With an unsteady hand, he unlocked the gate; it swung inward with surprising ease, as if either the place or its controlling agency were eager to receive him. Following Janice, who went with her knife at the ready, he moved along a path winding among shrubs hung with overripe berries and low spreading trees with blackish green leaves; the foliage was so dense that he was unable to see anything of the buildings other than the rooftops. The wind did not penetrate there, and the stillness was such that every rustle he made in brushing against the bushes seemed inordinately loud; he fancied he could hear his heartbeat. Moonlight lacquered the leaves and applied lattices of shadow to the flagstones. He felt he was choking, moving deeper into an inimical hothouse atmosphere that clotted his lungs; he realized this was merely a symptom of fear, but knowing that did nothing to alleviate the symptom. He fastened his eyes on Janice’s broad back and tried to clear his mind; but as they drew near the building where Zemaille’s apartment was situated, he had the notion that someone was watching . . . not just an ordinary someone. Someone cold, vast, and powerful. He recalled how Kirin and Mirielle had described their apprehension of Griaule, and the thought that the dragon’s eye might be turned his way panicked him. His fists clenched, his jaw tightened, he had difficulty in swallowing. The shadows appeared to be acquiring volume and substance, and he imagined that terrible creatures were materializing within their black demarcations, preparing to leap out and tear at him.
Once inside the door, which opened onto a corridor lit by eerie mosiac patterns of bioluminescent moss, like veins of a radiant blue-green mineral wending through the teakwood walls, his fear increased. He was certain now that he could feel Griaule; with every step his impression of the dragon grew more discrete. There was an aura of timelessness, or rather that time itself was not so large and elemental as the dragon, that it was something on which Griaule had gained a perspective, something he could control. And the walls, the veins of moss . . . he had the sense that those patterns reflected the patterns of the dragon’s thoughts. It was, he thought, as if he were inside Griaule, passing along some internal channel, and thinking this, he realized that it might be true, that the building, its function aligned with Griaule for so long, might well have become attuned with the dragon, might have in effect become the analogue of his body, subject to his full control. That idea produced in him an intense claustrophobia, and he had to bite back a cry. This was ridiculous, he told himself, absolutely ridiculous, he was letting his imagination run away with him. And yet he could not escape the feeling of enclosure, of being trapped beneath tons of cold flesh and bones the size of ships’ keels.
When at last Janice pointed out the door to Zemaille’s apartment, it was with tremendous relief that Korrogly inserted the key, eager to be out of the corridor, hoping that the apartment would provide a less oppressive environment; but although well-lit by globes of moss, the room that greeted his eye added more fuel to the fires of his imagination. Beyond an alcove was a bedchamber of a most grotesque design, the walls covered in a rich paper of crimson with a magenta stripe, and coiling around the entire room was a relief depicting a tail and a swollen reptile body, all worked in brass, every scale cunningly wrought, resolving into a huge dragon’s head with an open fanged mouth that protruded some nine feet out from the far wall, wherein lay a bed like a plush red tongue. The eyes of the dragon were lidded, with opalescent crescents showing beneath, and its claws extended from the foot of the bed; above the head, suspended from the ceiling, was a section of polished scale some four feet wide and five feet long, angled slightly downward so that whoever entered would see – as Korrogly did now – their dark reflection. He stood frozen, his eyes darting between the scale and the dragon, certain that through some mystic apparatus he was being perceived by Griaule, and he might have stood there for a good long time if Janice had not said, ‘Hurry! This is no place to linger!’
There was little furniture in the room – a bureau, a small chest, two chairs. Korrogly made a hasty search of the chest and bureau, finding only robes and linens. Then he turned to Janice and said, ‘What am I looking for?’
‘Papers, I think,’ she said. ‘Kirin told me once that Mardo kept records. But I’m not sure.’
Korrogly began feeling along the walls, searching for a hidden panel, while Janice stood watch at the door. Where, he thought, where would Zemaille have hidden his valuables? Then it struck him. Where else? He stared at the bed within the dragon’s mouth. The idea that Mirielle had once slept there repelled him, and he was no less repelled by the prospect of exploring the dark recess behind the bed; but it appeared he had no choice. He knelt on the bed, his trouserleg catching on one of the fangs, stalling his heart for an instant, and then he crawled back into the darkness, tossing aside pillows. The recess extended for about six feet and was walled with a smooth material that felt like stone; he ran his hands along it, hunting for a crack, a bulge, some sign of concealment. At last his fingers encountered a slight depression . . . no, five depressions, each about the size of his fingertips. He pressed against them, but achieved nothing; he tapped on the stone and it resounded hollowly.
‘Have you found it?’ Janice called.
‘There’s something here, but I can’t get it open.’
In a moment she came crawling up beside him, bringing with her a faint sweetish smell that seemed familiar. He showed her the depressions, and she began to push at them.
‘Maybe it’s a sequence,’ he said. ‘Maybe you have to push them one at a time in some order.’
‘I felt something,’ she said. ‘A tremor. Here . . . put your weight against the wall.’
He set his shoulder to the wall, heaved and felt the stone shift; the next second the stone gave way and he went sprawling forward. Terrified, he pushed up into a sitting position and found himself in a small round chamber whose pale walls, veined like marble, gave off a ruddy glow. At the rear of the chamber was a lacquered black box. He started to reach for it, but as he picked it up the veins in the stone began to writhe and to thicken, melting up from the surface of the chamber, becoming adders with puffy sacs beneath their throats, and behind the wall, as if trapped in a reddish gel, there appeared the image of Mardo Zemaille, a dark hook-nosed man robed in black and silver, his hands arranged into tortuous mudras from which spat infant lightnings.
Korrogly screamed and pounded on the wall; he looked behind him and saw that the serpents were twining around one another, some beginning to slither toward him. Zemaille was intoning words in some guttural tongue, staring with demonic intent, and the detonations of light emerging from the fingertips were forming into balls of pale fire that spat and crackled and arrowed away in all directions. Korrogly pried at the wall, his breath coming in shrieks, expecting the adders to strike at any second, to be scorched by the balls of fire. A searing pain in his ankle, and he saw that one of the adders had sunk its fangs deep. His screams grew frantic, he lashed out his foot, shaking the adder loose, but another struck at his calf, and another. The pain was almost unendurable. He could feel the venom coursing through his veins like black ice. Half-a-dozen of the serpents were clinging to his legs, and his blood was flowing in rivulets from the wounds. He began to shiver, his right leg spasmed in a convulsion. His heart was huge, swelling larger yet, bloating with poison; it felt like a fist clenched about a thorn inside his chest. One of the fireballs struck his arm and clung there, eating into his arm, charring cloth and flesh. Zemaille’s voice echoed, the voice of doom, as meaningless and potent as the voice of a gong. Then the wall swung outward, and he scrambled from the chamber, falling, coming to his knees, making a clumsy dive toward the bed, only to be caught up by Janice.