Shimrod at last said: "Most interesting! My ideas have been profoundly altered."
"A pity you must depart! Do you intend to return, perhaps, with more thunder-eggs?"
"As soon as possible! In the meantime I would like to take with me a few souvenirs, to keep Irerly fresh in my memory."
"No problem whatever. What strikes your fancy?"
"Well—what about the small glittering objects which show many entrancing colors, thirteen in all? I might well accept a set of those."
"You refer to the florid little pustules which accumulate around certain of our orifices; we think of them as chancres, if you will forgive the word. Take as many as you like."
"In that case, however many will fit into this pouch."
"It will accommodate only a single set. Mank, Idisk! A few of your choicest pustules, if you will! Now, returning to our discussion of teleological anomalies, how do your own savants reconcile the various antic overviews to which we have made reference?"
"Well—in the main, they take the bad with the good."
"Aha! That would be consonant with Original Gnosticism, as I have long suspected. Well, perhaps strong feelings are unwise. You have packed your keepsakes? Good. Incidentally, how will you return? I notice that your sandestins have dissipated into dust."
"I need only follow this line to the portal."
"A clever theory! It implies a whole new and revolutionary logic."
A far mountain ejected high a jet of blue magma, to express displeasure. "As always, Dodar's concepts almost superstitiously range the inconceivable."
"Not so!" declared Dodar stoutly. "A final anecdote to illustrate my point—but no! I see that Shimrod is anxious to depart. A
pleasant journey then!"
Shimrod groped his way along the yarn, sometimes in several directions at once, through clouds of bitter music, across the soft bellies of what he whimsically conceived to be dead ideas.
Green and blue winds thrust from below and above, with such force that he feared for the strength of the yarn, which seemed to have acquired a curious resilience. Finally the ball of yarn reached its original dimension and Shimrod knew that he must be close upon the aperture. He came upon a sandestin in the form of a freshfaced boy, sitting on a rock and holding the end of the yarn.
Shimrod halted. The sandestin rose languidly erect. "You are carrying thirteen baubles?"
"So I am, and I am now ready to return." "Give me the baubles; I must convey them through the whorl." Shimrod demurred. "Better that I carry them. They are too delicate for the care of a subordinate."
The sandestin tossed aside the loose end of yarn and disappeared into green mist, and Shimrod was left holding a useless ball of yarn. Time passed. Shimrod waited, ever more uncomfortable. His protective mantle had frayed to the verge of collapse and his perceptual disks were presenting sets of unreliable images.
The sandestin returned, with the air of one who had nothing better to do. "I am instructed as before. Give me the baubles."
"Not one. Does your mistress consider me such a mooncalf?"
The sandestin departed into a tangle of green membranes, looking with sardonic finality back over its shoulder.
Shimrod sighed. Faithlessness, utter and absolute, had been proved. From his pouch he brought those articles provided by Murgen: a sandestin of that sort known as a hexamorph, several capsules of gas, and a tile inscribed with the spell of Invincible Thrust.
Shimrod instucted the sandestin: "Lead me back through the whorl, back to the glade by Twitten's Corner."
"The sphincter has been sealed by your enemies. We must go by way of the five clefts and a perturbation. Wear gas and prepare to use the spell."
Shimrod surrounded himself in gas from one of the bladders; it clung to him like syrup. The sandestin led him a far way, and eventually allowed him to rest. "Be at your ease; we must wait."
Time passed, of a duration Shimrod could not reckon. The sandestin spoke: "Prepare your spell."
Shimrod took the syllables into his mind, and the runes faded from the tile, leaving a blank shard.
"Now. Speak your spell."
Shimrod stood in the glade where he had come with Melancthe. She was nowhere to be seen. The time was late afternoon on a gray chilly day of late autumn, or winter. Clouds hung low over the glade; trees surrounding held up stark branches, marking the sky with black. The face of the bluff no longer showed an iron door.
The Laughing Sun and The Crying Moon on this winter evening was warm and comfortable and almost empty of guests. Hockshank the landlord welcomed Shimrod with a polite smile. "I am happy to see you, sir. I feared that you had suffered a mishap."
"Your fears were by and large accurate."
"It is no novelty. Each year folk strangely disappear from the fair."
Shimrod's garments were torn and the fabric had suffered rot; when he looked in the mirror he saw haggard cheeks, staring eyes and skin stained the curious brown of weathered wood.
After his supper he sat brooding by the fire. Melancthe, he reasoned, had sent him into Irerly for one of several possible purposes: to acquire the thirteen spangled gems, to ensure his death, or both. His death would seem her prime purpose. Otherwise she might have allowed him to bring out the gems. At the cost of her virtue? Shimrod smiled. She would break her promise as easily as she had broken faith.
In the morning Shimrod paid his score, adjusted the feathers to his new boots and departed Twitten's Corner.
In due course he arrived at Trilda. The meadow showed dreary and bleak under the lowering clouds. An additional quality of desolation surrounded the manse. Shimrod approached, step by step, then halted to appraise the manse. The door hung ajar.
He went forward slowly and entered through the broken door, into the parlor, and here he found the corpse of Grofinet, who had been suspended from the ceiling-beams by his lank legs and burned over a fire, presumably that he might be forced to reveal the location of Shimrod's treasures. By the look of affairs, Gro-finet's tail had first been roasted away, inch by inch, on a brazier. At the last his head had been lowered into the flames. No doubt, in a hysteria, he had screamed out his knowledge, suffering agonies as much for his own weakness as for the fire he dreaded so much. And then, to silence his raving, someone had split his charred face with a cleaver.
Shimrod looked under the hearth, but the gnarled object which represented his store of magical adjuncts was gone. He had expected nothing else. He knew rudimentary skills, a few charlatan's tricks, a clever spell or two. Never a great magician, Shimrod was now barely a magician of any sort.
Melancthe! She had given him no more faith than he had given her.
Still, he would have brought her no great harm, while she had sealed the portal against him, so that he should die in Irerly.
"Melancthe, dire Melancthe! For your crimes you will suffer! I escaped and so I won, but in that absence caused by you I lost my possessions and Grofinet lost his life; you will suffer accordingly!" So raved Shimrod as he stalked about the manse.
The robbers who had seized upon his absence to pillage Trilda, they also must be captured and punished: who might they be?
The House Eye! Established for just such contingencies! But no, first he would bury Grofinet; and this he did, in a bower behind the manse, along with his friend's small possessions. He finished in the fading light of late afternoon. Returning inside the manse he set every lamp aglow, and built a fire in the fireplace. Still Trilda seemed bleak.
Shimrod brought the House Eye down from the ridge-beam, and set it on the carved table in the parlor, where, upon stimulus, it recreated what it had observed during Shimrod's absence.
The first few days passed without incident. Grofinet zealously discharged his duties and all was well. Then, during the middle of a languid summer afternoon the nunciator cried out: "I spy two strangers, of ilk unknown. They approach from the south!"
Grofinet hurriedly donned his dress helmet and took up what he considered a posture of authority in the doorway. He called out: