The basement also housed a sophisticated medical facility. Gifted healers like Kara, as well as regular doctors and nurses, were present at all times to deal with emergencies and dispense routine care. Next to the “clinic,” which really looked more like a mini-hospital, was a large lending library. That was a much happier discovery for me. I didn’t have a chance to explore it, but I hoped they had some things I’d like to read.

Above ground, the main part of the house was all public rooms. A vast ballroom took up the center, but there were at least a dozen smaller rooms for meetings, receptions, parties, and so forth. The Nolanders’ quarters had been sized for humans, but the public rooms seemed to have been built to accommodate larger creatures — all had at least twelve-foot ceilings, and the doors were oversized. So was some of the furniture.

The central part of the house also had a number of bathrooms. Some of them had facilities I’d never seen before. Gwen paused to chat with someone, so I poked around in one of the strange ones. It had a toilet that was basically a three-foot-wide sunken tub. When you flushed it, which you did with a floor pedal, a large central hole opened up and tons of water cascaded down the sides.

What sort of creature would require such a thing? I tried to picture Ghosteater squatting at the edge and pooping. It was hard to imagine.

Then again, what about this whole thing wasn’t hard to imagine?

I thought about the document Cordus had given me, which I’d read before lunch. It had turned out to be a short, handwritten early history of the other world.

According to what I’d read, the world I was standing in right now was called the “First Emanation” because it had emerged through natural processes. The cosmos had come into being, galaxies had formed, the Sun had been born, planets had consolidated around it, life had arisen and evolved on Earth, and so forth. All that sounded familiar.

But after that, the story diverged from what I’d learned in school. On Earth, the document said, living things began to appear that had the capacity to manipulate essence, which was defined — more poetically than helpfully, I thought — as “the grain of is-ness.” The Second Emanation emerged not from the unguided processes of nature, but through acts of creation by these new beings.

At first, just a few places on Earth gained echoes or shadows — other-space environments generated when essence-workers reshaped their surroundings to the degree that their place no longer meshed properly with the rest of the world. Over time, more and more echoes were created. The Earth’s landmasses and oceans accumulated multiple versions as different essence-workers reshaped the same places at different times. The duplicated environments — called strata — came in contact with one another, establishing connections until they formed a world of linked but discrete spaces.