The mercury pool that was a mirror swirled again, and I saw a man's face in astonishing detail. It was the stranger who had come with Gaynor and Klosterheim. He stared upwards, presumably at his supernatural ally. His eyes, like mine, were crimson. They contained profound and complex experience. I wondered how any human soul could bear the burden of knowledge revealed in those eyes. Only Elric of Melnibone was sorcerer and warrior powerful enough to consider taking that burden. I doubted if there had ever been a human character equally strong.

The pool's surface flickered to show, full-length, a black-armored, black-helmed warrior. He had a huge round warboard on his arm, canvas covering its blazon. With some surprise I saw that he carried a black sword identical to my own. Then, for the first time, the truth began to dawn on me. It was so enormous it had eluded me. Three of us? Three swords? Three shields? But who carried the shields?

Sepiriz pulled me away from the mirror pool. "It is drawing you in. You'll drown in that if you're not careful. Many others have."

"Drown?" I laughed. "Drown in a reflection of myself?"

Ayanawatta came to join me. "So you understand." He radiated a certain calmness. He represented common sense in all this insanity. "You would not be the first to do that." His smile was quiet, comradely. "Some might say that was your friend Gunnar's fate! "

The more I knew this tall red man, the more I liked and respected him. He was a natural leader. He was unassuming, egalitarian, but acted decisively and with due caution. All the great leaders, like Alexander, could sit at backgammon with common soldiers and still have them believe him a living god.

I wanted to ask Ayanawatta where the rest of his people were. His tribal style was familiar to me, but I was not sufficiently knowledgeable to identify it. This was no time to satisfy such curiosity. Events were moving too swiftly. We had all been thrown together by our different circumstances. I had no idea how Gaynor and company had reached Kakatanawa or why they were here.

The shrieking air was painful. My ears felt as if needles were being inserted and twisted in them. I covered them as best I could and noted that my companions were equally affected. Lord Sepiriz found some wax and handed it out to us. Stuffing the slick, malleable material into my ears relieved the worst of the howling. I could hear Prince Lobkowitz when he approached me. Cupping his hand around my ear, he spoke into it.

"We cannot fight Lord Shoashooan or his allies. We lack the necessary tools to destroy him, so all we can do now is retreat. We must abandon the outer city and seek the deeper reality within. We must fall back to the Skrayling Oak."

That was all he was able to say before the screeching wind grew even louder and fingers of ice wormed their way into my clothing and found the flesh beneath. I knew piercing agony and swore aloud at the fierceness of it just as White Crow reappeared in the doorway. There was something behind him. Something dark and looming. I longed to draw my sword, to run to his assistance, and then I realized it was a beast with him, his trusty pachyderm, Bes. Fearing for her safety, he had returned for her. Her saddle was still on her back, and her burdens were covered by a great white buffalo robe edged with blue and scarlet, which made it seem as if she had a Bactrian hump. Whether she would be better off with us or without us was an open question at that moment.

Bes moved as rapidly as the rest of us as we dashed through the camera obscura and through various other chambers, all of which were clothed in different raw metals, many of them precious. Our feet slipped and slid on the floors of these tunnels. Our reflections were distorted by the curving, polished walls. Twice my own face appeared, enlarged and transformed into something leering and hideous. The others scrambled to get away from the place. I found myself laughing in my grief-madness. How close these people had been to changing the eternal verities! What had destroyed them?

At last we were all crammed into a crystal room scarcely large enough to take the curling tusks of the great mammoth, let alone the rest of us. My hand was on the huge, curved ivory surface of one tusk as she turned her mild, unfrightened eye to regard me. A wall had fallen away behind her, revealing that we were above an unstable lake of rising and falling crystals.

Sepiriz muttered and growled, motioning with his staff over the crystals. They hissed in reply. Sluggishly they formed a rough shape and then fell back into the same amorphous mass. Again Sepiriz spoke to the crystals. This time they swirled rapidly and formed a cone with a black center.

Then we fell!

I shouted out, trying to resist the descent as the entire top of the city was enveloped in a sulphuric cloud. The crystals opened like a mouth threatening to swallow me. I stared in awe into a world of intense green foliage. Every shade of green, so vivid it almost blinded me.

The rest of the world roared into a void and disappeared.

We stood in the swaying top branches of a huge tree. The ground was so far away that I could see nothing below. Only endless leaves. Foliage stretched out and downwards from the canopy. I peered through giant limbs, heavy twigs and myriad leaves, into the complexity of all that grew from a single, vast trunk. For what might have been miles I could see massive branches, themselves supporting other branches which supported still more branches. I was dazed with wonder. The city had contained a mountain that in turn contained this measureless oak!

With a sign, Sepiriz jumped into the foliage. I saw him sink slowly, as if through water; and then I followed, and we were all descending little by little through womb-rich air, salty and thick with life. Everywhere the branches of that great tree stretched into infinity. The trunk of the tree was so large we could not see the whole of one side. It was like a wall stretching on forever. The thickest limbs were equally difficult to accept for what they were.

I was overwhelmed by the scale of it all and wondered if I would ever find my wife again. Impotent fury bubbled in me. Yet I remembered the admonition I had heard more than once since my adventures began so long ago in Nazi Germany: Every one of us who fights in the battle, fights as an equal. Every action we take has meaning and effect. My moment was bound to come. This hope sustained me as we drifted like motes of living dust down through the lattice of intersecting realities, of dreams and possibilities. We sank down into the multiverse itself and let it embrace us.

Countless shades of green were dappled by a hidden sun. Sometimes a shaft of golden or silvern light blinded me or illuminated a mysterious, twisting corridor of foliage. Leaves that were not quite leaves, yet which proliferated and reached enormous distances. Branches that were not quite branches became curling, silver roads on which women and men walked, oblivious of the intricacy around them. And these branches turned back and put out further branches, which in turn formed a matrix within a matrix, a billion realities, each one a version of my own. Oona! I struggled in the hope of glimpsing my wife. Down we sank in Sepiriz's supernatural wake, down through what was at once concrete reality and abstract conception, passing through countless permutations, each one telling the same human story of conflict without and within: the perpetual conflict, the perpetual quest for balance, the perpetual cycle of life, struggle, resolution and death which made us one with the rest of creation. What put us at odds with creation was, ironically, the very intelligence and imagination which was itself creative. Man and multiverse were one, united in paradox, in love and anger, life, death and transfiguration. Oona!