And still he kept looking. And still he kept seeing, and though there were horrors here, to be sure, nothing in him made him want to leave off his seeing.
There was a curious calm upon his soul; a kind of dreamy indifference to his own situation. If he’d reasoned this out perhaps he would have concluded that he wasn’t afraid because none of this could possibly be real. But he did not reason it out. He was beyond reasoning at that moment. Beyond anything, indeed, but witnessing. He had become a living instrument; a flesh-and-blood camera, recording this wonderland. He kept turning on his heel, counter-clockwise, as sights caught his attention off to his left; and left again; and left again.
Everything here had a miraculous shine to it, as though whatever divinity had made it had an army of workers at His or Her command, perpetually polishing the world. Every leaf on every tree had its gloss; every hair on every mammal and every scale on every reptile had its sheen; every particle of dirt, down to the shit from the flea-infested backside of a boar, had a glamour all of its own. A rat sniffing in the carcass of a gored hound came away with drops of corruption on its whiskers as enchanting as a lover’s eyes. The earth at his feet (yes, there were tiles there too, painted with as much love as forest or cloud) was a surfeit of glories: a worm his heel had half-killed was lovely in its knotted agonies.
Nothing was inconsequential here. Except perhaps, Todd Pickett. And if that was the case, then he wasn’t about to dispute the point. He would not wish anything here other than the way it was, including — for the first time in his life — himself.
This thought — that he was finally at peace with himself — came over him like a breaking wave, cooling a long and exhausting fever. If he was nothing here, he thought, except the eyes with which these strangenesses could be glorified, then that suited him fine. And if in the end the witnessing burned him up, and made an end to him, that was fine too; perfectly fine, to die here, watching this shining world. It would hear no complaint from him.
“You like it?”
Ah, there was Katya. Off to his right, a little distance, staring up at the glamorous sky.
He followed her gaze, and saw something he’d missed until now: the sun was three-quarters eclipsed by the moon. That was why the light was so peculiar here; it was the light of a world in permanent semi-darkness; a murk which had inspired everything that lived here to catch its own particular fire. To snatch every last gleam of light out of the air and magnify it; to be its own exquisite advertisement.
“Yes,” he said to her, hearing something very close to tears in his voice. “I like it very much.”
“Not everybody does, of course,” she said, glancing over at him. “Some I brought here were so afraid that they ran. And of course, that’s not a very smart thing to do here.”
“Why not?”
She wandered over to him, assessing him as she did so, as though to see if he was telling the truth, and that he really liked what he saw. Apparently satisfied, she laid a light kiss on his cheek: it almost felt as though she was congratulating him. Coming here had been a test, he realized; and he’d passed.
“You see over there, just beyond the hill? The deep forest there?”
“Yes.”
“Then you also see the horsemen coming through the trees?”
“They’re the reason we shouldn’t run?”
“They are.”
“Why?”
“They’re hunters. The Duke Goga, who leads them, counts all these lands as his own.”
“They’re getting closer.”
“Yes they are.”
“How is that possible?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean: how is it possible that they’re getting closer to us? They’re in the walls.”
“Is that what you think?” she said, coming closer to him. “Is that what you really believe?”
He stood still for a moment, and listened to his heart. What did his heart tell him? The wind gusted, cold against his face. It was not a Californian wind. Overhead, the sun remained eclipsed, though he knew there was no possible way to see the sky from this deep a place in the house.