in her face, the least important of her many mouths. But inside her, she was screaming it with fear. She was crooning it with desire. She was gnashing the words angrily like broken teeth. She was grieving over them like dead children.
And the man said nothing, but smiled at a woman who wasn’t there at all. They walked off in different directions, unaware that they had never really been in the same place, would never be.
But Nimue stayed, and watched, and listened to the things that people said, and the things that they really said.
She never tried to escape anymore. She had no idea where the Wardlands were, what part of the map they were on, if they were on any map. But she knew she didn’t know how to get from here back to where she was from, and she had a thin frosty feeling from the future that she would never see the old places again.
She wasn’t terribly upset about that. She had seen the spires of Camelot and the walls of Paris. She had even seen Rome, where fingers of broken stone accused the uncaring sky and a frightened baron and his knights crouched behind a curve of the dirty green river and called themselves the kings of the world. She had heard wilder tales of the east with its many cities and silken roads. But she didn’t believe there was any city on Earth like A Thousand Towers.
The many towers that gave the city its name were mostly very old, from a time when the city was bound by its walls. But they were all in excellent repair, working homes for the ancient families that lived in them. She herself was housed in one: Tower Ambrose, ancestral home of Merlin and his notorious kin. Every morning she climbed to its height and watched the sun rise out of the west, over the steep ragged ridge of the Hrithaen Mountains.
The sun rose in the west here. That’s how far from home she was. She said to Earno, “If the sun rises there, that’s the east.” But he replied, “East and west are not arbitrary directions. The worlds are linked by the Sea of Worlds, and they radiate from the anchor of the Rock Probability in non-random fashion. The points of the compass, like Probability, are fixed. Our sun rises on the western edge of the world, as it faces the Sea of Worlds.”
“A globe doesn’t have an edge. If I were on the other side of the globe—”
And then he explained to her that the world was flat. That was a very long strange conversation, in which she learned and unlearned many things.
The great city center bristled with its many towers, but the city spread far beyond its ancient walls now: long ages of peace had made the towers relics, those that had not been dismantled. On either side of the river Ruleijn the long twisting tree-lined streets ran, speckled with markets and bookstalls and smithies and wineshops and schools and open-air refectories and dancing greens and gymnasia where people wrestled as naked as seals and buildings that clearly had some function but Nimue didn’t understand it.
And she never got lost. It seemed as if part of her had always lived there, or had waited to live there. She had walked the place in dreams, never remembering them until she woke to find herself there.
One evening she was coming home to Tower Ambrose, the sun a smoky red eye sinking beyond the blue wrinkled line of the Grartan Mountains in the east, when Earno met her on the street.
“You shouldn’t walk so much,” he said gruffly, not bothering to greet her.
“Pregnant women need exercise too,” she pointed out, amused. She knew that he was worried about her trying to escape again, and that he was angry at her because she was associated with Merlin, and that he despised her because she had betrayed Merlin, and that he was frightened of her because her swollen belly reminded him of his mother in her childbearing youth, and that he felt a faint dark trickle of desire for her, which in turn disgusted him because he was primarily attracted to younger men. All these were voices in his chorus, but underneath and overtop of all them was this: she was in his charge and he was concerned for her well-being. That was the strong harmonizing note in his internal chorus. She found his inner self in great harmony with his