"Your grandfather never told you? Regneniel never told you?"

"What nonsense are you spouting, Cray Ormoru?"

"I don't think it's nonsense," Cray said. "Leemin told me, and I know of no reason why it should lie to me. This palace is Regneniel's offspring. That is why it grows."

"Regneniel's offspring? Absurd. This palace is a crystal, and crystals can grow without being alive."

"I know very little about crystals, my lady. I know only that Leemin insists that this building is a living creature of Ice, with a living creature's soul and source. I would think that a demon of this world would be an adequate judge of what lives here and what does not."

"Nonsense! Leemin is foolish and ignorant. Come along with me, and I'll show you how alive this palace is." She climbed to her feet and, turning sharply, strode toward the doorway that gave on the stairs.

In his hurry to follow her, Cray knocked in a wall of his toy castle and then stumbled over the spilled blocks; he clutched at the nearest bin to keep from falling. By the time he regained his balance, she was no longer in the cradle room. She was no longer in sight. He loped the few paces to the stairway and up three steps before he stopped.

She was not on the stairway.

"Aliza?" he said. He climbed the rest of the way up the milky tunnel. At its top, the mirrored panel sealed it. He knocked on the panel, a blunted sound that betrayed no hollowness beyond. "Aliza?"

Her voice came from below him. "Cray Ormoru." He turned. He saw her standing at the foot of the stairs.

"You came in the other door," she said.

He descended to stand beside her on the bottom step. "My lady, that was as neat a piece of sorcery as I've ever seen. Did you use invisibility, or did you open a second passage from the upper part of the staircase to down here?"

She smiled slightly. "You think I climbed these stairs?"

"I saw you walk through this doorway."

Her lips quirked, as if she were almost about to laugh. Instead, though, she said, "You saw me walk through the doorway that leads to the small sitting room. The same doorway I used to enter the cradle room, the one I ordinarily enter by. But you didn't enter that way, did you? You came in from the other side, from the unfurnished rooms on the other side."

"Yes. I did." He frowned, looking back to the cra-dle room with its bins and child-sized furniture, andthe ruins of a toy castle marking its center. "But how could you come in from the sitting room? That's where this stairway is now."

"So it is, from your point of view. And so, in order to leave the cradle room without climbing these stairs, you will have to go back into it, cross it, and go out the other door. Then you'll have to make a half circle about it through the surrounding rooms to come to the sitting room. Go on. I'll use the other door and meet you."

"What other door?" said Cray.

"The door to the sitting room."

"You mean you'll open a new one?"

"No. It's there. But you can't use it right now. Ah, I see you're confused. I suppose I must have been confused about it myself at the beginning. But it's quite simple, really. The cradle room has two doors to other rooms in Ice and a stairway to the human realm. Whichever door you enter by, you must exit by the same if you wish to stay in Ice, and by the other if you wish to go to the human realm. Since you and I have entered the cradle room by two different doors, we must leave it by two different doors."

"What a peculiar arrangement," said Cray.

"Is it?"

He laughed. "Truth to tell, this whole place is pecu-liar. There isn't another like it anywhere, or so the demons tell me."

"I wouldn't want there to be one," said Aliza. "Now, I had something to show you, remember? Go on.

I'll meet you in the sitting room."

"Wait. You're on this stairway-does that mean you went out the door that I didn't go out?"

"Yes."

"Then what do you see in that room? Do you see the rocking horse over there to the left of the other doorway and the bin with the old linens closest to where we stand?"

She shook her head. "I see the room from the other side, of course. The rocking horse is close to me and the bin of linens is at the other end."

"Then what would happen if we linked arms and walked down this last step and through the doorway together?"

The faint smile faded from her face. "This is a strong spell, Cray Ormoru. After all, it was laid by my grandfather. I think it would be a mistake to tempt his sorcery."

Cray leaned against the wall, looking out into the cradle room. Through the opposite doorway, he could see part of the empty chamber, and try as he might, he could not imagine how Aliza was seeing some frag-ment of the furnished sitting room in that same place. "Strong the spell may be," he said, "but it seems unnecessarily complicated to me. Surely it would have been simpler to set the stairway at one end of the room and the exit to Ice at the other and be done with it." "I'm sure he had good reasons for arranging things this way," said Aliza. "He always has good reasons for everything."

Cray turned his head and looked into her eyes. "Does he?" he said softly.

She nodded. "Even on those few occasions when I've disagreed with him, I've always known that his reasons were good."

"You've disagreed with him?"

"Does that surprise you so?"

"I thought you were ... an obedient grandchild."

"I am. But I do have a mind of my own. Perhaps you didn't think I did,"

"I don't know what I thought," said Cray. "But I'm glad to hear that you don't consider yourself com-pletely his slave."

"Even a slave maythink what it likes."

He smiled at her. "There was a time when you would have denied that slaves could think at all. For how can athingthink?"

Her lips curved for just a moment. "I've learned something since then. I'm still an apprentice, remember-still learning." She gestured toward the room. "Shall we go?"

"You first. I'm curious to see what happens."

She shrugged. "What happens is sorcery. Surely you've seen plenty of that."

"There is sorcery and sorcery, my lady. Go on. I'll meet you in the sitting room." When she hesitated, he added, "I won't lose my way, don't worry."

"I don't know how you could," she said. "The cloudy walls would guide you. But ... I'll meet you in the empty room beyond the door, just to be sure."

"As you wish, my lady."

"In a few moments, then." And she plunged down the last step and through the doorway.

And vanished, like a soap bubble popping in air.

And reappeared at the same instant on the opposite side of the room, striding purposefully toward Cray, as if she had just stepped through that other doorway to cross the room. Six swift paces brought her almost to him, and, involuntarily, he retreated a step to avoid the collision. But she vanished again at the instant she should have crossed the threshold before him.

Cray clutched at the milky walls to his left and right. Though he had expected something of the sort, he found the actual event to be a trifle unnerving, and he had to sit down heavily on the step behind him. Hehad seen sorcery, true enough-all kinds of sorcery. He had seen mortals call lightning down from the sky and lava up from the depths. He had seen demons change their shapes from glorious to grotesque, and he had seen them vanish or reappear in the blink of an eye as they dived through their portals between one realm and the other. But this jumping about of mortal flesh, this frenetic winking in and out of existence of a being of his own sort, was another thing entirely. It was only apparent, he realized, only a trick of view-point. From Aliza's viewpoint,he had been the one to vanish, or he would have if she had been looking back at him. As she had walked through the room itself, she had not seen him, even though she appeared to he looking straight at him; instead, she had seen the doorway to the sitting room which, in some fashion he could not fathom, was in front of her. The notion made his head spin. Doorways that were or were not there, depending on one's point of view-it was noth-ing to Aliza, just old, familiar sorcery. But to Cray it was proof again that there was a great deal he did not know, that he had never dreamed there was to know. And was it also proof, he wondered, that sorcery had no limits save the human imagination?

Aliza stepped through the doorway opposite him, the one that led, for him, to the empty room. "You're still there," she said.

He sprang to his feet and, in the same motion, through his own doorway. She did not vanish-he did not expect her to, for she had obviously traversed the rooms that surrounded this one in order to enter at the same door he had. Now they both saw the room from the same point of view, and both could use the same door to reach a single goal. They halted in the middle of the room's aisle, each on his own side of the fallen toy castle.

"I was contemplating the marvel of this chamber," he said. "Please accept my apologies for dawdling overmuch."

"Not overmuch," she replied. "I ran."

He smiled at her. "Were you afraid I'd become lost without a guide?"

"No, but I do have something to show you."

"Another marvel?"

"Not to me. But you might think so. Come to the kitchen with me."

"The kitchen?"

"Oh, you haven't been in the kitchen, have you? That's where Regneniel prepares my meals."

"I know what a kitchen is, my lady."

"Very well, then, come along." She turned toward the door, but she had hardly taken a step when she looked back at him. "And don't call memy lady any more. You're not my slave, after all. Call me Aliza."

"Only if you call me Cray. All my friends do."

She gazed at him levelly, over her shoulder, and her cool eyes were unreadable. "So we are friends now?"

"I hope so." She pursed her lips. "Very well. We are friends, Cray."

"Will you give me your hand on our friendship?" He held out his own.

After a long moment, she extended her hand toward his but did not touch it.

"The other hand," said Cray, and when she offered it, he grasped it firmly. "This is a handclasp, Aliza. It is a symbol of trust. I have been your friend from the moment I first saw you. I would never willingly do you harm. Rather, I would always try to help you in whatever way I could. I hope that you will come to feel the same way toward me."

She looked down at their clasped hands. "I have no desire to harm you," she said. "As for the rest-you ask a great deal."

"I ask nothing. I only hope. In the meantime, I find you a pleasant companion, and I suspect that you have not been totally bored by me."

"Not at all."

"And I look forward to whatever it is that you wish to show me in the kitchen."

"Yes, the kitchen," said Aliza, and she pulled her hand from his and strode briskly through the doorway.

The kitchen was half a dozen steps up from the dining hall, through a door that Cray had not pre-viously used. It was a long, narrow room, with a hearth on the nearest wall and only one piece of furniture-a small cupboard whose doors stood open to reveal a few metal pots and utensils and some small, transparent jars of salt and dried herbs. Regneniel leaned close to the hearth, and with the crystal rod clenched in its beak, it stirred the simmering contents of the pot that rested amid the flames. A human cook would not have pushed the pot so deep into the fire, but the Ice demon, of course, had no fear of being burned.

Aliza went to the cupboard and, kneeling, reached to the back of its lowest shelf. She brought out a metal pot no larger than her two cupped hands, a footed crystal vase narrow enough for a single rose, a transparent rod slimmer than the one Regneniel was using, and a purple-tinted jar tightly closed by a cork.

"I haven't touched these things in a long time," she said, motioning for Cray to join her at the cupboard.

When he had seated himself cross-legged on the floor beside her, she uncorked the jar. Inside was a white powder. She shook some of it into the pot. "Regneniel, fetch me a goblet of water." While the demon was out of the room on this errand, Aliza inspected the rod and the vase, wiping them thoroughly with a cloth that hung from the handle of one of the cupboard doors. "Regneniel used these for some of my earliest lessons, to help me understand the nature of crystals."

Cray picked up the purple jar and peered inside. "What is this stuff?"

"A salt. But don't taste it. It isn't the kind of salt you'd want to put on your food. Regneniel prepared it from the incrustation at the edge of a salt lake in the human realm. It hasn't any name, nor, as far as Regneniel knows, any use beyond this one of teaching me. And now you."

"What will it teach me?" "Wait and watch and you'll see for yourself."

When the demon returned with a brimming goblet, she poured a small amount of water into the pot.

With the crystal rod she stirred powder and water until most of the former had dissolved, leaving just a thin layer of residue to settle to the bottom. Then she held the pot out to Regneniel, saying, "Set this on the fire to boil."

Two of the demon's stubby arms lengthened to grasp the pot and to place it beside the larger one in the midst of the flames.

"It won't take long for so little liquid," said Aliza. "And while we wait, perhaps you would like to sample supper. I know I would. You will be staying for supper, won't you?"

Cray grinned. "I am a bit hungry. But I was going to invite you to Spinweb for supper. After hearing so much about you from me and from Gildrum, my mother would like to meet you."

"Spinweb?" Aliza sat back on her haunches, almost as if recoiling from him.

"Yes, and you could even stay overnight if you wished. We have plenty of guest room."

"Overnight?"

"You could bring Regneniel along. My mother said she wouldn't mind."

Aliza was frowning. "Your mother would let another sorcerer inside her home?"

"She would let a friend of mine inside. Yes."

"And a demon as well?"

"A demon lives with her. And others have visited from time to time. She is accustomed to them."

Aliza shook her head. "No. No. I couldn't."

Cray reached out and, very lightly, touched her hand. "You've had your yearly examination already, haven't you?"

"Yes."

"And you did well, I'd wager."

"Yes, I did well."