Hios does not attempt to disavow the rumours that claim it was she who poisoned the king. The commander of the guard is prepared to do whatever Hios asks of him, and so are his men. Since the deaths of Gato and Taal, Hios has grown so beautiful that she seems to have pillaged all the jewels of hell. Her dark splendour holds the praetorians in thrall; any of them would willingly undergo torture and death for the sake of their lady. Life at the palace becomes uncanny and dreamlike. The guards now walk its corridors, sprawl on its expensive upholstery in their high riding boots, enter its halls and chambers without invitation. Everyone gets out of their way. Hios glows with an icy, deathly beauty; fear abounds in the chambers of the palace. Uddo retires to ever-more remote rooms, waiting for Hios to strike against her. Hios leaves her mother alone while she considers how to dispose of her. One night Uddo gathers her jewels and makes an attempt to leave the palace by a side gate, but the guards there silently refuse to raise the barrier. Uddo shouts at them, then breaks into sobs and offers them jewels and money, but none of them speak or step aside, so Uddo returns to her room.
Hios begins to rule over the palace and the island as a whole. She refuses the title of queen, although the praetorians, who love the lustre of ceremony and the sight of gaily-coloured uniforms in the light of the sun, persist in proposing a magnificent coronation. It is enough for Hios that everyone fears her. She has the gemstone fished out of the statue and sent to Tana on Illim; using this, Tana is able to wash the red coating off the marble panel and thus prepare the remedy for Nau, who begins to get softer as soon as the first drops are applied. But when Tana asks for the return of his son’s remains, Hios refuses to give up Gato’s skeleton. She commands that this stays in the statue, and every evening when it is lit by the setting sun and Gato’s silhouette comes into relief like a puppet in an Adriatic shadow theatre, she walks across the deserted courtyard and sits on a granite paving stone in front of the statue, where she remains until it is immersed in shade and Gato disappears.
One afternoon it suddenly grows dark and above the sea there appears a black column approaching the shore. The superstitious town-dwellers, whose streets are infected by the silent horror flowing from the palace, tell one another that the Devil has come for Hios. But it is nothing more than a tornado. When the whirling dance reaches the town, it rips off several roofs and tosses them into the air. It shakes the ships in the harbour, and — on reaching the palace — bores into the jelly statue like a giant screw, gathers it unto itself, bears the statue off towards the skies, then drops it — jelly, Gato’s skeleton, the predatory fish, and all — into the streets. Before the fish die of fright they manage to sink their teeth into a number of people who try to pick them up from the ground. Hios orders the collection of Gato’s remains, and these she has placed in the gold box, out of which she first ejects the manuscript of her brother’s book. Now she detests whoever has the same blood as she, whether living or dead. Then she gives the order that Mii be found and told that Hios has work for her. But Mii, who has experienced a religious crisis and become terrified of the world that gave birth to her visions, is by this time living somewhere in northern Europe, on the tundra and deep in the forest, making ephemeral statues out of ash, then watching the wind reshape them until they disappear. So Hios’s envoys bring to Devel the sculptor Nubra of Kass. When Mii was working on Fo’s palace and the statue in jelly, Nubra was one of her assistants, and after her departure he took over her workshop.
The new sculptor
Hios asks Nubra if he is able to create a sculpture in gold that would show the moment when Gato, behung with predatory fish, emerged from the jelly for the last time before falling back into the statuary. The figures in gold should be of the same size as the jelly and living figures in the scene that is the subject of the gold statuary. The sculptor tells Hios straight away how much gold he will need. Hios promises him all the gold from the state treasury, and in addition to this she issues a decree that all noblemen and wealthy merchants should exchange their gold for state bonds. No one believes in the validity of these, but no one protests.
The sculptor immediately gets to work on his design. He, too, is work-obsessed, but unlike Mii he does not create great visions, worlds that grow out of a confrontation between one’s eyes and a space, a void filled with endless content. He concentrates always on one statue only, and he works on this until he has solved the rebus or complex mathematical equation it presents him with. As a rule Mii would reject any conditions set for a commission (unless her failure to meet them would result in her death, as was the case with the statuary in jelly); she would create her worlds gradually by her own themes, laws and rules, and in her own style, none of which were known to Mii before she started work. With her successor, on the other hand, the stricter the rules the client sets, the better; when this is not the case, he sets advance conditions of his own, which he must respect at all costs, even though these sometimes verge on the impossible and he is the only one who knows of them.
When, for example, he was commissioned to produce a portrait of the family of the chancellor of one of the island kingdoms, he began his work by setting himself to ensure that the fingertips of each of the figures described the circumference of a precise, if imaginary circle, whose radius he determined by the throw of a dice; after this he three times opened a dictionary with his eyes closed, thus finding the names of three objects or beings he would have to work into the composition of the statuary group. These were a pineapple, a bat and a hand of a clock. It was Nubra’s task somehow to establish connections among them and also between them and the members of the chancellor’s family, related to what the subjects thought about and the kind of lives they led. Such incipient connections as these draw other objects and animals into the statue, providing outlines for situations in which they might be inserted. Once a statue is finished, it is common that those who view it find in its composition and the objects and scenes it depicts symbolic meaning and deep philosophical thought. In addition to this, Nubra likes to experiment in the creation of a variety of moving, mechanical statues, some of which are driven by wind or water, others by springs concealed in their insides and wound up by a great key protruding from the back of the plinth. It is possible that these experiments have their origins in Nubra’s work on the statuary in jelly.
Incidentally, Nubra was deeply dissatisfied with Mii’s execution of Taal’s task. Although her statue corresponded exactly to the task set by the king in its amended, definitive version, it was Nubra’s opinion that the small changes to the assignment secured by Mii undermined the purity of her design and with it her achievement as a whole. Nubra believes that the conditions set at the outset should not under any circumstances be changed — that if the chess player is unable to defend his king it does not give him the right to move his rook as if it were a bishop. So years later Nubra decides to correct Mii’s error and create a statue that really is made of water. The principle on which he bases this is relatively simple: springlets of water are sprayed through a dense web of holes drilled into horizontal panels placed at a variety of pre-determined heights, thus creating a relief. Of course, this system has one significant defect; perhaps, dear reader, you have hit upon it yourself: it does not allow for overhangs — as the lines of the water statue work their way upwards, they are bound to narrow. It is not even possible to create in the common position something as simple, yet important as the human nose. But Nubra finds a solution to this problem, too: he designs his water statue in such a way that it requires no shape whose highest point is wider than its lowest.