She was looking down into blueness, a hundred or more blue-uniformed mages in a blue stone room clouded with rising blue smoke. The nacreous metal of the incense holders ranged in a double star around a space in the center was the only thing that was not blue, apart from hands and faces. Around the central space, the Brothers were standing in a complex zigzag pattern, some facing the center, some lined up sideways to it. As the High Head raised his sword-wand, they sang, long bass notes that vibrated through Flan’s knees on the floor and her chin on the coping, while the musical instruments, still out of sight underneath, jangled a bewildering shrillness around the song. The effect was to make Flan decidedly dizzy, and for the first time, she found she was ready to credit all this talk of vibrations in Arth.
She did not at first notice the young man being hustled through a narrow corridor between the standing mages. She saw him only when the blue-clad men leading him thrust him out into the star-space in the middle and hurriedly retired. Even then she had trouble recognizing him. He seemed dazed and his face was slack. As he staggered into the very center of the space, Flan saw that he was the young fellow who had been so cheerful and kind when they first arrived. Zillah’s friend. She forgot the name. She wondered what he had done — no, that was silly. It was just a question of who with. Zillah?
The mages began to move. Again Flan became fascinated. Each line of men took its own path of difficult curves and strange zigzags, wheeling smartly at the corners, emerging from the complex of movement at the edges to gesture, bend, and sidestep, then plunging back into what seemed a living, walking maze. They were making, Flan was astonished to see, actual, living sigils of power on the floor of the room. Signs she knew well and signs she had never before seen formed before her eyes, were marked by the deep notes of the song, ratified by the gestures of those mages at the edge, and then re-formed to a new sign. No doubt to the mages down there it was just a muddled sort of dance they had to learn, but from up here she could see lines and patterns of pure power. She could also see, quite as clearly, the mages who slipped up and muddled a gesture or muffed a turn, as many did. They were so slack. Tomorrow she would—
The young guy in the center fell heavily to the floor. Flan looked at him almost irritably, for distracting her from the faults of the dance. But what she saw stretched her eyes wide and kept them that way, strained open and staring as if they would never shut again. Blood ran from a knuckle she did not know she was biting. He was melting. No, changing. Under her stretched eyes, he rose into gray, jellylike hummocks, heaving and mounding and shifting, trickling pulpily, until he was a big, slug-colored shape like a frog or a toad, except that, like a slug, the surface of him ran with some kind of slime, glistening stickily in the blueness.
The creature lay humped and pulsing faintly while the dance went on around it, quicker now, with fewer pauses between the deep, sung notes. Smoke gusted upward and stung Flan’s staring eyes. Her hair moved and crackled, and she smelled ozone mixed with the smoke. Through the blue wreathing haze, she saw the reptile shape writhe. The slime on it was oozing to big, frothy bubbles, which burst and re-formed and burst again. It flung one desperate paw-thing out as it writhed, clutching for a hold on the smooth flagstones. God, he was in agony! It was like pouring salt on a slug. He was twisting all over.
He was gone.
Just like that, there was an empty, stained space on the floor. Oh my God! What a way to kill someone! Flan’s legs jumped straight, ready to carry her away, quick. She knew she was going to throw up. But the ritual was by no means over. Like the rituals she had taken part in at home, it had to be wound down. She was forced to wait there, retching, gulping against her bloodied knuckle, while the lines of power were drawn in reverse, and the music stopped and each mage relaxed and turned to his neighbors, chatting, laughing a little, as if this were all in a normal day’s work. Normal! By Flan’s watch, the entire ritual had taken a bare twenty minutes, but it felt like a lifetime. She scrambled up and ran. When the veil still did not let her through, she was sick on the veil, uncaring, and it parted with a shiver as if it were disgusted. Flan bolted forth and ran again.
3
Zillah went like a sleepwalker through bare blue halls and down impossible ramps. Marcus, she could feel, was a long way below and quite safe. She would go there presently. For now her mind was straining to contain that dissolute image in the High Head’s mirror. When she tried to put Mark as she had known him beside this other, this Herrel, it seemed almost more than she could do. Mark’s image, like a pale moon, would keep sliding behind Herrel’s bearded face, and only appearing dimly through. She supposed it must be that they were both only half the person they should be. Mark was all solemnity, seriousness, and responsibility, and the face in the mirror had nothing but humor, wickedness, and sly malice. Both half the person — both halves of a person. Well, there was no knowing about analogues, of course, but if you thought of them as identical twins — Analogues were like twins in a way — twins brought up apart from each other — the same person put in a different environment, so that different aspects of his personality were enhanced. No, because it was known that identical twins turned out quite alike all the same. With these two, Zillah thought that each must have repressed at least half of himself. Mark certainly had. Zillah bitterly recalled her vain search for humor in Mark — the sheer fun that instinct told her was really part of Mark’s character — and her frustration when he seemed to be constantly withholding it from her. With Herrel, she suspected she would search equally vainly for any kind of seriousness — but it must be there! Yet now Zillah could not rid herself of a feeling that there had never been any humor in Mark to find. She was sure of it, having seen this Herrel — as if she had stumbled on the missing half of Mark.
At this, it came to her like a bolt of electricity, Why not?
The question jolted her out of her sleepwalking state. She looked up and around the curved blue corridor where she found herself, to find it ringing faintly, as though the bolt of electric thought had somehow struck it physically. She could smell ozone.
And here, around the corner, just as if the striking bolt had called her up, Flan Burke came hastening. Or maybe a better word was fleeing, or scuttling. Flan’s face was pale, and her manner uncharacteristically dithery. “Oh, thank God!” she said. “Zillah! I thought I felt you around. Zillah, something awful’s happened to your friend — I’ve just seen the nastiest little ritual — he was your friend — I mean that dapper little fellow with the slightly smart-ass air — you know—”
“Tod,” said Zillah. “You mean Tod?”
“Yes, I think I mean him — the other one you go round with apart from the centaur boy and the kid with big feet—”
“Yes. Tod,” said Zillah. Flan’s eyes had dark bags under them and she reeked of sweat. What was the matter with her?
“Yes, well, High Horns and my Ritual boys have just disappeared him,” Flan said. She gulped back a retch and leaned against the wall, shaking. Her teeth chattered. “It was — awful. They dragged him to the middle — he was looking absolutely stunned — I don’t know what they did to him — not before, I mean. The ritual was all living lines of power — I saw that — and it was quite short really — it just felt like several lifetimes. But, Zillah, first he — sort of changed — he kind of melted into something gray and lumpy and slimy — and they boiled him — I knew it hurt — and then he went. He wasn’t there anymore, Zillah. Then they all packed up as if it was all just one more job in the day and left. After that I didn’t care if High Horns saw me. I ran. But, Zillah, what did they do?”