“How are these things known?” Avluela asked, but Gormon pretended not to hear her.
We saw the line of fusion-pylons built early in the Third Cycle to draw energy from the world’s core; they were still functioning, although stained and corroded. We saw the shattered stump of a Second Cycle weather machine, still a mighty column at least twenty men high. We saw a hill on which white marble relics of First Cycle Roum sprouted like pale clumps of winter deathflowers. Penetrating toward the inner part of the city, we came upon the embankment of defensive amplifiers waiting in readiness to hurl the full impact of the Will against invaders. We viewed a market where visitors from the stars haggled with peasants for excavated fragments of antiquity. Gormon strode into the crowd and made several purchases. We came to a flesh-house for travelers from afar, where one could buy anything from quasi-life to mounds of passion-ice. We ate at a small restaurant by the edge of the River Tver, where guildless ones were served without ceremony, and at Gormon’s insistence we dined on mounds of a soft doughy substance and drank a tart yellow wine, local specialties.
Afterward we passed through a covered arcade in whose many aisles plump Vendors peddled star-goods, costly trinkets from Afreek, and the flimsy constructs of the local Manufactories. Just beyond we emerged in a plaza that contained a fountain in the shape of a boat, and to the rear of this rose a flight of cracked and battered stone-stairs ascending to a zone of rubble and weeds. Gormon beckoned, and we scrambled into this dismal area, then passed rapidly through it to a place where a sumptuous palace, by its looks early Second Cycle or even First, brooded over a sloping vegetated hill.
“They say this is the center of the world,” Gormon declared. “In Jorslem one finds another place that also claims the honor. They mark the spot here by a map.”
“How can the world have one center,” Avluela asked, “when it is round?”
Gormon laughed. We went in. Within, in wintry darkness, there stood a colossal jeweled globe lit by some inner glow.
“Here is your world,” said Gormon, gesturing grandly.
“Oh!” Avluela gasped. “Everything! Everything is here!”
The map was a masterpiece of craftsmanship. It showed natural contours and elevations, its seas seemed deep liquid pools, its deserts were so parched as to make thirst spring in one’s mouth, its cities swirled with vigor and life. I beheld the continents, Eyrop, Afreek, Ais, Stralya. I saw the vastness of Earth Ocean. I traversed the golden span of Land Bridge, which I had crossed so toilfully on foot not long before. Avluela rushed forward and pointed to Roum, to Agupt, to Jorslem, to Perris. She tapped the globe at the high mountains north of Hind and said softly, “This is where I was born, where the ice lives, where the mountains touch the moons. Here is where the Fliers have their kingdom.” She ran a finger westward toward Fars and beyond it into the terrible Arban Desert, and on to Agupt. “This is where I flew. By night, when I left my girlhood. We all must fly, and I flew here. A hundred times I thought I would die. Here, here in the desert, sand in my throat as I flew, sand beating against my wings—I was forced down, I lay naked on the hot sand for days, and another Flier saw me, he came down to me and pitied me, and lifted me up, and when I was aloft my strength returned, and we flew on toward Agupt. And he died over the sea, his life stopped though he was young and strong, and he fell down into the sea, and I flew down to be with him, and the water was hot even at night. I drifted, and morning came, and I saw the living stones growing like trees in the water, and the fish of many colors, and they came to him and pecked at his flesh as he floated with his wings outspread on the water, and I left him, I thrust him down to rest there, and I rose, and I flew on to Agupt, alone, frightened, and there I met you, Watcher.” Timidly she smiled to me. “Show us the place where you were young, Watcher.”
Painfully, for I was suddenly stiff at the knees, I hobbled to the far side of the globe. Avluela followed me; Gormon hung back, as though not interested at all. I pointed to the scattered islands rising in two long strips from Earth Ocean—the remnants of the Lost Continents.
“Here,” I said, indicating my native island in the west. “I was born here.”
“So far away!” Avluela cried.
“And so long ago,” I said. “In the middle of the Second Cycle, it sometimes seems to me.”
“No! That is not possible!” But she looked at me as though it might just be true that I was thousands of years old.
I smiled and touched her satiny cheek. “It only seems that way to me,” I said.
“When did you leave your home?”
“When I was twice your age,” I said. “I came first to here—” I indicated the eastern group of islands. “I spent a dozen years as a Watcher on Palash. Then the Will moved me to cross Earth Ocean to Afreek. I came. I lived awhile in the hot countries. I went on to Agupt. I met a certain small Flier.” Falling silent, I looked a long while at the islands that had been my home, and within my mind my image changed from the gaunt and eroded thing I now had become, and I saw myself young and well-fleshed, climbing the green mountains and swimming in the chill sea, doing my Watching at the rim of a white beach hammered by surf.
While I brooded Avluela turned away from me to Gormon and said, “Now you. Show us where you came from, Changeling!”
Gormon shrugged. “The place does not appear to be on this globe.”
“But that’s impossible!”
“Is it?” he asked.
She pressed him, but he evaded her, and we passed through a side exit and into the streets of Roum.
I was growing tired, but Avluela, hungered for this city and wished to devour it all in an afternoon, and so we went on through a maze of interlocking streets, through a zone of sparkling mansions of Masters and Merchants, and through a foul den of Servitors and Vendors that extended into subterranean catacombs, and to a place where Clowns and Musicians resorted, and to another where the guild of Somnambulists offered its doubtful wares. A bloated female Somnambulist begged us to come inside and buy the truth that comes with trances, and Avluela urged us to go, but Gormon shook his head and I smiled, and we moved on. Now we were at the edge of a park close to the city’s core. Here the citizens of Roum promenaded with an energy rarely seen in hot Agupt, and we joined the parade.
“Look there!” Avluela said. “How bright it is!”
She pointed toward the shining arc of a dimensional sphere enclosing some relic of the ancient city; shading my eyes, I could make out a weathered stone wall within, and a knot of people. Gormon said, “It is the Mouth of Truth.”