Here is a vision, which may also be a dream.
I am standing in a room, and the room is carved of stone. The floor and walls are veined gray marble. So is the vaulted ceiling, with its intricate floral traceries. The draperies are carved of white marble by a master’s hand; their heavy folds form crumpled piles on the floor. The furniture is stone too – granite, basalt, onyx, obsidian. Even the paintings are carved reliefs, the tactile ghosts of artworks.
The flames in the fireplace are carved as well, vibrant glowing tongues of amethyst. The same crystal flames tip the alabaster candles. The windows are sheets of polished crystal, shot through with needle-like inclusions. I gaze through them into a starlit, sleeping garden.
My boots tick on marble floors as I walk through halls lit with shifting violet fire. My hands steals to the hilt of my dagger as I round each corner. But every room is empty. Nothing stirs in the labyrinth of chambers. It feels as if the whole world has been petrified. I step onto what appears to be a carpet, but it is a clever mosiac imitation. The chairs are set at careless angles, but they are immobile, welded seamlessly to the floor. Their arrangement is a lie and an illusion. Even the dents on their cushions are carefully carved, implying a recently-departed body.
I enter another room, and find I am in a silent library. Spines of marble books line granite shelves.
A single book lies open on a black marble table. But this book is also a simulacrum in stone. Its two exposed pages are sheets of pale marble, veined in blue and ochre. I try to see the pattern as text or illustration, but it eludes me. If it tells a story at all, it is an ancient tale of metamorphosis:
Once, so long ago, there was a sea. In the sea lived tiny drifting creatures. They died, and settled into mud. (Drifting, drifting downward.) Time passed, and the mud hardened into limestone. (Time passed. Time passed.) The stars changed, and the mountains shifted. Sea-bed slid beneath them. (Heat, vast heat, and pressure.) The stone was changed to marble, intricate with hints of meaning. (Remember. Remember.)
This is not a book I can read. Its web of patterns might have been cast among the stars.
But as I gaze, the pattern shifts, and becomes a map of a meandering rust-red river in a forgotten jungle. Then I no longer see a map. I am on the river, drifting in a carved canoe. Yellow eyes gleam from the shadows. The birds call out in human voices. But I do not know their language.
The birds are fierce blue and crimson, with long tails, cruel, hooked beaks and obsidian claws. They beat their wings and scream as I drift beneath them. The feathers of their throats stand erect, like tiny blades on a jade-edged dagger.
I drift aground at a temple buried in a serpent-tangle of flowering vines. Inside its stones a python glides, and its curves replace the river on the map. The snake’s coils crush bones on a bed of forgotten gold.
The map has now become a Chinese drawing in ink, in the momei style, depicting the branch of an ancient plum tree. But the trunk of the tree is also still the river, its ink-wash scattered with sand-bar islands. The wet dark blotches on the bank are either jungle trees, or drying plums in the neglected orchard.
If you look at it just so, the river bank has now become a writhing dragon…
I hear a footstep on the marble floor behind me.
I start to turn.
But there is already a hand on my shoulder.
—