For the rest of the journey back to the Tower City, sickness and exhaustion muddled my head. I kept hearing the faint echoes of the starving Singlar’s song of joy drifting through the stormy ever-night, soaking through my soggy clothes and into my skin and bones right along with the dismal rain.
Wait I did, and it drove me to distraction. I’d not come to the Bounded for lessons in geography or economics, no matter how odd or interesting. I had certainly not come to see that the Singlars were fed or to drag them out of their mud holes. I didn’t like it that the place felt so familiar or that the people took it for granted that I was their king.
The Guardian continued to ignore me. He even stopped coming to the table for meals. Maybe the damnable villain thought I’d go away if he paid me no attention. We had been in the Breach three weeks by my reckoning when I decided I could wait no longer.
“He’ll never take us to the Source willingly,” I said one day when Paulo and I were wandering aimlessly through the deserted streets of the Tower City. “And no one else seems to have any idea what it is or where to find it. We’ll just have to learn when he goes, and then follow him.”
“He goes somewhere every third evening before the lights go down,” said Paulo. “That’s the times he don’t come to the room to check on us, and he’s always fired up nasty the next morning.”
“I don’t think the Source will let him send me away. Otherwise we’d be on the road or dead by now.”
“What is this Source? Is it somebody?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out. So, he came sneaking around last night and the one before. That means he’ll go this evening. There’s an alcove on the third landing… ”
The winding stair of mottled red stone, polished and smoothed like marble, was the heart of the Blue Tower. Though the rooms one found beyond its landings had no relation to the outside shape of the tower, the staircase followed the exact curve of the spiral. The audience hall and the retiring room, the dining and reception rooms, were on the ground level. Paulo and I slept in guest apartments on the second level, and the Guardian had his private apartments on the third level. The storerooms were below ground, so we understood. The maintainers guarded them ferociously and would not allow us to go down the narrow stairs. All the other rooms on the ten levels of the tower, including a luxurious bedchamber on the fourth level and a rabbit warren of winding passages and large and small chambers that had no clear function, were reserved for the king.
Paulo and I slipped out of our room right after supper. The upper levels of the Blue Tower were quiet, as always. And we didn’t fear running into anyone. The servants seemed to disappear as soon as we were fed.
We crowded into an alcove near the third-level landing, counting on the fact that the Guardian would use the stair if he was going anywhere, and we’d be able to follow him. No more than an hour after we’d begun our watch from the cramped space behind a slender column that supported the spiral stair, we heard steps approaching from the direction of the Guardian’s quarters.
Surprisingly, the knob-jointed man started up the stair, not down. We crept after him, staying just close enough to keep his gray robe in view. He climbed all the way to the uppermost landing.
The yellowish wall at the head of the stair glowed softly of its own light, plain and undecorated save for a carved circle about the size of my full arm span. The Guardian seemed to be running his fingers slowly around the circle. Crouching low on the stair one turn of the spiral below the Guardian, we couldn’t see what else he might be doing or hear him saying any words. But after only a moment, the center of the circle dissolved into a curtain of deep shadows. And a moment after that, the Guardian stepped through and vanished, leaving us staring stupidly after him.
We hurried up the steps and examined the wall… now solid stone again, colored the pale golden yellow of ripe wheat. The devices carved on the stone circle at top, bottom, left, and right seemed quite ordinary: wheat sheaves, grapevines, flowers, and so forth. In the center of the circle was a small raised area about the size of my fist, having an oddly shaped hole in the center of it. Nothing told me how to invoke the enchantment.
But as I ran my fingers idly around the carved border, much as the Guardian had done, the center of the circle melted away again. “Well,” I said. “That was easy enough. Keep watch - ”
“Wait,” Paulo whispered, laying a hand on my arm.
Without bothering to discuss it, Paulo pushed past me and stepped into the opening.
No alarm rang out. No one shouted or cursed. But I was furious. Fool! Why did you do that? You should have let me examine the opening… to look for enchantments. Dangers. I was sorely tempted to charge after him straightaway. But, of course, that would risk compounding the blunder if he was going to fail, or wasting his courage and luck if he was going to succeed. So I didn’t follow him, but I listened until my ears hurt, and probed the emptiness and the silence with every sense. The Lord Parven would claim Paulo had done exactly the right thing. As my skills were potentially more useful, it was only right that the “expendable partner” lead the way into unknown dangers.
About the time I was ready to damn the risks and lay my hand on the carved circle yet again, Paulo stepped back through the wall as if he were walking out of the stable door. Even if we’d have been standing in pitch dark, I could have felt his grin. “It’s the damnedest! You won’t believe it. It’s safe enough, but watch the first step. It’s a rouser.”
First things first. I grabbed his head and pulled his ear close to my mouth. “Don’t you ever do that again.” Paulo was not expendable.
Then I ran my fingers around the circle and walked through the dark hole. The effect was quite the same as when Vroon and company transported us from place to place, as if the solid earth had dropped away beneath my feet, taking my stomach with it. No shapes were visible. Only a nauseating smear of gray, swirling and streaking by. And I heard nothing but a fast, dull throb in the ears that might have been the beating of my own heart.
Before I could force my stomach back where it belonged, my feet jolted onto solid ground, and the world came to a standstill. My eyes blinked open to a sight so alien to everything we’d experienced in the Bounded that I almost burst out laughing.
Paulo leaned over my shoulder, whispering. “The damnedest, right?”
We stood in a doorway that opened onto a graceful, curved gallery, its floor made of diamond-shaped tiles of red clay, its roof supported by a row of slender columns that were joined by a waist-high railing of carved stone. Beyond and below the gallery lay a garden, acres of trees and shrubs of a thousand varieties; vines with stems as thick as my arm looped about the columns and railing; flowers of colors beyond my ability to count them. Bounding the garden on every side were sheer cliffs of varying height. Our perch was embedded halfway up one of them. To our right, maybe a quarter of the way around the roughly circular expanse, beyond the spot where the gallery ended in solid rock, water splashed down in a silver ribbon from the heights into a pool far below us, all of it sparkling in brilliant daylight. Not sunlight - the smell and taste and feel of the air told me we were not outdoors - but from some other fiery yellow source lost in the glare above us.
I stepped to the railing and hung over it, marveling. No storms. No black-and-purple sky. A pleasantly warm breeze, wafting a fine spray all the way from the waterfall, rustled the huge trees and stirred the scents of flowers and herbs. A cardinal, as deep a scarlet as King Evard’s banners, flicked by at my eye level, mocked by a crested jay perched in the highest branches of an oak.
Pressing a finger to his lips - wise in the echoing vastness - Paulo gestured toward the pool and the falls. He led me quickly down a flight of narrow stone steps, and onto a well-worn path through the garden. We hurried past masses of pink and violet flowers, between rose bushes taller than my head and covered with red, pink, and white blooms, past fragrant patches crowded with herbs, and rocky mounds, their niches and crevices home to a hundred varieties of low-growing, thick-leaved greenery dotted with tiny, star like flowers of yellow and red. The path led us around the pool past the base of the falls, a pool which must have drained directly into the earth below, for its only visible outlets were a dozen threadlike runnels that spread out through the garden.