I raced up to Gesar’s office on the third floor like a lunatic. Considering that I was waving a book on the childhood of outstanding Others in the air, I must have looked like someone who has discovered a coded prophecy for the next two hundred years in Pinocchio, together with a report of an encounter with aliens from another planet, the formula of a cure for the common cold, and an obscene acrostic at the beginning of chapter two.

“Where’s the fire?” asked Gesar.

He was sitting on the edge of the desk, and the boy-Prophet was lounging in his office chair. The chair was rather spacious for the boy, to put it mildly. Judging from the fact that Kesha was sitting in a clumsy imitation of the simplest meditation pose, Gesar must have been trying to teach him to control his gift. There was no one else there.

“The Tiger!” I exclaimed wildly.

“He’s far away,” Gesar replied calmly. “I believe we’ll be okay until the morning.”

I cited Blake’s poem:

“Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand and what dread feet?”

“You could at least quote the entire poem,” Gesar replied, and continued:

“What the hammer? What the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? What dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,

And water’d heaven with their tears,

Did He smile His work to see?

Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”

Kesha gaped at us wide-eyed. Nowadays you don’t often see two grown men suddenly start reciting verse. Then he closed his eyes again. Such diligence—incredible!

“Is the full version any more help to us?” I asked sullenly.

“I just think it suggests that we have time until the morning,” Gesar explained.

“You know everything already,” I said. “The Prophet Erasmus Darwin. The only Prophet who ever got away from the Twilight Creature.”

“I don’t know,” Gesar replied simply. “That’s one version of the story. But I regard it as poetic license in an account of one of the standard squabbles between the Light Ones and Dark Ones of Ireland.”

“Is the Tiger something like a Mirror?” I asked.