She stood before a door, surely the door that led to that room, that family. It was green, wet with mist, and embellished with a large brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head that held the knurled ring in its mouth.
Leodora reached up, grabbed the ring, and swung it hard against the door. The sound of it thundered, echoed as along endless hollow corridors. The lion’s brass head opened golden eyes and stared down at her.
“The choice is made!” said the voice of her companion, and she jolted upright in her carriage seat, then glanced about herself in disorientation.
Across the carriage, Soter-but-not-Soter leaned toward her and said, “What is now proved was once only imagined.” He offered her his walking stick, and the head of it was the lion’s head of the door knocker. Had it been thus earlier? She hadn’t looked closely enough. But she closed her fingers over it.
“Good-bye, Leodora,” said the songwriter, and through her hand, between her fingers, the geometrics she’d stepped through before came swirling. They spun about her, twisted into a cylindrical blur that drew her upright and held her with her arms extended to the side, fingers skimming the patterns as she descended, flowed through the dream, sliding down the golden string, which settled her gently back within the hexagonal bowl. As her toes touched, the bowl reignited with so bright a light that it seemed to burn straight through her as though she were no thicker than the hammered skin of a shadow puppet. She looked at her hands glowing red from the blood within, and then all at once brighter still. In a burst that consumed her, she became light, and as the blaze faded all that remained was the thread of gold, which she followed downward into darkness.
Diverus maintained that he had slept through the visitation of the gods to the Dragon Bowl in which he’d been chained. He’d gone to sleep an idiot and waked a whole and reasoning being with no memory of the event that linked the two, which presumed that the event had been a visitation—that gods had descended in the night, driving mad all who saw them. Now that he had stared into the milky wasting eyes of soul-drinking afrits and been transported to some other place or time at acute cost to his life, he could well imagine being driven mad at the sight of beings divine and horrible.
Whatever he had envisioned of that missing time, it had been dark and subtle, nothing like a flash of light bright and powerful enough to knock him down in the sea-lane, dazzling him where he sprawled. His senses returned, a moment or an hour later. Along the rail and the bollards beside him a bluish fire scurried, crackling like grinding glass. It edged the building behind him, too, and sparked off Soter, who still lay stretched out in the lane. Rising up, Diverus saw his own hands, arms, and torso defined by the dancing fire, like an illusion, with no hint of sensation. As he got to his feet, this flame flickered and leapt as if willfully to the rail, abandoning him and merging with the glow there as though it shunned anyone conscious. Beam and Dragon Bowl both pulsed with the blue fire. The bowl stood empty. Leodora had vanished.
Now people appeared, out of doorways and from between buildings. People in cloaks and vests and some in careless dishabille looked, saw, came running along the narrow lane. Wherever they brushed the blue glow, it sparked and crackled but seemed to harm no one. They ran to him, to Soter, to the space in the railing where the dragon beam projected.
Soter climbed unsteadily to his feet and had to be held up. His head had a gash, a crooked line of blood over one eye. With a dull expression, he focused on Diverus, and his eyes went wide. “Lea!” he said, and with sudden ferocity he wrestled free of helpful supportive arms and hands while Diverus, already panicked by the sight of the empty bowl, plunged onto the dragon beam ahead of him.
The length of the beam had been repaired. Before the blast of light, the retaining walls had been nothing but crumbling remains. Now they were smooth and waist-high on both sides of a brown-tiled walkway. So, too, the wall around the bowl, sparking with blue fire, had been rebuilt. It shone hard and glossy. People in the lane were crying,