Perhaps there’s some way I could just sneak by whatever it is.
You’d have to leave the trail to do that, Frakir replied, and since the trail does run through the circle of stones where it’s coming from, I’d say no.
Nobody told me I couldn’t leave the trail. Do you have any instructions to that effect?
I know you are supposed to follow the trail. I’ve nothing specific concerning the consequences of leaving it, though.
Hm.
The way curved to the right, and I followed it. It ran directly into the massive circle of stones, and though I slowed my pace, I did not deviate. I studied it as I drew near, however, and noted that while the trail entered; there, it did not emerge again.
You’re right, Frakir observed. Like the den of the dragon.
But we’re supposed to go this way.
Yes.
Then we will.
I’d slows to a walk by then, and I followed the shining way between two gray plinths.
The lighting was different within the circle from without. There was more of it, though the place was still a study in black and white, with a fairyland sparkle to it. For the first time here I saw something that appeared to be living. There was something like grass underfoot; it was silver and seemed to be studded with dewdrops.
I halted, and Frakir constricted in a very odd fashion-less a warning, it seemed, than a statement of interest. Off to my right was an altar-not at all like the one over which I had vaulted back in the chapel. This one was a rude slab of stone set atop a couple of boulders. No candles, linens, or other ecclesiastical niceties kept company with the lady who lay atop it, her wrists and ankles bound. Because I recalled a similar bothersome situation in which I had once found myself, my sympathies were all with the lady-white-haired, blackskinned, and somehow familiar-my animus with the peculiar individual who stood behind the altar, faced in my direction, blade upraised in his left hand. The right half of his body was totally black; the left, blindingly white. Immediately galvanized by the tableau, I moved forward. My Concerto for Cuisinart and Microwave spell would have minced him and parboiled him in an instant, but it was useless to me when I could not speak the guide words.
I seemed to feel his gaze upon me as I raced toward him, though one side of him was too dark and the other too bright for me to know for certain. And then the knife hand descended and the blade entered her breast beneath the sternum with an arcing movement. At that instant she screamed, and the blood spurted and it was red against all those blacks and whites, and I realized as it covered the man’s hand that had I tried, I might have uttered my spell and saved her.
Then the altar collapsed, and a gray whirlwind obliterated my view of the entire tableau. The blood swirled through it to a barber pole-like effect, gradually spreading and attenuating to turn the funnel rosy, then pink, then faded to silver, then gone. When I reached the spot, the grasses sparkled, sans altar, sans priest, sans sacrifice.
I drew up short, staring.
“Are we dreaming?” I asked aloud.
I do not believe I am capable of dreaming, Frakir replied.
“Then tell me what you saw.”
I saw a guy stab a lady who was tied up on a stone surface, Then the whole thing collapsed and blew away. The guy was black and white, the blood was red, the lady was Deirdre-
“What? By God, you’re right! It did look like her-in negative. But she’s already dead-“
I must remind you that I saw whatever you thought you saw. I don’t know what the raw data were, just the mixing job your nervous system did on them. My own special perceptions told me that there were not normal people but were beings on the order of the Dworkin and Oberon figures that visited you back in the cave.
An absolutely terrifying thought occurred to me just then. The Dworkin and Oberon figures had had me thinking briefly of three-dimensional computer simulations. And the Ghostwheel’s shadow-scanning ability was based on digitized abstractions of portions of Pattern I believed to be particularly concerned with this quality. And Ghost had been wondering-almost wistfully, it now seemed-concerning the qualifications for godhood.