the language. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’m not really in your world. At least, I am, but –’
‘But?’
‘I’m from another world,’ Nathan explained. His voice didn’t sound quite right – eerily hollow and distant.
‘So it’s started, has it?’ The man’s tone sharpened. ‘It’s been long in the coming. The walls between the worlds are breaking down. Still, I don’t quite understand … What would you want of me? Whoever you are.’
‘I don’t know,’ Nathan admitted. ‘My dream brought me here.’
‘Your – dream? You mean, you are dreaming this? You are dreaming me?’
‘Yes.’
‘How very interesting. This couldn’t be part of a spell – some leakage through a portal?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Nathan said. ‘If there’s a portal, it’s in my head.’
‘Hmm.’ There was a pause.
Then the man said: ‘I am forgetting my manners. Won’t you come in?’
Nathan followed him inside. The apartment consisted of a cluster of irregularly-shaped rooms connected with arched doorways and hung with diaphanous drapes. Furniture curved with the walls; a small fountain bubbled out of what looked like a crystal cakestand in the midst of the main room; the light was vague and sourceless. Stronger light was condensed into two or three pillars of clouded glass, and in the outer wall oval windows were covered with translucent screens, flushed red from the sunset beyond. ‘My name,’ said the man, seating himself, ‘is Osskva Rodolfin Petanax. But perhaps you knew that already?’
‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘I don’t know anything very much. Is this part of the Grandir’s palace?’
‘If you mean the seat of government and residence of our ruler and his bridesister, then – no. We wouldn’t call it a palace. This is accommodation for his senior advisers and others in the higher echelons of authority. I am a first level practor – if you understand what that means?’
‘I … think so. A kind of magician?’
‘So you do know something of this world. You have been here before.’
Nathan didn’t comment. There was a niggle at the back of his mind, another of those elusive connections which he couldn’t quite place. Whenever he sought for it, it slipped away into his subconscious, tantalizingly out of reach. He knew he was here for a reason – there was always a reason behind his dream-journeys – but he had no idea what it might be, and he felt like an actor dropped into the middle of an unfamiliar play, while the audience waited in vain for him to remember his lines. His host continued to study him with absorption but curiously little surprise.
‘Have you met the Grandir?’ Osskva asked.
‘Not met, no. I’ve seen him.’
‘Whom have you met, apart from me?’
Halmé, Nathan thought, but he didn’t say so. She had concealed him from the Grandir; he could not betray her. And Raymor, her former bodyguard. And the dissident Kwanji Ley, who had stolen the Grail in this world, and paid with her life …
Now he remembered.
‘Take it,’ she had said, giving him the cup, when she was dying of the sundeath in a cave in the desert. ‘To … Osskva …’ Osskva!
‘Who is he?’
‘My father …’
Nathan sat down abruptly, holding his head in his hands. When he looked up, the practor was standing over him. ‘What troubles you?’ he said. ‘What do you know?’ His hood fell back, showing hair to match the beard, long and white. Then – perhaps to observe Nathan more closely – he took off his mask. His face, like that of all Eosians, was disproportionately long, at least to Nathan’s eye, a structure all lean curving bones with a skin the colour of tarnished brass, contrasting sharply with the hair and beard. Thick white brows swept low over his eyes, which shone with a glint of pure amethyst. The same shade as Kwanji’s, Nathan remembered. There might be many people on Eos called Osskva, but he knew his dream had not deceived him. This was the one he sought.
Only he hadn’t been seeking him. He’d been looking for someone quite different. But the dreams, he now realized, couldn’t be controlled – or not by him …
‘I once … met someone called Kwanji Ley,’ he said.
‘I see.’ The man’s face changed, his eyes hooding, as if he did see.
‘She asked me to find you.’
‘Kwanjira. My daughter. Kwanjira the rebel.’ Suddenly, he looked up. ‘Did you know she was my daughter?’
Nathan nodded, feeling uncomfortable, even though this was a dream – or at least, a dream of sorts – waiting for the question he knew would come.
‘Is she dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve known it, I suppose – I’ve felt it – for months past. We didn’t keep in touch, but this time there was a differentness to her silence. There is a point when you sense no word will come again. But … you are the word. A word that has come to me. Can you tell me how she died?’
‘She was in Deep Confinement,’ Nathan said, remembering the pale emptiness of the prison pits. ‘She begged me to help her, to dream her out, and I tried, but you can’t really manipulate the dreams. I messed it up. I left her in the desert – in the sun. She made it to the cave, but not in time. When I got back – when I found her – it was too late.’ He didn’t tell Kwanji’s father what the sundeath had done to her. The guilt returned, like a sickness in his stomach, but Osskva made no move to apportion blame.
‘She always wanted to change things,’ he said with a curious smile. ‘The government – the magics – the fate of the world. In the cave … what was she looking for?’
‘The Sangreal,’ Nathan said, picturing the greenstone cup, held in Kwanji’s ruined hand. ‘She asked me to bring it to you. She thought you could perform the Great Spell.’
‘Did she find it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then she died happy. I couldn’t do a Great Spell; I haven’t the power. Even the Grandir may not have the strength for it, or our world would have been saved long since. Besides, the Cup alone is no use. It needs also the Sword, and the Crown. Once they were said to be in the cave, guarded by a monster of ancient days, but there are other rumours. I’d heard they were scattered throughout the worlds for safe-keeping, so they could not be brought together too soon, or by the wrong agency, lest the Spell of Spells should go awry … Yet you say the Sangreal was in the cave.’
‘It was a mistake,’ Nathan explained. ‘It had been kept in my world, but someone stole it. After … after Kwanji died, I wasn’t sure what to do, but I thought it was best to take it back.’
‘You
