whispered. “Kirishgan, I don’t know that you should give it to me. How can I keep from breaking it?”
“You cannot,” said the selk, “but surely you knew that already? We can possess a thing, but not its loveliness-that always escapes. Close your fist, lock your door, imprison the cherished thing in your home or heart. It makes no difference. When next you look, a part of what you cherished will be gone.”
“I’d like to give it to Thasha,” said Pazel on an impulse.
“A fine idea,” said Kirishgan. “I will send it to her, while your cure progresses. The message within is for all of you.”
Pazel carefully rolled the sphere back into his hands. “Thank you,” he said with feeling. “But Kirishgan, I still don’t understand what that spider had to do with my cure.”
“A great deal,” said Kirishgan. “Pazel, the medets exist in this world the way murths and spirits do: here and elsewhere at once, and detecting us as much by our spirits as our bodies. There was a reason for that bite, and you must seek it on the Floor of Echoes, or there can be no cure. The Actors will help you if they can-but the help of the medets is more important. They are expecting you, though you may not see them.”
He gestured at the door. “You may enter as soon as you like. Leave your boots; they will be returned to you when you exit Vasparhaven. And do not speak on the Floor of Echoes unless bidden to do so: that is essential.”
Pazel looked at him steadily. “This is a sort of test, isn’t it?”
“What isn’t, Pazel?”
“And does everyone who visits the Floor of Echoes take this test?”
Kirishgan nodded. “In one form or another. Tomorrow it will be my turn.” He gripped Pazel’s arm. “I must bid you farewell, sudden friend. Do not forget the heavens: that is what my people say. We are all young beneath the watchful stars. They will wait out our ignorance and errors, and perhaps even forgive them.”
Cradling the glass orb, he descended the stair. Pazel listened to his footsteps fade. It felt strange to be alone in this temple, inside a mountain, on the far side of the world from Ormael. Strange, and eerily peaceful. But he could not linger, he knew. Lifting the candle from the table, he walked to the door and swung it wide.
Another staircase rose before him. It was steep and built of ancient stone, and candles burned in puddles of wax on the crumbling steps, dwindling into the darkness above. Pazel tugged off his boots and set them outside the door.
The stones were wet and cold against his feet. The staircase curved and twisted, and soon Pazel knew that he had climbed the height of several additional floors. He glanced back, and saw to his great surprise that every candle he had passed was extinguished. He cupped his hand protectively around the one he bore.
The staircase ended, as it had begun, with a door, but this one stood open a few inches, and a brighter light was shining through the gap. Pazel crept forward and glimpsed a small fire crackling in a ring of stones. Figures crouched around it, and through their shoulders Pazel caught the flash of a crystal abdomen, the flicker of a ruby eye. Then the door creaked, and the figures leaped up and scattered into the darkness.
All but one. A young dlomic woman remained by the fire, wearing a pale peach-colored wrap that left her black arms bare to the shoulders, and a dark mask on the upper part of her face. She was holding a wide stone bowl over the flames. Of the spider Pazel saw no trace.
The woman beckoned him in, her silver eyes gleaming. Pazel stepped through the doorway, and found that he could see neither the ceiling nor any wall save that behind him. A strong draft, almost a wind, blew about them, making the fire dance and flare and shrink by turns. If he had not known better, Pazel would have thought that they were meeting not underground but on some desolate plain.
His candle went out. The woman held the bowl in one hand and with the other took his own, drawing him down to kneel across from her. As he did so a flute began to play in the darkness: a melancholy tune, full of loss and yearning; but somehow thankful all the same, as though there were gifts the music remembered. Pazel closed his eyes, and it seemed to him that the song drained some of the road-weariness from his body. There were other sounds from the shadows, now: a voice softly matching the flute, a repeated note from the quietest imaginable drum. The woman moved the bowl close to his chin.
“Breathe,” she said.
The bowl held a colorless liquid. He gave it an uncertain sniff, and the woman shook her head. She drew a deep breath, demonstrating, and rather stiffly Pazel imitated her. Whatever was in the bowl had no scent.
“Again,” said the woman; and, “Again,” once more. Still Pazel could not smell a thing, but all at once he realized that his eyes were watering-streaming, in fact. The woman leaned closer, her masked face glowing; Pazel blinked and scattered tears.
It was then that her eyes changed. Silver darkened suddenly to glossy black, and the pupils vanished altogether. The woman’s mouth opened, as though she were as startled as Pazel himself. “Nuhzat!” she said, and emptied the bowl into the fire.
The sudden steam burned Pazel’s eyes. He surged to his feet. It was pitch black, and hands were gripping him on all sides. The dlomic woman was standing before him, her bare feet atop his own. Then a hand daubed something cold and sticky on his eyelids, and Pazel found he could not open them. He wanted to shout aloud, tell them to stop-but Kirishgan had warned him to be silent, and he knew somehow that he must obey.
The woman removed her feet from atop his own; the hands abruptly withdrew. Pazel reached out, trying to find what had become of them. His hands met with nothing at all.
He groped forward, one step, then another. The stone floor pitched like a boat in a gale, and wild thoughts raced through his head. Nuhzat. The dlomic dream-state, the trance. Pazel was frightened, and furious-what was being done to him this time? Why didn’t anyone, ever, ask his consent?
I did, Pazel.
He whirled. That voice! Didn’t he know it? Had it really spoken aloud, or was it an echo in his mind? Whatever it was, it suffused him instantly with an almost unbearable mixture of sadness and hope. He walked forward, blind. Ramachni! he wanted to scream. Where are you?
Afterward it felt as if he wandered for an age on the Floor of Echoes. The mage’s voice called to him again, but now it was one among many: some kind, some desperate, some chuckling with hate. There were heady scents, frigid drafts. There were rough rock walls that ended suddenly in yawning spaces, and tight little rooms with strange objects that he explored with his fingers: tables, statues, a mute piano, an unstrung harp. He found a wooden box with hinges and a padlock, and from within it came a desperate thumping. He brought it close to his ear, and to his horror it was Chadfallow, Ignus Chadfallow, crying from within: Let me out! Let me out!
Time became slippery. One moment he would be creeping along with moss beneath his feet; the next he would find himself rushing headlong, with the sound of a panting animal close on his heels. He was often frightened. And yet in the worst moments, when he was close to falling or giving way to panic, he found the webbed hand of the dlomic woman in his own, and a little peace returned to him, and he went on.
Then all at once a different hand touched his shoulder, and his head was suddenly, perfectly clear. The hand moved to his face, and a warm, wet cloth rubbed his eyes. The sticky resin melted away. Pazel blinked, and found himself facing the Master Teller.
“Welcome back from blindness,” said the old dlomu. “Now I know that I was right to send you here, for the purpose I could not see before is revealed. You needed practice with the dark.”
Pazel shook his head.
“You don’t understand, of course,” said the Teller, smiling. “Never mind: you will.”
They were in a large, lavish, forbidding chamber, like the hall of some subterranean king. There was a stone table, a barren hearth, some hulking cabinets stuffed with books and scrolls. But dominating the chamber was a round pool. It was about a dozen feet wide, with a ring of stairs descending some five or six feet to the bottom, and the palest imaginable blue light that seemed to come from the water itself.
“You stand in the Ara Nyth, the ancient heart of Vasparhaven, and its most sacred chamber,” said the Master. “It is with the water of this pool that I bathed your eyes, and drew the last of the medet’s serum. The pool is fed by a spring deep beneath the lake: a spring fed in turn by the Nythrung, which some call the River of Shadows. Through blindness you have come here, protected by our Actors, but guided by your spirit alone. Therefore you may drink from the pool if you like, and become the first human to do so in a great many years. Or you may depart: turn your back, walk directly away, and leave Vasparhaven by the stairway ahead. Do you know your wish? You may speak now, but softly.”
Pazel realized he was blinking over and over. Nuhzat. The dream that was not a dream. He was trapped in it;
