They left the horses hobbled in the courtyard and followed him in. It wasn't as dark inside as they had expected. They stood at one side of a great square room, with a huge opening in the stone of the ceiling, like a skylight; it was positioned directly over what appeared to be a firepit raised some feet above the floor on a platform. Around the walls of the hall were doors opening on to vaguely lit passageways. Through one of these they could see a flight of stairs leading upward. The stairs were uneven, one broad one being staggered with two steep narrow ones as far up as they could see.
'Well,' Herewiss said, 'if this is the dining hall, I wonder what the bedrooms are like? Let's look.'
The group went slowly across the hall, clustered together. 'I keep expecting something to jump out of one of those doors,' Freelorn said, as they started up the stairs.
'Well, I doubt it would be one of the original inhabitants,' Herewiss answered. 'The lack of furniture makes me think they moved out permanently — unless they have very severe tastes in decor.'
At the top of the stairs they paused for a moment. There was nothing to be seen but a long, long corridor full of open doorways into dark empty rooms. One door, the fourth or fifth one down on the left, must have opened to a room with a window; sunlight poured out through it and on to the opposite wall.
'We could look at the view,' Herewiss said, and started down the hall. He looked into the first door he passed—
—and halted in midstep. Freelorn bumped into him, and Lang into Freelorn, and Segnbora into Lang, and they all looked—
There was no room behind the door. The stone of the doorsill was there, hard and solid under their hands as they reached out to reassure themselves of it: but through the opening cut in the glittering gray they saw a mighty mountain promontory rearing upward from a sea the color of blood. Pink foam crashed upward from the breaking waves and fell on the rose-and-opal beaches; the wind, blowing in from the sea, stirred trees with leaves the color of wine, showing the leaves' flesh-colored undersides. The mountain was forested in deep purples and mauves; a cloud of morning mist lay about its shoulders.
Herewiss reached out, very very slowly, and put his hand through the doorway. After a moment he withdrew it, rubbing his fingers together.
'It's cooler there,' he said, 'and damp. Lorn, this is it. Doors into Otherwheres—'
They moved on slowly to the next door.
It showed them sand, endless reaches of it: butter-colored sand, carved by relentless winds into rippled dunes with crests like knives, stretching from one horizon to the other in perfect straight lines. A corrugated desert, showing not one sign of life, not the tiniest plant or creature. The sky was such a deep pure blue violet as one sometimes sees in the depths of a lake at evening.
'If you cut our sky with a knife,' Segnbora whispered, 'it would bleed that color.'
'Come on—'
The next doorway opened on a hallway of gray stone, crowded with seven people who looked through a doorway at a hallway of gray stone, crowded with seven people who looked through a doorway at a hallway—
'Dear Goddess!' Freelorn said, and spun to look behind him. There was nothing there but another doorway, this one showing a volcano erupting with terrible, silent violence against a night sky. A flying rock fell close to the door as he watched. He flinched back and Herewiss reached out to steady him.
'It's all right. Let's go on.'
'What if that had come through?'
'I don't know if it can — though it does seem likely. Look at the sun coming out of this one—'
They gathered before the next door. 'Suns, you mean,' Dritt said. They looked down on a placid seashore. Out over the dark water, one small red sun was going down in a fury of crimson clouds; another one, larger and fiercely blue, shone higher in the sky.
'Two suns.' Moris's voice, usually loud and abrasive, was hushed. 'Two suns! What kind of place is that?'
'Goddess only knows. Look at this one—'
The group relaxed a little, broke slightly apart as each person went looking through a separate doorway, looking for a wonder of their own.
'—blue trees?'
'What the Dark is this??'
'Look, it's our country. Moris, isn't that the Eorlhowe? And the North Arlene peninsula—'
'This one is underwater — look, there goes a fish!' 'I didn't know the Goddess made birds that big.' 'It's snowing here, I can't see a thing.'
Herewiss was standing before a doorway that showed nothing — nothing at all, a vague blurry darkness. Not the darkness of night, but an absence, an absence of anything at all. He looked at it, and his heart was beating fast. An unused door? Maybe—
Freelorn came to him from further up the hall, took Herewiss's arm and began to pull him along. 'What? What?' Herewiss said, but Lorn wouldn't answer him. He pulled Herewiss in front of one door. 'Look,' he said.
The door showed them a view from a high place, looking down into a landscape afire with a sunset the color of new love. Below and before them stretched a fantastic growth of crystalline forms, islanded between two rivers; jutting upward against the extravagant sky like prisms of quartz or amethyst or polished amber, but scored and carved and patterned, dappled with sunset light. They grew in all sizes and shapes, a forest of gigantic gems, spears of opal and dark jade and towers of obsidian. They caught the light of day's end and reflected it back from a thousand different planes and angles, golden, red, orange, pink, smoky twilight blue; a barbaric and magnificent display of a god's crown-jewels, the diadem of Day set down between the crimson rivers as the Sun retired. One spire reached higher than all the others around it, a masterwork of crystal set in gray stone and topped with a spearing crown of silver steel. On the crown's peak a single ruby flared, pulsing like a Dragon's eye, and rays of light struck up from the circlet like pale swords against the deepening blue. In the silences of the upper sky, a crescent Moon smiled at the evening star that flowered beside it.
Beside Herewiss, Freelorn moved softly, as if afraid to break a dream. 'What is it?' he whispered. 'Is it real?'
'Somewhere it is.'
'Is it really what it looks like, a city? How did they build it? Or did it grow? And is that glass? How did they make it that way—?'
Herewiss shook his head, and out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of Segnbora moving slowly and silently toward the door, like one entranced. He reached out and caught her by the arm, and she pulled at him a little, wanting to be let go.
'No,' he said. 'Segnbora — look at the view. The door opens out on to somewhere very high. There may be ground under it, but there may not be. You could step out on to nothing. And it would be a short flight for someone who doesn't have wings.'
She stared out the doorway with longing, the colors of the softening sunset catching in her eyes. 'It might be worth it,' she said.
'Come on—'The next doorway was dark, but not as the one Herewiss had seen. In the endless depths of its darkness, stars were suspended. Not the remote cold stars of night in the desert, but great flaming swarms of them, hot and beautiful, cast carelessly across the boundless black reaches of eternity. And close, so close you could surely put your hand out and pluck one like an apple. They spun outward from a blazing common core, burning like the sudden fiery realization of joy—
Freelorn took a step toward the doorway. 'This is the real Door,' he said, very softly, 'the last Door—'
Alarm stirred in Herewiss, drowning his appreciation of the beauty in sudden concern for Freelorn. 'Not the Door into Starlight, no,' he said. 'You can't see that until you're dead, Lorn, or have the Flame — and you're in neither condition—'
'But my father—'
'That's not where he is.' Herewiss took Freelorn by his shoulders, as much from compassion as from fear that he might cast himself through. 'Your father is past that other Door — down by the Sea of which the Starlight is a faint intimation. They're lovely, but these are just stars. Not the final Sea.'