Lord Tophet - By Gregory Frost Page 0,66
a membrane pierced, where everything was alien and incomprehensible; and invariably that moment yielded to sudden acclimation, to the strange made normal as the newly penetrated world enfolded and welcomed her. This was more expansive a transition than any other in that the world itself turned to give her balance.
The round-faced man grinned. “By your expression I see you’ve adjusted. That’s capital. And your friend—I can’t tell you how rare it is to have two travelers at once.”
“Or really any travelers at all,” the woman added.
“And of their own volition.”
“Hush!”
“Where have we come?” Leodora asked, looking beyond the couple at the intensely colored buildings, which bore striking resemblance to those of Colemaigne.
“Where, she asks,” he said to the woman, who laughed mellifluently and answered, “Nowhere and everywhere. Where you are depends on where you’ve been. We are the Pons Asinorum you sought because that’s the name Colemaigne maintains in its thoughts. But we are known far and wide, as Nazar, as Breasail, as Yggdrasil and TirNaNog and a thousand more besides.”
“How can that be?”
“We’re the world of the timeless, of desire and elusion.”
“It looks very much like Colemaigne. The buildings, I mean.”
“Yes, but that’s also because of how you arrived. Enter from, say, Palipon, and we are an island world full of cells, although ours are open, the inverse of a prison.”
Leodora pondered that. Diverus shook his head in incomprehension. “What’s Palipon?” he asked.
“Would it help,” asked the woman, “if I told you that your upright world is connected everywhere below the surface by us, through us?”
“Connected to what?” said Leodora.
“To everything else, everywhere.” Both of them grinned, and while their demeanor was outwardly gracious and jolly, beneath it lurked the slightest hint of something not quite as generous, as if some darker truth was not being shared.
“But you are our guests,” said the man, “and you must stay. Feast, relax, and please yourselves in our company. Everyone will want to meet you, storyteller.”
Her hosts turned. Leodora glanced again at Diverus. With his head, he gestured at her hand. She surreptitiously showed him the corked phial still clutched there and then slipped it into her tunic.
“I don’t know if we should,” she said. “We have a performance—”
The woman turned back to her. “Oh, but you cannot refuse. You’re questing for stories and we have them, the oldest, the most arcane, the least retold, the original, the consigned to oblivion.”
Over his shoulder, the man said, “We connect everything. We are story.” He looked back. “It’s why we’ve become your preoccupation. The omphalos of your obsession.”
“What you need,” the woman emphasized as she followed the man.
“What I need,” Leodora repeated. Her voice seemed to come from someone else’s mouth.
Diverus urgently said her name, but it barely penetrated. They, these people, had the world’s stories. Many times over the years on Bouyan she had expressed a desire to Soter to travel to the mythical Library of Shadowbridge, there to retrieve all the stories that had ever been; but now she needn’t bother. She could learn every one of them here.
Diverus clutched her arm. She stared at his hand and blinked away her disorientation.
“Diverus,” she said. “Surely we can stay a few hours, hear a few stories before we have to go back. It’s only morning, after all.”
“I don’t trust them,” he said, but smiled pleasantly when the woman looked back. “I don’t trust here. What sort of world can transmute the way they claim?”
She peered once more at the oceanic sky. “One that isn’t real,” she replied, “but let’s find out more first, before we decide. Please? If they have all the stories . . .”
He could not deny her that possibility. He knew how much that mattered, but mistrusted the place all the more that they knew what to say to ensnare her.
Shortly they left the broad bright street of orange, red, and yellow houses for narrower crooked lanes of more subdued and empurpled tones. The street surface remained oddly metallic, with a sheen running through bands of color as if from various alloyed minerals. People greeted them as they passed, and then fell in after them. Glancing back, they found the way clogged with dozens and dozens of inhabitants.
“Does it ever rain?” asked Diverus, watching the liquid sky.
“Of course,” the man remarked. “It falls up from the ground most nights.”
They arrived before a decrepit hovel. The stone walls were cracked, the thatchwork bald in places. Sitting on a stool before the hut was a small fellow with hair and beard of