My companion threw back his hood. “Ah!”
He turned to me and grinned, opening his lantern so that the light swelled up between us. Then he held out his hand.
“Miros of Sinidre,” he said. “Disgraced nobleman, temporary valet, and general layabout.”
I took his hand. “Jevick of Tyom.”
“You’re a foreigner, aren’t you?” he said, lifting the lantern and peering at my face. “And a battered-looking one, too. What have they been doing to you in the Houses? You look hag-ridden.”
I glanced behind me. “I’ve been locked up. Shouldn’t we be moving?”
Miros shouted with laughter. “Vai!” he swore. “Thank you for reminding me of my duty. It’s easy to forget such things on a night like this. Right. Here’s the official message: Mailar, High Priestess of Avalei, greets you and requests your presence at her salon.”
I hardly knew what to make of him: his grin, his unkempt curls, the mixture of wariness and mischief in his manner. But his cheerfulness was as welcome to me as the breeze on that open walkway, and the Priestess of Avalei, I knew, was an enemy of the Priest of the Stone.
“I shall be pleased to attend,” I said.
He clapped me on the shoulder. “Well done. The formalities are over. This way—and don’t go to close to the edge. The railing, I warn you, was probably made in the days of worshiping milk, and it’s a nasty drop into the garden.”
We moved through the night palace. We walked across bridges, through halls where the painted statues looked startled in Miros’s light, as if surprised in acts of darkness. Sometimes we found sentries drowsing in stairwells, leaning on their spears, or pacing the battlements with a weary stride. None of them stopped us to ask about our business. With some of them Miros exchanged envelopes or tobacco, and once a small bottle of teiva; but he seemed to receive as many gifts as he gave, so that the ritual looked less like bribery than like an arcane form of politeness. The night was cool and fresh, and on the terraces the wind came, lifting my hair, spreading the scent of nocturnal flowers. Between the towers where windows were lighted or lamps shone in the elevated gardens, bats veered fleet and precise in the light. We passed walls of whispering ivy, entered the peaked arch of a doorway. In the halls beyond, my sense of direction failed me. I knew only that we walked through one vast silence after another while the lamplight slid over frescoes and gilded floors.
At length we reached an indoor garden, its branches awash in moonlight. The only sound was the dripping of hidden water, and the ruddy glow of the lantern seemed indelicate, almost enough to wake the whorled flowers from their sleep. The waxy leaves of rhododendrons touched my hair in the scented gloom as we made our way down the tiles of the little path. At the end of this artificial jungle stood a door of dark wood flanked by tulip-shaped lamps, and Miros opened it for me with a bow.
“Here we are at last.”
I stepped past him into an antechamber. A lamp burned on a table just inside, guarded by a retainer in the last stages of senility whose thin, silvery hair hung over his shoulders. He looked at me doubtfully and then immediately lost interest and stood plucking at the loose rosettes on his jacket. Miros greeted him, clearly without expecting a response, left his lantern on the table, and hung up his cloak.
In the next room, night had been dispelled. The globes of the lamps diffused a light that artfully mimicked the beaming of the sun; they shone, glazed and bulbous, from the sweetly scented tangle of flowering vines coaxed to grow across the ceiling. This canopy of dark green life melted into the verdure that covered the walls, winding among the branches of trees growing in pots, trees that glittered with a subtle life which I soon realized was not life at alclass="underline" we were entering a forest of colored glass. A bird’s wing flickered; the flowers around it tinkled. We crossed a bridge over a miniature canal that gleamed with carp. In the parlor beyond it a circle of figures sat or reclined on couches, enveloped in laughter, smoke, and the notes of a lute.
We approached them, and they grew quiet and looked at me. Their faces were proud, impassive, some of them beautifully painted. I knelt before them. Then a voice said: “Rise, dear boy!”—and I knew before I raised my head that it was the voice of the woman on the pink couch. Splendid, stupefying, she had already dazzled me with her breasts, almost completely uncovered, framed in a window of black silk. She was perhaps forty years old, her full throat powdered, encircled with diamonds and jet. Narrow eyes slumbered in her marmoreal face.
I rose, and she held out her arm. I stepped forward and took her perfumed hand. The curls of her armored coiffure shone like lacquer.
“Welcome, precious boy,” she said in her deep voice, without smiling. “I am the High Priestess. You may kiss my shawl.”
The High Priestess of Avalei was a prisoner on the Blessed Isle. She had not been to the mainland for over a decade. Yet she maintained a dignified, even a sumptuous, salon, entertaining guests from the noble families who still supported her failing cult. She made sacrifices to the goddess in one of the hillsides of the Isle; she was permitted the use of a ballroom in the Tower of Mirrors on feast days. Her shawl was of a silk so rare it felt heavy, like a live thing. When I pressed it to my lips, it left a flavor of mulberries.
“Sit down,” she said.
I sank in the yellow upholstery of the chair she indicated. I found it difficult to meet her intelligent, faintly lascivious gaze. She said in a slow and liquid voice, each word a stone dropped into a pooclass="underline" “You are safe here, my child. Don’t be frightened. Someone bring him a drink.”
A sullen girl stepped out of the decorative forest and lowered an object made of glass and silver filigree into my hands.
“Thank you,” I said, holding it gingerly. It looked something like a lamp, having a round belly and four silver feet. Several others like it stood on the low table inside the circle; from each rose a curving pipe of glass.
“Have you drunk los before?” asked the High Priestess.
I shook my head.
“How fortunate you are to be trying it for the first time! Such is the priviledge of youth!”
A wire-thin, avid young lady opposite me, her skirts adorned with a fortune in peacock feathers, took one of the round vessels from the table, put her lips to the pipe, and sucked, winking a painted eye. A line of golden liquid filled the tube. I followed her example and took a cautious sip from my own vessel, drowning my tongue with the thick, sweet, and potent peach liquor which is the refreshment of the Olondrian aristocracy. Its flavor and fiery texture were overpowering: I felt as if I had drunk undiluted perfume. However, after a brief wave of sickness, energy charged my veins. I thanked the High Priestess a second time, and she gave a low gurgle of laughter, barely parting her lips, which still did not smile.
The room dissolved in los. The lute player took up his instrument again and the unctuous air filled with its sorrowful notes, while the guests fell into conversation, laughed and sipped their drinks, too polite or too scornful to notice my existence. The lady who had come to my aid with the drink beat her hand against her flat chest so that her gold bracelets jingled, emitting a series of helpless shrieks, while beside her an odd-looking man, young but with spiky, dead-white hair, punctuated his story with disdainful shrugs. One youth was trying to set his boot on fire; another, flushed and handsome, lounged on the floor with his head pillowed on a hound. A furtive monkey curled up in the lap of a gilded beauty, and she scratched its ears with her whitened fingernails. There was a slender courtier in peach-colored silk, a middle-aged lady with bunches of violets above her ears whose cheeks collapsed with every swallow of los, and among the servants on the floor a Nissian slave of searing beauty, her cheek against the arm of an empty chair.