wailing, as if a chorus stood beyond the limit of her vision, responding to his words, answering or lamenting.
“Terrible time, this, terrible. But then what time isn’t, hmm? We all wear the mind-forged manacles in this world to bring forth your own.”
“I don’t understand at all,” she answered.
“Stories—yours and others’—they’re the products of disenchantment. Without it, no telling would be necessary. All would be harmony. But it never is, save in memory where the disharmonious is excised as with a scalpel, and ‘Oh, for the Golden Days of Old’ becomes the Song of Delusion, when no such days ever have been or will be. Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.”
Leodora shook her head. His words danced along the edge of comprehension, as if his meaning, like the chorus, lay just outside the wall of fog, attainable if only she could penetrate it. To delve into the fog, however, meant to move away and lose sight of him, which seemed to her a great risk.
The chorus sounded again, in doleful harmony with her dilemma. They were nearer, right behind him, as if they or the street were moving, sliding.
The rhythmic clop and clatter of another carriage approached, and this time she drew back as it neared, well before his hand grabbed her, so that this time she pulled him away. The fog parted as though fleeing her, and there stood the chorus in a half circle around a low stone wall upon which perched a large, long-haired cat. The cat’s fur ran through a rainbow of colors, as bright as if a beam of sunlight were somehow penetrating the fog bank and striking the creature. One of the members reached out and ran a grubby hand the length of the cat, smoothing its fur. Its mouth opened, and a weird music floated out. The chorus listened to the notes and then as a group repeated them. Their dissonant chants had nothing to do with her songwriter after all.
“Beast knows all the tunes,” he said.
She became aware that the latest coach had slowed and come to a halt behind them, and she turned back.
“It’s for us,” said the songwriter. His hand at her elbow gently impelled her. His gaze—Soter’s gaze—was benign.
“Where are we going?”
“That I cannot say. It’s your journey, and you must tell the carriage where to go, when to stop.”
In the mist behind him, the cat lit up in colors and let forth another musical refrain of gliding notes that the crowd tried to emulate immediately, producing a caterwaul of conflicting voices. Had she been any nearer, she would have winced.
“How can I know where to stop when I can’t see anything?” she asked him.
“Perhaps,” he suggested, “it’s not something you do with your eyes?”
“I’m not used to this. I’m not ready.”
“No one ever is. Nor will you be here long enough to adapt. Not that you’d want to. The stink of old Londinium would win in the end. The blackened churches, the sighs like blood running down the walls. Not for you.” He held open the door of the carriage and reached out, his palm up. “Come into my hand,” he said, which she found stranger even than what he’d said previously.
She took his palm and let him lift her forward and up into the carriage, which rocked back and forth as she took her seat. He got in behind her and closed the door. Then, with a walking stick she hadn’t noticed previously, he rapped twice on the ceiling.
The carriage lurched, and he said, “Off we go.”
She studied him now. In the shadowy confines of the carriage she could make him out more clearly than in the fog. It was Soter’s face, all right, but with a thick shock of hair wild about his head, and much less dissolution across the terrain of his cheeks—a Soter who hadn’t drowned his every trouble in tuns of wine.
Under her scrutiny, he commented, “The maiden forgets her fear.”
She sat back. “How is this my journey?” she asked.
“You walked the pattern, although it wasn’t visible any longer. That’s an impressive enough feat for almost anyone. You traveled though you never left the spot. Now you choose the thing that returns with you, which might be important, or superfluous—but you do choose it.”
“Does everyone?”
“Does everyone choose? May-my, yes, everyone who comes here, though none—including you—remembers. Nothing I’ve told you will you remember.”
“Diverus, then. He chose his gift.”
“I assume that is the name of someone who came before you? If so, then yes. I didn’t