But the illusions at work in this room of Katya's were of another order entirely. There was a force at work here that was both incredibly powerful and old; even venerable. It did not require electricity to fuel it, nor equations to encode it. The walls held it, with possessive caution, beguiling him by increments.
At first he could make virtually no sense of the images. It simply seemed that the walls were heavily stained. Then, as his eyes became accustomed to reading the surface, he realized he was looking at tiles, and that what he'd taken to be stains were in fact pictures, painted and baked into the ceramic. He was standing in a representation of an immense landscape, which looked more realistic the longer he looked at it. There were vast expanses of dense forests; there were stretches of sun-drenched rock; there were steep cliff-walls, their crannies nested by fearless birds; there were rivulets that became streams, in turn converging into glittering rivers, which wound their way towards the horizon, dividing into silver-fringed deltas before they finally found the sea. Such was the elaboration of the painting that it would take many hours of study, perhaps even days, to hope to discover everything that the painters had rendered. And that would only have been the case if the pictures had been static, which, as he was now astonished to see, was not the case.
There were little flickers of motion all around him. A gust of wind shook the tangle of a thicket; one of those fearless birds wheeled away from the cliff-face, three hunting dogs sniffed their way through the undergrowth, noses to the ground. "Katya ... ?" Todd said.
There was no reply from behind him (where he thought she'd last been standing); so he looked back. She wasn't there. Nor was the door through which he'd stepped to come into this new world. There was just more landscape: more trees, more rocks, more birds, wheeling.
The motion multiplied with every flicker of his gaze. There were ripples on the rivulets and streams, there were clouds over the sea, being hurried along by the same wind that filled the sails of the ships that moved below. There were men, too, all around. Riders, moving through the forest; some solitary, some in groups of three or four; one procession of five horses mounted by richly attired men, parading solemnly between the trees. And fishermen on the banks of the streams; and on little boats, bobbing around the sandbars at the delta; and in one place, inexplicably, two men laid out naked on a rock, and in another, far more explicable, another pair hanging from a tree, while their lynchers sat in the shade of the old tree they'd put to such guilty use, and looked out at the rest of the world as they shared a flagon of beer.
Again he looked around for Katya, but she wasn't to be seen. But she'd said she'd be close by, even if -- as now -- he couldn't see her. The room, he began to understand, had control of his eyes. He found his gaze repeatedly led away from where she might be, led skyward, to gawk at some passing birds (there were tiles on the vaulted roof, he saw; he could hear the squeak of the bird's wings as they passed overhead); led into the forest, where animals he could not name moved as if in some secret ceremony, and others fought; and others lay dead; and still others were being born. (Though like did not spring from like in this world. In one spot an animal the size and shape of a tiger was giving birth to half a dozen white lizards; in another a hen the size of a horse was retreating from her eggs in panic, seeing that they'd cracked open and were spilling huge blue flies.)
And still he kept looking. And still he kept seeing, and though there were horrors here, to be sure, nothing in him made him want to leave off his seeing.
There was a curious calm upon his soul; a kind of dreamy indifference to his own situation. If he'd reasoned this out perhaps he would have concluded that he wasn't afraid because none of this could possibly be real. But he did not reason it out. He was beyond reasoning at that moment. Beyond anything, indeed, but witnessing. He had become a living instrument; a flesh-and-blood camera, recording this wonderland. He kept turning on his heel, counter-clockwise, as sights caught his attention off to his left; and left again; and left again.
Everything here had a miraculous shine to it, as though whatever divinity had made it had an army of workers at His or Her command, perpetually polishing the world. Every leaf on every tree had its gloss; every hair on every mammal and every scale on every reptile had its sheen; every particle of dirt, down to the shit from the flea-infested backside of a boar, had a glamour all of its own. A rat sniffing in the carcass of a gored hound came away with drops of corruption on its whiskers as enchanting as a lover's eyes. The earth at his feet (yes, there were tiles there too, painted with as much love as forest or cloud) was a surfeit of glories: a worm his heel had half-killed was lovely in its knotted agonies.
Nothing was inconsequential here. Except perhaps, Todd Pickett. And if that was the case, then he wasn't about to dispute the point. He would not wish anything here other than the way it was, including -- for the first time in his life -- himself.
This thought -- that he was finally at peace with himself -- came over him like a breaking wave, cooling a long and exhausting fever. If he was nothing here, he thought, except the eyes with which these strangenesses could be glorified, then that suited him fine. And if in the end the witnessing burned him up, and made an end to him, that was fine too; perfectly fine, to die here, watching this shining world. It would hear no complaint from him.
"You like it?"
Ah, there was Katya. Off to his right, a little distance, staring up at the glamorous sky.
He followed her gaze, and saw something he'd missed until now: the sun was three-quarters eclipsed by the moon. That was why the light was so peculiar here; it was the light of a world in permanent semi-darkness; a murk which had inspired everything that lived here to catch its own particular fire. To snatch every last gleam of light out of the air and magnify it; to be its own exquisite advertisement.
"Yes," he said to her, hearing something very close to tears in his voice. "I like it very much."
"Not everybody does, of course," she said, glancing over at him. "Some I brought here were so afraid that they ran. And of course, that's not a very smart thing to do here."
"Why not?"
She wandered over to him, assessing him as she did so, as though to see if he was telling the truth, and that he really liked what he saw. Apparently satisfied, she laid a light kiss on his cheek: it almost felt as though she was congratulating him. Coming here had been a test, he realized; and he'd passed.
"You see over there, just beyond the hill? The deep forest there?"
"Yes."
"Then you also see the horsemen coming through the trees?"
"They're the reason we shouldn't run?"
"They are."
"Why?"
"They're hunters. The Duke Goga, who leads them, counts all these lands as his own."
"They're getting closer."
"Yes they are."
"How is that possible?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean: how is it possible that they're getting closer to us? They're in the walls."
"Is that what you think?" she said, coming closer to him. "Is that what you really believe?"
He stood still for a moment, and listened to his heart. What did his heart tell him? The wind gusted, cold against his face. It was not a Californian wind. Overhead, the sun remained eclipsed, though he knew there was no possible way to see the sky from this deep a place in the house.
"I'm in another world."
"Good," she said.
"And it's real."
"Again, good. And does it trouble you, to be in the middle of such a mystery?"
"No," he said. "I don't know why and I'm not sure I care."
She put her arms around him, holding him tighter than she'd held until now, and looked deep into his eyes, looking deeper than she'd ever looked. "It doesn't matter, my love. Whether it's in my head, or your head, or the head of God -- "