“What stories? What are you talking about?”

But the huge round face was blank.

On the fifteenth day… or maybe the sixteenth… a blizzard hit them.

It was a moving wall that reached up to the clouds. It turned Teal’s world to a blur of huge flakes; the air was almost unbreathable.

“We must… must keep moving,” Orange trumpeted. He buried his face in her snow-laden fur. She wrapped her trunk around his shoulders. “F… follow me,” she said. “We will find… the Eight Rooms…”

He closed his eyes and struggled on.

The storm took days to clear.

Teal woke to a world silenced by snow. Brushing clear his clothes, he sat up to look around.

Orange was staring straight ahead, her fingers working in agitation.

“Wha…” Teal squinted in the direction she was looking, to the red-lit north.

There was something on the horizon: a patch of darkness amid the snow.

A structure.

It was a cube with sides about half as tall again as a man. The walls were unbroken save for a single large door set in the south-facing side.

The whole thing was hovering about an arm’s length from the ground.

“The s-songss,” hissed the mummy-cow. “That iss what… the songs describe…”

“The Eight Rooms,” Teal sighed. “You were right. It’s unmistakable.”

Orange quivered; he studied her curiously. She was paralyzed by fear… but she’d known where to look. He thought of generations of mummy-cows, used and despised by the people they’d been designed to serve — but all the time hoarding a knowledge and lore, a kind of courage, of their own.

He wondered uneasily how much else there was to learn about the world.

He stumbled to his feet, then patted Orange’s flank. “Come on,” he said. “Just a bit further…”

Orange wouldn’t come closer than a few paces to the structure. Teal approached alone. He knelt in the snow and passed his hand underneath the cube. “Must take an awful lot of hot air to hold this up…”

Teal walked up to the door and pushed tentatively. He found his chest tightening.

Orange whimpered and buried her eyes in her trunk.

He opened the door wide. The interior was pale blue.

Teal hadn’t seen blue for a decade.

Blinking away tears, he climbed into the room.

They spent the night under cover for the first time since Teal’s exile. He woke in comparative warmth and took a slow breakfast on water and a cheeselike bud.

It had taken a lot of coaxing to get Orange to clamber into the room.

“There’s nothing to fear — it’s just a big teepee.”

“No, it is-isn’t…”

“Well, maybe not…”

Now she huddled uncomfortably at the center of the floor, standing in her own muddy footprints.

Teal inspected the room. He’d found it empty save for a thing like a lamp bracket attached to the ceiling. There were doors leading out from all four walls — even hatches in the floor and ceiling.

The doors watched him like blank eyes.

He ran his hands over the blue walls. The material was warm, slightly yielding — disconcertingly skinlike. He thought of stroking his wife’s belly through a soft leather blanket.

He pushed the image away.

He took his coil of rope from Orange’s pannier. He tied one end round his waist. “Here,” he said. “Don’t let go of this. If you don’t hear from me… after a while, try to pull me back. Do you understand? And whatever happens, go back and tell my grandmother what you’ve seen. All right?”

The great head dipped. He stroked her trunk, once.

He turned to the door opposite the entrance to the cube. Orange shivered as she watched him. Now then, he thought, logic tells me there’s nothing beyond this door. Only another way out, to the snow.

Right?

He pushed at the door. It swung back smooth as a muscle.

There was another room beyond. It was like a mirror-image of the first: bare walls, single light pendant, doors all over it—

Maybe it really was a reflection.

No, that was stupid. He looked back at the trembling brown hulk of Orange. There was no Orange in the second room… and no Teal, for that matter.

He stepped through the door.

Well, the floor felt solid enough… and the air was just — air.

All his intuition told him he should have been hovering at waist-height somewhere outside the boxlike structure. Instead, here he was…

He laughed. So Allel’s old song had been wrong. The wonder of the second room wasn’t in what it contained, but in the fact that it was there at all.

Pulling the rope of twisted leather behind him he pushed at the door in the left-hand wall of the second room. Beyond was a third room, another copy of the first.

He decided he wasn’t surprised.

More confidently he walked through the third room and pushed at the door to his left. Beyond this he’d presumably find a fourth room, making up a square array of rooms, and then he could turn left again to find his way round the square back to Orange—

The fourth room wasn’t empty. It contained Orange. He was looking at her left side; she held a grubby rope that stretched forward through an open door.

She turned her head to him, eyes wide with astonishment.

He jumped back, trembling. Could he have miscounted the rooms?

His mind racing, he took Allel’s knife from his belt and placed it gently on the floor inside Orange’s room. Then he walked back through the third and second rooms.

In the first room, Orange was facing him. “Take it easy,” he murmured abstractedly to her. “It’s all right…”

The door to her left was ajar. A stone knife lay on the floor, just inside the first room. He walked across to pick it up, tucked it into his belt.

Well, it felt real. Were there two knives now?

He walked around to the third room again. The knife beyond the door was gone… of course.

So there was no fourth room to make up the square.

He sat on the bare floor of the third room and closed his eyes. If he wasn’t careful, the strangeness of the place was going to overwhelm him.

He opened his eyes. He looked speculatively up at the hatch set in the ceiling of the third room. Surely he would break out of this odd cycle if he climbed up another level.

He stood up straight. The lamp fitting was just out of his reach, but he found that if he — jumped — he could just grab it with both hands.

He hung there for a moment, gently swinging, the burn scars around his chest itching slightly. Then he arced backwards, swung both feet forwards and slammed them into the roof hatch.

It fell back with a soft thump. Another swing, one-armed this time, and Teal had grabbed the edge of the hatch-frame. Then it was simple to haul himself up into the room. Orange’s rope trailed after him.

The fourth room was empty — another copy of the first, with the usual lamp fitting and the six exits. He took a few deep breaths and let his heart rattle to rest; and then, with a kind of confidence — surely there was nothing else that could be thrown at him — he strode forward and pushed open a door.

He almost cried out.

Through the door in the wall he was looking into the first room again — but the whole room was tipped on its side. Orange looked as if she was clinging to a wall, a huge hairy spider. A rope trailed from her trunk out of a door ahead of her.

He shoved the door closed hastily, fighting back a sudden wave of nausea. Suppose he’d stepped forward… surely sideways would suddenly have become down, and he would have fallen full-length onto poor Orange. And if she’d looked up as he stood there, would she have seen him sticking sideways out into the air like an outstretched arm?

He didn’t even try to work out the explanation this time. With some reluctance he turned and walked across to the door opposite Orange’s. What next? Unconsciously he pulled his stone knife from his belt.