“I don’t see that it changes anything,” said Roland. “But if Fareed and Seth are as interested as you are, they’ll want this creature most certainly! They’ll be willing to pay for him, Rhosh, pay a great deal. I could use that payment. I could use it for centuries to come. I need such a payment.”

“I can give you all the gold you want, Roland. Think no more on any problem with gold. I’ll pay you handsomely for the creature now. But you’re not grasping the significance…”

Far away. Sounds of traffic. Vibrations moving down through the earth under the traffic.

Rhoshamandes was still speaking in a rush of excited words, Derek could no longer understand him.

“I still say…”

“No, you’re wrong.” And then it was a rumbling again like water in the pipes of this house, or cars on the boulevard above. And the monsters had left the house.

Derek sat up. He was nauseated, weak, thirsting. He grabbed for the pitcher on the table beside him. Empty. The monsters had left him without water. He lay back down again thirsting from every pore in his body. With all his will, he tried to feel vigor but his body was deadweight.

All he could hear now was the vibration of Rhoshamandes’s voice and then he raised his voice in exasperation. “No, no, they mustn’t know anything about this for now, Roland. Nothing. No one must know of this until I think this through.”

Derek fell back on the pillow, hungry and cold. He stared at the distant lightbulb, this soiled ugly light shining in its rusted cage, and he cried with all his soul.

“Chop you up, rend you limb from limb,” he whispered. “If only…” When had he, Derek, ever thought such vengeful thoughts? And to think he’d never understood this dimension of human beings, and now he was as poisoned with dreams of vengeance as any human could be.

He rolled over on his left side, and brought the blanket up over his shoulder. Was it safe now to remember that moment, when the tower had blossomed and grown from the egg? Was it all right to remember their being together, roaming Atalantaya together in those endless warm days and nights? He was walking again, with his arm around Garekyn under the great arching green banana leaves, and everywhere he looked there were flowers, pink and red and yellow and purple, flowers of such colors—petals caught swirling in the breeze.

Vines climbed the walls of luracastria, and clusters of petals shivered above him, clusters shaped like clusters of grapes.

Arion woke him. Arion had come in and sat on the bed beside him.

“I have something for you,” he said.

“Water, please, I beg you.”

“Oh, I brought that as well,” said Arion.