[“I don’t like this at all,” I said. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Carabosse, it will happen, whether we like it or not,” sighed Israfel. “It has been inevitable, ever since Elladine arrived. This world does not appear in our futures; we misinterpreted that fact, that’s all. We had no way of knowing.”
“I should have read all The Diaries,” I confessed. “I should have been more careful.”
“Shhh,” said Israfel. “Be ready to salvage what we can.…”]
I looked across at Constanzia, who shrugged. Evidently her father had gone further in The Diaries than she had. Following his urgent beckoning, we entered the castle and paraded down a long, stone-floored corridor between files of uniformed guardsmen, climbed several flights of rocky stairs which twisted and coiled about in the walls of the place, and arrived at last in a tower room set up for the study of astrology, alchemy, or some even more esoteric science. I stooped to one great brass telescope as we passed it, finding it focused upon the heights of Baskarone. The mechanism had not the power of Mama’s salve, but one could make out the effulgence of the place.
“At last,” the Viceroy said, lighting candles and setting alembics to bubbling. “At last,” as he thrust a sword through a ring and suspended both above a chair. “At last,” as he bustled about opening books to proper pages, laying out indescribable things upon a stone set in a pentacle. He motioned for Mama to seat herself in the chair. She looked at the suspended weapon with a suspicious eye, but complied even as she summoned me nearer, taking me firmly by the hand.
“If I am not mistaken,” she murmured. “The Viceroy is about to turn his universe inside out.”
[“This world has lasted for centuries,” I sighed. “Oh, Israfel, why. Why? Just when we had need of it.”
Israfel didn’t answer me. He had no time to answer.]
Various members of the Viceroy’s family were assigned parts in the rite. They were already well-rehearsed. The telescope was evidently part of the ritual, for it was sprinkled with liquids from the alembics, censered with fragrant and bitter smoke, and Mama was asked to put her eye to it as the final words of the spell or invocation were spoken. The words were in no language I knew. I could not even have begun to spell the sounds which issued in gutteral imperatives from the Viceroy’s throat.
Silence.
A wind came up from somewhere. Mama gripped my hand. A voice from behind us said, “May I drop you ladies somewhere?” I turned to see the ambassador from Baskarone, smiling at us both. Senora Carabosse stood at his side, looking like a rider whose horse had just died unexpectedly, her face a puzzle of chagrin and impromptu resolution. I looked back at the Viceroy, only to find him vanished, his place taken by an amount of empty and chilly air. So with Flatulina and the children. Constanzia whirled past, her hair a wheel of dark and light as she spun and was gone. She held out her hand toward me, her face pleading.
I cried out to her. “Constanzia …”
The ambassador shook his head. “Ambrosius Pomposus did not intend his imaginary world to exist forever. He included in his creation a procedure whereby the inhabitants, when they grew sufficiently bored, could accomplish the rite of dissolution. Some such rite is part of all creations, Beauty. Of Faery. Of the world. It is our misfortune that our own actions have helped un-create this one just now.”
He took Mama on one arm and me on the other and began to stride across the clouds that suddenly stretched before us, Senora Carabosse walking effortlessly beside. I thought, irrelevantly, that if she walked so easily, she could not be so old as I had previously thought. My fingers tingled where they touched the ambassador’s arm. I heard Mrs. Gallimar’s voice saying faintly to someone, “Such a lovely wine. Such a lovely, lovely wine,” and then came the retreating wail of the Stugos Queen. The clouds opened below us to let us see a great, edgeless river where a lonely boatman looked up from his oars and waved. Chinanga had departed, but the river was still there.
“The Styx was imagined before Chinanga,” said the ambassador. “It will be there through many creations yet.”
“Ylles, Israfel, if you would be so kind,” Mama said in a strained, polite voice.
“Glad to be of service, Elladine,” he replied. There was something weary and ironic in his voice.
We were very high up. For a moment I saw the beautiful heights of Baskarone, clear as day. Then they were gone, and so was he.
21
I write the truth when I say that Ylles is an almost-Baskarone. When one eats fairy fruit, one sees it as glorious, lovely, utterly beyond compare. Since I had eaten no fairy fruit prior to arrival, however, my first glimpse of it was disappointing. It looked rather like a waste of moorland with some pigpens and hovels scattered here and there. The moment we arrived, Mama darted away into the bushes, and Carabosse, who was standing quietly beside me with an expression of deep pain upon her old face, leaned forward and said, “Come see me as soon as you can, Beauty. Ask Puck to bring you.” Before I could ask her who Puck was, she took a step or two down the path toward some pigpens, sidled a little to the right and was gone. It was a
