"The Mistress wants to see you," Musnakaff announced from the doorway.
"Good," she said, and started to rise. She instantly felt lighthearted.
"Boy, oh boy," she said, picking up her cup and peering into it. "That juice has got a kick to it."
Musnakaff allowed himself a smile. "It's moumingberry," he said. "Are you not familiar with it?" She shook her head, which was a mistake. Her senses swam.
"Oh Lord," she said, and started to sit down again. 'Maybe I should just wait a few minutes."
"No. She wants to see you now. Trust me, she's not going to give a shit if you're a little tipsy. She's scarcely ever sober herself." He came over to Phoebe, and persuaded her back to her feet. "Now remember what I told you-"
"King Texas... " Phoebe mumbled, still trying to order her thoughts.
"No!" he yelped. "Don't you dare mention him."
"What then?" she said.
"The vale of tears," he reminded her.
"Oh yes. I remember. The Cosm's a vale of tears." She repeated it to herself, just for safety's sake.
"Have you got it?"
"I've got it," she said.
Musnakaff sighed. "Well then," he said, "I can think of no excuse to put this off any further," and duly escorted her out of the kitchen, along the passageway and up the stairs to meet with the Mistress of the strange house.
Thou h the trees that bounded the shore of Ephemeris grew
9 so close together their exposed roots knotted like the fingers of praying hands, and the canopy overhead was so dense the sky was blotted out altogether, there was not a leaf, twig, or patch of moss that didn't exude light, which eased Joe's progress considerably. Once in the midst of the forest, he had to rely upon his sense of direction to bring him out the other side, which indeed it did. After perhaps half an hour the trees began to thin, and he stumbled into the open air.
There, a scene lay before him of such scale he could have stood and studied it for a week and not taken in every detail. Stretching in front from his feet for perhaps twenty miles was a landscape of bright fields and water-meadows, the former blazing green and yellow and scarlet, the latter sheets of silver and gold. Rising overhead, like a vast wave that had climbed to titanic height and now threatened to break over the perfection below, was a wall of darkness, which surely concealed the lad. It was not black, but a thousand shades of gray, tinged here and there with red and purple. It was impossible to judge the matter of which it was made. It had the texture of smoke in some places, in others it glistened like skinned muscle; in others still it divided in convulsions, and divided again, as though it were reproducing itself. Of the legion, or nation, that lurked behind it, there was no sign. The wave teetered, and teetered, and did not fall.
But there was another sight that was in its way more extraordinary still, and that was the city that stood in the shadow if this toppling sky: b'Kether Sabbat. The glory of the Ephemeris, Noah had called it and, had Joe'sjoumey taken him not one step closer to the city's limits, he would have believed the boast.
It was shaped, this city, like an inverted pyramid, balanced on its tip. There was no sign of any structure supporting it in this position.
Though there were myriad means of ascent from the ground to its underbelly, which was encrusted with what he assumed to be dwellings
(though their occupants would have to have the attributes of bats to live there), the sum of these lactders and stairways was nowhere near sufficient to bear the city's weight. He had no way to judge its true scale, but he w@is certain Manhattan would have fitted upon the upper surface with room to spare, which meant that the dozen or so towers that rose there, each resembling a vast swathe of fabric, plucked up by one comcr and falling in countless folds, were many hundreds of stories high.
Despite the lights that blazed from their countless windows, Joe doubted the towers were occupied. B'Kether Sabbat's citizens were choking the roads that led from the city, or rising from its streets and towers in wheeling flocks.
Such was the sheer immensity of this spectacle he wis almost tempted to find himself a comfortable spot among the roots, and watch it until the wave broke, and it was obliterated. But the same curiosity that had brought him from the shore now pressed him on, down the slope and across a swampy field, where a crop of crystalline flowers sprouted, to the nearest of the roads. Despite the vast diversity of faces and forms in the throng upon that road, there was a certain desperation in their faces and in their forms a common dread. they shuddered and sweated as they went, their eyeswhite, golden, blue, and black@ast over their shoulders now and again towards the city they'd deserted, and the teetering darkness that shadowed it.
Few showed any interest in Joe. And those few that did looked at him pityingly, judging him crazy, he supposed, for being the only traveler on this highway who was not fleeing b'Kether Sabbat, but heading back towards it.
Musnakaff's Mistress was sitting in a bed so large it could, readily have slept ten, propped up on twenty lace pillows and surrounded by a litter of torn paper, which was so light that the merest breath of wind from window or hearth was enough to raise fty of the scraps into the air and make the sheets rustle like leaves. The chamber itself was absurdly overwrought, the smoke-stained ceiling painted with naked deities cavorting, the walls lined with mirrors, some cracked, the rest in severe decay. The same might have been said for the Mistress herself. Decayed she was, and plainly cracked. For fully five minutes Phoebe and Musnakaff waited at the end of her bed while she tore up pieces of paper into yet smaller pieces, muttering to herself as she did so.
What light there was came from the oil-lamps on the various tables, which were-like those in the rest of the house-turned down so that they barely glimmered, lending the whole chamber a troubled air. Its ambiguity did little to flatter the woman. Even by this subdued light she was a grotesque, her sparse hair dyed a lush black (which only served to emphasize her parchment pallor), her cheeks furrowed, her neck like a fraying rope.
At last, without looking up from her litter-making, she spoke, her thin lips barely moving.
"I could have used a woman like you, in the old days. You've got some meat on your bones. Men like that." Phoebe didn't respond. Not only was she intimidated by this crone, she was afraid her lack of sobriety would be all too evident if she spoke. "Not that I care what men like or don't like," the Mistress went on. "I'm past that. And it feels fine, not to care." She looked up now. Her eyes were rheumy, and roved back and forth in Phoebe's general direction, but didn't come to rest.
"If I cared," she said, "you know what I would do?" She paused. "Well, do you?" she demanded.
"I would dream myself a beauty," she replied, chuckling at the notion.
"I would make myself over as the most fetching woman in Creation, and I would go out in the streets and break every heart I could." The chuckled disappeared. "Do you think I could do that?" she said.
"I... I daresay you could."
"You daresay, do you?" the Mistress responded softly. "Well let me tell you: I could do it as easily as piss. Oh yes. No trouble. I dreamed this city, didn't I?"