The realization unnerved him. The place was like a maze. A simple one, perhaps, but nevertheless designed to confound or delay. Once again he heard the walls grinding, and pictured the whole construction closing in on him, and he suddenly unable to find his way out before the walls pressed him to bloody dust.
But he couldn't turn back now; not with the luminescence tempting him to turn one more corner. Besides, there were noises reaching him from the world outside: strange, disfigured voices, as if the inhabitants of some forgotten bestiary were prowling around the Temple, scraping at the brick, padding across the roof.
He had no choice but to press on. He'd sold his life away for a glimpse of Godhood; he had nothing to return to now but the bitterest defeat.
Forward then, and to Hell with the consequences.
3
As Cal came within a yard of the Temple door his strength gave out.
He could no longer command his legs to bear him up. He stumbled, throwing out his right arm to prevent his falling too heavily, and hit the ground.
Unconsciousness claimed him, and he was grateful for it. Escape lasted seconds only however, before the blackness lifted, and he was delivered back into nausea and agony. But now - and not for the first time in the Fugue - his blood-starved brain had lost its grasp on whether he was dreaming, or being dreamt.
That ambiguity had first visited him in Lemuel Lo's orchard, he remembered: waking from a dream of the life he'd lived to find himself in a paradise he'd only ever expected to encounter in sleep. And then later, on Venus Mountain, or beneath it, living the life of planets - and passing a millennium in that revolving state - only to wake a mere six hours older.
Now here was the paradox again, at death's door. Had he awoken to die?; or was dying true wakefulness? Round and round the thoughts went, in a spiral with darkness at its centre, and he fleeing into that darkness, wearier by the moment.
His head on the earth, which was trembling beneath him, he opened his eyes and looked back towards the Temple. He saw it upside down, the roof sitting in a foundation of clouds, while the bright ground shone around it.
Paradox upon paradox, he thought, as his eyes drifted closed again.
‘Cal.'
Somebody called him.
‘Cal.'
Irritated to be summoned this way, he opened his eyes only reluctantly.
It was Suzanna who was bending over him, saying his name. She had questions too, but his lazy mind couldn't grasp them.
Instead he said:
‘Inside. Shadwell...'
‘Hold on,' she told him. ‘You understand me?'
She put his hand on her face. It was cool. Then she bent down and kissed him, and somewhere at the back of his skull he remembered this happening before; his lying on the ground, and her giving him love.
‘I'll be here,' he said.
She nodded. ‘You'd better be,' she replied, and crossed to the door of the Temple.
This time, he did not let his eyes close. Whatever dream waited beyond life, he would postpone its pleasure ‘til he saw her face again.
III
THE MIRACLE OF THE LOOM
Outside the Temple, the quake tremors were worsening. Inside, however, an uneasy peace reigned. Suzanna started to advance down the darkened corridors, the itching in her body subdued now that she was out of the turbulence, in this, the eye of the hurricane. There was light ahead. She turned a corner, and another, and finding a door in the wall, slipped through into a second passageway, as spartan as the one she'd left. The light was still tantalizingly out of reach. Around the next corner, it promised; just a little further, a little further.
The menstruum was quiet inside her, as though it feared to show itself. Was that the natural respect one miracle paid to a greater? If so, the raptures here were hiding their faces with no little skill; there was nothing about these corridors suggestive of revelation or power: just bare brick. Except for the light. That coaxed her still, through another door and along further passageways. The building, she now realized, was built on the principle of a Russian doll, one within another. Worlds within worlds. They couldn't diminish infinitely, she told herself. Or could they?
Around the very next corner she had her answer, or at least part of it, as a shadow was thrown up against the wall and she heard somebody shouting: ‘What in God's name?'
For the first time since setting foot here, she felt the ground vibrate. There was a fall of brick dust from the ceiling.
‘Shadwell,' she said.
As she spoke it seemed she could see the two syllables - Shad Well - carried along the corridor towards the next door. A fleeting memory came too: of Jerichau speaking his love to her; word as reality.
The shadow on the wall shifted, and suddenly the Salesman was standing in front of her. All trace of the Prophet had gone. The face revealed beneath was bloated and pale; the face of a beached fish.
‘Gone,' he said.
He was shaking from head to foot. Sweat droplets decorated his face like pearls.
‘It's all gone.'
Any fear she might once have had of this man had disappeared. He was here unmasked as ludicrous. But his words made her wonder. What had gone? She began to walk towards the door he'd stepped through.
‘It was you -' he said, his shakes worsening. ‘You did this.'
‘I did nothing.'
‘Oh yes -'
As she came within a yard of him he reached for her, his clammy hands suddenly about her neck.
"There's nothing there!' he shrieked, pulling her close.
His grip intended harm, but the menstruum didn't rise to her aid. She was left with only muscle power to disengage him, and it was not enough.
‘You want to see?' he screamed into her face. ‘You want to see how I've been cheated?
‘I'll show you!' He dragged her towards the door, and pitched her through into the room at the heart of the Temple: the inner sanctum in which the miracles of the Gyre had been generated; the powerhouse which had held the many worlds of the Fugue together for so long.
It was a room some fifteen feet square, built of the same naked brick as the rest of the Temple, and high. She looked up to see that the roof had a skylight of sorts, open to the heavens. The clouds that swirled around the Temple roof shed a milky brightness down, as if the lightning from the Gyre was being kindled in the womb of troubled air above. The clouds were not the only movement overhead, however. As she gazed up she caught sight of a form in the corner of the roof. Before her gaze could focus on it, Shadwell was approaching her.
‘Where is it?' he demanded. ‘Where's the Loom?'
She looked around the sanctum, and discovered now that it was not entirely bare. In each of the four corners a figure was sitting, gazing towards the centre of the room. Her spine twitched. Though they sat bolt upright on their high-backed chairs, the quartet were long dead, their flesh like stained paper on their bones, their clothes hanging in rotted rags.
Had these guardians been murdered where they sat, so that thieves could remove the Loom unchallenged? So it seemed. Yet there was nothing in their posture that suggested a violent death; nor could she believe that this charmed place would have sanctioned bloodshed. No; something else had happened here - was happening still, perhaps - some essential point both she and Shadwell could not yet grasp.
He was still muttering to himself, his voice a decaying spiral of complaint. She was only half-listening; she was far more interested in the object she now saw lying in the middle of the floor. There it lay, the kitchen knife Cal had brought into the Auction Room all those months ago; the commonplace domestic tool which the look between them had somehow drawn into the Weave, to this very spot, the absolute centre of the Fugue.