'In fact,' said Hercуl, as if no one had just bellowed at the top of her lungs, 'I've heard of you already, Pathkendle. Dr. Chadfallow says you're a natural scholar. He has spoken of you for years, but I never imagined he would arrange for us all to sail on Chathrand together.'
'He's a friend of Dr. Chadfallow?' demanded Thasha incredulously.
'No,' said Pazel. 'Not anymore.'
'Do not condemn Ignus Chadfallow for the nation he was born into,' said Hercуl. 'True friendship is not a thing given lightly, nor should it be lightly tossed away.'
'Tell that to him,' said Pazel.
'You have a sharp tongue,' said Hercуl, 'but I know a little of your reasons for it. Do me a favor, now that I've rescued you from both Thasha and your shipmates: tell me exactly what's wrong with you.'
Pazel looked up at the kindly but piercing gray eyes. If his evasions had not fooled Thasha, they had no chance with this man. So for the second time in ten days, he did what he had long sworn never to do: he told strangers about his Gift.
'Or curse, as you say,' he added. 'I always imagined-from the stories in books, and Mother's stories, too-that magic would feel like a thunderclap. In fact it's more like catching a cold. You know when a fever starts, and it feels as if some army's come in through your ears and is burning up your insides, one room at a time? Well, in my case it's a good army, at first. If I need to speak Augronga, it gives me Augronga. If I look at the Chathrand's escutcheon, it tells me what I'm reading. And I never forget, even after the mind-fits.'
'How many languages have you learned this way?' asked Thasha, still glowering.
'Twenty.'
She gave him a skeptical smile-did she think he was joking? — and then asked him his age in Opaltik, which Lorg Daughters study as one more way to pass the years before marriage. When Pazel answered instantly, she tried something much more difficult: a nursery rhyme from the Ulluprid Isles, taught to her years ago by Syrarys. Even before it ended she knew he understood, for he looked still more flustered and uncomfortable. The rhyme was 'My Darling Sailor.'
'If only we could show him to Ramachni,' said Thasha. She glanced at the clock on her dresser. Then her eyes grew wide. 'Hercуl! It's open!'
Hercуl had not noticed the clock face either. 'He is aboard, then! Did you see him, Pathkendle?'
'He's a mink,' added Thasha helpfully.
Pazel started. 'Then I wasn't dreaming. You mean he's a woken animal? A real one? And he belongs to you?'
'One does not own a woken beast,' said Hercуl severely, 'except as a slave-keeper.'
'He's not really a mink,' Thasha said. 'In his own world he's a bald old man.'
'Ramachni is much more than that,' said Hercуl, smiling a little now.
'Of course,' said Thasha. 'He's a great mage, and he's been visiting me for years by crawling through my clock.'
Pazel looked from girl to man to clock, and back again.
'Have a look,' said Hercуl. 'But touch nothing, and make no sound.'
Gingerly, Thasha took hold of the clock's moon-face and opened it wide. And behind it was a tunnel.
At least, tunnel was the word that leaped to mind, although pipe might have been more accurate. Pazel looked, blinked and looked again, and found he could not tear his eyes away. He, who lived with magic in his blood, was seeing magic today for the first time.
And what a sight it was. Just inches wide, the tunnel ran straight through the clock and onward-forty feet onward-through wall and adjacent cabin, and the cabin beyond that. It should have ended, roughly, in the center of the first-class dining room. A cold draft flowed from its mouth, carrying a hint of cedar smoke and a few grains of dark sand that fell from the clock to scatter among Thasha's rings and bracelets.
But at the same time the tunnel was not there. He passed his hand behind the clock and felt nothing, looked and saw nothing but the plain cabin wall. The tunnel only existed within the clock.
And at its far end there glowed a room. It was just visible, sharp and tiny, like the view through the wrong end of a telescope: crackling firelight, a three-legged stool, a bookshelf. Just that, and the sound of a desolate wind that was not blowing around the Chathrand.
He straightened, gaping, and Thasha returned the clock face to its just-open position.
'Ramachni's Observatory. That's what he calls it.'
'Where… where is it?'
'In the mountains of another world.'
'His world?'
She nodded. 'I've been there. In a manner of speaking.' She laughed. 'There's a secret way to open the clock, and they didn't think I knew it. But I'd watched Hercуl do it once, pretending to be asleep, and the next night I felt like talking to Ramachni before bed, and opened the clock myself. He wasn't home, but I left the clock ajar. And that night I passed along the tunnel somehow and stepped into the Observatory. I saw wonders-a sleeping cat with smoke puffing from its nose, a bookshelf that became a wall each time I put out my hand, a great glass house full of trees and flowers, hot as anything, but built on a snowpeak.
'Suddenly Ramachni was standing among the flowers. He looked quite human. He offered me a strawberry, and when I'd eaten it he asked me to take a walk with him. We passed through the glass house and into a kind of dark toolshed, very cold-the floor was a mix of snow and sand-and then he threw open the far door and there were the peaks, huge frozen peaks all around me, and the air was thin and icy. We stepped out and I realized we were on the very edge of a cliff. So high, Pazel-I can't begin to tell you how high and terrifying it was. The wind was screaming and the ground was slick ice under my night socks, but you could see forever, and there were creatures larger than whales in the distance, gliding among the clouds. And then he asked if I knew where home lay. I was in tears, but he laughed and covered my eyes. He said the tunnel was not a plaything, and that I might be able to visit him by it just twice more in my lifetime. Then he took his hand away and I was back in my room in Etherhorde.'
'Thasha has a most spectacular dream-life,' said Hercуl.
'It wasn't a dream,' she said fiercely. 'My socks were wet afterward.'
'But why does he visit you?' Pazel asked. 'You particularly, I mean?'
A brief silence: Thasha looked at Hercуl. 'They won't tell me,' she said at last.
'All that I am given to tell, I tell,' said Hercуl. 'Complain to the mage of his mysteries, once we find him. But just now, boy, I would like to test your Gift a little further.'
He then asked Pazel questions in Tholjassan and Talturik and Noonfirthic, and when Pazel answered each in turn Thasha laughed in delight. Pazel smiled despite himself. She wasn't the only one with something special to her name.
'There's another thing,' he said. 'Sometimes I hear better than normal. Just voices-and come to think of it, just translated voices. If you went into the next room and whispered in Arquali, I wouldn't hear a thing, because I learned Arquali before my mother cast the spell. But I would hear perfectly if you spoke in, say, Nileskchet-'
He stopped dead.
Hercуl's eyes narrowed.
Bewildered, Thasha looked from one to the other. 'Nileskchet. That's a funny name for a language. I've never even heard of it. What is Nileskchet?'
'Yes,' said Hercуl, in a changed voice. 'Can you tell us that?'
Pazel knew he had made a terrible blunder. However kind these new friends appeared, they would never forgive him for associating with crawlies. And what about the ixchel themselves? Even Diadrelu had promised to kill him if he revealed their presence.
'It's just some old language,' he stammered. 'I don't think anyone uses it today, except in poetry.'
Hercуl bent toward him, hawk-like. 'Do you, by any chance, enjoy Nileskchet poetry?'
'I've never heard any.'
'Few men have.'
'Why are you so strange all of a sudden, Hercуl?' said Thasha. 'We should be deciding what to do about him.'
Hercуl kept his eyes on Pazel for another long moment. Then at last his gaze softened and he sat up. 'True
