Garric's body continued sleeping on the couch in the conference room. His mind got up from it and strolled out of the building. He didn't have any control over his movements, though that didn't concern him at the moment. He supposed he was dreaming.

Garric's legs swung in their usual long stride, but he was moving faster than a walking man and not traveling through space alone. He recognized all the places he passed, but many were in Barca's Hamlet, not Valles, and some were from out of the waking world.

The people Garric met were shadows, but sometimes they spoke to him and he replied. He couldn't hear the exchanges, even the words that came from his own lips.

He was alone for the first time since his father had given him a coronation medal of King Carus. When Garric hung that ancient gold disk against his chest, he and had Carus begun to share an existence closer than twins, closer than spouses. But now—

Garric felt for the medallion. It lay back with his sleeping self. He straightened his shoulders and let the dream carry him where it would.

He reached a bridge and started across. Behind him was Valles; beyond... he couldn't be sure. Sometimes Garric saw shining -walls; other glimpses were of ruins which might once have been the same buildings. The structure underfoot felt more solid than stone, though to Garric's eyes he was walking on a tracery of blue light, a fairy glow without substance.

Garric reached the far end of the bridge. It was daylight here, though it had been early dusk in Valles when he left his couch. Before him was a city which at the time of its glory must have been magnificent; it was breathtaking even now. He strode toward it.

Modern Valles might be larger; Carcosa in the days of King Carus and the Old Kingdom was far greater yet. In the richness of its fittings, though, nothing Garric knew from his own day or the past could compare with what this place must once have been.

He was walking up an esplanade paved with slabs of red granite, each as wide as Garric was tall and twice as long. The labor of cutting and smoothing such hard stone made him blink.

The blocks were cocked and broken, by time and the roots of trees crawling from the median plantings. The surface should have been as hard to walk on as a seascape frozen in the middle of a lashing storm. In this dream existence, the footing didn't hinder Garric.

Pedestrian porticos flanked the roadway. Some of the arches had collapsed. The core was fitted stones rather than the concrete and rubble of similar constructions in ancient Carcosa.

The buildings to either side were stone also, but originally metal had covered them. Some had worn tin, decayed now to powdery tendrils trailing from the cracks between close-fitting blocks. Others had been clad in sheets of copper and bronze whose blue-green revenants still stained the walls.

Garric frowned. He'd heard of this place, but as a myth of the final days before the fall of the Old Kingdom. A fragment from a discourse of the philosopher Andron, captured in a quirky anonymous compendium entitled The Dress of All Peoples in All Times. He couldn't remember the exact words or the claimed location, but he recalled the description of residents wearing striped clothing which reflected variously according to the color of the mirroring walls they passed beside.

A dream of a myth? These ruins had a solid reality.

He walked toward the vast building at the end of the esplanade. The three stages of its facade were supported by pillars of equal height, but those of the middle level were more slender than the massive columns beneath them, while delicate pairs of banded travertine chosen for appearance rather than strength formed the uppermost range. The wooden casements and shutters of the upper-story windows had rotted to dust.

The ground-floor entrance was recessed deeply within a pointed arch, but the door itself was small and so strongly made that it yet survived. Flanking the porch were fountains. Rains had left a stagnant scum in the orichalch basins, but the bronze statues from which water had once played were twists of verdigris which gave no hint of their former shapes.

The city was silent save for the wind soughing through the walls.

A broad helical staircase twisted from the ground to the building's roof. The pillared tower was styled to match the main structure, but the two were only connected at the top.

Garric climbed the stairs. Their pitch was shallow, too shallow for his long legs, and should have been uncomfortable. In his present dream state he only noticed what he had no muscles to feel.

He wondered if King Carus missed Garric's presence as much as Garric did his. Did Carus even realize that Garric was gone?

As Garric mounted the stairs, his view of the city through the columns broadened. The streets were laid out in concentric circles centered on this building, though the docks of what had been a thriving seaport ate an arc out of one edge. The ships were gone, but the quays and stone bollards remained. The port didn't have sloping ramps up which oar-driven warships could be drawn to prevent their light hulls from decaying while not in use.

At the very edge of his vision Garric thought he saw a wall of shimmering light like that which formed the bridge. It was too faint for him to be sure. Though daylight suffused the sky, there was no sun.

Garric stepped onto the roof. It was covered with granite like the boulevard and esplanade, but these slabs were as nearly level as the common table in Reise's inn. The foundations must sink down to the bowels of the earth.

The roof was a vast plaza decorated by a score of stone planters like buttons tucking the horsehair of an upholstered seat. Grass and weeds grew in them now, and from one sprouted a twisted apple tree—the progeny many times removed of the tree placed there when the building was new. Roots had burst out the sides of other planters in the distant past, spilling the soil for rains to wash into a film of mud; only the lone apple had been able to reseed itself.

The roof was an audience ground. At the end opposite the staircase was a chamber with a screen of pierced alabaster for its outward-curving front wall. Garric walked toward it, his feet taking him where he would have gone of his own volition.

The translucent alabaster was no more than a finger's thickness. Light both reflected from and refracted through the milky stone, giving the air a soap-bubble sheen. The piercings were not simple holes or even a repetitive pattern. As Garric stepped close he saw a tracery of images, each as subtle and unique as the starlings of a flock wheeling in autumn.

The cut-out shapes had meaning—of that Garric was sure. His conscious mind couldn't grasp what the meaning was, however. Would Tenoctris understand?

The screen permitted citizens to see and hear their ruler close at hand, while still preventing them from touching him—or her, Garric supposed. It was carved from a seamless sheet of alabaster and had no door. A twig with a few dried leaves was caught in one of the small holes.

In ancient Carcosa the King of the Isles addressed the people assembled in the Field of Heroes from a high balcony on the back of the palace. Since the Dukes of Ornifal had become Kings of the Isles, they'd practiced a cooler sort of kingship. The populace had seen Valence III in formal processions and at ceremonies before the great temples, but he'd never addressed them directly. Anything the king had to say to his people came through the mouths of underlings.

That was going to change. It had already changed, beginning the day a combination of pragmatism and fear forced Valence to adopt Garric as his son and successor. Garric thought the idea of a podium or high balcony was a better choice than this screen, but the notion was an interesting one.

The screened audience chamber had solid walls on the other three sides. The -windows in the sidewalk had screens of electrum filigree, and the door in the back wall had a grate over the viewport.

The room was empty save for dust and a bier of travertine marble. Discolored patches on the floor showed where bronze hardware had decayed. What—

Garric stepped through the alabaster as he had the door of the conference room when he started this journey. He felt momentary surprise, but he was too busy taking in his changed surroundings to marvel at inconsequentials.

Now that Garric was inside, he saw a plump old man in a tasseled tunic on the bier. Over him a serpentine shape waxed and waned, never fully visible but casting a glow like a golden blanket.

The old man's eyes opened. He rose with a cheery smile, pulling with him a tail of the quilted velvet covering the stone. “Good day, sir!” he said, extending his arm to clasp Garric's. “And who would you be?”

The old man paused. His smile slipped into an expression half-wary, half-peevish. “Or have we met? Do I know you? Tell me!”

It was late evening. The sky, visible through the electrum grating, was a sullen red. Crowds were looking up from the streets. Ships packed the quays, moored several deep in some cases, but no vessels were under way in the harbor.

“Sir, I don't think we've met,” Garric said. He stepped forward, offering his arm though the old man had jerked his own back as doubt struck him. “I'm Garric or-Reise of Haft.” He swallowed. “But I think I'm dreaming.”

The old man's smile returned like the sun flashing after a summer shower. They clasped, hand to elbow so that their forearms joined. The old man's grip was firm; his flesh resilient and vaguely warm.

“Dreaming?” he said to Garric. “Nonsense! You're here, aren't you? How can you be dreaming?”

The room was the same as when Garric viewed it through the alabaster, except that now signs of occupancy littered it. A cushioned pad covered the bier, and wooden bookcases lined all three walls: shelves for codices and pigeonholes for scrolls.

The cases were empty. Here and there a locked screen hung askew, wrenched off as the library was ransacked with brutal haste.

Garric stepped back. The old man looked around him with dawning puzzlement. “Sir, may I ask your name?” Garric said politely.

“What?” said the old man, again with a querulous tone. “I'm Ansalem, of course!”

He'd been looking at the glowing shape rippling in and out of existence above the bier. It seemed to be a serpent with a short, fat body, but sometimes the head appeared to be on one end, sometimes on the other.

Ansalem paused and fingered a wall niche large enough to have held a life-sized statue. It, like the bookcases, was empty. “I think I am, at least,” he said. “But I don't understand. If I'm Ansalem the Wise...”

He turned to Garric, his face wrinkling in an expression of concern foreign to it. “If I am, then where are my books? And where are the baubles I've gathered over the years?”

Ansalem's expression flowed suddenly into something as cold and inhuman as the ice of a pond at midwinter. “Have you taken them?” he demanded. “You must return them at once! They're objects of power. They aren't safe for anyone else to have, you see. I know better than to use them, but anyone else might”—he snapped his pudgy fingers in a sound as sharp as nearby lightning—”blast this world to dust! I'm not joking, young man. You must return them at once!”

“Sir,” Garric said. “I haven't taken your property or anyone else's. I just arrived, and I don't even know where I am.”

His mouth was dry. Ansalem was as unpredictable as the sky in summer, changing from sun to storm before a shepherd has time to call his flock.

And for all his general good nature, Ansalem was more dangerous than any storm. Garric didn't recognize the name, but he knew that the old man was a wizard. If he'd brought Garric here, he was a wizard of incalculable power.

“Where you are?” Ansalem said, his sunny disposition reasserting itself. “Why, you're in Klestis, in my palace. Don't you know?”

He gestured broadly. That made him notice the empty cases again; his face slipped back into a worried frown. “Where can—”

Ansalem stopped. He fixed Garric with an analytical gaze and took the youth's chin between finger and thumb. He twisted Garric's head from one profile to the other.

Garric accepted the attention, though he felt a surge of anger at being treated like a sheep being sold. Ansalem was an old man and obviously confused.

Ansalem wasn't a bit more confused than Garric, though, if it came to that.

“Are you sure I don't know you?” Ansalem asked, not harshly but with a note of sharp interest. “Surely we've met! Now where, I wonder?”

He turned to the bookcase on his right, obviously reaching for a volume that was no longer there. He froze, his face taking on the terrible icy hardness Garric had seen before.

“Where are my acolytes?” Ansalem demanded. “Have you seen them, Master Garric? Purlio will know what's going on here.”

“Sir, I don't know anything,” Garric said. “I've never heard of you, and the only Klestis I know of is a fishing village on the south coast of Cordin.”

“Fishing village indeed!” Ansalem said in a tone of amazement. He beckoned Garric to the window looking onto the harbor. “Does this look like a fishing village, sir?”

“No sir,” Garric said, “but—”

“But what's wrong down there?” Ansalem said, looking himself at the scene and finding it different from whatever he'd meant to show Garric. “Everyone's standing in the streets and staring up...”

He spun on Garric with another flash of mercurial temper. “What have you done with my acolytes?” Ansalem said. “Purlio, come here at once!”

“I—” Garric said.

Ansalem stepped to the bier from which Garric had awakened him. He ran his hand through the air, seeming to caress the flickering serpent. “The amphisbaena is here,” he said, “but not the other objects. Some of them are too dangerous to use, even for me! Don't you understand?”

Ansalem's patted the tall niche, then touched other alcoves and ran his fingers over the top of a marble plinth standing empty beside the door in the back of the chamber. He moved with the quick, jerky motions of a toad hopping, desperate in its terror.

“You must bring them back!” Ansalem said. “They won't do you any good, I assure you. There's nothing there but destruction for whoever uses them!”

The chamber grew foggy as another world began to interpenetrate it. “Bring me...” Ansalem cried in a voice as high as a distant gull's.

The words faded. Garric felt his soul rushing back the way it had come. He was a shimmer in existence like the current of a rushing stream.

“Garric?” a voice said. Not Ansalem, but—

Garric opened his eyes. He lay on a bench in the conference room. Liane stood beside him, holding a lamp; the light through the open door was the last red of sunset. His friends were watching him with guarded concern: Cashel and Sharina, Tenoctris and Ilna, and Liane, thank the Lady; Liane, her worry clear in her dark, limpid eyes.

“I was dreaming,” Garric said as he sat up cautiously. “And I'm very glad to see you all.”

“You didn't wake up,” Sharina said. “We thought—well, Tenoctris says there's something dangerous going on.”

“Something very powerful which I don't understand, at any rate,” the old wizard explained. She cocked Garric a wry smile. “Which I suppose means it's dangerous, true enough.”

She sobered. “I need to learn what the—source of power—is. It's already causing disruption on this portion of the cosmos. There's a nexus nearby; somewhere in Valles.”

“I'm going with Tenoctris to, well, fetch and carry,” Cashel said with a grin. To protect the old woman, Cashel meant; he was carrying the hickory quarterstaff he'd shaped with his own big, capable hands. “Sharina and Ilna are coming too. We know you're busy, but we thought we'd ask if you wanted to come along. Like old times, you know.”

“You're scheduled to dine with Chancellor Royhas tonight,” Liane said, meeting Garric's eyes but speaking with a careful lack of emphasis. “I was going to suggest that a more relaxed evening might be a good idea anyway.”

“I've seen you lots of times after you've plowed all day in the hot sun,” Cashel said. “That sweated you down to a nub, but you never looked as bad as you do now.”

Ilna nodded. She'd stayed arm's length behind the others, unwilling that anyone might think she was pushing herself forward even though she and Garric had been friends for all their mutual lives.

“You're stretched too far,” she said crisply. “Anyone can see that. I can't imagine how a meal with your chancellor can be a strain, but you obviously think it is. Only a fool would break himself by going to dinner instead of getting the sleep he needs.”

“I don't need to go with Tenoctris,” Sharina said apologetically. “Garric, why don't you get proper rest in a bed tonight. I'll meet with Lord Royhas if it's just a formal meal.”

Garric looked at his friends. “It's not just a formal meal,” he said. “It's part of the biggest problem I've got as, as whatever I am now.”

“As King of the Isles, lad,” whispered Carus through the ages. The king was back in Garric's mind; as straight as an ancient pine, and as great a support to the youth he guided. “That's what you are.”

“The greatest problem I've got as King of the Isles, I mean,” Garric said, correcting himself with a rueful smile. This was no place for self-deprecation. “And sure, I need sleep, but this nap's been enough to hold me. What I really need is to talk to my friends about the kingdom.”

“Garric, I don't know anything about kingdoms,” Cashel said. “Maybe Sharina... ?”

Garric stepped forward and embraced Cashel. It was like hugging a warm boulder. Garric was taller than his friend—by a bit—but Cashel had a solid strength that went beyond that of any other human being Garric had met.

“I need to talk to people I trust,” Garric said. “You five are the only people on earth I can trust to want exactly what I want—peace for all the people of the Isles.”

He stepped back and glanced toward the wizard. “Tenoctris?” he said. “Can the thing you're looking for wait for us to eat and talk first?”

“Yes,” Tenoctris said. Frowning as she tried to explain to people who couldn't see the varied forces that worked the cosmos the way she saw them, she continued, “It isn't a hostile intrusion, not a thing of Malkar or a wizard allied to Malkar.”

To Malkar: to evil, the force of absolute black evil that was the abnegation of all light and good.

“It's just very powerful,” Tenoctris added, spreading her hands.

Garric nodded. “Half the buildings in the palace compound haven't been yet,” he said. “Let's find a quiet spot in one of them and I'll cook supper like I would if we were watching the flock overnight in the North pasture. All right?”

“Cook?” Liane said. She clapped her left fingers to her lips in embarrassment the instant the question slipped out.

“Cook,” Ilna repeated with emphasis. “If the stewards can't supply prince Garric with flour, cheese, and onions promptly, I suspect the chamberlain will have replaced them all before morning.”

“And a flitch of bacon,” Garric said, laughing with the relief of not being Prince Garric of Haft for this one evening. “We'll eat like rich folk tonight, with meat for dinner!”

He shrugged to loosen his muscles. He needed to exercise more than he'd been doing recently.

“After we talk and eat,” Garric said, “we'll find the nexus Tenoctris is looking for. And if it's a problem, then we'll deal with it.”

“As we've done before,” boomed King Carus. He stood with his thumbs hooked in his sword belt, grinning at the youth whose mind he shared. “And as we'll keep on doing until the Isles have the peace I wasn't able to give them alone!”