never reached. A kingdom in the depths. He’d conjured it once with childish ignorance, a place for his discarded mother to be reborn; but he wondered now what sort of creature could thrive in such darkness. Not someone he knew—not someone close. Rather, someone transformed beyond his knowing.
The undulating light upon the water and the tendrils of moss below proved hypnotic in combination, and his eyelids lowered. The tiny fish suddenly zipped away in all directions, and ripples hinted at a coalescing shape in the depths below. The light grazed the side of something pale that slipped into the shadows again. It should have jolted him alert but instead his eyes grew heavier, his head lolled, and he folded onto his side, dozing but also aware, as though in some lucid dream-state, of a shape sliding out of the water beside him. He heard small splashes, followed by a wet and supple emergence. Try as he might, he could not open his eyes, although—as if his eyelids had turned to glass—he saw at the rim of his vision a shape of milky skin, of round moon-like eyes. In his dream he instinctively recoiled from the horror that had once sucked in his thoughts, his memories, and would have absorbed his life, given more time. The afrit. He remembered Bogrevil, or was it Eskie, explaining that the creatures dwelling in the giant hookahs were water demons, repelled by light, forever rapacious, seeking an easy sup, so of course they would hang about piers in the hope of finding the occasional dozing watchman . . . or a fool musician who’d already been sampled and had about him the scent, the taste, of one already opened to them. It explained to him why he’d stayed behind: He’d been under the influence of the creature even before he saw it. Easy prey. And now he could not fend it off, the remnants of his conscious self urging his entranced body to resist but held motionless. He thought how Leodora didn’t know where he was. No one knew, nor could help.
The pale shape edged close. It touched his cheek with gelid fingers, then crawled upon him. He strained and strained and in the end managed to open his eyes, or at least his dream-self did. He was staring into a face that was no afrit after all, but something entirely unfamiliar. The skin was bone white, and the eyes as fully black as marbles. Hair that wasn’t hair hung about its face in wet, knotted strands of green and brown, parted about shell-like ears, and dripped upon him. Long sharp fingers tenderly combed his cheeks but could have flayed them. Soft slits in her throat waved open and closed. He felt her breasts pressing into him.
She smiled, her thin lips drawing back from a row of short bony fish teeth. “Sing for me,” he heard her say, and the music emerged out of him as it had out of the multicolored cat. Thus in an instant he remembered: the gods, an open pavilion with fountains and pools like no place he’d ever seen because it was no place he’d ever seen, it was Edgeworld, and beside one pool lay a cat that he’d been drawn to, that he’d touched and stroked, and which had stood up and produced the purest, most exquisite sound; then someone had proclaimed, “The choice is made,” though he didn’t understand what that meant at all, but the cat had licked him, opened its jaws wide as if yawning, except that the mouth had grown and grown until it surrounded him or he fell into it, tumbled down into darkness, into deeper depths of memory than he’d ever known before.
The light above receded. Somewhere below lay her home, his mother, and she, with the unraveling winding sheet waving above her like a ribbon, would come looking for him, would rise up to take him and never have him return to that living world of spans and bridges, spirals and magic and the confusion of what they all expected of him, whom the gods had shaped and fed to a cat. Farewell to them, farewell to the music. Farewell to Leodora. He whispered her name and it rippled through the waters. From high above came a distant reply. He cast his eyes toward the surface and through the green he saw her—pale skin and hair ablaze, Leodora in the beams of sunlight above, and he knew he didn’t want to leave