'I would like to go downstairs,' I said. 'To return to my own time.'
Master Ash said, 'I understand.'
'I wonder if you do. Your time, if I have heard you rightly, is that of this house's highest story, and you have a bed there, and other necessary things. Yet when you are not overwhelmed by your labors you sleep here, according to what you have told me. Yet you say this is nearer my time than your own.'
He stood up. 'I meant that I too flee the ice. Shall we go? You will want food before you begin the long trip back to Mannea.'
'We both will,' I said.
He turned to look at me before he started down the stair. 'I told you I could not go with you. You have discovered for yourself how well hidden this house is.
For all who do not walk the path correctly, even the lowest story stands in the future.'
I caught both his arms behind him in a double lock and used my free hand to search him for weapons. There were none, and though he was strong, he was not as strong as I had feared he might be.
'You plan to carry me to Mannea. Is that correct?'
'Yes, Master, and we'll have a great deal less trouble if you will go willingly.
Tell me where I can find some rope I don't want to have to use the belt of your robe.'
'There is none,' he told me.
I bound his hands with his cincture, as I had first planned. 'When we are some distance from here,' I said, '1 will loose you if you will give me your word to behave well.'
'I made you welcome in my house. What harm have I done you?'
'Quite a bit, but that doesn't matter. I like you, Master Ash, and I respect you. I hope that you won't hold what I am doing to you against me any more than I hold what you have done to me against you. But the Pelerines sent me to fetch you, and I find I am a certain sort of man, if you understand what I mean. Now don't go down the steps too fast. If you fall, you won't be able to catch yourself.'
I led him to the room to which he had first taken me and got some of the hard bread and a package of dried fruit. 'I don't think of myself as one anymore,' I continued, 'but I was brought up as ' It was at my lips to say torturer, but I realized (then, I think, for the first time) that it was not quite the correct term for what the guild did and used the official one instead, ' as a Seeker for Truth and Penitence. We do what we have said we will do.'
'I have duties to perform. In the upper level, where you slept.'
'I am afraid they must go unperformed.'
He was silent as we went out the door and onto the rocky hilltop. Then he said,
'I will go with you, if I can. I have often wished to walk out of this door and never halt.'
I told him that if he would swear upon his honor, I would untie him at once.
He shook his head. 'You might think that I betrayed you.'
I did not know what he meant.
'Perhaps somewhere there is the woman I have called Vine. But your world is your world. I can exist there only if the probability of my existence is high.'
I said, 'I existed in your house, didn't I?'
'Yes, but that was because your probability was complete. You are a part of the past from which my house and I have come. The question is whether I am the future to which you go.'
I remembered the green man in Saltus, who had been solid enough. 'Will you vanish like a soap bubble then?' I asked. 'Or blow away like smoke?'
'I do not know,' he said. 'I do not know what will happen to me. Or where I will go when it does. I may cease to exist in any time. That was why I never left of my own will.'
I took him by one arm, I suppose because I thought I could keep him with me in that way, and we walked on. I followed the route Mannea had drawn for me, and the Last House rose behind us as solidly as any other. My mind was busy with all the things he had told me and showed me, so that for a while, the space of twenty or thirty paces, perhaps, I did not look around at him. At last his remark about the tapestry suggested Valeria to me. The room where we had eaten cakes had been hung with them, and what he had said about tracing threads suggested the maze of tunnels through which I had run before encountering her. I started to tell him of it, but he was gone. My hand grasped empty air. For a moment I seemed to see the Last House afloat like a ship upon its ocean of ice.
Then it merged into the dark hilltop on which it had stood; the ice was no more than what I had once taken it to be a bank of cloud.
XVIII
Foila's Request
For another hundred paces or more, Master Ash was not entirely gone. I felt his presence, and sometimes even caught sight of him, walking beside me and half a step behind, when I did not try to look directly at him. How I saw him, how he could in some sense be present while in another absent, I do not know. Our eyes receive a rain of photons without mass or charge from swarming particles like a billion, billion suns so Master Palaemon, who was nearly blind, had taught me.
From the pattering of those photons we believe we see a man. Sometimes the man we believe we see may be as illusory as Master Ash, or more so.
His wisdom I felt with me too. It had been a melancholy wisdom, but a real one.
I found myself wishing he had been able to accompany me, though I realized it would have meant the coming
