The torches that lit the narrow stairwell burned intensely and in the wrong color, flame like melting gold or shattered suns.

192... 193...

Brennan's sandals clicked softly on the stone steps, snicking in sequence, like dominos very slowly falling.

227... 228...

Half a circle ahead of him, a trailing fringe of dark cloth whispered down the stairs, the robed figure itself staying just out of sight.

239... 240...

Not much longer, Brennan predicted to himself, and his guess was accurate:

Sixteen times sixteen steps was the number, and they stood before the portal of glass.

The great curved gate had been wrought with cunning, humor, and close attention to indices of refraction: it warped light, bent it, folded it, and generally abused it, so that there were hints of what was on the other side (stronger light sources, dark walls) but no possible way of seeing through—unless, of course, you had the key: the counter-door, thick for thin and thin for thick, in which case the two would cancel out.

From the robed figure beside Brennan, two hands emerged, gloved in reflective cloth to conceal skin's color. Fingers like slim mirrors grasped the handles of the warped gate—handles that Brennan had not guessed; in all that distortion, shapes could only be anticipated, not seen.

"Do you want to know?" whispered the guide; a whisper nearly as loud as an ordinary voice, but not revealing the slightest hint of gender.

Brennan paused. The answer to the question seemed suspiciously, indeed extraordinarily obvious, even for ritual.

"Yes," Brennan said finally.

The guide only regarded him silently.

"Yes, I want to know," said Brennan.

"Know what, exactly?" whispered the figure.

Brennan's face scrunched up in concentration, trying to visualize the game to its end, and hoping he hadn't blown it already; until finally he fell back on the first and last resort, which is the truth:

"It doesn't matter," said Brennan, "the answer is still yes."

The glass gate parted down the middle, and slid, with only the tiniest scraping sound, into the surrounding stone.

The revealed room was lined, wall-to-wall, with figures robed and hooded in light-absorbing cloth. The straight walls were not themselves black stone, but mirrored, tiling a square grid of dark robes out to infinity in all directions; so that it seemed as if the people of some much vaster city, or perhaps the whole human kind, wa...

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