A twilight era began, in which I rose and walked about the several oval rooms. I was not sure how many rooms there were, sometimes three, sometimes seven. Sometimes it seemed they were endless and without number. I bathed many times each day in the sunken bath of black marble, which seemed like a sleepy tomb, and was oddly pleasant to me. I looked often from the two long windows with which each of the rooms was graced. I could not understand the view-pale glow, soft white mists, dim golden columns, very thin and tall, and clusters of green foliage that shed a constant and unchanging veridian light into the rooms. There were no sunsets and no dawns. There was no time at all.
It was a long while later that I began to see my apartments for what they were.
There were four rooms in all, each oval, and each similar to the one preceding and the one following. They were built in a circular chain about an inner space onto which the tall windows looked, and one could therefore pass from the first room to the second, from the second to the third, from the third to the fourth, and from the fourth back into the original and first. Each was hung and ornamented ,in costly black materials. Black smooth onyx things stood ready to be caressed, carvings of animals and swans. A black and muted silver mosaic on the floor, black gauze draperies. On the ebony tables, the sudden white luminance of huge alabaster lamps, which the woman lit sometimes, randomly, from tapers. Beyond my windows, a petrified garden of carved green jade,
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glowing and misty from unimaginable sources. How the rooms were ventilated, I do not know. There was no access to the open except the single door through which the woman came. I examined it in her absence and found it to be locked. There were two small grooves on the surface; I touched them but there was no response. I was shut, like a rare insect, into a beautiful prison, and left there to be observed, perhaps passionlessly dissected at my keeper’s will.
A new obsession grew on me-that there was some hidden means for watching me. I questioned the woman, and found she would not answer. In frustrated anger I struck her across the face. It might have been a doll I struck.
The day after that-I say a day, I mean one of those unknown units that followed sleep-she brought me undergarments, a long dress of black silk with tight waist and sleeves, a girdle of golden links each shaped like a three-winged leaf, and a golden mask with the face of a cat. She set them down on my bed and left me at once.
When she was gone, I examined these things, mostly the mask. It was very beautiful and lifelike. Around the widerimmed eyes were set translucent green gems, and there were no glass eye-pieces to hide the human organs behind them. The pointed ears were hung with swinging, clashing earrings of golden drops and discs, each with a nugget of emerald burning dependent at the center. From the crown of the mask hung long tails of stiff gold threads, plaited to resemble hair.
There was no mirror in the apartments, which had pleased me, I, who never dared look in one. Now, almost hypnotized by these strange clothes, I longed for the means to see myself dressed in this way. Yet I did not dress. I stood, naked as I had been since waking here, afraid of a possession overcoming me.
I walked to the door and tried it for the thousandth time. It did not yield.
I went to bathe.
I lay a long while in the scented water, then rose at last, and found the woman had come back. She dried me, then held out the black silk dress. It seemed very natural then that I should put it on, and the golden belt also. Now the mask was in her hands. I took it, and at once she hid her eyes in her palms and turned away.
I tore the hated shireen from my face, and put on the mask of the cat.
Incredible, it was beaten so thin and fine it rested on my
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face lighter than a shadow. The golden plaits swung into my hair. A new strength flowed into me. At once I felt as I had done on the causeway, when I had said to Vazkor’s men, “Will you kill me again?”
I caught the woman’s shoulder so hard she cried out at the pain.
“Take me through the door.”
Somehow she, squirmed from my grasp, and ran away from me, but I caught her at the door as she opened it with a sideways pressure of her smallest fingers in the two grooves I had noted earlier. The door swung open. I seized her arm and went through to the other side, pulling her with me as my captive.
3
Beyond the rooms, a dark corridor, shimmering like glass, glass globe-lamps set in the walls.
I pushed her down it, walking a little behind her now, an edge of her sleeve in my fingers. At the end of the corridor a single arch filled by a gold-worked curtain. We went through into another black room, this time very vast, echoing, and oddly chill with size. Enormous basalt columns reared toward the ceiling. It was utterly dark, only one tiny glowing point of light elusive between the pillars, some way ahead.
Suddenly my hand was seized and pulled from the woman. A shadow slid closer to me, and turned me toward itself, even as she fled from me, swift as the moth she resembled.
“So, you’re ready now,” Vazkor said.
His voice, the voice of Darak, had grown strange to me in the time I had not been with him. I could not see his face, yet I could feel the pressure of his hand on mine.
“Come with me,” he said.
I could not bear the touch of his familiar-unfamiliar hand. I drew mine away.
“Where is this place? And what is it?”
“Come with me, and I can show you.”
He walked away from me, expecting me to follow, but it was hard to do it in the blackness, now that I did not have his hand to guide me. I had felt sure enough before I found him here. Now I was not so sure. There was a fierce terror in me that his being would absorb mine; I had known this fear
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with Darak but neither so intensely nor in a manner so selfunderstood.
We stood in an aisle, slightly sloping upward. Down the aisle, onto our closed faces of wolf and cat, the dull light filtered. There was a tall veiled shape-a statue of gold, glittering faintly under its covering. Before it, the block of an altar from which rose a great basalt cup. In the cup, a flickering, ever-changing light.
How well-known to me.
Here was Karrakaz. So near. Yet I heard no voice, felt no sensation.
“Here then,” I whispered.
“An ancient altar,” he said. “I have kept the flame burning for them, as it burns in all the great temples of the Cities.”
He went close to it. I followed him. I stared in at the twisting, phosphorescent flame. Did he have no sense of Evil near him?
“Look up,” he said.
I drew my eyes away, looked instead at the statue, and saw a metal woman in a black dress and the golden mask of a cat.
“You understand nothing,” he said. I thought I heard a slight contemptuous pleasure in his voice. “I must teach you about yourself. Goddess.”
So he taught me-their customs, their beliefs, their dark dreamings, and his own ambition which was to be mine as well. And he taught me how he would use me as the instrument of his power, like an ax, to hew out the way for him. Yet he taught me also, without intending it, that he feared me and my sudden coming, that he feared I should in the end be more than he was. And he taught me to fear him, too.
The City of Ezlann was old, as were all the Cities beyond the Water-which they called Aluthmis, after the Aluthmin, a blue stone mined thousands of years before their birth. And the mining of the stone, the building of the Cities had been in the time of the Great Ones. Now humans, who would not admit their humanity, lived there like the rats who invade foresaken houses. Yet not quite like that. How they came into possession of these places I did not know, nor were there records to tell me-only their legend. The legend said they carried the seed of the Great Ones, a mixed stock, part-god, part-human. They had rebuilt the cities exactly as they had been in the earlier time. They had learned the mechanisms of the Cities (although without properly understanding them, I