Chapter Thirty-six

Olrun's face went white when her mistress disappeared. Sparrow began to chuckle.

The maid was already on her knees. She bowed her forehead to the floor and said, "Milord, milord! I wasn't a part of that. I didn't help her to, to . . ."

Sparrow's dog whined. She licked the woman's cheek and ear in concern.

The smith bent and touched Olrun's shoulder to guide her upright. "I didn't think it was your doing, lady. Do you—"

He smiled as Olrun rose at his touch. She was very nearly as tall as he was; and solidly built for a woman—though Sparrow was massive for a man.

"—know where it is your mistress might have gone, though?"

The maid shook her head miserably. "I'd never asked about the cabinet," she said. "It came from Nainfari's palace with us, but I'd never seen it do anything. It was just—"

She waved at the blank white walls and the overturned foliage. "Just decoration, I thought. I don't understand why she lives in a place so bleak when she's a princess."

Sparrow laughed again with grim amusement "She'll get along well with my master."

Olrun raised an eyebrow.

"Oh, yes," Sparrow said. "She'll come to my master. I was sent to arrange that."

The maid smiled minusculy. "That will be a change for Princess Mala," she said with a perfect absence of inflexion. "She has always done what she wishes . . . and only what she wishes."

Sparrow touched Olrun's shoulder again, the way he might have petted his dog in affection or for reassurance. "Do you think you could find us some food, lady?" he asked.

"Of course," Olrun said as she started out of the room. She paused. "But it won't be real food like you're used to," she warned. "The meat hasn't any proper fat to it."

"That's all right," the smith replied. "In hot lands like these, you couldn't keep rich food down anyway. You'll learn that when you travel more."

The maid left the room with a vague smile playing over her lips. The dog followed her to the open doorway, then turned back to Sparrow and whined.

Sparrow got out his mirror. After a moment, the bronze face clouded. It cleared in a view of Princess Mala, huddled against a background of gray mist.

The vectoring bead on the mirror's rim was green. The smith walked slowly around the spot where Mala had vanished. The bead rotated around the metal rim, indicating a point in the center of the empty floor.

Sparrow chuckled again. He lowered his bulk onto the table carefully to be sure that the flimsy-looking piece of furniture would support him. The legs and paper-thin surface were stronger than they appeared. It was like sitting on a solid block of glass.

There was nothing wrong with the craftsmen here on Plane Three, though their techniques were not those the smith himself used.

Olrun bustled back with a platter. On it were a stew of boiled roots and a rack of edaphosaur ribs from which ladylike portions had already been carved. "What sort of utensils do you want, milord?" she asked.

"Nothing wrong with my fingers the last I checked," the big man replied. "You've been living among frogs in a swamp for too long, my girl."

The maid blushed and set the platter down beside him.

Sparrow gripped adjacent ribs with either hand and broke off the endmost. He tossed the smaller portion to his dog, then began gnawing the remainder of the roast himself. "It's hungry work, the job I've been doing," he commented to Olrun.

The maid's eye fell on the seeming handmirror which rested on Sparrow's lap. Mala's face stared from the bronze surface. The black eyes of the princess were calm but unfocused.

"Oh," Olrun cried. "You've found the mistress! Where was she?"

Sparrow cracked the rack's chine with a thrust of his thumbs. He dropped the rib that he had mostly cleared. The dog sniffed the new offering, then returned to the meatier portion she had started on.

"The princess is in the Matrix," the smith said. "Between planes. She hasn't traveled anywhere, she's just crawled into a hole."

He snorted. "To think that anybody would try to hide from me in the Matrix! Me, Sparrow the Smith!"

A tag of flesh hung down from the end of the roast Sparrow was worrying. Olrun tugged the bit of meat loose between her thumb and forefinger then dropped it into her mouth.

"Would you like to bathe?" she asked without looking at the smith directly.

Sparrow shrugged. "It'll be the same mud going in the opposite direction. There'll be time enough to clean off when I have the princess in my master's hands."

He glanced sidelong toward Olrun. "There'll be time enough for a lot of things, I think."

Olrun smiled without meeting the smith's eyes. "You'll go after her, then, Master Sparrow?" she asked.

Sparrow set the meat back on the planter and picked up the container of vegetables. They were still hot, hotter than comfortable. He slurped a little of the broth from the edge of the container.

He grimed at the maid. "No," he said judiciously. "I'll bring her back here. In good time. But first I'll give the princess a lesson about running from me."

The bitch looked up at the note she heard in Sparrow's voice. When she was sure nothing was intended for the immediate present, she went back to her bone. Her back teeth splintered the edaphosaur rib with a series of short, crunching sounds, like the clock/clock of a mason's hammer.

When Sparrow had finished his meal and washed it down with drafts of brandy distilled from cycad hearts, he lay on the cold stone floor. His eyes glazed.

Beside him, Olrun began to groom the dog.

Time meant nothing to Mala here. Often she entered this state to meditate in perfect nothingness. Some day, she thought, she would decide to remain forever in this gray perfection, free of the nagging asymmetries of present existence.

The stranger's intrusion, the smith's intrusion, was intolerable. It should not have happened, so here in the featureless realm of the ideal it had not happened. Nothing could touch her. Nothing existed outside herself, nothing moved—

Something moved.

At first Mala thought it was her hammering heart that caused the sensation. Nothing could—

But the grayness had shape now; beyond the strait confines of her cabinet was a plain of stark outlines.

Icy stalagmites rising from an icy floor. Slime molds the size of men, motionless all around her. Mala stared. On all sides the same.

Her feet edged to the center of her immaterial enclosure so that no part of her body was closer to the edge than any other.

The figures shifted at the infinite slowness with which constellations wheel in the heavens, turning their faces toward the girl in their midst.

A mountain loomed on the distant horizon. Mala stared at it for an unimaginable time in order to avoid watching the nearer figures; but as she looked, the crags and fissures ceased to be geological occurrences. The mountain wore the lineaments of a human face.

She gasped and spun around. A stalagmite of blue ice was pressed toward her. She started backward.

It was her brother, Morfari. Half his skull had been burned away.

Mala shrieked and closed her eyes. Her universe dived, then spun vertiginously. Light flashed. She threw herself forward, screaming, and sprawled onto the floor of her bower on Plane Three.

Olrun, her fingers tangled in the neck ruff of a brown dog, stared at her mistress, while Sparrow the Smith groaned as he returned from another frozen plunge into the Matrix.