“What is that?” Avluela asked.
“Come. See.”
A line progressed into the sphere. We joined it and soon were at the lip of the interior, peering at the timeless region just across the threshold. Why this relic and so few others had been accorded such special protection I did not know, and I asked Gormon, whose knowledge was so unaccountably as profound as any Rememberer’s, and he replied, “Because this is the realm of certainty, where what one says is absolutely congruent with what actually is the case.”
“I don’t understand,” said Avluela.
“It is impossible to lie in this place,” Gormon told her. “Can you imagine any relic more worthy of protection?” He stepped across the entry duct, blurring as he did so, and I followed him quickly within. Avluela hesitated. It was a long moment before she entered; pausing a moment on the very threshold, she seemed buffeted by the wind that blew along the line of demarcation between the outer world and the pocket universe in which we stood.
An inner compartment held the Mouth of Truth itself. The line extended toward it, and a solemn Indexer was controlling the flow of entry to the tabernacle. It was a while before we three were permitted to go in. We found ourselves before the ferocious head of a monster in high relief, affixed to an ancient wall pockmarked by time. The monster’s jaws gaped; the open mouth was a dark and sinister hole. Gormon nodded, inspecting it, as though he seemed pleased to find it exactly as he had thought it would be.
“What do we do?” Avluela asked.
“Gormon said, “Watcher, put your right hand into the Mouth of Truth.”
Frowning, I complied.
“Now,” said Gormon, “one of us asks a question. You must answer it. If you speak anything but the truth, the mouth with close and sever your hand.”
“No!” Avluela cried.
I stared uneasily at the stone jaws rimming my wrist. A Watcher without both his hands is a man without a craft; in Second Cycle days one might have obtained a prosthesis more artful than one’s original hand, but the Second Cycle had long ago been concluded, and such niceties were not to be purchased on Earth nowadays.
“How is such a thing possible?” I asked.
“The Will is unusually strong in these precincts,” Gormon replied. “It distinguishes sternly between truth and untruth. To the rear of this wall sleeps a trio of Somnambulists through whom the Will speaks, and they control the Mouth. Do you fear the Will, Watcher?”
“I fear my own tongue.”
“Be brave. Never has a lie been told before this wall. Never has a hand been lost.”
“Go ahead, then,” I said. “Who will ask me a question?”
“I,” said Gormon. “Tell me, Watcher: all pretense aside, would you say that a life spent in Watching has been a life spent wisely?”
I was silent a long moment, rotating my thoughts, eyeing the jaws.
At length I said, “To devote oneself to vigilance on behalf of one’s fellow man is perhaps the noblest purpose one can serve.”
“Careful!” Gormon cried in alarm.
“I am not finished,” I said.
“Go on.”
“But to devote oneself to vigilance when the enemy is an imaginary one is idle, and to congratulate oneself for looking long and well for a foe that is not coming is foolish and sinful. My life has been a waste.”
The jaws of the Mouth of Truth did not quiver.
I removed my hand. I stared at it as though it had newly sprouted from my wrist. I felt suddenly several cycles old. Avluela, her eyes wide, her hands to her lips, seemed shocked by what I had said. My own words appeared to hang congealed in the air before the hideous idol.
“Spoken honestly,” said Gormon, “although without much mercy for yourself. You judge yourself too harshly, Watcher.”
“I spoke to save my hand,” I said. “Would you have had me lie?”
He smiled. To Avluela the Changeling said, “Now it’s your turn.”
Visibly frightened, the little Flier approached the Mouth. Her dainty hand trembled as she inserted it between the slabs of cold stone. I fought back an urge to rush toward her and pull her free of that devilish grimacing head.
“Who will question her?” I asked.
“I,” said Gormon.
Avluela’s wings stirred faintly beneath her garments. Her face grew pale; her nostrils flickered; her upper lip slid over the lower one. She stood slouched against the wall and stared in horror at the termination of her arm. Outside the chamber, vague faces peered at us; lips moved in what no doubt were expressions of impatience over our lengthy visit to the Mouth; but we heard nothing. The atmosphere around us was warm and clammy, with a musty tang like that which would come from a well that was driven through the structure of Time.
Gormon said slowly, “This night past you allowed your body to be possessed by the Prince of Roum. Before that, you granted yourself to the Changeling Gormon, although such liaisons are forbidden by custom and law. Much prior to that you were the mate of a Flier, now deceased. You may have had other men, but I know nothing of them, and for the purposes of my question they are not relevant. Tell me this, Avluela: which of the three gave you the most intense physical pleasure, which of the three aroused your deepest emotions, and which of the three would you choose as a mate, if you were choosing a mate?”
I wanted to protest that the Changeling had asked her three questions, not one, and so had taken unfair advantage. But I had no chance to speak, because Avluela replied unfalteringly, hand wedged deep into the Mouth of Truth, “The Prince of Roum gave me greater pleasure of the body than I had ever known before, but he is cold and cruel, and I despise him. My dead Flier I loved more deeply than any person before or since, but he was weak, and I would not have wanted a weakling as a mate. You, Gormon, seem almost a stranger to me even now, and I feel that I know neither your body nor your soul, and yet, though the gulf between us is so wide, it is you with whom I would spend my days to come.”
She drew her hand from the Mouth of Truth.
“Well spoken!” said Gormon, though the accuracy of her words had clearly wounded as well as pleased him. “Suddenly you find eloquence, eh, when the circumstances demand it. And now the turn is mine to risk my hand.”
He neared the Mouth. I said, “You have asked the first two questions. Do you “wish to finish the job and ask the third as well?”
“Hardly,” he said. He made a negligent gesture with his free hand. “Put your heads together and agree on a joint question.”
Avluela and I conferred. With uncharacteristic forwardness she proposed a question; and since it was the one I would have asked, I accepted it and told her to ask it.
She said, “When we stood before the globe of the world, Gormon, I asked you to show me the place where you were born, and you said you were unable to find it on the map. That seemed most strange. Tell me now: are you what you say you are, a Changeling who wanders the world?”
He replied, “I am not.”
In a sense he had satisfied the question as Avluela had phrased it; but it went without saying that his reply was inadequate, and he kept his hand in the Mouth of Truth as he continued, “I did not show my birthplace to you on the globe because I was born nowhere on this globe, but on a world of a star I must not name. I am no Changeling in your meaning of the word, though by some definitions I am, for my body is somewhat disguised, and on my own world I wear a different flesh. I have lived here ten years.”
“What was your purpose in coming to Earth?” I asked.
“I am obliged only to answer one question,” said Gormon. Then he smiled. “But I give you an answer anyway: I was sent to Earth in the capacity of a military observer, to prepare the way for the invasion for which you have Watched so long and in which you have ceased to believe, and which will be upon you in a matter now of some hours.”