“You know me. You were me when all this happened. You must know that I won’t do you any harm. On the contrary, I will help you.”
I couldn’t give a damn for his help. He had installed himself in my head without my permission! What I wanted was to scrape the voice of that accursed archmagician out of my ears altogether.
“I will help you to get out of here and complete your job.” He spoke in a low voice; I had to listen closely to make out the words.
“You were me, and I became you. You knew my life, and now I know yours. All your concerns, all your goals. We are one whole.”
“We are not one whole!” I angrily kicked the dead man’s skull and it went rolling across to the wall. “This is my body.”
“Let it be so.” Valder had no intention of arguing. “Simply allow me to fall asleep when all this is over, and I will help you to get out of here.”
“Fall asleep? What do you mean, fall asleep? Inside my head?”
“Yes . . . I want peace. I have waited for you too long. To fulfill my promise.”
“Waited? A promise? To whom?”
No reply.
“No, a thousand times no, may a h’san’kor devour me! This is my head, only mine. Get out of it!”
“Very well,” Valder replied after a long silence. “I’ll help you in any case, and then go away. You have wandered into a time mirror. Go out through the window. Just jump and do not think about anything.”
Should I do as he said and end up in the winter world? What would I do if I suddenly found myself two hundred years in the past? Would I be able to get back, or would I have to spend the rest of my life in a place that was completely strange to me?
The archmagician said nothing, and basically there was nothing else I could do except follow his advice and climb out of that accursed room through that equally accursed window. Time was passing imperceptibly—another two or three hours and dawn would begin. I had to get out of that lousy place before the first rays of sunlight broke over the line of the horizon.
I walked up to the broken window and looked outside. A light, frosty breeze chilled my face. What was that the archmagician had said? Assuming, of course, that he had said it, and it wasn’t my insane imagination.
“Just jump and do not think about anything.”
Easily said! Take a run up and leap, like a circus tiger jumping through a hoop of fire. Only here, instead of flames, there were sharp shards of broken glass round the frame. But then it wouldn’t be the first time. I had left several rich men’s houses in the same way after visiting them.
I put the magical trinket away—there was more than enough moonlight. After a moment’s thought I picked up the vase and flung it out into the street. It spun through the air and disappeared, without hitting the ground.
“May the demon of the abyss gnaw on my liver!” I exclaimed, and spat, then took a run and jumped into the unknown.
A glimpse of the room, a white roadway, the moon slowly drifting across the sky, snowflakes falling. I landed on my feet, couldn’t keep my balance and started falling sideways, so I rolled over across my right shoulder.
The illusion disappeared. It evaporated, borne away by the wind of time. No snow, no new houses with windows lit in bright invitation, no people hurrying about their business. Just the dead Street of the Sleepy Cat. Dead houses with dead windows. And summer. So I was where I needed to be.
Valder had showed me the right way out after all. Overcome by curiosity, I looked round at the judge’s house. I went back and looked in through the window at the room where I had just been. A table, flower stems thrown out of a vase, a skeleton. A door. And beyond it a dark, narrow corridor, leading off somewhere into the gloomy interior of the dark building.
“I’m getting away from here!” I muttered, swinging the crossbow behind my shoulder.
The Street of the Sleepy Cat was no different from the Street of Men. The same desolation, the same thousands of imaginary eyes observing me from the ragged wounds of the windows. Except that here the street was a bit narrower and darker, and the buildings were poorer.