlings of their garments.
I wrenched futilely at the manacles, then fumbled for the sliding link and shouted to Zak not to try to stop the alzabo without a weapon.
Gu
I answered, “She’s dead! The beast speaks through her.”
“She’s riding on its back. They’re here by me.”
My numb fingers had found the link, but I did not open it, knowing with a sudden certainty that could not be denied that if I were to free myself now and hide among the sailors, as I had pla
“Justice!” I shouted to them. “I tried to act justly, and you know that! You may hate me, but can you say I harmed you without cause?”
A dark figure sprang up. Steel gleamed like the alzabo’s eyes. Zak sprang too, and I heard the clatter of the weapon as it struck the stone floor.
Chapter XIX — Silence
IN THE confusion I could not tell at first who had freed me. I only knew that they were two, one to either side, and that they took my arms when I was free and led me quickly around the Seat of Justice and down a narrow stair. Behind us was pandemonium, the sailors shouting and scuffling, the alzabo baying.
The stair was long and steep, but it had been constructed in line with the aperture at the apex of the dome; faint light spilled down it, the final glimmer of a twilight yet reflected from a scattering of cloud, though Yesod’s sun would appear no more until morning.
At the bottom we emerged into darkness so intense that I did not realize we were outdoors until I felt grass beneath my feet and wind on my cheek.
“Thank you,” I said. “But who are you?”
A few paces away, Apheta answered, “They are my friends. You saw them on the craft that brought you here from your ship.”
As she spoke, the two released me. I am tempted to write that they vanished at once, because that is how it seemed to me; but I do not think they did. Rather, perhaps, they walked away into the night without a word.
Apheta slipped her hand into mine as she had before. “I pledged myself to show you wonders.”
I drew her farther from the building. “I’m not ready to see wonders. Yours, or any other woman’s.”
She laughed. Nothing is more frequently false in women than their laughter, a merely social sound like the belching of autochthons at a feast; but it seemed to me that this laughter held real merriment.
“I mean what I say.” The aftermath of fear had left me weak and sweating, but the wild bewilderment I felt had little or nothing to do with that; and if I knew anything at all (though I was not certain I did), it was that I did not want to begin some casual amour.
“Then we will walk — away from this place you wish so much to leave — and talk together. This afternoon you had a great many questions.”
“I have none now,” I told her. “I must think.”
“Why, so must we all,” she said sweetly. “All the time, or nearly.”
We went down a long, white street that meandered like a river, so that its slope was never steep. Mansions of pale stone stood beside it like ghosts. Most were silent, but from some there came the sounds of revelry, the clink of glasses, strains of music, and the slap of dancing feet; never a human voice.
When we had passed several I said, “Your people don’t speak as we do. We would say they don’t speak at all.”
“Is that a question?”
“No, it’s an answer, an observation. When we were going into the Examination Chamber, you said you didn’t speak our tongue, nor I yours. No one speaks yours.”
“It was meant metaphorically,” she told me. “We have a means of communication. You do not use it, and we do not use the one you use.”
“You weave paradoxes to warn me,” I said, though my thoughts were elsewhere.
“Not at all. You communicate by sound, we by silence.”
“By gestures, you mean.”
“No, by silence. You make a sound with your larynx and shape it by the action of your palate and lips. You have been doing that for so long that you have almost forgotten you do it; but when you were very young you had to learn to do it, as each child born to your race must. We could do it too, if we wished. Listen.”
I listened and heard a soft gurgling that seemed to proceed not from her, but from the air beside her. It was as though some unseen mute had come to join us, and now made a croaking in his throat. “What was that?” I asked.
“Ah, you see, you have questions after all. What you heard was my voice. We call so, occasionally, when we are injured or in need of help.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Nor do I wish to. I must be alone with my thoughts.”
Between the mansions were many fountains and many trees, trees that seemed to me tall, strange, and lovely even in the darkness. The waters of the fountains were not perfumed as so many of ours were in the gardens of the House Absolute, but the scent of the pure water of Yesod was sweeter than any perfume.
Flowers grew there too, as I had seen when we had left the flier and as I was to see again in the morning. Most had now folded their hearts in the bowers of their petals, and only a pale moonvine blossomed, though there was no moon.
At last, the street ended at the cool sea. There the little boats of Yesod were moored, just as I had seen them from above. Many men and women were there too, men and women who went to and fro among the boats, and between the boats and the shore. Sometimes a boat put out into the dark, lapping water; and at times some new boat appeared, with sails of many colors I could scarcely make out. Only rarely was there a light.
I said, “Once I was so foolish as to believe Thecla alive. It was a trick to draw me to the mine of the man-apes. Agia did it, but I saw her dead brother tonight.”
“You do not comprehend what happened to you,” Apheta told me. She sounded shamed. “That is why I am here — to explain it to you. But I will not explain until you are ready, until you ask me.”
“And if I never ask?”
“Then I will never explain. It may be better, though, for you to know, especially if you are the New Sun.”
“Is Urth really so important to you?”
She shook her head.
“Then why bother with it or me?”
“Because your race is important to us. It would be far less laborious if we could deal with it all at once, but you are sown over tens of thousands of worlds, and we ca
I said nothing.
“The worlds are very far apart. If one of our ships goes from one to another as fast as the starlight, the voyage takes many centuries. It does not seem so to those on the ship, but it does. If the ship goes even faster, tacking in the wind from the suns, time runs backward so that the ship arrives before it sails.”
“That must be very inconvenient for you,” I said. I was staring out over the water.
“For us, not for me personally. If you are thinking that I am in some fashion the queen or guardian of your Urth, dismiss the thought. I am not. But yes, imagine that we desire to play shah mat upon a board whose squares are rafts on that sea. We move, yet even as we move the rafts stir and slip into some new combination; and to move, we must paddle from one raft to the next, which takes so long.”
“Against whom do you play?” I asked.
“Entropy.”