Those great chalk ramparts gleamed now with overpowering whiteness in the bright blaze of the sun, filling all the sea before them like an impassable barrier. Varaile and Prestimion stood staring in wonder. “I think I can make out two of the three levels from here, and maybe just a hint of the third,” he said. “The big one that forms the base of the island is called First Cliff. There’s a forest along its rim, hundreds of feet above sea level. Do you see? And that must be Second Cliff that begins there, set back a goodly way from the one below. If you follow the white wall up and up, you’ll see a second line of green—that’s the boundary between Second Cliff and Third Cliff, I suppose. Third Cliff itself begins several hundred miles inland. You can’t really see it from below, except perhaps a suggestion of its summit. That’s where Inner Temple is: the place of the Lady.”
“It dazzles my eyes. I knew the Isle was made of white stone, but I never thought it would shine like that! Will we be going all the way to the top?”
“Probably. The Lady rarely descends to meet her son; it’s always the other way around. The custom is for her hierarchs to meet the Coronal at the harbor and take him first to the lodge they maintain for him there. He’s the representative of the world of action, you see, all noise and masculine bluster, and he needs to go through some transitional rituals before he can be admitted to his mother’s contemplative domain. Then they conduct him upward to her through the various terraces of the three cliffs. Eventually we’ll arrive at Inner Temple itself, up at the top, where my mother will receive us.”
So steeply did the Isle’s tremendous white rampart rise from the sea that there were only two harbors where ships could land, both of them difficult of access: Taleis on the Zimroel side, and Numinor here, facing Alhanroel. To these, at certain specified times of the year, came pilgrims from the mainland, some merely to retreat from the world for a year or two of meditation and ritual cleansing, others to join the Lady’s realm and spend the rest of their lives in her service.
The swift vessel that had carried Prestimion and Varaile across from Alaisor was too big to enter Numinor harbor. It had to anchor well out at sea, where its passengers were transferred to a waiting ferry whose pilot knew the secrets of the narrow channel, much beset by swift currents and treacherous reefs, through which the shore could be approached.
Three tall, slender elderly women of great dignity and gravity of bearing, clad identically in golden robes trimmed with red, were waiting at the pier when the ferry arrived. They were hierarchs of the Isle, lieutenants whom the Lady Therissa had sent to greet him. “We are instructed to conduct you first,” the senior one told them, “to the house called Seven Walls.”
Prestimion was expecting that. Seven Walls was the traditional guesthouse for newly arrived Coronals. It turned out to be a low, sturdy building of dark stone that stood atop the rampart of Numinor port, at the very edge of the sea. “But why is it called Seven Walls?” Varaile asked, as they were shown to their chambers within it. “It looks perfectly square to me.”
“No one knows,” Prestimion replied. “This place is as old as the Castle itself, and most of its history is lost in legend. They say that the Lady Thiin, Lord Stiamot’s mother, had it built for him when he came to the Isle to give thanks for his victory at the end of the Metamorph Wars. Supposedly seven Metamorph warriors were entombed in its foundations—warriors that Lady Thiin killed with her own hands while defending the Isle against an army of Shapeshifter invaders. But the building’s foundations have often been reconstructed and nobody’s ever found any Metamorph skeletons down there. Then there’s a notion that Lord Stiamot had a seven-sided chapel constructed in the courtyard while he was here, but there’s no trace of that, either. I’ve also heard it said that the name’s just our version of ancient Shapeshifter words meaning ‘the place where the fish scales are scraped off,’ because there was a Metamorph fishing village here in prehistoric times.”
“I like that one the best,” said Varaile.
“So do I.”
Certain rituals of purification were required of him before he could proceed higher on the Isle, and he spent several hours that evening performing them under the instruction of one of the hierarchs. He and Varaile slept that night in a splendid chamber overlooking the sea, amidst dark weavings of a style so antique that Prestimion found himself wondering whether Lord Stiamot himself had selected them. He imagined that the ghosts of all the kings of bygone years who had slept in this room would be crowding around him in the night, offering anecdotes of their reigns, or advice on how to deal with the problems of his own, but in fact he dropped almost instantly into the deepest of sleeps, and the dreams that came to him were peaceful ones. The Isle was a place of tranquility and harmony: all anxiety was banished here.
In the morning began the journey upward to the Lady. Varaile and Prestimion alone would go, not any of the others who had made the journey with them from the Castle. Permission to ascend to Third Cliff and the Inner Temple was not ordinarily granted to those who had not passed through the full rite of initiation.
The hierarchs led them to the terminal along the waterfront from which the floater-sleds in which they would make their ascent departed. Looking up at the glittering white wall of First Cliff, rising skyward virtually in a straight line, Prestimion was unable to see how it could be possible to traverse it. But the sled rose silently and easily, making the steep climb without effort, and nestled into its landing pad at the summit of the cliff like a great gihorna folding its wings. When they looked back, they could see Numinor port like a toy town below them, and the two curving arms of its stone breakwater jutting out into the sea like a pair of fragile sticks.
“We are at the Terrace of Assessment, where all novices come first. They are evaluated there, and their destinies are decided,” one of the hierarchs explained. “Beyond it, a short distance inland, is the Terrace of Inception, where those who will be allowed to continue to a higher level undergo their preliminary training. After a time—weeks, months, sometimes years—they go on to the Terrace of Mirrors, where they are brought into confrontation with their own selves, and make their preparations for what lies ahead.”
A floater-wagon was waiting to carry Prestimion and Varaile onward. Quickly they left the pink flagstone streets of the Terrace of Assessment behind and journeyed across a seemingly endless realm of cultivated fields to the Terrace of Inception, whose entrance was marked by pyramids of dark blue stone ten feet high. Here they saw some novices working at menial farming tasks, and others gathered in outdoor amphitheaters receiving holy instruction. There was no time to pause for a closer look, though, for the distances here were great, and Second Cliff’s formidable white bulk, standing large in the sky before them, still was very far away.
Indeed, the afternoon was beginning to wane before they reached the cliff’s base. They halted for the night at the third of First Cliff’s terraces, the Terrace of Mirrors, which lay right below the mighty facade of the new wall that reared up over them. At this terrace huge slabs of polished black stone were set edgewise into the ground all about, so that wherever you turned you saw your own image looking back at you, transformed and intensified by the mysterious light of this place. And in the early hours of morning it was upward for them once again, a second dizzying floater-sled climb to the rim of the next level.
There atop Second Cliff they could still see the sea, but it seemed very far away, and Numinor itself lay tucked out of sight, hidden from view just beyond the perimeter of the Isle. They could barely make out the pink rim of First Cliff’s outermost terrace. The Terrace of Mirrors, directly below them, seemed to be aglow with green flame wherever its monumental stone slabs were struck by the morning sun. “The outer terrace where we stand now,” a hierarch told them, “is known as the Terrace of Consecration. From here we will come to the Terrace of Flowers, the Terrace of Devotion, the Terrace of Surrender, and the Terrace of Ascent.” Prestimion felt a touch of awe as he contemplated the complexity and richness of the system by which the realm of the Lady was constructed. He had never suspected so elaborate a structure of preparation for the tasks that were carried out here.