“Oh, that,” he said.
“Yeah, that.”
“Can we negotiate?”
“Uh, I think that’s what we’re doing.”
“You’re aware that just having that, that weapon out, is attracting all sorts of attention, right? I’m expecting help—”
“To have showed up the first time I drew her,” I finished for him. “That is, if there was anyone to show up.”
“Okay, point,” he said.
I gestured with Lady Teldra. Discaru shrugged and said, “All right.”
He moved fast, really fast. Maybe it was a demon thing, or maybe I was off guard, or maybe some of each, but he was past Lady Teldra before I knew it. He slammed his shoulder into me, and as I fought to keep my balance he ran past me back into the room and vanished.
“Well, crap,” I said to the walls.
“Sorry, Boss. I should have picked up on that.”
“So should I.”
I pulled the door shut. Okay, then. I’d learned some things from all of that. I wasn’t sure exactly what those things were, and certainly not how they fit together, and I had absolutely no idea how—or if—they were related to the mysterious nature of the “platform” I was walking around in, but I’d certainly learned some things.
Now what?
“Invent theories, then test them?”
“That’s what I’ve been doing, Loiosh.”
“Oh? What theory have you tested so far?”
“That I died, was brought to Deathgate, and the entire house is contained in the Paths of the Dead, and this has all been part of one of those tests you have to go through to reach the Halls of Judgment.”
“Oh. Is it?”
“No.”
“How do you know?”
“The Paths are set up for Dragaerans. Only Dragaerans. They couldn’t bring in a fake, mentally constructed Easterner I’d never met. He has to have been real. If he’s real, it’s all real. If it’s all real, then this isn’t part of a test, and I’m still alive. Also, if I’d died, you’d have mentioned something about it.”
“Good, then. Uh, did you really think that was going on, Boss?”
“No.”
“Then—”
“I’m not starting with the most likely, I’m starting with the easiest to test.”
“Oh. So, what’s the next theory?”
“Actually, that was the only one I had.”
“Right.”
To my left was the beast, locked in its room. I didn’t feel like meeting it again. To my right was the stairway back down, and places I hadn’t yet explored. So, just go ahead and open doors? Why not. Maybe there were answers behind one of them. Maybe there were pieces of answers behind all of them. So downstairs, and—
“Boss, there’s still a door here you haven’t opened.”
“Where?”
“There.”
Yeah, heading back toward the stairs, on my right. Well, sure then. The echo of my boots was very distinct as I walked toward that door; I was aware of the sound as I hadn’t been before.
I stood in front of the door, took a deep breath, and opened it.
Light.
Pure light.
I don’t mean blinding; I didn’t have an urge to shut my eyes or anything, but it was like the entire room was filled with light, or there was so much light that it was impossible to make out anything inside.
“Loiosh?”
“Boss?”
“Seem dangerous?”
“Well, not as far as I can tell.”
I shut the door and looked around. My eyes worked fine.
Why was there a room of light? Who would do that? And what would be in the room? Well, if I couldn’t answer that, there was another one: what would be past a room full of light? As I was trying to figure that out, something else occurred to me.
A room of mirrors, a room of light, the smell of bread, stone grinding against stone, footsteps in the halclass="underline" Light and sound and smell. The fact is, if you’ve known me for a while, the things I notice aren’t so much how much light there is, and what odd sounds there are, and smells. I have, from time to time, mentioned them, because I’ve been trying to give you, my listener, an idea of the place where things happened. But I’ve had to work to do it, because the things I notice are more like There’s a nook where someone could be hiding, or, That guy could be walking that way because he has a knife in his boot, or, I could go ten steps down that street, duck into that doorway, and vanish, or, Both of those guys can use a blade, but the one on the right is faster, or, That guardsman is watching me. That’s the stuff that I automatically pay attention to, because that’s who I am, because that’s what you need to be aware of when you kill people for a living. I’m not apologizing, I’m just telling you, because it was just then, standing before that door, that I became aware of how important light and sound and smell were in this place, and that I hadn’t been paying enough attention to them.
There was a connection between my world and the Halls of Judgment, and the connection was based on necromancy, which I understood not at all. But I knew this much: if I was going to make sense of how this place was put together, I was going to need to pay attention to all sorts of things I wasn’t used to noticing. Things are always the way they are for a reason: sometimes as a cause to create an effect, sometimes as a deliberate or accidental effect of something else, sometimes both at once. But there was a reason for the light, for the dark, for the smell of bread, for the sound of stones and footsteps.
I opened the door again.
“Boss?”
There was probably a little end table that I’d bark my shin on, or I’d set off a trap that would send a bucket of molten lava on my head and kill me, or something like that.
“Boss, we’re not going in there, are we?”
“Would you be afraid if it were dark, instead of light?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we’re going in. Our answers are on the other side.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because.”
“Because?”
“Uh, because, why not?”
“Oh, good.”