It was the nature of the dark house that it never occurred to the ones who saw the children and looked where they looked, that it was the dark house they wondered about. Those who look at the dark house that way cannot be followed in their thoughts, because they are looking at a different place, an obscure and difficult place. Their sight has gotten into a maze that no eye can follow without entering into it as well. The children's souls have gone colder than they were and they do not feel the daylight on their backs. They do not feel safe anymore, but they do not feel any imminent danger either. The house has been stable for a very long time and time goes out from here in musty stability. It is the scale of things in the neighborhood which has been rearranged. A moment is an hour. A place is the universe. The universe is a street and a dark house with dirty windows; and they contemplate this possibility and do not like being so close to it; but they know it is on every street and that wherever it exists it is always next door or across the street. It is the most dangerous thing in the world to stand in its alley or on its porch and the most fearful thing in the world to think of its door opening.

But it opens for the woman in her shabby cloak. And there is nothing of the ordinary about her any longer.

The air was musty with the decay of pages and leather. The light shafted through from the two windows danced with dustmotes and picked out the subtle hues of books and yellowed paper in shelves and stacks about the walls, on tables, chairs; towering stacks about the floor which preserved their own precarious equilibrium against all odds: light fell on age-silvered floorboards and on dust; light fell on a narrow carpet runner which might once have been red but which was silvered with the dust of time and neglect, and this carpet marked a trail through the maze of shelves and stacks, this single faded and dusty aisle of carpet alone offered a line of sight that led away into a dark corridor between the stacks of books and between the bookcases and the laden furniture. Ambush might lurk within the stacks. A single step, a single shift of weight made the aged boards of the floor creak and betrayed the visitor. Melot Cassissinin looked about her, her cloak clutched against her and her body yearning back toward the daylight. The door had opened itself. She was not overly surprised. Now, inevitably, it did the other thing and shut itself; and for a moment the air was cold. Magic did that, unattended magic: it got its force from the air and the ground and from whoever was standing by, and Melot shivered: it robbed her as well, leaving her with only the dusty windows-light and that thin red track of carpet, the color of life all faded, leading into the hall.

"Master Toth," she called out, quaking where she stood. And again: "Master Toth!"—which sound lost itself in the maze and drew neither echo nor answer.

Flight urged at her. But the carpet-path beguilded the eye with its mazy designs and the fear settled away into a vague and gnawing terror. It seemed logical to go on, since she had come this far; and if there were ambushes they were likeliest ambushes calculated to frighten and not to harm. She walked the carpeted track and steeled her nerves against bogles and icy touches and whatever sort of whimsy an old man might devise for unwelcome intruders. Her business was certain and she was not a woman to turn when she had made up her mind a thing had to be: she simply told her feet they would go on and never back no matter what her mind was doing. And she told her body not to flinch even if something should run icy fingers down her neck: she was not a proud woman, this Melot, but she was a woman in a hurry and the fingers of willywisps and trolls were all the same class of nuisance to a woman in her set of mind as fingers of other unwelcome sorts which she well knew how to deal with. She had tactics, did Melot of the Ram, and a withering look for man or devil who tried her. It masked a habitual dour despair, like the despair of the conscript soldier who knows tomorrow is like today, and all tomorrows like that one, one more walk and one more fight; and the enemy everywhere. Melot was a conscript of life; to be alive was not what she would have chosen, but by the gods all and several she was too stubborn to retreat once launched.

So she went walking down the dark hall of many doors and called out the name she had called out before, going deeper and deeper into the dark, till the hallway and the carpet ran up against a stack of books and a table with other books and papers. There the carpet and the hall bent to the right with a dim window at the end. This too she followed, past doors and past hanging pictures lost in murk and cobwebs, over the carpet which was her only track and guide, toward what at first seemed only another hall stacked high with books, but which revealed a stairs and an ascent lighted by a dim window up at the landing.

"Master Toth," she called up; and: Toth, Toth, Toth, the echoes said, but nothing more. So she clenched up her skirts in her fist and climbed, where the faded red carpet led, up and up past the landing to yet another hall all in dark, where crazily leaning stacks of books and papers breathed out a miasma of age and rot. "Master Toth?"

But the carpet went only up the stairs, while the hall floor was bare boards and littered with paper. The stairs promised light above, where by yet another window, dirty-paned daylight streamed into the dust and the neglect.

She close the stairs and climbed, hard-breathing now; and gathered her skirts past stacks of books. Another turn: a small slit of a window; and a door at the top of the stairs. The air seemed colder here. A prickling ran her nape. She thought if she turned about at this instant there would be something black and small and glitter-eyed staring at her from the landing she had left: that was the thing that built itself in her mind. It would grow brave. It would come up the stairs. If she turned around she would see it baring its needle-sharp teeth; and its kingdom was the dark hallway which she had to pass to go down again.

"Master Toth!" She let go her skirts and stepped up to the door and hammered with her fist as her nerve began to fail her. "Master—"

The air chilled and the door opened onto a dusty-windowed loft as mazed with books as all the rest of the house. And before the great windows at the far end of the loft a hunched figure perched on a stool poring over something on a reading stand. This someone turned, a spidery silhouette against the white light; and Melot felt the approach of the black thing at her heels and skipped up that step and inside in haste.

The door closed behind her. The shadow in front of the windows got off its stool and Melot kept herself close to the door and flight, black thing or no.

"Master Toth," she said in a voice not as bold as her voice in the halls below. The figure beckoned. She came, closer, closer through the tilting maze of books and papers, and her eyes accepted the light enough to make out this figure, which began to have color—the bottle-green coat, and dark hair (white, she had thought) and a lean, smooth face (wrinkled, she had expected) and a fine-boned hand (ink-stained) holding a pair of spectacles. Melot's step failed her and her mouth opened for more breath, because he was none of the things she had expected, no crabbed ancient huddled at his bookstand, but a tall young man with the features of a god, except his nose was a bit hooked and his eyes were set too close, so that they stared with a concentration that seemed to focus somewhere in the center of the subject's heart and not at its surface.

"Well?" this young man asked. "Well?" This man looked at her and Melot Cassissinin felt naked in a way that had nothing to do with clothes, and burned in a way that had everything to do with his handsomeness and the look of those dark eyes which looked straight into her own. No man who looked like that looked that way at Melot's plain face, and all at once she flushed like a thirteen-year-old and felt the floor about to cave in to swallow herself and her purpose which could not possibly sustain such a stare. The voice so gentle was about to crack like a whip, was about to turn acid with impatience and sting her with wit her wit could not, in its present state, deal with.