“That only shows me what she wants me to see,” said Wad. “I think she lives her entire life as if she expected me to be watching. She undresses and dresses as if she had an audience. She knows what I can do.”

“She has that kind of self-control? Every action is a performance, all the time?”

“Absolutely,” said Wad. “She plays her roles every moment, waking and sleeping.”

“Sleeping!” Anonoei scoffed.

“I think even her dreams are lies that go along with the persona she’s adopted. I think she believes her own lies as she tells them, and keeps on believing them.”

“If she believes them, are they lies?” asked Anonoei.

“A question I once asked Pope Boniface the Fourth,” said Wad. “He was busy converting all the pagan temples in Rome into Christian churches. I tried to explain to him how resentful the Greek and Roman Families of mages were about such treatment, and he told me that the gods didn’t exist. I considered myself proof of the contrary, and I showed him what I could do. I gated us both up into the Alps—very high mountains in Mittlegard. There we stood in the bitter cold of an Alpine winter, with him still dressed in his lightweight sleeping gown, and he informed me, even as he was freezing to death, that my existence was a lie. That I was tempting him as Satan tempted Christ.”

“I have no idea who you’re talking about,” said Anonoei.

“I realized that he really did believe that what he was actually experiencing—the cold of the mountain wind, the sight of high mountains and snow all around him—was a delusion, a vision I had created to deceive him. I told him that the snow and the wind and the mountains were real, that he was lying to himself, and I wasn’t even from the same planet as the person he called ‘Satan.’ He informed me that I was the liar, and that’s when I pointed out that I couldn’t be lying, because I believed what I was telling him, while he knew perfectly well that the cold was real, so he was lying to me.”

“Another circular argument.”

“He told me that this only proved I was a better liar than he was. He admitted he felt the cold, which showed how powerful the illusion was. My obvious shivering from the cold did not change the fact that it was a delusion. ‘If you lie to yourself, it’s still a lie,’ says he, ‘even if you do it so well that you believe it.’ A very wise man, for a Pope.”

“I take it ‘Pope’ is like ‘King’?”

“More or less,” said Wad. “I can meet with anybody I want. I can always get past the guards and bureaucrats.”

“Speaking of which,” said Anonoei, “I’m a bit concerned about Keel. He seems to be quite urgently afraid at this moment.”