He agreed, “Awk,” at once and held out his hand to be taken.
“I’ll come too,” Judy said, somewhat to Zillah’s surprise.
The three of them went out through the almost unfelt folds of the doorway into the blue corridors beyond. Judy said nothing and seemed to rely on Zillah to choose a direction. Zillah let Marcus tug her the way he wanted to go. She rather thought he was making for the kitchens.
If he was, Marcus had made a mistake. He stumped doggedly up one of the circling ramps, towing Zillah, with Judy sleepwalking behind, and plunged through a wide area of veiling at the top. The brightness and blueness on the other side made Zillah blink. There was a smell of asepsis. In great busy quiet, mages in pale blue gowns were working beside a sort of bier on which lay a young man with a handsome, friendly face, evidently dead. Because his fair hair was trailing backward, it took Zillah a second to recognize Tam Fairbrother.
Marcus knew him at once. “Dib!” he cried in desperate sorrow, and advanced with one hand out and his face crumpled for crying. “Dib dead!”
The tallest mage whirled around. Before Zillah could move, he had fielded Marcus with large, gentle hands — hands from which a blue shimmering stained with blood rapidly disappeared as they met Marcus — and turned him back toward Zillah. “I don’t think this is quite the right moment to bring the child in here,” he said, looking down on her with awkward shy firmness.
Zillah recognized the curiously small, boylike face of the head doctor-mage. What was his name? Edward. He was nice and he seemed to like her. This made her feel truly bad about bursting in here. “I’m so sorry. Marcus just — just brought us here. I didn’t know — I didn’t realize you’d be doing autopsies. I’ll — I’ll take him away at once.”
“For now. You’re welcome to bring him back in a day or so,” Edward said. He made it sound as if it were all his fault. Then, as Zillah started for the door with Marcus, and Judy turned dumbly to go with them, his large hand fell on Judy’s shoulder, stopping her. “She’d better stay,” he said. “She needs more healing than I knew.”
Before Zillah was aware, she was out on the ramp again without Judy, rather taken aback at the power of this medical mage. At another time she might have been almost destroyed with embarrassment — blundering in on an autopsy like that! — but Marcus claimed her full attention. He was very upset. “Dib!” he said desolately, over and over, as he stumped downward.
Zillah had not realized even that Marcus knew Tam, and she certainly had had no idea that he liked Tam enough to give him a special name. As far as she knew, Tam had twice, but only twice, briefly visited Amanda, but evidently that had been plenty of time for him to make a hit with Marcus.
“Dib’s all right,” she explained as they stumped she knew not whither, except that Marcus firmly led her downward. “He doesn’t hurt, Marcus. It’s like being asleep, only better,” she said, and found herself saying all the things adults do say to a child confronted by death. And they were so inadequate. Marcus had known instantly that Tam was dead. He always knew so much more than she gave him credit for.
They came down to another wide veiling, blue fluting filling a sizable archway, which gave way into a sudden open space. Zillah was relieved. Here was something that might distract Marcus. The large, open square she had seen from the orbiting capsule stretched in front of them. It was possibly a parade ground, for it was nothing but a stretch of gravel with one carefully tended strip of grass around the perimeter. Here, sure enough, Marcus forgot his sorrow and ran gleefully out into the large, sandy space. Zillah followed, pretending to chase him—“I’ll catch you, I’ll catch you!” — to keep his mind on other things. She had to quell an attack of some kind of agoraphobia as she ran. Blue sky was overhead. The blue buildings around the square, reduced by distance to the height of cottages, might have concealed landscape beyond, except that she knew they did not. The blue sky was all there was beyond them. She had to keep her eyes on Marcus’s small trotting figure, and even that became the center of vertigo. For a moment the whole flat space swung upside down, and Marcus was trotting across a ceiling.
It was a parade ground. With immense relief, her eye caught a disciplined group of blue uniforms over in the right-hand corner. They were just breaking ranks after some kind of exercise and streaming toward another of those veiled archways. Some were detaching themselves in twos and threes and making for other exits. The sight helped a little. She now saw everything at a steep slant. No, it was worse. She was absolutely going to fall. But Marcus had changed direction and was now running toward three of those detached figures, arms stretched out, for some reason in an ecstasy of delight. Zillah swerved after him. Her knees bent and she had to restrain an urge to trail her knuckles along the gravel.
“Ort! Ort!” Marcus was shouting.
It was the centaur again, now wearing a smart blue jacket on his human torso. The degree of illusion in this place became apparent when Marcus pounded up to the centaur and his companions in remarkably few strides. Or maybe the centaur moved swiftly to meet him.
“Ort! Ort!” Marcus cried, relief and joy all over him. Zillah realized that it was in hopes of meeting the centaur again that Marcus had gone to that medical place. Perhaps he had even been afraid that the centaur was dead too.
The centaur reached down and swung Marcus up level with his face. “How did you know I came from the Orthe?” he asked, through Marcus’s squeals of pleasure. He was quite as delighted as Marcus. His pale, mottled face was shining.
Zillah, as she sloped up, decided it would not be tactful to point out that Marcus had been saying something else.
“You’ve got it wrong, Josh,” Tod said, with his arm affectionately over the centaur’s flank. “The little fellow was actually calling you a horse.” Josh laughed. Tod nodded cheerfuly at Zillah. “Nice to see you again. What’s wrong? This place giving you the slopes?”
Zillah came upright again in the greatest relief. “Yes, but I’m all right now.” Tod had made it all right, by being so normal.
“It does that to me too,” said the third one of the group, leaning on Josh’s other side. “All the open places give me the slopes. That’s because space really is bent here, you know. The more of it you can see, the more it shows.”
Zillah looked at him with interest. He was not as odd as the centaur, but she could not help feeling he might in fact be even odder. He looked human, skinny and fair, but there was a sort of inner shining to him, and his eyes were tremendous — as were his hands and feet. Like an undernourished version of Michelangelo’s David, she thought.
“Let me introduce,” said Tod. “The fellow keeping Josh upright on the other side is Philo. He’s a Peleisian gualdian, if that means anything to you. The centaur is Horgoc Anphalemos Galpetto-Cephaldy, or Josh to his friends.”
“Pleased to meet you, lady.” Josh deftly swung Marcus around to sit astride at his back, where Marcus nestled against the blue jacket looking blissful, while Josh held out a large, pale hand to Zillah. It was warm when Zillah took it, horse-warm. The young-man-seeming part of him was all over larger than human. It would have to be, she thought, to match the horse part. The patch that had covered his eye the day before was gone, showing healing cuts above and below, although the cuts were hard to see for the big liver-colored horse-mottle that crossed his face and spread into his hair.