A number of openings awaited her, all filled with modulating radiance. Some were narrow corridors that soon curved out of sight. Others were almost as high as the forehall of Revelstone, and seemed to extend indefinitely through the lucent rock. But the Harrow selected a passage without hesitation. Eagerly, urgently, he led the way into one of the narrower tunnels.

At every step, the Staff of Law touched the stone, invoking momentary exhalations of vapor. Linden felt rather than heard her friends’ respiration. They breathed scents and colors instead of air.

Beyond the passage, they entered another chamber, smaller than the first, but still wide and round enough to accommodate a copse of wattle or a stand of jacaranda—and high enough to accept cedars. Indeed, the space dwarfed the jut of crude dark rock in its center. Supported by a low mound of unfinished basalt, bitter rock reared upward, gnarled and somehow grisly. It formed two sides that resembled jaws filled with ragged teeth. And between the jaws, there appeared to be a seat: the entire outcropping may have been a throne.

Within the perfection of the chamber’s walls, the upraised stone was a maimed thing, deformed by malice or indifference.

Linden could not imagine why the Viles had chosen to create such a shape. But she did not ask the Harrow to explain it. She felt repulsed by it. It seemed to emit an odor like ordure. If it were a sculpture, it was an exercise in derision.

Fortunately the Harrow strode past the jaws and the seat without glancing at them. Still certain, he selected a hallway beyond the throne and entered it swiftly, as if he wished to distance himself from the dire rock.

Trembling for no reason that she could name, and glad that Stave and Liand still held her arms, Linden followed the Insequent with the rest of her company close around her.

This hall was straight, featureless, and long: long enough for Linden to realize that her perceptions were suffering a kind of delinition. The glow of the stone became less a matter of sight and more a flowing series of sensations on her skin: brief caresses as loving as kisses; small scrapes that caused no pain; the tickling of feathers; warm breaths. The colors were the multitudinous susurrus of her companions. Like the Harrow’s, her steps were little clouds, and every touch of the Staff on the stone trailed streamers like rills of mist.

She was falling into paresthesia again, the neural confusion caused by the intangible essence of the Viles. Remnants of their lore lingered where they had once flourished. Soon she would have to follow the Harrow by smell and taste as much as by small pennons of illumined fog. Insidiously she was being led astray, guided out of contact with mundane existence.