"I know you're human. The painting lies."

"No, Therion."

"Prove it for me. Change for me. Change now." He released her and stepped a short way back. "Do it. Change for me."

She looked at him sadly. Then, without perceptible transition, she turned herself into a replica of him, as she had done once before: the final proof, the unanswerable answer. A muscle quivered wildly in his cheek. He watched her unblinkingly and she changed again, this time into something terrifying and monstrous, a nightmarish gray pock-marked balloon of a thing with flabby skin and eyes like saucers and a hooked black beak; and from that she went to the Metamorph form, taller than he, hollow-chested and featureless, and then she was Sarise once more, cascades of auburn hair, delicate hands, firm strong thighs.

"No," he said. "Not that one. No more counterfeits."

She became the Metamorph again.

He nodded. "Yes. That's better. Stay that way. It's more beautiful."

"Beautiful, Therion?"

"I find you beautiful. Like this. As you really are. Deception is always ugly."

He reached for her hand. It had six fingers, very long and narrow, without fingernails or visible joints. Her skin was silky and faintly glossy, and it felt not at all as he had expected. He ran his hands lightly over her slim, practically fleshless body. She was altogether motionless.

"I should go now," she said at last.

"Stay with me. Live here with me."

"Even now?"

"Even now. In your true form."

"You still want me?"

"Very much," he said. "Will you stay?"

She said, "When I first came to you, it was to watch you, to study you, to play with you, perhaps even to mock and hurt you. You are the enemy, Therion. Your kind must always be the enemy. But as we began to live together I saw there was no reason to hate you. Not you, you as a special individual, do you understand?"

It was the voice of Sarise coming from those alien lips. How strange, he thought, how much like a dream.

She said, "I began to want to be with you. To make the game go on forever, do you follow? But the game had to end. And yet I still want to be with you."

"Then stay, Sarise."

"Only if you truly want me."

"I've told you that."

"I don't horrify you?"

"No."

"Paint me again, Therion. Show me with a painting. Show me love on the canvas, Therion, and then I'll stay."

He painted her day after day, until he had used every canvas, and hung them all about the interior of the cabin, Sarise and the dwikka-tree, Sarise in the meadow, Sarise against the milky fog of evening, Sarise at twilight, green against purple. There was no way he could prepare more canvases, although he tried. It did not really matter. They began to go on long voyages of exploration together, down one stream and another, into distant parts of the forest, and she showed him new trees and flowers, and the creatures of the jungle, the toothy lizards and the burrowing golden worms and the sinister ponderous amorfibots sleeping away their days in muddy lakes. They said little to one another; the time for answering questions was over and words were no longer needed.

Day slipped into day, week into week, and in this land of no seasons it was difficult to measure the passing of time. Perhaps a month went by, perhaps six. They encountered nobody else. The jungle was full of Metamorphs, she told him, but they were keeping their distance, and she hoped they would leave them alone forever.

One afternoon of steady drizzle he went out to check his traps, and when he returned an hour later he knew at once something was wrong. As he approached the cabin four Metamorphs emerged. He felt sure that one was Sarise, but he could not tell which one. "Wait!" he cried, as they moved past him. He ran after them. "What do you want with her? Let her go! Sarise? Sarise? Who are they? What do they want?"

For just an instant one of the Metamorphs flickered and he saw the girl with the auburn hair, but only for an instant; then there were four Metamorphs again, gliding like ghosts toward the depths of the jungle. The rain grew more intense, and a heavy fog-bank drifted in, cutting off all visibility. Nismile paused at the edge of the clearing, straining desperately for sounds over the patter of the rain and the loud throb of the stream. He imagined he heard weeping; he thought he heard a cry of pain, but it might have been any other sort of forest-sound. There was no hope of following the Metamorphs into that impenetrable zone of thick white mist.

He never saw Sarise again, nor any other Metamorph. For a while he hoped he would come upon Shapeshifters in the forest and be slain by them with their little polished dirks, for the loneliness was intolerable now. But that did not happen, and when it became obvious that he was living in a sort of quarantine, cut off not only from Sarise — if she was still alive — but from the entire society of the Metamorph folk, he found himself unable any longer to dwell in the clearing beside the stream. He rolled up his paintings of Sarise and carefully dismantled his cabin and began the long and perilous journey back to civilization. It was a week before his fiftieth birthday when he reached the borders of Castle Mount. In his absence, he discovered, Lord Thraym had become Pontifex and the new Coronal was Lord Vildivar, a man of little sympathy with the arts. Nismile rented a studio on the river-bank at Stee and began to paint again. He worked only from memory: dark and disturbing scenes of jungle life, often showing Metamorphs lurking in the middle distance. It was not the sort of work likely to be popular on the cheerful and airy world of Majipoor, and Nismile found few buyers at first. But in time his paintings caught the fancy of the Duke of Qurain, who had begun to weary of sunny serenity and perfect proportion. Under the duke's patronage, Nismile's work grew fashionable, and in the later years of his life there was a ready market for everything he produced.

He was widely imitated, though never successfully, and he was the subject of many critical essays and biographical studies. "Your paintings are so turbulent and strange," one scholar said to him. "Have you devised some method of working from dreams?"

"I work only from memory," said Nismile.

"From painful memory, I would be so bold as to venture."

"Not at all," answered Nismile. "All my work is intended to help me recapture a time of joy, a time of love, the happiest and most precious moment of my life." He stared past the questioner into distant mists, thick and soft as wool, that swirled through clumps of tall slender trees bound by a tangled network of vines.

That one takes him back to the beginning of his explorations of these archives. Thesme and the Ghayrog all over again, another forest romance, the love of human and non-human. Yet the similarities are all on the surface, for these were very different people in very different circumstances, Hissune comes away from the tale with what he thinks is a reasonably good understanding of the soul-painter Therion Nismile — some of whose works, he learns, are still on display in the galleries of Lord Valentine's Castle — but the Metamorph is a mystery to him still, as great a mystery perhaps as she had been to Nismile. He checks the index for recordings of Metamorph souls, but is unsurprised to find that there are none. Do the Shapeshifters refuse to record, or is the apparatus incapable of picking up the emanations of their minds, or are they merely banned from the archives? Hissune does not know and he is unable to find out. In time, he tells himself, all things will be answered. Meanwhile there is much more to discover. The operations of the King of Dreams, for instance — he needs to learn much more about those. For a thousand years the descendants of the Barjazids have had the task of lashing the sleeping minds of criminals; Hissune wonders how it is done. He prowls the archives, and before long fortune delivers up to him the soul of an outlaw, disguised drearily as a tradesman of the city of Stee—