When the carpet bobbed up lighter and they had a chance to look around, they gasped again. For here were the islands and promontories and bays of dim gold that Abdullah had seen in the sunset, spreading out from beside them into the far silver distance, where they lay hushed and still and enchanted like a vista of Paradise itself. The pellucid waves broke on the cloud shore with only the faintest of whispers, which seemed to add to the silence.

It seemed wrong to speak in such a place. Sophie nudged Abdullah and pointed. There, on the nearest cloudy headland, stood a castle, a mass of proud, soaring towers with dim silvery windows showing in them. It was made of cloud. As they looked, several of the taller towers streamed sideways and shredded out of existence, while others shrank and broadened. Under their eyes, it grew like a blot into a massive frowning fortress and then began to change again. But it was still there and still a castle, and it seemed to be the place where the carpet was taking them.

The carpet was going at a swift walking pace, but gently, keeping to the shoreline as if it were not at all anxious to be seen. There were cloudy bushes beyond the waves, tinged red and silver like the aftermath of sunset. The carpet lurked in the cover of these, just as it had lurked behind trees in Kingsbury Plain, while it circled the bay to come to the promontory.

As it went, there were new vistas of golden seas, where far-off smoky shapes moved that could have been ships or may have been cloudy creatures on business of their own. Still in utter, whispering silence, the carpet crept out onto the headland, where there were no more bushes. Here it slunk close to the cloudy ground, much as it had followed the shapes of the roofs in Kingsbury. Abdullah did not blame it. Ahead of them, the castle was changing again, stretching out until it had become a mighty pavilion. As the carpet entered the long avenue leading to its gates, domes were rising and bulging, and it had protruded a dim gold minaret as if it were watching them coming.

The avenue was lined with cloudy shapes, which also seemed to watch them coming. The shapes grew out of the cloud-ground in the way that one often sees a tuft of cloud curl upward out of the main mass. But unlike the castle, they did not change shape. Each one ramped proudly upward, somewhat in the shape of a sea horse or the knights in a game of chess, except that their faces were blanker and flatter than the faces of horses and surrounded by curling tendrils that were neither cloud nor hair.

Sophie looked at each one as they passed it with increasing disfavor. “I don’t think much of his taste in statues,” she said.