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“You knew from the first that I was Autarch, didn’t you? If you have studied Urth, you surely knew. Putting manacles on Zak was only a stratagem.”
She did not reply, even after we had reached the dark arch. Set in a white stone wall, it seemed the entrance to a tomb; but the air within was as fresh and sweet as all the air of Yesod.
“You must lead me, my lady,” I said. “I ca
I had no sooner spoken than there was light, a dim light like a flame reflected from tarnished silver. It came from Apheta herself, and pulsed like the beating of a heart.
We stood in a wide room, hung on every side with muslin curtains. Padded seats and divans were scattered upon a gray carpet. One after another, the curtains were twitched aside, and behind each I saw the silent, somber face of a man; when he had looked at us for a moment, each man let his curtain fall.
“You’re well guarded, my lady,” I told her. “But you’ve nothing to fear from me.”
She smiled, and it was odd to see that smile lit by its own light. “You would cut my throat in an instant, if it would save your Urth. We both know that. Or cut your own, I think.”
“Yes. At least I hope so.”
“But these are not protectors. My light means that I am ready to mate.”
“And if I am not?”
“I will choose another while you sleep. There will be no difficulty, as you see.”
She thrust aside a curtain, and we entered a wide corridor that bent to the left. Scattered about were seats such as I had seen outside, and many other objects as mysterious to me as the appliances in Baldanders’s castle, though they were lovely and not terrible. Apheta took one of the divans.
“Does this not lead us to your chamber, my lady?”
“This is mine. It is a spiral; many of our rooms are, because we like that shape. If you follow it, you will come to a place where you may wash, and be alone for a time.”
“Thank you. Have you a candle to lend me?”
She shook her head, but told me it would not be entirely dark.
I left her and followed the spiral. Her light went with me, growing fainter and fainter but reflected by the curving wall. At the end, which I was not long in reaching, a breath of wind suggested that what Gu
I thought about it while I relieved myself and washed, and when I returned to Apheta, who lay on one of the divans with her naked loveliness pulsing through a thin sheet, I kissed her and asked, “Are there no other worlds, my lady?”
“There are very many,” she murmured. She had unbound her dark hair, which floated about her shining face, so that she seemed herself some eerie star, wrapped in night.
“Here in Yesod. On Urth we see myriad suns, dim by day, bright by night. Your day sky is empty, but your night sky is brighter than ours.”
“When we require them, the Hierogrammates will build more — worlds as fair as this, or more fair. Suns for them too, should we require more suns. Thus for us they are there already. Time runs as we ask here, and we like their light.”
“Time does not run as I ask.” I seated myself on her divan, my aching leg stretched before me.
“Not yet,” she said. And then, “You are lame, Autarch.”
“Surely you’ve noticed that before.”
“Yes, but I am seeking a way to tell you that for you time will run as for us. You are lame now, but if you bring the New Sun to your Urth, you shall not always be so.”
“You Hierarchs are magicians. You’re more powerful than those I once met, but magicians still. You talk of this wonder and that, but though your curses may blast, I feel your rewards are false gold that will turn to dust in the hand.”
“You misunderstand us,” she told me. “And though we know so much more than you, our gold is true gold, got as true gold is, often at the cost of our lives.”
“Then you’re lost in your own labyrinth, and no wonder. Once I had the power to cure such things — sometimes, at least.” And I told her of the sick girl in the jacal in Thrax, and of the Uhlan on the green road, and of Triskele; and last of all, I told her how I had found the steward dead at my door.
“If I try to unravel this for you, will you understand that I do not, no more than you yourself, know all the secrets of your Briah, although they have been my study? They are without end.”
“I understand,” I said. “But on the ship I thought we had come to the end of Briah when we came here.”
“So you did, but though you may walk into a house at one door and walk out at the other, you do not know all the secrets of that house.”
I nodded, watching her naked beauty pulse beneath the fabric and wishing, if the truth be known, that it lacked so strong a hold on me.
“You saw our sea. Did you notice the waves there? What would you say to someone who told you that you saw not waves, but only water?”
“That I’ve learned not to argue with fools. One smiles and walks away.”
“What you call time is made up of such waves, and as the waves you saw existed in the water, so time exists in matter. The waves march toward the beach, but if you were to cast a pebble into the water, new waves, a hundredth or a thousandth the strength of the old, would run out to sea, and the waves there would feel them.”
“I understand.”
“So do future things make themselves known in the past. A child who will someday be wise is a wise child; and many who will be doomed carry their dooms in their faces, so that those who can see even a short way into the future find it there and turn away their eyes.”
“Aren’t we all doomed?”
“No, but that is another matter. You may master a New Sun. Should you, its energy will be yours to draw upon, though it will not exist unless you — and your Urth — triumph here. But as the boy foreshadows the man, something of that faculty has reached you through the Corridors of Time. I ca
“And had the Claw of the Conciliator no power at all?”
“Let me see it.” She held out a shining hand.
“It was destroyed long ago by the weapons of the Ascians,” I told her.
She made no answer, but only stared at me; and when a heartbeat had passed, I saw that she was looking at my chest, where I carried the thorn in the little pouch Dorcas had sewn for me.
I looked myself, and saw a light — fainter far than hers, yet steady. I took out the thorn, and its golden radiance shone from wall to wall before it died away. “It has become the Claw,” I said. “So I saw it when I drew it from the rocks.”
I held it out to her; she did not look at it, but at the half-healed wound it had made. “It was saturated with your blood,” she said, “and your blood contains your living cells. I doubt that it was powerless. Nor do I wonder that the Pelerines revered it.”
I left her then, and groping, found my way to the beach once more, and for a long time I walked up and down the sand. But the thoughts I had there have no place here.
When I returned, Apheta was waiting for me still, her silver pulsing more importunate than before. “Can you?” she asked, and I told her she was very beautiful.
“But can you?” she asked again.
“We must talk first. I would be betraying my kind if I did not question you.”
“Then ask,” she whispered. “Though I warn you that nothing I say will help your race in the test to come.”