Helpless to resist her amazement, Linden gazed around the palace like a woman bespelled. As she did so, some indistinct part of her observed that her companions appeared to feel the same dazzlement. Even the Humbled and Stave were lost in wonder. They wandered away from her, away from Covenant, in a kind of rapture, studying avidly every gleaming crystalline miracle. Liand drifted apart. The Giants separated to peer in awe and delight at the filigree shafts, or at the fountain held ineffably in abeyance. Some of them stooped to trail their fingers along the patterns that elaborated the rugs. Like the ecstatic figures in dreams, the Cords and Liand craned their necks to watch the dance of the chandeliers, hear the music of the mosaics. In spite of his blindness, Manethrall Mahrtiir was dazed by munificence.

Anele had awakened. Squirming in Galesend’s arms, he asked her to put him down. When he stood on the glowing floor, however, he did not move. Instead he remained where Galesend had placed him, jerking his head from side to side with an air of rapt attention, saying nothing.

For some reason, the Ardent had wrapped his raiment tightly around himself again. Then he sank to the floor in a mound of garish and incondign hues. There he rocked himself from side to side like a child in need of comfort.

And Covenant—He, too, had drifted away. Standing before one of the braziers, he stared into the evanescent mansuetude of the flames as if they had ravished him.

In her tranced state, Linden saw no sign of the Harrow. But she did not care what had become of him. She could not: the palace ruled her as though her mind or her spirit had been consumed by astonishment.

Here she might find it possible to know and feel nothing except glad peace until she became as translucent as the fountain and the stairs, the rugs and the chandeliers.

Some time seemed to pass before she found the heart of her amazement and recognized the truth, the defining mystery of what the Viles had accomplished in the prime of their power. Inspired by her previous encounter with their theurgy, she saw that the entire palace and everything in it, the walls and rugs, the shafts of glass, the frozen fountain, the hanging anadems of the chandeliers, the voiced and melodious mosaics, even the golden luxury of the braziers and flames: all of it was made of water. Of water, pure and irreproachable. The magic enchanting her was the magic that had formed the edifice; the magic that sustained it millennia after its makers had perished from the Earth. Somehow the Viles had woven water into these multifarious shapes, these myriad details, and then had caused the water to remain—

The palace was a sculpture, a work of the most sublime art: an eldritch and enduring triumph of ability and will over the fluid inconstancy of time.