She turned and walked away, and for all that Chance had claimed immunity, he took a moment or two before following, a moment to watch the curve of her leg as it showed briefly through the folds of her sarong at the farthest stretch of her stride.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

As he followed his guides deeper into the labyrinth, Chance found himself set slightly apart. Galina seemed to know Danil well, for she walked beside him and chatted without artifice. The Mermaid occasionally joined in the conversation, but mostly she was silent, content to be carried by the untiring Danil.

Chance was not fooled by his own crafting. They were neither alive nor dead. They were not real. Were they memories, dreams, or solid projections created by his own ruminations on this bizarre, angel-assigned case? All of the above, or none, or simply fragments of possibility. Labyrinths could do that, hypnotize the human mind to break free of time-bound perception and remember precisely, see clearly, foretell accurately. His labyrinth was made of his own mind coiling back on itself and examining itself, and these walking ghosts were all connected to him by a ritual that was only myth, but a myth powerful enough to acquire a kind of shared reality.

And yet . . . it was hard not to care about them. Whatever his actions as an undying one, the uncertainties of his human life had taught him to bear the weight of the mystery of death. To want to die well, with meaning, as more than an unlucky accident or the victim of a murderous whim—this was a desire he could understand. That was what made ritual, and even the rumor of ritual, so powerful. It gave meaning, however ill-founded, to death. Humans would look for a pattern in anything—a face in the clouds, a voice in the wind, and a reason in chaos. The problem was not that patterns did not exist but that people were better at fabricating them than discovering them.

He saw clearly. He knew what was of his own making. They were not real, but even the shadow of their existence deserved his respect.

He walked unseeing from dim starlight into dim twilight, from sharp, dry cold to damp coolness, and into the next place. It was a walled garden, but not a neat and overgroomed patch of boredom. Here were crumbling bricks fallen in a pile to breed thick moss under a dripping cast-iron downspout; there were straggly nests of dry grass and scraps of wild cotton poking out of the uneven holes left in the wall. The birds that flew unerringly in and out of those close-quartered nests were in constant song, lilting a teasing tune and then chuckling at the joke. The very weeds bloomed obligingly, bright yellow-gold and emerald-green treasures that made marvelous alchemy of the mud and gravel caught in the long, narrow gutters alongside the paths.