“Can you hear me?”
If she could, she made no sign of it. Seconds passed into minutes and still she was a wall, his questions fracturing against her and falling into silence.
And then she said: “I’m here.” Her voice was insubstantial, like a foreign station found on a radio; words from some unfixable place.
“With him?” he asked.
“Yes.”
No prevarication now, he charged himself. She’d gone to the European, as he’d asked. Now he had to use her courage as efficiently as possible and call her back before anything went wrong. He asked the most difficult question first, and the one he most needed an answer to.
“What is he, Carys?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
The tip of her tongue flickered out to spread a film of spit across her lips.
“So dark,” she muttered.
It was dark in him: the same palpable darkness as in the room at Caliban Street. But, for the moment at least, the shadows were passive. The European didn’t expect intruders here. He’d left no guardian terrors at the gates of his brain. She stepped deeper into his head. Darts of light burst at the corners of her thought’s sight, like the colors that came after she’d rubbed her eyes, only more brilliant and more momentary. They came and went so quickly she was not certain if she saw anything in them or illuminated by them, but as she progressed and the bursts became more frequent, she began to see patterns there: commas, lattices, bars, dots, spirals.
Marty’s voice interrupted the reverie, some foolish question that she had no patience with. She ignored it. Let him wait. The lights were becoming more intricate, their patterns cross-fertilizing, gaining depth and weight. Now she seemed to see tunnels and tumbling cubes; seas of rolling light; fissures opening and sealing; rains of white noise. She watched, entranced by the way they grew and multiplied, the world of his thought appearing in flickering Heavens above her; falling in showers on her and about her. Vast blocks of intersecting geometries thundered over, hovering inches above her skull, the weight of small moons.
Just as suddenly: gone. All of them. Darkness again, as relentless as ever, pressed on her from every side. For a moment she had the sensation of being smothered; she grabbed for breath, panicking.
“Carys?”
“I’m all right,” she whispered to the distant inquirer. He was a world away, but he cared for her, or so she dimly remembered.
“Where are you?” he wanted to know.
She didn’t have a clue, so she shook her head. Which way should she advance, if at all? She waited in the darkness, readying herself for whatever might happen next.
Suddenly the lights began again, at the horizon. This time-for their second performance-pattern had become form. Instead of spirals she saw rising columns of burning smoke. In place of seas of light, a landscape, with intermittent sunshine stabbing distant hillsides. Birds rose on burning wings then turned into leaves of books, fluttering up from conflagrations that were even now flaring on every side.
“Where are you?” he asked her again. Her eyes roved maniacally behind her closed lids, taking in this burgeoning province. He could share none of it, except through her words, and she was dumb with admiration or terror, he couldn’t tell which.
There was sound here too. Not much; the promontory she walked on had suffered too many ravages to shout. Its life was almost out. Bodies sprawled underfoot, so badly disfigured they might have been dropped out of the sky. Weapons; horses; wheels. She saw all of this as if by a show of lurid fireworks, with no sight glimpsed more than once. In the instant of darkness between one light-burst and the next the entire scene would change. One moment she was standing on an open road with a naked girl running toward her, bawling. The next, on a hillside looking down on a razed valley, snatched through a pall of smoke. Now a silver birch copse, now not. Now a ruin, with a headless man at her feet; again, not. But always the fires somewhere near; the smuts and the shrieks dirtying the air; the sense of relentless pursuit. She felt it could go on forever, these scenes changing before her-one moment a landscape, the next an atrocity-without her having time to correlate the disparate images.