Orphans of Chaos

1.

Miss Daw did get permission to take me to Chapel in the morning. She brought my Sunday uniform on a hanger. Dr. Fell came by, once I was dressed, to help escort me.

Miss Daw unlocked the chain from the ring at my neck and then toyed with the key and lock under my ear (where I could not see) for several moments.

She said to Fell, “Grendel altered reality. I cannot get the collar off. Can you dissolve it?”

His third eye opened in his forehead, glistening and metal-blue. I saw it only inches away.

It seemed to consist of nested concentric spheres of semi-transparent substance, hard and shining. There was something like a pupil, or at least an aperture, one in each sphere. By lining up the different pupils in the different spheres he seemed to get a stronger or weaker ray. When enough apertures opened, I could see down a tiny well of clear holes, to a hidden spark of incandescence at the center, a starlike pinpoint of fuel in the tiniest, innermost chamber. Perhaps the different spheres had differing filters or augmentations for different effects. It did not look organic at all. It was clearly a machine thing; hard, finely-tooled, insensitive.

He said, “It has clearly shrunk somewhat, and seems to be made of a lighter, more bluish-white metal. The atomic latticework has been replaced with continuous substance. It is the Aristotelian paradigm, and outside of my competence. It is no longer made of iron, but of a ratio of earth essences with fire essences. I can remove it, but it might hurt the girl.”

The center of his eye turned red and an aiming beam came out. The various apertures began to slide together. I smelled ozone…

“Um!” I said, “It’s OK! It doesn’t hurt! Really!”

With a dizzying, chameleon eye-like optic motion, Dr. Fell rotated certain middle spheres to thicken the number of layers blocking the inner chamber. The metal eye dimmed, as if idling on standby. “Move your hands out of the way, girl.”

Miss Daw said, “Where is Mrs. Wren?”

Dr. Fell frowned slightly. By some intuition, I knew that he did not like to hear her saying, in front of me, any hint of whose power stopped whose. He said curtly, “She is unavailable at this time.”

That was what Dr. Fell usually said when Mrs. Wren was drunk.

Fell said, “Should I continue? You have primary responsibility for this subject.”

Miss Daw said, “It is unforgivable that a girl should be forced to wear such a cruel thing in the House of the Lord.”

I admired her for saying that.

“…What would people think?”

My admiration dimmed.

Fell said, “Is that permission to proceed…?” His eye lit up again.

I screamed and jumped back (hey, it was really, really nice not to have that big chain hanging there). “Get a hacksaw! Don’t let him blow my head off!”

Miss Daw said, “Let us not alarm the child, Ananias.” She looked pensive, and said, half to herself, “It does seem much smaller than before. Perhaps people will think it is jewelry.”

2.

No one else was there. Not Victor, not Colin, not Quentin, not Vanity. This one week I had gone longer without seeing them than I had my whole life previously.

Even the other members of the staff and administration were not there. I was hoping to see Taffy ap Cymru, and blackmail him into letting me go, or getting a message to his boss, Hermes. But the Chapel was deserted except for the vicar, the altar boy, and us.

Miss Daw sat on my right side, her beautiful face glowing as if with an inner light. Dr. Fell on my left. Fell had an indifference to religion that went beyond contempt. During the service he sat with a checkbook and a pocket calculator, doing sums.

Our services were given by a vicar named Dr. Foster, a tall, dim-eyed, white-haired man, thin as a rail, who muttered and murmured mildly for his sermons, and who managed to make even the most interesting Bible stories into boring digressions into abstract theology or Trinitarian speculations. He was the only person I knew who used the word “consubstantiality.” At other times, instead of Bible lessons, his sermons somehow led down twisting paths to end up as descriptions of the metaphysical disputes he had against his friend, the Rev. James Spensley, from Mumbles, who was a Wesleyan; or the Rev. Price, from the Dissenter’s Church at Llangennith, who dared to be, of all things, a Calvinist.

I owe much of my agnosticism to Dr. Foster and his somnolent, sonorous sermons.

As horrible as this sounds, it was not until that day that I ever thought to wonder what denomination we were. I had always assumed we were High Church because our ceremonies were elaborate and beautiful. But were we? We said our Sunday prayers in English, from the Common Book, so I knew that we were not Roman Catholics (or “Reprobate Papists” as Dr. Foster liked to call them). Although Vanity and I had, when we were young, said our prayers at night in Latin.

Or, at least, we had been saying something in Latin. Maybe Mrs. Wren (who was, after all—let’s face it—a witch) was not telling us true prayers.

Our Chapel had both icons and stained glass windows, so I knew we weren’t Lutherans, and we had saints, but we were instructed to revere them without prayer to them per se. And Miss Daw and I went to the altar rail to kneel and accept the Host, which Dr. Foster blessed, and an altar boy, whose name was Jack Jingle, held the salver beneath my lips as I knelt and took the wafer.

Dr. Foster, as sometimes happened, stood at the lectern, blinking, having forgotten what part of the ceremony he was in. Miss Daw and I continued to kneel at the rail, and she took the opportunity to lower her eyes in silent prayer.

I wondered what would happen if I ran up to Dr. Foster or Jack the altar boy and begged for sanctuary, like Esmeralda in Notre Dame de Paris.

I looked over at Jack speculatively. He looked younger than me, and he always had, a boy who had not yet grown hair. I am no judge of ages. Eight? Ten? Six? He was young. In his hands he held the silver plate that carried the Host, and he was looking at Dr. Foster with some worry, and polishing the salver with his long, flowing robe sleeve.

I was reminded of something Quentin once told me. He said that the purpose of holding a mirrored surface beneath the mouth of someone taking Communion was to discover whether any vampires had infiltrated into the body of the Holy Church. The altar boys were supposed to pour the Holy Wine over their head, should that happen, whereupon it would instantly turn into the blood of Christ, and burn the vampire to a crisp. That was Quentin’s theory.

Once, long ago, after services, I had asked Dr. Foster about the question of vampires. He blinked at me and told me the essence of the wine was transfigured, but not transubstantiated, while remaining substantially the same, and that it was done by the grace of Christ, rather than by the authority of the priest.

I could not imagine Foster being able to understand that I was a prisoner.

I could imagine, very clearly, if Foster did get the idea that I was in trouble, demanding an explanation from Dr. Fell, or calling for him to bring a telephone (at once!) so that he could summon the police. I could also imagine Dr. Fell, a bored look in his thin, gray face, opening his third eye and burning Foster to a crisp. Or—why be so crude?—stunning him with a jolt and injecting him with something to erase short-term memory.

And the little altar boy? Because he did not seem to age, I wondered if he, like Lelaps the dog, or Sister Twitchett, was one of their creatures, disguised as a human boy and here as part of the stage scenery. After all, I never saw Jack except on Sundays, and he did not seem to live in Abertwyi. The local children didn’t know him. Maybe he was a homonculus, and was kept in a box during the week in Dr. Fell’s lab.

I did not tell them I was a prisoner. Instead, I knelt and prayed.

Yes, I prayed. Why not? The advantage of being an agnostic over being an atheist is that I always had the possibility of being wrong, and could still entertain the hope that the universe was better organized than it appeared to be.

But I did not know to whom to pray.

What if Henry Tudor had been wrong and God was Catholic and not Anglican at all? What if Paul had been wrong, and God was Jewish just like He had been in the Old Testament, and hadn’t repealed any of the Old Covenant Law after all? People always said that God did not care about denominations. Everything in His Holy Book said that He cared about denominations very much. What were the Pharisees, so earnestly and bitterly criticized by Christ himself, if not a denomination? Why spend page after boring page describing the vestments, dietary restrictions, and sacrificial animals sacred to the Chosen People, if these things were trivial? Why kill the guy—I forget his name—who was trying to straighten out the Ark of the Covenant when it fell over?

Well, I wanted to pray, and I did not think it right to pray to Archangel Gabriel, not this time. It was time to pick a God.

For a while, I thought I really ought to pray to the God of the Koran, and become Mohammedan. For one thing, the Koran was written after the New Testament, the same way the New Testament was written after the Bible, so it might be a more developed form. Also, the Mohammedans seemed to be more devoted to a simple and severe form of worship, and did not clutter up their monotheism with saints or trinities.

Two things stopped me. First, I had no idea which direction Mecca was in from Wales. South and East, I assumed. Second, I did not know if women were allowed to pray.

Even as I was kneeling and thinking all these flippant thoughts, a prayer rose up in me as if of its own accord. I whispered very softly what was in my heart.

“God of Abraham, who led the Israelites out of bondage, and freed the slaves from the cruelty of the Pharaoh, free me. Free my friends. Lead us from this Lion’s Den, and let us find our home, our families, our friends. Lead us from this alien land to a place where we belong. I beg you. You saved Moses and his people. Save me. Amen.”

It was not as if I can take credit for making up what I said. It came out more or less without any effort on my part. Nonetheless, afterwards, I actually thought it had been a pretty clever thing to say. I mean, the God of the Christians and the Jews and the Mohammedans, whichever one He is, all of them are the God who saved the Israelites from Egypt. Right?

Miss Daw was watching me. I saw her eyes focused in a direction I could not see, and saw the slight frown crease the perfect whiteness of her alabaster brow.

3.

Dr. Foster, as it turned out, simply raised his hands and began the closing benedictions. “May the Lord make His face to shine upon you, and give you peace…”

We had skipped one or two hymns that were posted on the notice board, the recitation of the Nicene Creed, and the part of the service where we call responses to the prayer. I do not know what that part is called, but it was my favorite part when I was much younger.

Anyway, what Colin used to call the “crapshoot of the Foster Amnesia” sometimes led us to go through two services in a row, if Foster lost his place late on, and started again from the top. At other times, the “crapshoot” cut the service time in half, as it had done today.

Fell and Daw ordered me to walk ahead of them down the path, around the corner, and to the door beneath the bell tower. The entrance to the cell was less than a dozen steps from the main Chapel door. The cell was part of the same building, which may have been one reason why I had been allowed out.

There was still snow on the ground, but it was patchy. Apparently the weather for the week I had missed had turned mild. It was chill, but it was a crisp, refreshing chill. A week ago the early winter had seemed late winter, and December days were getting February weather. Now, early winter seemed like late autumn, and December air had an October feel to it. Like the realization that I had never missed my friends for so long a time, I realized that I had never gone for so long without seeing the weather in my life, either.

The trees had no leaves on them but, after my long confinement underground, they seemed as bright as any trees in spring. The clouds were few, and very white, and the sky was high and cool and blue.

I walked slowly, thinking that my prayer had not only not been answered, but that the service, by being cut short, had sped my trip back into the gray brick cube of my cell.

I tried to look in the fourth dimension. My visions and senses were still utterly blocked, as they had been from the moment yesterday when Glum had come to drool on me. I could not even remember what hyperspace looked like. I was a girl, an entirely ordinary girl, wearing an iron collar I could not take off, because that was the way Glum wanted it, and his desires could change reality in a way I could not sense or resist.

A tall black man, either a Negro or a Pakistani (I had never seen either in real life, and was not sure which was which) came suddenly around the corner. His hair was loose and lay along his shoulders like a girl’s, instead of being wiry, so perhaps he was a Pakistani. His face was more handsome than the face of a statue. He wore a long powder-blue coat, with blue trousers and black boots beneath it, and he walked with his head hunched down, as if he (in this fine weather) were cold, and his hands made deep fists in his pockets.

We bumped directly into each other, and he brought up both his hands to catch me by the shoulders before I fell off the path.

“A thousand pardons, Miss,” he started.

If he had just had his hands in an oven, they could not have been warmer. It felt good on my arms.

I grabbed the metal collar around my neck with both my hands and tugged on it, trying to show him it wouldn’t come off. I said, “Help me! Please! Call the police!”

He looked a little startled. Without letting go of my shoulders, he looked up and said, “Telemus, is this one of yours? This is Phaethusa?”

Dr. Fell said, “This is Miss Windrose. She is not my responsibility. I did not take her out of her cell. And that is not the name I use here, thank you.”

My heart started sinking.

The black man looked at Miss Daw, “You, then, Thelxiepia?”

Miss Daw stepped forward, her gloved hands folded at her waist, clutching the tiniest possible pocketbook, her high-heeled pumps clacking on the pathway. “I will thank you to unhand the young woman. Proprieties must be observed.”

He said, “You keep her in the cell? That cell? The one Corus and I are cleaning?”

Miss Daw did not answer, but gave him a stiff look, as he still had not released me.

I said, “I don’t know who you are, but I didn’t do anything wrong. I am not whatever they told you I was. I’m just a girl. I’m really nice, once you get to know me. I’m not a monster and I don’t like being locked up, and won’t you please help me? I’ve never done anything to you. If you ever got caught by our side, and I could get you out of a cell, I’d do it! What’s your name? I’m Amelia! I really am a person, just like you!”

“Notus. We are called Notus.” To Miss Daw, he said, “My brother is being unduly cruel. What a wonder of cruelty! That cell is clearly cursed with a cur…” (or maybe he said “ker”) “…and it cannot be healthy for a woman of this most tender age. The Great Lady Cyprian, I am thinking her happiness will not be a great thing, hearing of this.”

Dr. Fell said drily, “They are organisms from Chaos. Pre-frontal lobotomies would have been the best way to keep them restrained.”

“To you, I will not speak!” exclaimed the black man. “You are a thing of gears and levers, you. I do not call you a man! Bah! You, Thelxiepia, you are a gracious woman. You know the secrets which cause men to die when they hear them. Can you not prevail upon Boreas? Tell him we will take these children away if they are not well cared for! We have an agreement with the Uranians!”

Dr. Fell said sardonically, “Why ask her, Notus? Boreas is your brother.”

“Bah! Since I am not talking to you, I am not listening to you!”

I suddenly had the fear that the scheme Boggin had told me, about how sternly we were supposed to be treated in order to convince the others that we were secure, was about to backfire.

I said, “They really don’t treat me that badly! Boreas is really nice!”

The black man had a look of slow horror come onto his face. Nothing I could have said would have convinced him more completely that I was being lashed and tortured.

He let go of me, which made my arms suddenly feel quite cold. “It does not matter. You may not take her back to the cell yet. We need Dr. Fell to bring his instruments to take some readings, to localize the breach. Come, Telemus!”

“I am not under your authority,” Dr. Fell said coldly.

“You will come, or I will whirl you from here into the sea!” And the black man’s long shining hair began to flow and sway as if in the breeze, except there was no breeze. A warmth came from him as if an invisible oven had suddenly opened its door.

Dr. Fell raised his hands, and said sardonically, “Well, your argument has some merit. It is what we call Argumentum ad Baculum, of course, but I am not prepared at this time to enter into the finer points of such a dispute. I will communicate with Mulciber about this.”

“Bah! Again, I say my Bah! I am with the Lady Cyprian. I do not care for your Mulciber, Round-eye!”

Dr. Fell put his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “Neither, by all accounts, does the Lady Cyprian.”

Then Dr. Fell wiggled his finger at me, and to Miss Daw he said, “Watch her. Guard her. She is the dangerous one.”

The two men walked away, Dr. Fell marching with his stiff step (almost like a goose) and Notus, with many a glance back at me across his shoulder.

4.

“Can we walk around the estate? Just up and down a few paths, or see the Library? I’d like to get a book. I’m so bored! Please?”

Miss Daw just sat down on the bench that was there, a marble slab with feet carved into little cherubs blowing trumpets. Two dry rosebushes showed their thorns to either side. She patted the seat next to her.

Slowly, I sat. Then I threw back my head, and laughed.

Miss Daw looked at the horizon, and was preparing to take no more notice of me.

I said, “You are not going to ask me why I laughed, are you? It’s because of what Dr. Fell said. He called me the dangerous one. Not Victor, not Colin, not Vanity, who can call a magical mind-reading ship from beyond the world’s edge. Me! Why am I the dangerous one?”

I started kicking my legs back and forth under the bench. Maybe I should make a break for it? Pick up a rock and brain the frail Miss Daw over the head? She would probably go down harder than the unexpectedly brawny Headmaster Boggin.

I decided to give talking one more chance: “Why did Boreas tell you not to talk to me? He cannot be afraid of me. I am not the dangerous one. You cannot be afraid of me, Miss Daw; you’ve known me my whole life. You know me. I am not a monster. Really, I’m not. No more than any other girl my age, I suppose.”

Miss Daw smiled, a sad smile, a very far-away smile.

I looked around on the ground. Here were patches of winter grass, mounds of snow lining the edges of the path, a little strip of leafless and barren garden to our left and right. No rocks.

I could see the buildings of the estate all around me. Beyond the Great Hall was the main Manor House, with the Library to the North and the Stables and yards to the South.

No one was around. I was hoping Victor might come along the path. But there was no one.

“What are they doing in my cell?”

Miss Daw’s lips twitched, but she did not answer.

I said, “Miss Daw…?”

No answer.

“…how long am I going to have to stay there…?”

She thought about whether or not to answer. Then she said, “Be at peace, child. Matters will soon resolve themselves. One way or the other.”

I said slowly, “But they aren’t, are they? They are not going to go back the way they were. We’re too old. Everything’s changed.”

Miss Daw said, softly, “Nothing is stable. Nothing is certain.”

She hugged herself a bit. She murmured, half to herself, “Changes will come, but other changes will come after, wiping out each layer of change like waves on a beach, erasing the ripples in sand cast up by the previous wave. Everything is sand. There is only one rock to which we can cling.”

I thought I knew what she meant. I said, “You saw me praying. What did you see?”

Miss Daw spoke in her silver voice, her eyes still on the far horizon. “Your prayers flew up. There was an echo in return. The relational energy went somewhere. Where, I do not know. Someone heard you.”

Well, here was a topic I could get her to rise to. I said, “What denomination are we?”

She drew her eyes down from the horizon and glanced at me, a small quirk to her lips. “ ‘We’? Miss Windrose, that is an excellent question. What indeed are we?”

“Well, then, what are you? High Church? Dissenters? What?”

She smiled a half-smile, filled both with melancholy and with an aloof amusement. “I am of the body of the one true Church, and I am the last of that body. We called ourselves the Pure Ones. Others called us Donatists.”

“And where was your Church?”

Her face showed that she had flown in thought, far away, far down the corridors of memory. At last she said in a soft, distant voice: “Our Archbishopric was centered in Alexandria, at a time when North Africa was the most civilized and cultured spot in the Empire. The European and Asian provinces had been wasted in the wars between the Four Caesars.

“We cast out from us the unfit, who delivered their scriptures and sacred vessels up to our persecutors under Diocletian; once the persecution was relaxed these traditors, these deserters from the duty of martyrdom, attempted to carry on as if their actions had not put them out of communion with the faithful. Bribed electors raised, and men outside grace ordained, a certain false bishop, Caecilian, above us; but we refused him, electing Donatus the Great from among the pure and faithful.

“How the Bishop of the Chaff hated the Bishop of the Wheat! The impure said that their bishops had authority to choose our bishop, and that we were their cattle. The archbishop of Antioch turned Constantine against us. Constantine was one who hated our religion, but sought to harness the power of the faith of Christ and use it against his political enemies.

“In time, Constantine declared himself Pontifex, and said his word ruled the Church as a matter of law. Him! Pontifex! As if the outcome of bloody battles made his the voice of God! The election of pagan and corrupt Praetorians could vest Constantine with temporal power, yes; but spiritual authority, we held, came from other sources.

“They called us heretics and schismatics, but they were the ones who strayed from the true path. A splinter group which rebelled against the Greek Church grew to power amidst the decayed and corrupted remnants of the Western Empire. These are the ones you call the Catholics, who were rebels against the Metropolitan authority of the Greek Church. Those of us in North Africa who remained pure in our faith were persecuted again and again. Then a time came when the Paynims from Arabia swept over the land.

“And that was the end of us.”

She was silent for a while, lost in sad thought.

She said: “Nothing of the true teachings now remains. Our books are lost. The Gospels of Thomas and Simon are gone, the Letters of Instruction, the writings of Symmeticus, Antonius Thaumaturgos the Elder, Antonius Pius, and the Epistles of Peter, the Gospel of Judas, and the Book of Tubalcaine from before the Flood, are all lost.

“When a council was called by our enemies, to gather together the many sacred writings and the books which preserved the memory of Christ and His apostles, we were banned. Our gospels and epistles were not included in their books; and those gospels that they did include were voted upon to include or exclude by a show of hands. The Greeks drove away dissenters from the council, and so their hands were the ones most numerous.

“And what did they vote into their Bible? Fables and nonsense. To this were added letters and boasts by Paul, who never met Christ, but had a dream of Him, and who invented, out of the speculations of the Greeks, a washed-down version of Platonic and Neoplatonic theogeny.

“And forgeries not by Paul, but bearing his name, were added; as were letters written by several Greeks later said to be the writings of John and Luke, who were illiterate fishermen.”

I said, “Are you talking about the Bible? I mean, our Bible?”

She looked at me sidelong. “You yourself delivered a four-page paper on the Pauline and Pseudo-Pauline epistles, including an analysis of First Timothy, when we were discussing the Markian Hypothesis and the possibility of the Q document in seminar last year.”

“Um… sure.”

“You did not write that paper, did you?”

“I wrote… part of it…”

“You wrote your name at the top.”

“Vanity sort of helped out with some of the wording. And Quentin, uh, checked my spelling, and… Well, what does it matter if I cheated on one little tiny paper! I am just going to be killed, or sold into slavery!”

“You will not be killed, child. And an education is always important.”

“It’s not doing me much good right now. You people have me locked up in a cell buried underground!”

“Since you slept through our study of the Bible, you still have the pagan authors to comfort you. You have the solace of having read Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. You have read the Crito, and you know from Gibbon the dignity with which Julian the Apostate met his fate. Epictetus was a slave, and he knew how to bear his lot with dignity…” And now she looked quite sad again, and her eyes turned back to the horizon.

I said, “What’s it like, being the last Donatist?”

“Being the only one who knows the truth in the world full of lies? Every teenager knows something of the feeling.”

“Miss Daw…? I’ve been wondering. How can you be a Christian if you are a pagan goddess?”

“I am not a goddess. That word is reserved properly for the Olympians, who can influence the motions of the Fates, which I cannot.”

“But how can you have faith in Christ? Is he one of you folk?”

She looked uncomfortable. “The matter is complex. There are those among us who claim that some upstart merely wished to steal the worship due to Jove; and that Baphomet, a child of Phorcys and Ceto, was the man crucified at Calvary; or else Simon the Magician, one of the Gray Sisters’ sons. Still others say it was merely a man who died on Golgotha; still others say no one died, and that Christ is an invention of priestcraft. There are many of us who could make ourselves seem to die, and rise again from the grave; for that matter, there are humans who could perform some slight-of-hand, or swap a living body for a dead; and anyone can forge a document, or tell a lie. But none of us could raise a human being from the dead, or promise truly to raise all men; and none of us can forgive sins, or wipe the stain of wrong away.”

“Why would one of you want to steal another person’s worship? Do you eat it?”

She smiled. “Something like that. The Olympians receive their power from the moral order of the universe, but also from the laws of men, and the guilt of those who break those laws.”

“Then how can you be a Christian, if you suspect Christ was one of you?”

She shook her head. “I suspect no such thing; I merely report what some among the immortals say. But even their opinion betrays the deeper truth. If the Redeemer was a fraud, Miss Windrose, my question is this: Who was he impersonating? Whose worship, as you put it, was he trying to eat? If Baphomet was a thief, there must have been real gold he was trying to steal.

“I am above humanity in the chain of being. The mere fact that there is a chain of being proves that there must be a top, a first link or Uncaused Cause from which all else emanates. Everyone fears and worships the thing that sets the circumstances and limits of his fate, as a hound might worship the master who owns him. Only something that is entirely without restricting circumstances, unlimited, infinite, can be called Divine. Unhindered, it would be motionless. With no wants and no lacks, it would be entirely serene.”

I said, “That could be any god of any religion. What makes you a Christian?”

She said, “In my youth I swam along the coasts of Carthage, and lured mortal sailors to their wretched deaths, promising them sweet kisses, and I laughed gaily as they drowned. A time came when the dying men called upon a strange and nameless God to save them, who was, at once, himself and his own son, and one of these forgave me as he died, though I was his murderess. Angered by the conceit, I determined to slay the next holy man of this new faith I came upon.

“I spied one who walked along the cliff overlooking the sea. He was dressed as a beggar, and leaned upon a staff as he walked, and he praised his God with every weary step of his long road. I swam ahead of him and scaled the rock, so that he found me combing my hair with a comb of shell, dressed only in my beauty. I tempted him with kisses, and he rebuked me sternly, and had no fear of me.

“It is our custom not to kill men until they fail to answer one of our riddles, because that failure shows their mortality and imperfection. So I asked the Holy Man if I had a soul, and if I could know salvation: this was a riddle to which I knew he knew no answer, since I did not know the answer myself.

“He raised his staff, and said it was no more likely that the dead wood in his hand could put forth bloom again, than that a mermaid could have a soul.

“No sooner did the words leave his lips, than the dry stick in his hand turned green, and flowers of unearthly beauty budded and bloomed all along the staff. I knew then that I was in the presence of a superior power: I dove from the cliff to flee from the saint.

“Like you, I can see the many dimensions of the world, and so I knew what it was that reached down through higher space to touch that old man’s walking stick. It was a power above Saturn, older than Time, able to restore the dead and recover the innocence I had once and lost. Many a day I huddled in the darkness far below the wave, wondering and grieving.

“And now I know that Eternity is beyond even the gods of Olympus. There is a shadow, a hint, of what Eternity is like within this world of time and death and decay: for if there were not, we would have no notion of perfection, no idea of beauty, no love, no hope. We would all be Dr. Fell.”

“Do you believe in souls? Do you think everything has a soul?”

“Only a creature with a soul could frame such a question.”

I said, “Do you think I have a soul?”

“Of course, dear child, and it is a bright one, despite your anger and confusion.”

“If I have a soul, I cannot be a monster. Boreas cannot be afraid of me.”

“I do not actually think he is afraid of you, child.”

“Then why did he order you not to talk to me? This conversation is the first one I’ve had in seven days. If you don’t count the little scene with Grendel. I am so bored. Bored and tired and scared. Tired of being scared. Bored of being scared. Scared of being bored. I will do whatever you say. I will do what Boreas wants me to do. Just don’t put me back in that cell!”

“We have little choice in the matter. Even Boreas has little choice.”

“At least give me something to read or something to do. What about my lessons? I had a test this week that I missed because I was in jail. One of your tests: the Hawking formulations on Black Hole Theory.”

“Naturally, I did not hold the test this week, Miss Windrose.”

“Give me the materials so I can study! How often do you have a student begging you for work?”

It seemed she was not listening. She said absentmindedly: “It would be a waste of time, child. No matter what you learned, you would have to learn it again when you come out.”

“At least come talk to me during the day. You must be bored, too, if there are no classes being held this week!”

She shook her head. Apparently she was not bored.

I said in an angry voice: “Answer me! Boreas cannot be afraid of me talking to you.”

“No, child. He is afraid I might take heart from your example.”

“Take heart?”

She turned and looked at me. Her eyes had been staring into the Fourth Dimension, and were still surrounded with a faint cloud of distance-negating energy, which, in the sunlight, made her eyes seem all silvery.

Solemn and sad, she said in the soft music of her voice: “I am a slave. These people are my captors, too. I am not from here.”

“Where are you from?”

“From home.”

“What home?”

“Home. Your home. My home. Our home. Myriagon.”