"How long have you been here?" I asked.

"A good forty years," he said. "And I haven't seen my brother since the day we arrived. Soon after disembarking on the dock, we came up with this arrangement. He would rule the day, and I, the night."

"Not even a glimpse of him?" I asked.

"My only evidence of him is the suffering of the prisoners," he said. "If I were to meet him, we would probably fight to the death. I know it will happen sooner or later. I live with the thought of it always."

We sat quietly for a long time. Silencio eventually stopped playing and came over to refill our glasses. That beautiful breeze was at work, and I wished I could sit there all night.

"Is this not a remarkable monkey?" asked the corporal, as Silencio pushed a drink toward him.

"Remarkable is not the word for him," I said. "He has already saved my life on more than one horrible day."

"He came to us from the city," said Matters, "the result of one of the Master's intelligence transference experiments. Apparently they did not want to do away with him, but he was far too friendly to be of any use. We have become good friends over the years. My brother could not get him to have anything to do with policing the mine."

"I will never look at animals the same again," I said.

"Silencio has made friends with all the prisoners. He takes it very hard when one of them does not return from the mines at night. That is when he takes to drinking himself—Three Fingers with a shot of Pelic Bay is his poison. For a whole week he will be inconsolable," said the corporal.

"A comforting thought," I said.

He laughed. "It is all rather absurd," he said. "But you'd better be off to sleep. Mine-is-the-mind will be here in a few hours."

I put down my drink and stood. The corporal of the day watch shook hands with me, and I went back through the inn and up the stairs to my room. I was not drunk, but I felt calm and sleepy. Once in bed, I closed my eyes and let the images of the Beyond flood my thoughts. During the day, I hid the Fragments under my pillow so that Aria's scent would be with me all night.

When I picked up where I had left off, I discovered that there was with them now a foliate, a man of green, whom they called Moissac. It never said in the text how they had come upon him. He just appeared at the beginning of a long shard of the journey. He was friendly to the miners and offered to take them to an ancient abandoned city by the shores of an inland sea. Harad Beaton thought there might be evidence among the ruins suggesting a path to paradise.

Moissac spoke to them through touch. He placed his viney hand upon the side of a man's face and spoke fluently. In his thatched, flowering hedge of a face there were eyes like distant fires, but in the tangle of branches and roots it was hard to see their exact origin. When he moved through the trees and underbrush he was almost invisible.

At this point, there were only four miners left beside Beaton. Even out beneath the open sky, they felt as if they had been trapped by a cave-in. In the weeks preceding, they had seen their companions devoured by demons, succumb to suicide, fall from some precipice, but they had not lost the idea that they were on a divine mission. They moved like ants through the immensity of the Beyond.

Before they entered the empty City, the foliate told them it was called "Palishize." Other than this he could tell them nothing about it. It looked from a distance like a giant sand castle melting in the surf. Situated behind an outer wall were high mounds punctuated by crude openings one could not exactly classify as doorways or windows. It appeared to be more the home of some prodigious beetles than any human civilization.

The miners drew their rifles and clutched their picks firmly as they walked between the sand and seashell pillars of the main entrance. Moissac led the way, motioning for them to move quietly through the already silent City. The streets were cobbled with millions of clam shells between which weeds had run wild.

The buildings of Palishize were tunneled dirt mounds hiding an elaborate network of passages and small empty rooms. The miners lit the candles on their helmets as they explored the weird structures. They soon found that the buildings were connected by long, underground hallways.

"There is nothing here," Beaton told the others after a full day of traversing the maze of tunnels. "We had better move on."

All were in agreement, especially Moissac, who told them he felt a sense of doom pervading the stale air of the place. They bedded down on the street for the night, thankful that they did not have to stay in one of the mounds. The dark emptiness of them reminded Beaton of a grave.

Just before dawn, the foliate awoke them. He pointed to the sky where strange red lights slowly moved like fish in a pool. The miners knelt and prayed, believing now what they had already suspected—that they were dead and working toward salvation in some world between heaven and hell. The lights swam in their eyes and dazed them, so that when morning came, they did not want to leave Palishize. Moissac implored them, telling them through touch that something was wrong.

Beaton told him everything was fine and that they would stay one more night to see the lights. All day they moved through the tunnels again, searching for some sign of humanity. Near evening, Mayor Bataldo's uncle, Joseph, found something in one of the passageways. It was a small gold coin with an imprint of a coiled serpent on one side and a flower on the other. After showing the others, he put it in his pocket and joined them for some salted caribou meat and turnip root.

My head nodded more and more with fatigue as I continued with Aria's account until I must have fallen asleep reading, because it was precisely here that the words of the text suddenly swept up off the page, turning into the snaking arm of a sea creature, and pulled me down beneath the surface of paper and ink. There was a minute of gasping for air, and then I, Cley, stood next to the huddled miners asleep on the street of Palishize. Even Moissac, who was supposed to be keeping guard, was firmly rooted in dreams. I leaned over and studied the face of Beaton as a young man.

"Cley," said a voice a few feet down the street. At the curve where the cobbled shells disappeared around the base of a building, there was a woman. She wore a veil over her entire face.

"Aria?" I whispered.

She waved to me to come to her. I moved cautiously away from the miners. As I approached her, she reached out to me, and I instinctively took her in my arms. I kissed her through the veil and we fell to lean against the slope of the mound. She was breathing heavily as my hand ran up under her skirts, along her thigh, toward paradise.

The next thing I knew, we were standing in front of the sleeping miners and Aria was pointing down at Joseph.

"He has my coin," she said to me.

"What coin?" I asked.

"It runs my child," she said. "The Master has taken my son and automated him, made him into a penny machine. I was given four coins to put in a slot in his back. When the coins drop in, he will be alive for an hour. He moves stiffly and sometimes I can hear the gear work humming, but I love him. I foolishly have used up three of the coins already, and the one that man has is my last coin. There are no others like them; the Master poured the metal himself."

I tried to nudge Joseph with the toe of my boot, but it passed right through him.

"I don't think we can do anything," I said.

"Tomorrow, we can," she said. 'Til bring up the red lights for one more dawn, and then tomorrow night we will have him."

"What do you mean, 'have him'?" I asked.

She took my hand and put it to her breast. An instant later, it was the next night and she was relating her plan for me. I was to play a little flute she gave me and lure him awake and around the corner where there was a small alley. She would be waiting there.