In an instant everyone fell silent. The winged figure of a giantess appeared, as sudden as the shadow of a bird but towering like the green pines of the necropolis.
All the Hierodules bowed at once, and a moment later so did Gunnie and I. The sailors who had come with us made their obeisance as well, pulling off their caps, bending their heads and knuckling their foreheads, or bowing less gracefully but even more abjectly.
If Grimkeld’s philosophy had protected him from fear, my memory had protected me. Tzadkiel, I felt certain, had been the captain of this ship when I had sailed upon her previously. Tzadkiel, I felt certain, was her captain now; and on Yesod I had learned not to fear him. But at that instant I looked in Tzadkiel’s eyes and saw the eyes that spangled her wings, and knew myself for a fool.
“There is a great one among you,” she said, and her voice was like the playing of a hundred citharae, or the purr of the smilodon, the cat that slew our bulls as wolves kill sheep. “Let him step forward.”
It was as difficult as anything I have done in all my lives, but I strode to the front as she had asked. She took me up as a woman lifts a puppy, holding me cupped between her hands. Her breath was the wind of Yesod, which I had thought never to feel again.
“Whence does so much power come?” It was but a whisper, yet it seemed to me that such a whisper must shake the whole fabric of the ship.
“From you, Tzadkiel,” I said. “I have been your slave in another time.”
“Tell me.”
I tried to do so, and found, I do not know how, that each word of mine now carried the meaning of ten thousand, so that when I said Urth, the continents came with it, and the sea and all the islands, and the indigo sky wrapped in the glory of the old sun reigning amid his ring of stars. After a hundred such words, she knew more of our history than I had known I knew; and I had reached the moment when Father Inire and I had embraced, and I had mounted the pont to the ship of the Hierodules, which was to take me to this ship, the ship of the Hierogrammate, the ship of Tzadkiel, though I did not know it. A hundred words more, and all that had befallen me on the ship and in Yesod stood shining in the air between us.
“You have undergone trials,” she said. “If you wish, I can give you that which will make you forget them all. Though only by instinct, you will still bring a young sun to your world.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to forget, Tzadkiel. I’ve boasted too often that I forget nothing, and forgetting — which I have known once or twice — seems to me a kind of death.”
“Say instead that death is a remembering. But even death can be kind, as you learned upon the lake. Would you rather I set you down?”
“I am your slave, as I’ve said. Your will is mine.”
“And if it were my will to drop you?”
“Then your slave would seek to live still, so that Urth might live too.”
She smiled and opened her hands. “You have forgotten already what a slight thing it is to fall here”
I had indeed, and felt a momentary terror; but to have fallen from a bed on Urth would have been a more serious matter. I settled to the floor of Tzadkiel’s quarters as lightly as thistledown.
Even so, it was a moment or two before I collected my thoughts sufficiently to note that the others were gone and I stood alone. Tzadkiel, who must have seen my look, whispered, “I have sent them away. The man who rescued you will be rewarded, as will the woman who fought for you when the rest would have slain you. But it is not likely you will see either again.”
She moved her right hand toward me until the tips of its fingers rested on the floor before me. “It is expedient,” she said, “that my crew think me large, and not guess how often I move among them. But you know too much about me to be deceived in that way, and you deserve too much to be deceived in any. It would be more convenient for us now if we were of similar size.”
I scarcely heard the last word. Something so astounding was taking place that all my attention was seized by it. The uppermost knuckle of her index finger was shaping itself into a face, and it was the face of Tzadkiel. The nail divided and redivided, then the whole of the first and second joints too, so that the lowest knuckle became her knees. The finger stepped away from the hand and put out arms and hands of its own, and eye-spangled wings; and the giantess behind it vanished like a flame blown out.
“I will take you to your stateroom,” Tzadkiel said. She was not so tall as I.
I would have knelt, but she lifted me up.
“Come. You are fatigued — more than you know, and no wonder. There is a good bed for you there. Food will be brought to you whenever you wish it.”
I managed to say, “But if you are seen…”
“We will not be seen. There are passages here that are used only by me.”
Even as she spoke, a pilaster swung away from the wall. She led me through the opening it revealed and down a shadowy corridor. I remembered then that Apheta had told me her people could see in such darkness; but Tzadkiel did not pulse with light as Apheta had, and I was not so foolish as to suppose we would share the bed she had mentioned. After what seemed a long walk, dawn came — low hills dropping below the old sun — and it seemed we were not in a corridor at all. A fresh wind stirred the grass. As the sky grew lighter, I saw a dark box set in the ground before us. “That is your stateroom,” Tzadkiel told me. “Be careful. We must step down into it.”
We did so, onto something soft. Then we stepped down again, and at last onto a floor. Light flooded the room, which was much larger than my old stateroom and oddly shaped. The morning meadow from which we had come was no more than a picture on the wall behind us, the steps the back and seat of a long settee. I went to the picture and tried to thrust my hand into it, but met solid resistance.
“We have such things in the House Absolute,” I said. “I see whence Father Inire took his model, though ours are not so well contrived.”
“Mount that seat confidently, and you may go through,” Tzadkiel told me. “It is the pressure of a foot upon the back that dissolves the illusion. Now I must go, and you must rest.”
“Wait,” I said. “I won’t be able to sleep unless you tell me…”
“Yes?”
“I have no words. You were a finger of Tzadkiel’s. And now you are Tzadkiel.”
“You know our power to change shape; your younger self encountered me in the future, as you told me only a few moments ago. The cells of our bodies shift, like those of certain sea creatures on your Urth, which can be pressed through a screen yet reunite. What then prevents me from shaping a miniature and constricting the connection until it parts? I am such an atomy; when we reunite, my greater self will know all I have learned.”
“Your great self held me in her hands, then vanished like any dream.”
“Yours is a race of pawns,” Tzadkiel told me. “You move forward only, unless we move you back to begin the game again. But not all the pieces on the board are pawns.”
Chapter XXV — Passion and the Passageway
EXHAUSTION operates strangely upon the mind. Left alone in my stateroom, I could only think that my door was unguarded now. Throughout my time as Autarch, there had always been sentries at my door, usually Praetorians. I wandered through several rooms searching for it merely to verify that there were none now; but when I opened it at last, half-human brutes in grotesque helmets sprang to attention.
I closed it again, wondering whether they were meant to keep others out, or myself inside; and I wasted a few moments more searching for some means of extinguishing the light. I was too spent, however, to keep that up for long. Dropping my clothing to the floor, I stretched myself across the wide bed. As my thoughts drifted toward that misty state we call dreaming, the light dimmed and went out.