The exhibits in the hall made strange lumps and forms in the half-light. It glinted off display cases, metallic objects, and glass eyes. A statue of Amberhill in luminescent marble stood near the entrance. It was closer to life-sized than the others she had seen. She wove her way past cases of arrowheads and daggers, of baskets and pots, while dead creatures watched her progress from their mounts.

One such creature stood near the rear of the room, part moose, part human, a p’ehdrose. This one was female and had to be the mate of Ghallos, the taxidermied specimen she’d seen at Dr. Silk’s dinner party. Her name had been Edessa. Like Ghallos, the human part of her flesh had been poorly preserved. It was leathery and puckered. A length of cloth draped across her front looked like it was just thrown there to protect the modesty of visitors by concealing her breasts.

Karigan did not linger, but passed into another exhibit hall, this one with a lofty ceiling and an aviary type of cage through which Dr. Silk was peering. She hid behind a case of pinned insects and watched.

“Did you get fed tonight, my pretty little jewels?” he asked.

It was too dark to see, but the unmistakable whir of hummingbird wings told Karigan what the aviary held. She frowned.

“Indeed, we fed them tonight, Dr. Silk,” said a new man, striding toward the aviary from even deeper in the museum. “A nice fat hog.”

“Excellent. I see that Ghallos isn’t back on exhibit yet.”

“We’ve been going over him, sir,” the man replied, “ensuring all is well after his long journey. We’re putting him back in place tonight.”

“That is acceptable. I have come to do some research in the library.”

“Very good, sir. If there’s anything you need, we’ll be here working on Ghallos. Just let us know.”

Wonderful, Karigan thought. More people to watch out for.

Dr. Silk and the museum workman parted, walking in opposite directions. Dr. Silk went to a door just beyond the aviary and unlocked it. Inside he turned on the light. Karigan moved carefully, just beyond the light that spilled across the floor. Within the library she espied shelves and shelves of books. She wondered if this library contained, as the professor’s had, the ragged, abused, and nearly destroyed tomes from her own time and farther into the past.

She skittered forward when the workman opened a door of his own and more light poured out, almost merging across the exhibit hall with light from the library. She continued to the back of the chamber and passed beneath an elaborate arch into another vast space. She stepped aside at the entryway and paused to lean across the wall and rest. Dare she drop her fading? She was exhausted, and her head pounded. She needed to rest, or she wouldn’t make it back to Lorine’s rooms. She sank to the floor, hugged her knees to her chest, and dropped the fading.

The head pain and nausea were not nearly as bad as the last time she had tried, maybe because there was so much more etherea in the palace proper. Still, it was bad enough. She kept her eyes closed willing the discomfort to pass, but keeping her ears alert for the tiniest noise that would indicate someone was coming her way. All she heard, however, were the distant sounds and voices of the workmen.

When the worst of her head pain eased, she opened her eyes, and her sight was no longer occluded by the graying of her ability. When her eyes once again adjusted to the dark, she realized she’d found the scything moon.

THE SCYTHING MOON

The obsidian floor glimmered like black ice beneath the glass ceiling of the exhibit hall, which was more like an observatory open to the night sky. Karigan ran her hand across the smooth floor beside her. It was not layered with dust, not like the last time she had set foot on it.

Four winged figures carved of stone stood upon pedestals, with wings spread as though ready to fly. They were arranged, Karigan was certain, to designate the four cardinal directions, and even though she could not see their faces well in the dark, she knew they were Eletian, for she had stood among them before.

She rose and walked across not just a floor, but across a universe of stars and worlds, a celestial map embedded into the obsidian with quartz and flaring silver. There were subtle tints of blues and greens and rose in the quartz, and spider-fine lines showing the paths of heavenly bodies. Characters in luminous Eletian script rippled at intervals along the lines. When she reached the very center of the room, she stood upon a full moon of quartz, and arrayed around it were smaller representations of the moon in its various phases. They shone with a subtle gleam, picking up the barest glint of starlight through the glass ceiling. She had stood here before, in another time. No, this was not Castle Argenthyne in the heart of Blackveil Forest, but somehow the floor and statues had been removed from the chamber of the moondial in Castle Argenthyne and meticulously reassembled, here in the emperor’s palace in Gossham.

Karigan knelt before the phases of the moon. She had called these structures “moondials” because they were like sundials, where a shadow pointed to the time of day. Only with Eletian moondials, it was more. A properly aligned shadow cast by moonlight could take one to a “piece of time,” a time preserved at a particular phase of the moon. Karigan had experienced this power in Blackveil, first outside the ruined village of Telavalieth, then in Castle Argenthyne. At the castle, the legendary queen, Laurelyn, had preserved a piece of time preceding the invasion of Mornhavon the Black. For a thousand years it protected those of her people who “slept” in a grove of vast trees in retreat from the burden of eternal life. Karigan, using her ability not only to fade, but also to cross thresholds between the layers of the world, had led the Sleepers from Laurelyn’s refuge to the safety of Eletia’s distant past.