3.
Some of the walls had the rooms and chambers of the Manor House behind them, much as you'd expect.
But other walls had strange things behind them. Strange beyond description.
Odd things. Spiderwebs with mushrooms growing under them; tiny men armed with stings from bees and wearing acorn caps for helmets; grinning gnome faces hanging in midair who winked at me; women made of smoke, whose hair streamed in swirls behind them, looking over their shoulders as I passed.
Other walls had forests beyond them, or starry night skies of alien constellations, mountains with carved faces rising from the sea, or fields of flowers luminous with moths and fireflies. Here were windowless domed houses, inhabited by squat, sluglike creatures, blind and slow, who oozed gelatinously across a landscape of gray ash and silent craters of black oil. There were forests thick with hanging orchids, flowers larger than parasols, and troops of albino elephants trooping through the moss.
I saw squat trolls dancing waltzes with fairy maidens with wings of ice; I saw myself and Colin and Quentin, dressed as lords and ladies, crowned with flowers and candles, riding winged horses; I saw a city of basalt towers, above which coffins as large as church steeples loomed, as if a race of pygmies had erected their town at the feet of monuments in the mausoleum for giants. I saw a dark place from which the sound of bones rustling against bones issued, and horror, and fear, and panic seeped from that darkness like a colorless light.
I saw a Lady, huge and very fair, like a mother might seem when seen from a child's eye. Her eyes were kind and her hands were soft. To either side of her sat a metal hound, one of silver and one of gold.
I saw a man with red hair; he was very thick through the chest and broad at the shoulder, and a sly half-smile played at the corner of his mouth. He was dressed in beggar's rags, but beneath the rags came a glint of rich armor, such as a warrior-prince might wear. In his hands was a bow made of rhino horn.
Dreams. I was seeing Vanity's dreams. And what I saw was affecting me: Fear and longing, touches, soft sounds, memories, were floating through my brain.
I closed two or three of my higher senses and just kept an eye on Vanity. I could not see her, but she was my guide, and she was the person I needed most in all the world, at the moment. In my usefulness-detector, she glowed like a star.
4.
There was no reason not to talk while we crawled.
I whispered, "Do you actually like Colin?"
She said, "He's a fathead. I might like the man he'll grow up into. If he loses his baby-fat-headed-ness."
"When did you stop liking Quentin?"
"I am just getting tired of waiting for him to make up his mind. There is such a thing as too quiet, you know. What has he ever done?"
"Quentin discovered how to fly! He broke into the meeting of the Board of Visitors and Governors, discov-ered who the enemy was, and was almost killed for his trouble. You'll remember everything in a little while… I hope."
I did not know whether my hope had any justice to it. I knew, among the staff, whose powers canceled out whose among the Uranians. But Vanity? She was a Phaeacian. Both Boggin and Mestor seemed to have the same space-distorting powers she did. But who had worked on her to blank her memory?
Maybe—and this was just a guess—it was a combination of two powers, and both were needed to stop her. Who had promised Vanity to Glum? He had mentioned more than once that she was "promised" to him. If that promise had been made by Boggin, for the purpose of inflaming Grendel's desire to keep her here, then maybe Grendel was one of the two powers needed to suppress her power.
Who was the other? Mrs. Wren, I assume. Why else have her be the one to lead us in nighttime prayers for so many years? Unless it was Fell, who gave us injections once a month. Or Boggin? The Board had said explicitly that he was here to stop Vanity. Was that merely because of the green ring, or did he have an anti-Phaeacian power?
Maybe. I was speculating in midair at the moment.
But I did know that I could still use my sight powers, and had regained the limited ability to affect weight when I walked along the South boundary. Quentin complained that spirits could not hear him, i.e., he could not affect them, even though he could still see things in tarot cards; his version, so to speak, of my
"higher senses." If I got Quentin to the North boundary, when the barrows pushed up their cold mounds, his ability to fly might come back. If he could fly without his walking stick. If, if, if…
We crawled in silence for a while. I took the risk of glancing through the walls again.
5.
I saw a long manlike shape in the waters. Its third eye rolled and shimmered in its forehead like an orb of metal. Telemus held me around the waist, high above the frothing wild waves, and driving rain formed black sheets, beating the water white. Waves like sudden mountains rose and fell to every side.
Telemus held a knife to my throat. 'Tell him to quell the storm."
The sea giant—he looked like Victor—turned his head toward me, his eyes shining like lamps. "I am embedding this message by means of cryptognosis into a preeon-sciousness level of your nervous system. The paradigms of Chaos have agreed only on this one point. We will wait for you to free yourselves. Once we have regained contact with you, we will descend down into the Cosmos and destroy its foundations. All biochemical-based life shall cease operation. Communicate on this frequency, by means of focused thought-energy signals directed at our outposts in the Hyades cluster. Longitude and Right Ascension notation follows…" There followed degrees, minutes, and seconds of arc.
An invisible signal—somehow in the dream, I was aware of it—sprang from the sea giant.
The clouds parted. Here and there, stars appeared in the gaps.
There were beings above the clouds. Far, far above. Their bodies looked like statues, hanging without weight, and coated with a gold metallic surface instead of skin. Only the smallest, little specks, were manlike; their faces were the faces of statues, stern and kingly.
Ten and one hundred times their size were a second group. These others were oval, like seeds from a metal tree.
One thousand to ten thousand times their size were even larger beings. This third group were shaped like serpents, mile upon mile of golden armor.
This third group were very large, and very high up in-deed. Sunlight, harsh and unfiltered from any atmosphere, glinted like solidified fire off their starboard sides. Their port sides were black with unsoftened shadow.
The giant in the water was not a giant; he was microscopic. He was a Telchine, a servant of much vaster beings. The Fallen were not fallen at all, but orbiting. I kept revising my estimate of how far away they must be, how large they were___
My dreams. We were crawling through my dreams now.
What sort of power did Vanity have? What were the Phaeacians?
6.
I saw two dreams up ahead. One showed a red lake, steaming beneath a desert sky. From the lake came a naked figure, rising, and a sensation of voluptuous passion and luxurious demand radiated from the figure. The sensation was so strong that it took my breath away. I could not see, in the dream, if the figure was male or female. As the figure rose, the blood-red fluid streamed down arms spread wide.
From it came a sound like a drumbeat, beats so loud that they seemed like gunshots, pounding, maddening.
The second dream showed a handsome old man seated on a crocodile. His beard and hair were white, and his expression was benevolent. On his wrist he carried a goshawk, hooded and in jesses. Next to him was a donkey, which, even as I watched, stood and became a donkey-headed man, and then a bearded man with a hoarse and coughing voice, who said, "One comes, and, with her, another!"