With a crack as abrupt as a pistol shot, a light appears high in the branches of the huge tree above my head. I’m so desperate I hardly notice it, keep reading, and more lights crack on, little starlike lights at the points of gemlike leaves and the tips of green stalks, old boughs. Soon the tree above is sending out arrowlike shafts of piercing but somehow not blinding light in all directions, making a thicket of light over me. There are dark, open doorways flanking the apse the tree stands in, and from these now bursts the groaning of many deep voices, resonating as if they emerged from a huge iron vessel.

I raise my own voice to compete with theirs, groaning long syllables in Lashlache, and the words fill the chamber with a smell like heated metal. I have reached the end of the first tablet and switch to the second. The words are flying from my lips without my understanding any of them; they are being dragged out of me like links in a chain that those other voices are pulling. Something really is happening—I reach the end of the inscription and suddenly I drop on my knees as if my legs had been hooked and dragged down, I feel my eyes jerk up into my head—I put my hands to my face, feel it stretch and work forming long low syllables in Laschlache, feel it hum with those words, and my throat swollen with the veins tendons standing out from it nearly tearing with the bell-like words I shout.

Off to my right and high up I hear two sharp raps, and a series of rapid taps in three different pitches, several playing simultaneously, like a mechanical operation there in the corner, but I can’t pull my eyes down out of my head to see it. The taps seem to follow the droning voices from the doors, from whatever it is that stands behind the apse. The taps stop. A moment later, I hear two knocks off to my left, high up and behind me, and the same series of taps. Before it ends another two knocks far behind me high and to the right, and halfway through what I think is the same sequence another breaks in from my left and another again near the end of that from the right. As the last tap comes, I feel as if a great hand that had been squeezing me suddenly lets me go. I spring forward on my legs, my eyes drop down and I can see again, my voice has stopped my throat raw, everything has stopped. Before me, I see a great white arch—the tree is far away, deep beyond in the space through the arch where I feel a powerful yearning to go, there is darkness, silence. The lights are all out, the sounds have stopped.

I wait. Time passes.

I turn, afraid. Makemin is between me and the faint light of the door.