I read every label. I stopped at the bird from the Mirror longer than I stopped at the others—the wings, the bead of an eye, the faint sense that the bird was not entirely still—and I went on.
I reached the end of the gallery.
It ended at a wall.
Or it should have. The plinths stopped. The labels stopped. The light dimmed by a fraction. The pale gold-veined marble of the floor ran on for six more paces and then met, set into the far wall, an archway.
The archway was not made of marble.
It was made of plain dark stone. No vein of gold ran through it. No light caught it. It was the only thing in the gallery, in the chamber, in the entire wing of the citadel I had walked through, that did not shine.
Inside the arch, the air was not still.
It rippled, a still pool disturbed by a hand from underneath. I had seen a ripple like that exactly once before in my life, with my palm on the rink glass at center ice in a strip mall in Spokane Valley, Washington, fourteen hours ago.
The bond went warm.
Not the welcome warm I had learned. The other warm. The high small warning tone of a fire that had banked and was now sitting up on its haunches.
This was the threshold the citadel had been quietly keeping me from since I arrived.
I didn’t even think—I stepped through.
It yielded exactly as the rink glass had.
Water-yielding. Cool against the heels of my palms where I had put them out, instinctively, in front of me. My ears popped—the right first, the left a half-beat after, the same order as before—and the pressure of the gallery on the other side of the arch dropped away into something unknown to me and impossible to name from a chart.
I came out into a passage.
The passage went down.
Not steeply. A gentle grade, like a rink ramp descending to the locker rooms or the long curve of a parking lot leading to the underground level no one wants to walk to alone. The citadel above me had been a citadel that climbed. This was a citadel that fell.
The gold in the marble had gone wrong.
I went down five more steps before I let myself look at it directly. The living gold I had been watching all morning thread through the pale stone—the gold that moved, that ran, that breathed—was here, in this passage, still moving. But the gold had gone the color of ash. Of guttering candle wick. It threaded through the stone of the walls in the same long languid loops, but the loops were dimmer, their motion reduced, and at threeplaces along the wall the gold had stopped moving entirely and gone the dull grey of metal that had not been polished in a long age and would not be polished again.
The air got warmer.
Not warm like the air over a fire. Warm like the air in a room where someone had been ill for a long time and the windows had been closed because the wind made it worse. There was a smell on it. Faint. Not unpleasant. Medicinal: clean, sharp, with something underneath it that the cleaning was meant to cover and could not, entirely.
I kept going down.
The bond on my wrist had stopped warning. It had gone quiet. I do not know which was worse.
The passage opened.
It opened into a hall.
I had thought the hall above was big. The hall above had been built for someone who wanted to be looked at by a long room before the room reached him. The hall above had columns the width of small cars and arches that went up and up and up. This hall was bigger. It was bigger by orders of magnitude. The columns went up into a dark I could not see the top of. The arches did not finish; they vanished into the high gloom of the vault. The floor ran out in front of me into a vast dim brown that took my eye a long count to even begin to organize, and when it did organize, what it organized was a throne.
The throne was empty.
It sat at the far end of the hall, raised on a dais of seven shallow steps, and even from this distance I could see that the throne was the source of the gold in this room—the gold bled from it through the marble of the floor and the columns and the walls. The flow was steady. Unceasing. It was the gold that was failing. The throne was the heart of it, and the heart was weak.
To the right of the throne, off the dais, set on the bare marble of the floor, was a bed.
A bed the size of a barge. That was the only word I had for it. Not a bed for sleeping; a bed for lying in. A platform of pale wood draped with linen that had once been white and was now the color of old cream, with a single low canopy of unornamented cloth over the head of it, and pillows that had been propped and re-propped a thousand times, and on the bed, under the linen—
