THERE CAME A TIME when we could wait no longer. Three days had passed, with nothing of note to mark them save that Valka accompanied me on my wanderings through storied galleries and along the packed exhibit chambers. Yume had declined to speak to us of all but the most cursory things, and so we had taken to exploring the labyrinth instead. Perhaps I’d hoped to find Tanaran in among the collection, wandering itself as we were permitted to do. Thrice I saw one of Kharn’s roving eyes gleaming in the gloom. Only once did it stop as I called out to it, and it did not stay to hear my words.

Wet air blew against our faces as the door to the Orchid Stair opened. The eponymous flowers hung from tree branches and the Nipponese-style arches that stood along the winding path down to the level of the gate. The artificial lighting was more umber now than golden, though whether it simulated sunset or sunrise I couldn’t say. Cicadas screamed in the false gloaming, and the nightingale sang.

“’Tis beautiful!” Valka breathed, pushing into the dim and fading light. I noticed lanterns hanging on the torii arches starting to glow, and despite the weight of where we were and the slender thread by which we held on, I smiled. Joy is rare, a thing always of the now, existing without regard for time past or time future, and without depending on them. Despite the long road and its troubles—despite the horrors that lay ahead—I have never forgotten her smile then or the sound of her voice. It was . . . a perfect moment, cut as crystal from the cloth of time. I was only an observer, and so felt I should be elsewhere, as if I were intruding like a storm cloud on midsummer’s eve.

The Stair was beautiful, and the descent was beautiful—as if sunset had transported that stepped grotto from Vorgossos to Faerie, as if the gate on the bottom opened onto Oberon’s court and not the deepest circle of hell. How else should it be? Milton’s Satan had raised for himself a palace greater and more lovely than any in creation, after all.

Pale lights winked to life amid the branches and hanging flowers, silver and pale gold. They twinkled, drifting like dandelion pods on the air. As the bloody sunlight dimmed, powering down, it was as if the stars themselves had passed through thousands of feet of stone to roost in the air of that cavern.

Yet ahead of me, Valka stopped. “What are they?” she asked, incredulous.

I knew. I heard stories about them time enough from Cat.

“Phasma vigrandi,” I said, “the fairy-lights of Luin.”

“Are they really?” Valka’s eyes were wide as moons as she turned in place, drinking in the impossibly lovely sight. “I’ve never seen them!”

“Neither have I,” I admitted. They seemed less to fly than to float, blown like embers or snowflakes. Many settled against the trunks of trees, or onto the high grass and bright flowers like a phosphorescent dew. “I had a . . . friend, once upon a time, who always wanted to see them.” I reached out a hand—hoping that one might settle on it like butterflies in a lepidopterarium. They never did. I could not make out their forms, so bright were they and so small that they seemed composed of light alone.

Tell me a story, would you? One last time.

I could almost hear Cat’s voice, her words small and sick-shrunken even as herself.

I’d told her the story of Kharn Sagara at the end. Our last story. I had told her how Kharn Sagara had avenged his mother’s death and the death of his people. How he had turned the Exalted against themselves and made himself their lord. They said he had conquered a daimon and made it his thrall. I had not believed it.

Sometimes I think that Edouard was right, that there is a God, and that he mocks me. Why else would Cat’s fairies mark the road to that last and dreadful gate? And why would the road to its door run through that last story I had shared with her?

Rest easy, Cat. And find peace on Earth.

Beautiful as the moment was, it could not last. We grew accustomed to the sight of the fairy lights as we descended the rough stair, mindful of the wooden ema hanging from the branches and from the torii. I could not read the painted letters, nor divine their purpose. Where before I had been unmoved by the beauty of that garden, now I understood—understood that every temple, sanctum, and palace hall was an imitation done in lifeless stone of the living world. That pillars were only the poorest imitation of trees and the ribbed vaults of arches and galleries nothing next to the canopies that hung overhead.

We had come to do a thing, and to see what we could see. Valka was first onto the mosaic at the bottom of the Well, and here she raised a hand. I had been speaking—about what I cannot say—and fell silent as a stone.

“I have something,” she said, voice hushed, and lowered all her fingers but one, as if she tested the wind by it.

I have little understanding of machines, and almost none of that networked kind with whose operation Valka was so familiar. So when I say that she was a witch to me it is because there was no difference to my perception between the arts she practiced and the incantations spoken by sorceresses in the most antique fables. I have heard it said there is no magic in all Creation. That what passes for magic is—to those initiated in its sacred mystery—only a species of knowledge. In this, Valka’s thaumaturgy was a skill little different from my abilities with a sword, only an art or science whose workings were alien to me. So too are the arts of the scholiasts, or the vaunted powers of the Maeskoloi, the genetic wizardry of the High College and the horrors enjoyed by the Exalted. All stand as the swordsman to his quarry: to be conquered by their arts.

I have reason to doubt this belief.

There are mysteries in Creation which do not break down, which defy our capacity. There exist walls beyond whose gates no art or reason can serve, and questions which cannot be answered. Of these, some exist only by our own failures—such as my ignorance of machines—but others, others only are. I know what Valka did was not truly magic, though it seemed as such to me. But next to the things that followed, mysteries in the truest sense, her display of power strikes me as a perfect thing: the image of human authority ordering the chaos of Creation.

In all our time together, I had had little chance to watch Valka work her magic, and though I saw much of it after, it is to that false twilight in the Orchid Stair my mind first goes when I think of her: striding silent across colored tesserae. She never lowered her hand, though her head tilted to one side, as though she was trying to locate each bird singing in the trees on the levels above us. She told me once that navigating a datasphere was like trying to catch water in cupped hands. So much information traded past her, so many points and nodes working at once, that the narrow eye of her attention—widened as it was by her neural lace and trained to handle such things—strained to apprehend them.

“You said the android turned you away last you were here?” she asked.

I walked around her, hands at my sides, until I stood between her and the heavy door at the end of the rough tunnel. Her eyes were closed, and deep creases traced the shape of her struggle on her face.

“You’re sure you want to do this?” she asked, cracking one eye.

“Do you have a better idea?”

“Several,” she said, but the grin that stole over her serious face was like a ray of sunlight in the dark of night.

The lights in the hall before us flickered and went out. My hand went to my sword where it hung familiar against my belt, ready on the electromagnetic clasp that held it in place. I turned, keeping myself between Valka and the darkness where the graven door had been, my off-hand ready on the catch that would activate my Royse shield. “What’s happening?” I asked.

“Ssh!” Valka hissed. A wet wind sighed down the hall, seeming to carry the shadows with it as it sighed about the bottom of the Well. “That’s the door!”

Something clattered against the mosaic tiles at my feet, and it was only my long combat experience that kept me still. It was one of Kharn’s eyes, a little silverfish no longer than the blade of my hand. I didn’t hesitate, and crushed it beneath my heel. Red lights slammed on along the floor of the tunnel, and turning to Valka, I asked, “Does he know?”

She was silent a long moment, face drawn down like a book slammed shut. Presently it opened, and she pulled a face. “I don’t think so. The door was on a closed system. Isolated. ’Twasn’t even hard.”

“And the eye?”

“The what?”

I spurned the thing with my toe.

Horror and confusion warred across her marble face. Confusion won. In a voice dry as old parchment, she said, “’Twas not I.” Gold eyes found mine. For an instant, neither of us moved. Something else had interfered, had knocked out Kharn’s eye. Not Kharn himself, surely.

After a disquiet moment, I said, “We should go.” And waiting for her to fall in beside me, hurried down the red-lit hall toward the burgeoning dark.