"Do have some confidence," Dr. Toth said, looking up from his table and his books. "The solution has to fit all round. And you're quite formidable, young man; I daresay we should warn the watch: the storm tomorrow may prove as much. But for the moment I suggest you go off to bed and let me work in peace, ummn? Nice. Nice. Here's an interesting point. Do go. Go, go, go, second door down the hall."

There was no sign of the black thing with teeth out in the hall. Perhaps it was in better humor. Melot saw Gatan to his room and the candles lit themselves for him the moment he entered—"Do be careful about the lights!" the doctor's voice pursued them down the hall.

"I'm scared," Gatan said, though he was a grown man and a half head taller; he was her little brother and told her such things, lingering in the doorway. "Melot, I'm scared."

"Hush, trust the doctor, he's very kind."

But she went back down the hall after Gatan had shut the door. She walked into the study with her heart beating hard. And stood there with her hands locked behind her while the doctor pored over a clutter of books and charts as if the night were still young. As if he needed no sleep nor ever would. The way he was two hundred years old and maybe ugly once, but never would be so long as he could bargain with wizards.

And as long as they needed him.

She coughed. Her heart beat doubletime. "You're looking in that book for him—or for me?" The doctor looked up through his spectacles and took them off. "It does seem to be one case, doesn't it?"

"Like, I mean, my brother's a wizard, isn't he?"

"Your luck made him that way."

"Like you said you were born because I needed you, was that true?" The doctor blinked at her. "Well—"

"I mean," she said, "when you reckon how much I owe you got to take that into account, like if you charged me too much my luck'd get me clear, wouldn't it?"

"Melot Cassissinin, you are a woman of unparalleled gall."

"Just lucky. Aren't I?"

The doctor stood up. Towered there in his magnificence.

"I reckon," said Melot, "it might be lucky for you if I stayed here, I mean, this place—" She waved a hand about. "It wants dusting. It wants straightening." The doctor's mouth opened, a very handsome mouth it was, and a very fine face, and him so lordlike and genteel. " My books—"

"Fact is," said Melot, hands behind her, rocking anxiously on her heels, "if I was lucky, I'd bring luck here, wouldn't I? And if I was lucky, maybe I'd be pretty and have nice clothes like yours and hire me foot-cabs with goldpieces and have me a brother a very fine and lordly wizard, wouldn't I, Master Toth?"

"Wouldn'tyou? You unmitigated—"

"If I was lucky," she said, and held up a cautioning finger, "only if I was lucky, wouldn't it be, Master Toth? And your books will tell you what's luckiest for you and me and all—won't they?" She smiled at him, a cheerful, believing smile. "I'm what you was born for, me, Melot Cassissinin, and I'm the luckiest woman alive."

1985

THE UNSHADOWED LAND

God turned his left eye to the earth and it shone like silver and burned the land with cold; he looked on the world with his right eye and that eye blazed like gold at melting heat: like the refining of gold it burned. He spread his wings and the wind of them scoured the sands with heat and broke the very stone. He flew, and the shadow of his wings was the sandstorm: so vast were those wings that there was nothing but that shadow in the world. So terrible was the wind of those wings that it mingled earth and sky to the depth and the height and hurled great stones from their seats.

And when God had folded away those wings and looked out again from his white-hot right eye (he watched his brothers and sisters with the other, warily, knowing their ways)—When God looked out on the world it was not the same world; and it was not the same Akhet who walked a crooked line over the sands, for this Akhet was burned, and the sound of the wings of God had entered into her skull, so that she heard them continually in the stillness of the sands, and communed with nothing else, not even memory.

It was the whim of God to turn up old secrets in the sands, in each re-making of the world, curiosities which he had collected and now brought beneath his gaze. Some were mirthful, smiling as they gazed eyelessly upon the eyes of God; some were dried wisps of leather and bone, bizarrely contorted as if they sought in their motionless way to sink into the depths again; others still had an anguished look, as if they protested such violence. Rarest and most amazing, a few gazed upward with profound solemnity, sere flesh almost indistinguishable from bone: they smiled the inward smiles of ancient kings and queens, in their rags or their nakedness. There were beasts also, and stalking carnivores of polished bone, some of twisted horror, others of gaunt, wind-scoured nobleness. There were stones which God had made and his creatures had shaped in imitation of him and his brothers and his sisters. There were the remnants of places which had had great names among such creatures, but God himself gave them no names and they had none now, like Akhet, who had forgotten that she was Akhet, or what direction she moved. She walked among these treasures. Sometimes it was one way and sometimes it was another: she forgot. But she found fellowship with these memories of God, and laughed with them, for she saw that the skin of her flesh became like their flesh, seamed with fine lines; and she fancied that her face was the face of the kings and queens she found, sere-lipped and hollow-cheeked and terrible as God.

She laughed; and was alone with that laughter in her skull, which rang in sudden silence, for the roar of the wings, which had never yet ceased in her ears, did cease. She stood in the white-hot sight of God, in the light of his right eye that left no shadows on the land, in his terrible light that left no color but its own, and shone round the rocks so that they cast no shadow. There was no dark place in all the land. The eye of God looked into Akhet's heart, and the light of his eye shone all round it as it did the stones, and it was one color with the stones and the land, as all things were. The silence became that color and that taste, which was like the smell of molten copper in the nostrils; and that silence drank up her laughter and gave it back again. Aaaa-ha, ah-ha, ah-ha, ah-ket, akhet, akhet, Akhet.

Her voice had become the voice of God, and that voice called her name, so that she turned and came, trusting as a child.

"Akhet!" she cried now and again, seeking herself. Or she was God, seeking Akhet. God's voice forever called her name, in a voice multiplied and strange.

"Akhet, Akhet, Akhet!"

She had thirsted; she had water and had forgotten this, when the wings had left her deaf. Now it made a small welcome sound as she walked, like the river-song. (Indeed she trod on the stones of another of God's forgotten secrets, the very mummy of a river, which was sere as the forgotten dead. The stones of its bed clicked beneath her feet, and the shreds of her sandals caught and made her stumble.) She carried other things she had forgotten. They burdened her, but she did not let them go, having recalled that they were Akhet and Akhet was these things. She drained the stagnant heat of the waterskin and let it fall empty at her side. She laughed and God laughed, redoubled her laughter, and slowly closed his eye.

It was the moment of shadow, of half-real things.

She saw cliffs. And those cliffs were red as blood. And they echoed with the voice of God—