I raised my hand curiously, untwisting the wrappings. They were smooth
and shining and colorless, with a bluish cast, like Gamine's veils;
no fabric I had ever seen. Evarin backed slowly away from me. For an
instant all I could see was a blurred invisibility--like Gamine's face
behind the veils--then a sort of mirror became slowly visible. It did
not seem to reflect anything; rather, it was a coldly shining surface,
cloudy, glittering from within. I bent to examine the pattern of the
shadows that moved on the surface. There was a curious pull from the
mirror, a cold that crept sluggishly from my hand. A familiar, soothing
cold. As if drawn by a magnet, my eyes bent closer--
Recognition crashed in my mind. Evarin--and his gilt deadly Toys.... I
dashed the colorless thing to the floor, giving it a savage kick. The
blurred invisibility wavered; I caught a glimpse of a tiny jewelled
mechanism, before it sprang back to gray ice again. Evarin had backed
halfway across the room; I leaped at him, collaring the dandy and
wrenching him close. "I've a good mind to tie the thing across your
throat!" I grated.
Evarin's lip twisted up. Suddenly his whole face melted in a blurring
invisibility and I felt his whole substance evaporate from between
my hands. He writhed like smoke, and I leaped backward just as he
materialized, whole and deadly, too close. "I am always--guarded!" he
jerked out at me, "I might have known--"
He stooped, reaching for the fallen toy. I kicked the little mirror
out of his reach, bent to retrieve it. "I'll keep this," I said, and
wadding the insulated silk around it, I thrust it into a pocket.
Evarin's eyes glared at me helplessly. "You'll stay solid for awhile
now," I jeered. "_Toymaker!_ Damned freak--" I stormed out of the
room, leaving him rubbing his bruised shoulder.
Now that Adric was back in control, I had no trouble discovering
where I wanted to go. Some blind instinct led me through the maze
of elevators and staircases; I stepped into servant's quarters,
kitchens, a roomful of buzzing machinery I dismissed with a glance of
familiarity; and finally found myself in the open, the semicircle of
rainbow towers around me.
Overhead the suns, red and white, sent a curious, double-shadowed
light downward through the neatly-trimmed trees. A little day moon,
smaller than any moon I had known, peeped, a curious crescent, over the
edge of a mountain. The grass under my feet was just grass, but the
brightly-tinted flowers in mathematically regular beds were strange to
me. Paths, bordered by narrow ditches to keep the pedestrian off the
flowers, wandered in and out of this strange pleasaunce; I accepted all
this without conscious thought, but some unconscious scrap of memory
gave me a vague practical reason for the ditches. I carefully avoided
them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account