Without percipience, she could not gauge how the residual theurgy of the Viles affected her companions. She had told them little about her arranged confrontation with the makers of the Demondim: words were impotent to convey the disorientation that the Viles engendered. Yet the pitch and timbre of Stave’s hand, and of Liand’s, held steady. Somehow they contrived to manage their delirant senses.

If the Giants or Linden’s other companions felt any distress, she did not discern it. The shades of their breathing baffled interpretation.

She had experienced similar dislocations before. Nevertheless she was not ready when the hall opened.

As though she had crossed a threshold into an altogether different definition of reality, she entered a space as open, ornate, and majestic as a palace.

Here her perceptions resumed their normal dimensions; or they seemed to do so. In this place, the complex puissance of the Viles was gone, utterly banished—or else their lore had devised an illusion more oblique and bewildering than paresthesia. Only a vague squirming, an almost subliminal discomfort, warned Linden that her senses were confused; that the substance of what she saw had been fundamentally altered.

To all appearances, she stood in the ballroom of a vast palace or mansion, the dwelling of some supreme sovereign surrounded by incarnate wealth. On a burnished marmoreal floor, rugs overlapped each other in every direction. They were as sumptuous as cushions, and as richly woven as tapestries; yet they were also transparent, as clear as light; simultaneously solid and impalpable. Against the far walls, wide stairways with treads and banisters of flawless crystal arced upward like wings. At precise intervals among the rugs, shafts of glass spun in delicate filigree rose to five or six times the height of the Giants; and from elaborate arms atop the shafts hung chandeliers in profusion, each bedizened with scores or hundreds of lights as pure and white as stars, and as clinquant as precious metals. Along the walls, golden braziers gave off flames that suffused the air with tranquility. And in the center of the space, a fountain of ice—translucent and perfectly frozen—spouted toward the distant ceiling. It reached as high as the chandeliers, where it spread outward in a ceaseless spray, droplets as fine and faceted as jewels. Yet no current flowed. No bead fell. The ice was so motionless that it seemed sealed in time rather than in cold.

Above it, on the ceiling itself, mosaics as magnificent as choirs displayed their voices from wall to wall. The magic of their creation made them simultaneously as articulate as glory and as colorless as water.