I bring this up because, well, here I was, back in the Halls of Judgment, but I knew it was stupid to be here, so that made it smart. Right? In fact, I figured I had a good chance of being okay as long as I didn’t run into a god or something.
I looked around. Light in the Paths of the Dead is weird; there’s no Enclouding like you have in the Empire, but there’s also no Furnace lurking behind it, so where does the light come from? I dunno, but whatever it is leaves the place feeling just a bit too dark, like a room where you can manage to read but you really wish for one more lamp. My memories of the Halls of Judgment involved thrones and pillars and darkness. Wherever I was now was a lot more interesting. There were trees that looked remarkably like trees—the tall kind that have branches only near the top, and have wide leaves that flop down at night. I’d seen a lot of them in the west. The grass was short and tended, and there were stone benches surrounding a fountain. I like fountains. This one was formed of three rings, where each ring had small arcs of water all around it. In the middle of each ring, a tall jet formed the petals of a flower, and in the middle a third jet of water rose higher still, splitting into three parts and then dissolving into mist with a shimmering rainbow in it. I’d seen rainbows in the East, and I’d always thought it had something to do with the Furnace being right there where you could see it, but I guess not. Or, you know, magic. It’s hard to form conclusions in the Halls of Judgment; in that sense it’s like Precipice Manor. So far, my conclusions had not gone beyond deciding that dead people like looking at fountains, too.
Discaru and I were in a clearing that might have been fifty yards in diameter, and beyond it was mist. I turned back to the fountain and watched it for a moment more before it crossed my mind to look behind me.
“Where’s the door?”
Discaru glanced over his shoulder. “These two rocks. Just turn around and take a step and we’ll be back. Try it, if you’d like.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “What is this place?”
“The Halls of Judgment.”
“Thought so. What’s beyond the mist?”
“Whatever you want, in a way, up to a point.”
“Why are we here?”
“You want to know about how Precipice Manor does what it does. It’s because of this connection, where we’re standing. So I brought you.”
“Oh. Well, thanks.”
“It’s no trouble.”
There were several indistinct shapes on the far side of the fountain. “Who are they?”
“Let’s go see,” he said.
I walked around it, slowly, because I wanted to keep watching it. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by water in motion, but I am. I’ve wasted more time than I care to admit just watching waves crash in from the ocean-sea.
There turned out to be four people—figures, I should say, because I don’t know if “people” is a good description for disembodied souls—standing and watching the fountain, another three seated on one of the benches. They looked like Dragaerans to me, but whether they were, or whether my brain was interpreting disembodied souls in the only way it could, I can’t say. Judging from the last time I’d come this way, things worked best if I just treated them as if what I was seeing were real. I also caught sight of a few figures wearing purple robes walking past in various directions. I hadn’t forgotten about them since I’d seen them last—I couldn’t forget them—but I tried not to think about them.
I got close to the ones watching the fountain, and identified an Issola and two Dragonlords. I’d run into a lot of Dragonlords last time I was here, and I hadn’t liked any of them. To the left, I’d liked all of the Issolas I’d met, so I thought maybe I’d say hello to this one, who was a broad-shouldered fellow with heavy brows and a tall forehead. As I got close to him, he glanced up at me, then turned his attention back to the fountain. I got the feeling he didn’t care to be interrupted, so I stopped and just watched the water some more.
Morrolan has a fountain in his courtyard, and a small one in a room just opposite the stairway up to the tower with the windows. I asked him how it was done once, and he taught me the spell and said now I could make one of my own. I never had, but during those years when I dreamed of a castle I’d thought about it, and even sort of designed it in my head. It would have been tall, with water shooting high, high up, in thin jets in all directions, and back into a granite pool that would swirl rightwise. It would have been a great fountain. I didn’t build it, though, because I didn’t get the castle, because Cawti sort of went through some changes in what she wanted, and then I got some people mad at me and I’ve been too busy running for my life to do much of anything else.
The Issola stood up, bowed his head to me, and walked away. Discaru had come up next to me. “What is this thing?”
“Memory,” he said.
“Huh. Looks like water.”
“Well, it’s that too.”
“Memory is water? Water is memory? Memory is like water? Water is—”
“You don’t have to complicate it so much. This is where souls come to recover their memories.”
“Souls forget?”
“Those who became Purple Robes.”
“Oh. So, since I haven’t lost my memories, it shouldn’t have much of an effect on me, right?”
I turned back to the fountain, watching an isolated jet rise, curve, turn into mist. It was pretty, the nice rainbow forming and wavering in, well, wherever the light was coming from. Jets dissolving into mist into rainbows, and so back into the pool, and up into jets.
Have you ever drunk so much that you don’t remember what you did? That there are hours where you know you were up, awake, doing something, but you don’t have the least clue what it was? I’ve only had that happen once.
It was a bad time for me. I was still married then, but things had come up with Cawti, and we couldn’t even see each other without starting in on all the ugly stuff. One day, in the middle of it, I went out and got a bottle of the worst Fenarian brandy I could find and brought it home. Cawti wasn’t there—she usually wasn’t in those days, being busy making things better for everyone who didn’t care about her, and worse for everyone who did. So I just started drinking.
At some point, Cawti came home, looked at me, started to say something, then shook her head. She started to walk past me. I said, “You killed me.” Forming words was hard.
“You’re drunk,” she said.
I picked up the bottle and looked at what was left.
“Yeah,” I said. “But you still killed me. I mean, before. They gave you money and you killed me.”
She nodded. “We’ll talk in the morning.”
“You know I never killed another human. Never.”
“I know. We’ve talked about it bef—we’ll talk in the morning.”
“But why? I just want to know why.”
“What’s the point, Vladimir? You won’t remember this tomorrow.”
“Yes, I will.”
“No, you won’t.”
“I just want to know why.”
“Because if I refused a job because the target was an Easterner, I’d be accepting that there are two classes of people, and I wouldn’t accept that.”