He lifted the shirt and tossed it in a hamper. The circle of revealed white carpet glared up at them like a glaucomic eye. “My path’s the one walked by a man who lived a good life in southern Iskar, a minor functionary in the troubadour’s guild, who wrote poems in his free hours and shuffled paper the rest of the day. Wine with friends on Sixthday and snatches of verse in university magazines, that was me. Couplets written in the odd hours between sleep and waking. I had a wife, until she ran off with a marine from Telomere. I took leave of my office and came to Kavekana, to live in solitude and write. I meant to go home a few weeks later. I would have gone home.”

“But you found something.”

“Words took fire in my brain.”

“More than words.”

He nodded. “My Lady. My queen. My muse.”

Kai felt as if a trickle of cold water had been poured down the inside of her spine. “Tell me.”

“In the first few weeks after I came here, I felt something scrape at the glass of my mind. Panic, I thought. You know that I was.” He swallowed. “Attacked. Mako may have told you.”

“Yes.”

“That night, when they beat me, the panic broke through the glass. Something crawled out of the hole it made. Blades tore from my lips. I do not mean that as metaphor. Glass and steel spines, a creature of solid light. That night, when I slept, I dreamed of green fire. A … a green man with a skull’s face and claws like a bear, only not. We embraced. It is strange to say. And the words came.”

“Not so strange.” A man. Interesting. “You said this muse was a lady.”

“The man was first. The Lady, later.”

“And after the attack, your work took off.”

“Yes.” He nodded. “The work had never seized me that way before. A whole-body trembling, a terror. I lived that scream. And then one night it stopped.”

“Stopped,” she echoed. “About eight weeks ago.”

“Yes.” He stopped, facing the off-white wall. “How did you know?”

She slipped the folded vellum out of the notebook, and held it between them, though he was not looking. “Three months back, on the twenty-ninth, an idol died up the mountain. I tried to save her, but I failed. When she died, I heard a line from your poem. Howl, bound world. Just that. Our idols don’t speak; they have no minds. Those words have haunted me ever since. That’s why I came up to you that night. That’s why I asked you for your sources.”

“Could have come from anywhere. That poem’s popular. They ran it in the Journal.”