Green Eyes Page 0,107

not think it could be anything positive. His attitude toward the veve puzzled her. He had not been at all distressed to learn of his addiction to it; in fact, he had appeared relieved to learn he could use it frequently.

One evening, eleven days after the completion of the veve, while sitting at their window, listening to branches snap, leaves scuttering across the side of the house, Jocundra noticed the corner of a notebook sticking out from beneath their mattress. On first leafing through it, she thought it to be notes for a new story because of the odd nomenclature of towns and people, its references to the purple sun and the Yoalo. But then she realized it was a journal of Donnell's walks upon the veve. On the inside foreleaf was a sketch of the veve, every junction numbered, and a list of what seemed to be the ranks of the Yoalo. Inductee, Initiate, Medium, Sub-aspect, Aspect, High Aspect. She had a twinge of foreboding, and as she settled back to read the first entry, she tried to tell herself it was only background for a story written in diary form.

Sept. 8. Ended up on Junction 14. The sun edging down, a long pale bulge like a continental margin lifting from the horizon, fringed by a corona of vivid purple. Stars ablaze. No moon. Broken, barren hills to my left, and I thought that Moselantja was somewhere behind them. I was atop a cliff which fell away into a forested valley. Massed empurpled trees locked in shadow, the crooked track of a river cutting through, and two-thirds of the way across the valley, at a forking of the river, was a village laid out in a peculiar pattern, one I could not quite discern because of my angle. I tried to shift my field focus forward; it was harder than usual. Instead of snapping into place, it was as if I were pushing through some barrier heavier than distance. Finally I managed a perspective at eye level of the street. A door opened in one of the houses; a man poked his head out, gave a squeal of fright and ducked inside. How the hell had he seen me? I looked down and saw that I was sheathed in black. Shimmering, unfeatured black. Energy suit. I had been on a clifftop, and now was planted smack in the midst of Rumelya (the name springing unbidden to mind). Memories flooded me, among them information about the suit's capacity for nearly instantaneous travel along line-of-sight distances. The river - the Quinza - was not safe for swimming, though I couldn't recall why, and the name of the forest was the Mothemelle.

Bits of litter, black leaves, were drifting across the dusty street. All the buildings were of weathered black wood, and most were of two stories, the topmost overhanging the lower and supported by carven posts. Every inch of the buildings was carved: lintels evolving into gargoyle's heads, roof peaks into ornate finials. The doorframes flowed with tiny faces intertwined with vines, and stranger faces yet - half flower, half beast -emerged from the walls. The similarity between these embellishments and those of Maravillosa was inescapable. Light issued from shutters pierced by scatters of star-shaped holes so that the appearance was of panels of night sky studded with orange stars. Though many of the details were not of my original invention - the names, for instance - it was the village of my story, complete down to the sign above the inn, an odd image I now recognized for a petro painting. The evilly tenanted forest looming over the roofs; the tense, secretive atmosphere; the cracked shells and litter blowing on the streets; it was all the same. Voices were raised inside the inn, and I had a strong intuition that some important event was soon to occur there.

As the sun's corona streamed higher above the forest, striking violet glints from the eddies in the river, I noticed an ideograph laid out in black dust centering the crossroads just ahead. The fitful breeze steadied, formed into a whirlwind over the ideograph, and dissipated it into a particulate haze. I had a memory of an old man wearing a dun-colored robe, bending over an orange glow, talking to me. His voice was hoarse and feeble, the creaking of a gate modulated into speech. 'The stars are men's doubles,' he said. 'The wind is a soul without a body.'

Shortly after this, I became afraid