Snodgrass and Other Illusions - By Ian R. MacLeod Page 0,127

mistress say! Too late now to attempt to rectify the situation at Mirror 28, with the planes beaded wet and the pistons dripping. She would have to speak to her apprentices this evening, and do her best to pretend sternness. It was what teachers generally did, she had noticed: when they had failed to deal with something, they simply blamed their class. Isabel tried to imagine the scene to the invisible west below. That dancing girl beyond the walls of the Cathedral of the Word would surely find this near-darkness a great inconvenience. The simple, the obvious—the innocent—thing seemed to be to go down and apologise to her.

Isabel descended the many stairways of her minaret. Stepping out into the world outside seemed odd to her now—the ground was so low!—but especially today, when, almost mimicking the effects of her fading sight, everything but her minaret which blazed above her was dim and blotched and silvered. She walked between the fields in the direction of the rosestone walls, and heard but didn’t see the animals grazing. Brushing unthinkingly and near-blindly as now habitually did against things, she followed close to the brambled hedges, and, by the time she felt the dim fiery glow of the wall coming up towards her, her hands and arms were scratched and wet. The stones of the wall were soaked, too. The air here was a damp presence. Conscious that she was entering the dim realm which her own inattention had made, Isabel felt her way along the wall until she came to the door. It looked old and little-used; the kind of door you might find in a story. She didn’t know whether to feel surprise when she turned the cold and slippery iron hoop, and felt it give way.

Now, she was in the outer gardens of the Cathedral of the Word, and fully within the shade of faulty Mirror 28. It was darker here, certainly, but her senses and her sight soon adjusted, and Isabel decided that the effect wasn’t unpleasant, in some indefinable and melancholy way. In this diffuse light, the trees were dark clouds. The pavements were black and shining. Some of the flowers hung closed, or were beaded with silver cobwebs. A few bees buzzed by her, but they seemed clumsy and half-asleep in this half-light as well. Then, of all things, there was a flicker of orange light; a glow which Isabel’s half-ruined eyes refused to believe. But, as she walked towards it, it separated itself into several quivering spheres, bearing with them the smell of smoke, and the slap of bare feet on wet stone.

The open courtyard which Isabel had gazed down on from her minaret was impossible to scale as she stood at the edge of it on this dim and foggy day, although the surrounding pillars which marched off and vanished up into the mist seemed huge, lit by the flicker of the smoking braziers placed between them. Isabel moved forward. The dancer, for a long time, was a sound, a disturbance of the mist. Then, sudden as a ghost, she was there before her.

“Ahlan wa sahlan…” She bowed from parted knees, palms pressed together. She smelled sweetly of sweat and sandalwood. Her hair was long and black and glorious. “And who, pray, are you? And what are you doing here?”

Isabel, flustered in a way which she had not felt in ages, stumbled over her answer. The minaret over the wall…She pointed uselessly into the mist. This dimness—no, not the mist itself, but the lack of proper light…The dancer’s kohled and oval eyes regarded her with what seemed like amusement. The bindi on her brow glittered similarly. Although the dancer was standing still, her shoulders rose and fell from her exertions. Her looped earrings tinked.

“So, you bring light from that tower?”

Isabel, who perhaps still hadn’t made the matter as clear as she should have, nodded in dizzy relief that this strange creature was starting to understand her. “I’m so sorry it’s so dark today. I’ve—I’ve heard your dancing from my tower, and I—thought…I thought that this oversight would be difficult for you.”

“Difficult?” The girl cocked her head sideways like a bird to consider. The flames were still dancing. Their light flicked dark and orange across her arms. “No, I don’t think so. In fact, I quite like it. My name’s Genya, by the way. I’m a beekeeper…” She gave a liquid laugh and stepped forward, back, half-fading. “Although, thanks to you, there are few enough bees today