When I finished speaking the others looked at me strangely for they had never heard me address them with so much self-confidence. For a moment I had fallen back into the autocratic speech patterns of a Physiognomist, First Class. I was somewhat startled myself, but managed to counter its effect with a smile.
By the time we left Nunnly's, it had stopped raining, and the sun shone in its final hours. The temperature had also nearly returned to its usual warmth. Anotine and I, ignoring my advice to the others of work and sleep, shuffled through the wet green leaves that littered the wood and marveled at the starkness of the naked branches silhouetted against a pink twilight. We said nothing but held tightly to each other. I wondered what she was thinking, but did not ask for fear that she would ask the same of me.
When we reached the edge of the island, it became obvious that the disintegration process had accelerated past the rate it had been earlier that afternoon. The clearing where we had all met and watched Brisden push the winch over the rim was now, itself, gone. Trees fell before us to the growing nothing, and the crackling sound of their disappearance, which at one point had been so faint, was now readily audible, like the feasting of an invisible swarm of insects.
On the way back to Anotine's rooms, we discovered that most of the blossoms that had filled the planters of the terraced village had shriveled and turned brown. She stopped to pluck one of the dead vines and crumble it between her fingers. At first, her look was that of the researcher, studying how the crumbs of stem came apart and floated away toward the stone of the terrace floor. Then her lips curled back and her eyes winced in a show of disgust. For the remainder of our walk back to her rooms, she kept wiping her hands together even after all trace of the dead plant was gone.
Later, we lay in bed and Anotine kissed me. She requested that we work toward discovering the moment again as we had tried the previous night before the monster's interruption.
"The time is not quite right" I said, gently pushing her back onto the pillow. Had she understood the signs, she would have seen that my body was yearning for a "discovery of the moment." In order to calm her and myself, I proposed that I would tell her a story.
"What about?" she asked.
"Wait and see," I said.
She seemed more interested in making love, but I coerced her with more lies, telling her that it would enable the discovery of the present at a much sooner time than if she refused to listen.
"Very well," she said, moving in close to me and resting her head on my arm.
I thought for a moment, staring at the face of the moon out the back window opening. She moved her nails in wide circles along my chest with the same graceful motion as in her experiment beneath the tree in the private garden. If I couldn't think of something to tell quickly, I would not have been able to hold myself in check, although my entire plan depended upon it. Then, like a ghost, a wispy cloud moved slowly in front of the moon, and I had what I was desperately searching for.
"This is the story of The Woman and the Green Veil" I began. "Once there was a very vain man with a position of great power …" I employed voluminous detail and slowly told the tale of my betrayal of Aria Beaton in the third person, as though the foolish hero were someone I had never met. Anotine's hand stopped moving, and I could tell she was listening intently. I spoke in as soothing a voice as possible.
More than an hour passed in the telling, and by the time I reached the part where the Physiognomist butchers the young woman's face in a foolish attempt to make her more virtuous, Anotine was, to my relief, fast asleep. I went on telling the rest of it, aloud, to myself, as if it were a confession of sorts.
The images came out of my memory in single file—Aria's face covered by the veil because I had made it so ugly that to gaze upon it meant sudden death, my imprisonment on the island of Doralice, my return to the Weil-Built City. I saw the false paradise, an enormous crystal egg, that Below had built underground to house Aria and Ea, the Traveler from the wilderness of the Beyond. Then the Master bit into the white fruit, the city was destroyed through explosions, and we managed to escape. Again, I witnessed the birth of Cyn, Aria's daughter, whom I was forced to deliver one stormy night. Somehow, that birth had caused Aria's face to heal to its original beauty. She left the veil with me when she and Ea and their children had gone off to the Beyond. This last detail, my uncertainty as to whether her leaving it was to remind me of my guilt or a sign of forgiveness, was where I ended the story. The experience of giving voice to every memory left me feeling perfectly calm.
I had never felt so exquisitely comfortable in all my life as while lying there, but I had to fight my inclination to doze off. With great care, I rolled Anotine back onto her side of the bed and then slowly swung my feet around to sit up. After waiting some time to see if she was deeply asleep, I stood and went over to the brown rug. There, I sat down cross-legged as I had somewhere read the pagan holy men of the territory do to meditate. I concentrated and conjured a lit Hundred-To-One; then I turned my attention to materializing something else that the mnemonic world could not as yet provide.
In my mind's eye, I pictured a Lady Claw scalpel, the kind the old Physiognomists, like Kurst Scheffler and Muldabar Rei-ling had once used. These instruments were supposedly more difficult to handle than the modern, double-headed type, but it had been said that they could cut bone as if it were pudding. The instrument glinted in the light of my thoughts, and I saw it from every angle. Even the fine, three-finger inscription on the handle did not escape me.
My self-induced trance lasted for as long as my story had, and when I finally opened my eyes, I stood and walked down the hallway to that mysterious dark closet. It had come to me in my meditation that the instrument would be in there on one of the shelves.
Once inside, I discovered that it was perfectly black. I felt along the inner wall of the room, letting touch be my guide. Before too long I found where the shelves began and started tentatively feeling around. These shelves reminded me of Mis-rix's Museum of the Ruins, and I thought of the pride with which he had shown me his display. My fingers came in contact with fur, ceramic, linen, and glass, and then with lumps of a soft unformed gel, which I guessed might be the element of things waiting to become.
I was beginning to think that my theory about the closet and the materialization of objects might have been all wrong, when I slid my hand across the dusty surface of a shelf and felt a sting on the tip of my index finger. Even a retired Physiognomist knows the feel of a scalpel, though it be the slightest caress. I knew the nick had drawn blood, and I smiled as I closed my fist around the handle. As I lifted it, I was startled by the sound of heavy breathing behind me.
"Cley," said a voice that I was sure was not Anotine's.
"Misrix?" I asked, rapidly placing the speaker.
"Yes," he said with a hiss.
"How long have you been in here?" I asked, careful to keep my voice to a whisper.
"I'm not here," said the demon. "I'm only speaking to you. I could not enter the mnemonic world again. It was hard enough to get my voice to travel over."