“Jupiter sides with the Master of the World! For that purpose he was designed. He would not betray his father! It would be betraying himself!”

“Review your logic again, squire. There are only two players, the red and the black. Each one has set in motion races and potentates and powers loyal to his side. But if there are only two players, and they both agree on the Vindication Calendar, then why has the question of Calendar Revision plagued mankind with a plague that even the Hierophants of the Long Golden Afternoon cannot cure? There must therefore be a third player.”

“From where? It cannot be the aliens. In all human history, there are only two camps: the forces of knowledge, majesty, glory, order, rule, hierarchy, and survival, and the big-nosed insanity opposing his rule.”

“Then one of the two camps was betrayed from within.”

The squire frowned. “You cannot prove Jupiter is guilty!”

Norbert said solemnly, “And you cannot shake your fear that he is.”

The squire wore the look of a man who wishes to contradict an accusation, but cannot.

“My ghost went mad,” said Norbert. “Nor could I discern it, because Exorbert was so much wiser than I. Perhaps he is only what I would have become had I never fallen in love; a theosophist mathematician obsessed with esoterics, non-Euclidean calculus, and Ptolemaic astronomy, believing every report of a sighting of a Maltese Knight. We divaricated. Few are the savants who survive such loss. I have that special look on my face, though you cannot now see it. But I see it on yours. You are a man who lost his soul. Jupiter divaricated.”

“Nonsense.”

“Jupiter has betrayed you. He has betrayed us all.”

Then he straightened, spread his arms, turned his mask toward the night sky netted with dark branches, and called out. “Hear me! Jupiter has betrayed mankind!”

He waited, arms wide.

The squire said, “What are you doing?”

“Waiting for the lightning bolt,” said Norbert calmly.

“Are you mad?”

“Mind yourself, squire! You meant to say ‘Are you mad, sir’?”

“Fair enough. Are you mad, sir?”

“By earthly standards, I am. The Rosicrucians of old handed down neuropsychological alterations which would never be permitted in orthogonal humans. Why am I not dead?”

“Jupiter’s spies are not listening.”

“Ah! So you told the truth about that. I see why scientists delight in successful experiments! The certainty after doubt is feast after famine.” With a slow and dignified gesture, Norbert lowered his arms, and continued to walk the paths deeper into the graveyard.

10. Dreaming Apples

The graveyard was very large, and reached for acre after acre across this table of land. There were hills occupied by looming mausoleums and valleys whose green slopes were adorned with marble walkways beneath sad poplars, at whose feet slabs or cubes of stone marked the rest of the dead. On raised walls were urns carrying ashes, and beneath panes of black glass set into the grass were interlocked sets of bones, or grinning skulls from whom wax death-masks slipped.

The hills were small and the dales were gentle, but the graveyard of space went on and on, and slowly the cathedral steeple behind them was lost to sight. In one place they crossed a gently arching bridge of stone that overleaped a rill of water flowing in a marble channel along the spine of a valley.

Both men stopped, because their internal navigation at that moment shut off.

The squire said, “We must be close. But I hear nothing.”

Norbert said, “Nor did anyone hear me. Why was I not struck dead for my blasphemy? How did you know Jupiter would not allow his myriad loyal angels and beasts and motes and microbes to hear us?”

The squire sighed. “Because he is the same man as Ximen del Azarchel, a man who respects the sanctity of the Church, which is the only thing in human history older than he is, and yet still lives.”

“The myths say the Master of the World killed the Sacerdotal Order of the old days, the Church, in order to give the world to the Witches. He hunted down and killed the last priest, a man named Reyes y Pastor, one of his loyal servants, and his father confessor.”

“You cannot believe all myths so unskeptically! What man kills his own father confessor? To whom would he confess the crime? I am sure the Master of the World only punished the Church for crossing him. The fact that Ximen del Azarchel is a loyal son of the Church surely shows that no matter how black a villain is painted, there must still be some good in him, if only a spot of white.”

“Or else it surely shows that joining in rituals with lip service and knee tribute does not brighten a dark soul even by so little as a spot. Come! Zolasto Zo is near.”

“Sir, if I may: how do you know? I hear nothing.”

“Use your nose. Do you catch the scent of the jet-black greenery of my world? It thrives above the bodies of the dead. Yonder is Cagliostro Lilly, Forget-Me-Soon, Black Nasturtium, and Goat Rue. But do you see those trees with branches dark as iron? The calycine leaves? The fruit that glows like the faces of the dead in the moonlight?”

“We have been following them all night.”

“These are the tradition-protecting trees of my world, the sustenance of my forefathers, and so many forms of cider and tart and dreaming pies are made from them that any sane man would sicken.”

“Once again, sir, I do not follow you.”

“But I follow them. The trees will lead me,” said Norbert. As they walked, he mused aloud, “What we did on Rosycross in the early days would never be allowed now. To preserve valuable memories across the generations our pantropists made the apples and the humans neuro-readably compatible, so any pioneer who learned a useful survival skill, after death would have the dream seed in his skull break forth and grow out into such a tree as this. Rosicrucians in the early days could eat the apples from the graveyard and instinctively know our land of red hills and black rills better. Nowadays, between genetic drift and physicians unwilling to abide by tradition, the apple strain is not maintained, nor the human. Rarely now do the apples send good dreams: we get garbled messages, or fragments, or hallucinations, or nothing. Out of memory, for saving our forefathers, they are sacred. When many of my departed kin are gathered, there will be a grove of such trees, and, if Zolasto Zo is as homesick as I, there he will pitch his tents.”

“Why is there no music and commotion wafting from his tents?”

“Zo would have surrounded his camp with tissues finer than gossamer through which men can walk, but programmed to block sound. I will ask the trees to part the veil.”

11. The Camp of the Mountebank

At that moment there came floating over the headstones, mausoleums, and solemn statues of winged beings the sound of drums, sackbut, taborine, and timbrel, the rattle of crotales and the whoop of brass trumpet. It seemed far in the gloom, but it was closer than it seemed; they spied a cluster of floating lanterns, flashing their lights in gay displays of cerise, amber, purple, and white, hanging above a thick grove of black-trunked trees with white fruit and oddly cup-shaped leaves. The headstones to the left and right of the grove radiated a stern disapproval, and several of the winged statues were frowning.

Through these trees, as the men approached, could be glimpsed what seemed to be the leafy fabric of walking tents, but garish and bright with many colors, hung with red berries as if in obedience to the rhythm of an autumn from another world; and the tents were not walking but dancing a spry jig, while children in festive colors chased them, and dancers in motley kept time.