Which faded almost at once into horrified silence. The sound of that roaring was still in our heads. Only very gradually did we perceive the other sound, the sound the mob had heard, reverberating, growing, a vibration loosed upon the city. From the north. The sound of the Shadowbell, going on, and on, and on, not dying but growing, louder with each moment, the dissonance keening in a knife-edge of noise, drowning the Eesties’ voices until it became the only sound, the only reality, driving the light before it as clean water is driven before the muddy flood. We watched as the light ran out of the city before the flood of shadow, as the white stairs crumbled, as the Tower shattered before that sound and fell.
And those who had cheered were crushed under stones, sprawled onto rippling pavement suddenly full of chasms. Roofs cracked and swayed, crumbled into shards and dust. Walls tumbled. Shadow filled the streets, fluttering, deadly shadow. Many of the Brotherhood fled, stupidly shrieking, leaving behind one figure to stand at the top of the stairs, swaying as the city died, its painted clown’s face staring down at Ganver, at me. What was it thinking? What had it really thought would happen? Was it so misled by its own ambition it could not have known what would occur here? I did not have long to wonder about it.
Some trick of the light made its painted face seem real, made the malice there seem to move. No matter whether the face was real or not, the thing itself was real enough, and it came for us, whirling down the shattering stairs like an avalanche of fury. It knew us. I clutched at Ganver and we went away, into the gray nothing.
“It saw you,” said Ganver. “As it saw me.”
“Were we there or not?” Peter asked in a breathless voice. “Sometimes we seem only to be watching history, sometimes we seem to be involved in it. How long ago was the Tower destroyed?”
“The Daylight Bell was destroyed some centuries ago,” it said as though beginning a chronicle. “First was the arrival of your people; then destruction and pain followed by the Battle of the Great Ones against your people, in which many of the great ones were destroyed; then the giving of the Talents; all these in a narrow space of years. Within one lifetime of your people, from the time you came, all these things occurred. . . .
“Much later came the blue crystals; then the destruction of the Tower. There were three irreplaceable treasures in the Tower of the Bell: the book from which the Shadowpeople sang; the lamp from which the light was spread; and the Bell itself. All destroyed when the Tower fell, as the great ones had been destroyed. Destruction and destruction. In my own memory, all these events were not long apart. In the eternal time of Lom, they were close indeed. . . .
“And since that time, the shadow has gathered with each ringing of the Shadowbell. It gathers most deeply here in the recollection of Lom, gathers here and flows from here. As for your being part of what you saw, yes, you were there. There are eddies in time. We Eesties move among memories, along the lines of thought. Sometimes we observe, sometimes we are there. Sometimes we participate. It is our movement in the Maze which recalls memory to Lom. It was your movement into the mind of Lom which recalled those memories. Our dance is the dance of recollection.
This seemed to me to be more poetry than practicality, but the sense of it was clear enough. The usual rules of cause and effect didn’t apply. This world we were in, this Maze, existed outside normal time. It had its own rules which even Ganver might not totally understand.
“There is one thing I do not perceive,” Ganver was saving to me now. “The Riddler, the Oracle, it wants to destroy you particularly, Jinian. Why?”
“I don’t know why! But I know you mustn’t let it happen, Ganver. If it wants to get me, it must have a reason connected with this evil thing it’s doing. And if you want to stop the evil, then you have to help me. That’s all there is to it.” I was as sure of that as I was of my own name.
“Ah, ah,” it said. “So I must help you. I have been told this by another of you, by others of you. I helped the one called Queynt. I helped the one called Mavin. I helped the one called Bartelmy, though she did not know it.”
“Bartelmy is my mother,” I said. “Mavin is Peter’s mother. Fate, Ganver. Do you believe in fate?”
“I have believed only in Lom. Is there something other than Lom?”
“I don’t know, Ganver. Truly I don’t. But at this moment, I think it would be wise for us to assume there is at least something else we can call upon. Call it fate or what-you-will, still we had better believe.”
The big old Eesty was silent so long I thought we had offended it mortally and it might not speak to us again. Finally, however, it said, “You accused me of complicity. Before we go further, tell me if you accuse me still?”
I couldn’t say anything. The old being was obviously so shattered by it all, it was hard for me to tell it what I really thought. Peter, however, seemed to have it well in hand. Of course, Peter was impervious to some of the feelings that had been floating around, which had cushioned him somewhat. Now he stood very straight on a heap of gray vacancy. I could visualize him in his own shape, his thumbs hooked into his belt as he sometimes posed when he was being judicious.
“I would not judge you wrong to have killed every man, woman, and
