Cray peered through the gap on his side and saw her. She stood where the mirrored barrier had been, and she gazed directly at the tunnel in Ice. As she slowly walked closer, he realized that her eyes were focused on the tapestry rather than on either of the human faces beside it. She halted very near it, nearer than the two crystalline chairs had been to each other, and she looked from one part of it to another and back again. Only when she had examined it with the greatest attention did her gaze slide past its edge and fasten on Cray's face. Standing there, she seemed to scrutinize his smile as closely as she had his mother's handiwork.

A small circle of the wall, a space not much larger than his hand, opened before him. Through that, he could hear her voice, though it sounded thin and distant. "You called my name," she said.

"I brought you a gift, as I said I would."

She glanced at the tapestry again, her eyes shuttling back and forth across it. "There was no need."

"I'm sure you'll recall that I thought there was. Do you like it?"

She considered the question for a long moment, then answered, "It is very well executed."

"I think it is very beautiful. My mother hopes you'll like it. She made it especially for you."

Aliza frowned a trifle. "She doesn't even know me."

"I told her about you. I told her that you were beautiful and that you should be surrounded by beauty."

She studied the tapestry yet again. "The colors are very interesting," she said at last.

"Take it," said Cray. "It'syours."

She shook her head. "You don't owe me any gifts."

"One cannotowe agift. It must be given freely or else it's not a gift but a payment."

"But what shall I do with it?"

"Hang it on a wall, of course. Your home is so large, it must have plenty of walls." He slipped four fingers through the circular hole and gripped its rim; he felt Elrelet's substance peel away from those fin-gers like rind from a fruit, exposing them to the chill breath of Ice as it passed through the aperture.

"I'd be glad to help you find an appropriate place for it."

"Ah," she said. "You want to come in."

"I wouldn't be here if I didn't want to come in and talk to you again. Perhaps I could help you with your studies. After all, I've been a sorcerer myself for quite a few years."

She stared at him. "You would help me with my studies? Of your own free will?"

He nodded. "Why not?"

"You would reveal the nature of your skills to me?"

"Again, why not?"

"Aren't you afraid I might use them against you?"

"No more than I'm afraid you'll use your own skills against me," he said. "I'm a reasonably likable fellow, and I generally try to live in such a way that I don't incur the anger of other people. I certainly have no desire to incur yours." He brought his other hand up to join the first at the gap in the wall; it was a suppli-cating gesture. "Won't you let me see the interior of your magnificent palace? Won't you let me try to divert you for just a short time? You can always throw me out if you find me boring." For a moment, she looked at the tapestry once more, then turned her gaze back on him, cool and remote. "I understand from my demon that you have journeyed here from the boundary of Ice with Air."

"That is true, my lady."

"It is a long way."

"That, too, is true."

"What will you do if I turn you away right now?"

"Come back another time, with another gift. The length of the journey means nothing to me, my lady. I would travel twice as far to see you."

"Why are you so persistent?" she said, and there was wonder in her voice rather than annoyance.

He felt a pang of pity for her wonder, for her innocence, for her ignorance. "The sorcerous breed is a lonely one, my lady Aliza," he said softly. "Even I, who have more friends than most, have need of every new friend I can find. I think if you knew what friendship was like, you would not scorn it so."

"Friendship," she said, and Cray thought he heard more than a touch of scorn in her cool inflections.

"You come here as a friend, and yet this visit would keep me from my studies."

Cray smiled sadly. "A few brief hours, perhaps. In the long run, will such a little time really make any difference to your skills? I think you exaggerate its effect, Aliza, because you are ... afraid."

Her shoulders straightened fractionally. "I am afraid of nothing."

"You are afraid of me and of what I represent."

"And what do you represent?"

"The outside. Everything that does not lie within the compass of this crystal palace of yours. The human realm and everything in it." He felt Gildrum's hand, hidden from Aliza by the tapestry, touch his shoulder, and he knew that it was meant as a warning, but he ignored it. He had no other path to follow; he had opened this one and could not turn back. "But you are human, Aliza. You are not made of Ice. You must believe me when I tell you that the human realm is worth knowing, worth being a part of."

She pursed her lips. "And letting you ... be my friend ... would be a way of knowing the human realm, would it?"

"It would be a start." His smile broadened. "And look-you don't even have to leave your home to do it; I've come to you."

"I am not afraid of you."

"I wish that were true, because then you would let me in and we could sit together and talk comfortably over a glass of wine instead of like this, as if one of us were a prisoner and the other come to pass messages through the bars. Which one of us would you say is the prisoner, Aliza?" "If I let you in," she said, "you would be the pris-oner. Your demon friends would never be able to get you out unless I wished it."

"I trust you," he said.

"If I really became tired of you, I could seal you up in one of these rooms and leave you there. You would starve to death. Then you wouldn't bother me any longer."

"Well ... I do have some sorcery of my own that does not depend on demons. I suspect that it might get me out if absolutely necessary. But I would hope that I might never need it."

She stood silent, her eyes focused first on him and then on the tapestry, back and forth, back and forth, as if she were weighing one against the other. Her cool expression was tinged with wariness. She backed up one step and then another. "Very well," she said at last. "A glass of wine."

The transparent wall melted away under his hands and, caught unprepared once again, he pitched forward to the hard floor of the chamber, Elrelet peeling from his flesh like wet clothing. The tapestry collapsed with him, tangling him in its suddenly heavy folds. By the time he climbed to his feet, the wall was solid again, his three companions sealed away on the other side.

"I see you brought a mortal friend along this time," Aliza said, gesturing toward the demons. "I hope you had no intention of asking me to lethim in as well."

Cray glanced back to the wall. "That's Gildrum," he told her. "You saw him before as a ball of light."

"A demon? With a human form?"

"Gildrum has a number of human forms. And ani-mal ones."

"Indeed?" said Aliza. "And how is that possible?"

Cray grinned. "I see I most certainly have something to teach you, my lady. You didn't know that a demon master may give his slaves whatever forms he can make with his own two hands?"

"How do you mean ...make?"

"I mean carve or chip or mold. Clay is used most commonly, but snow or ice or even stone will do. I gather you've never tried it."

"My demon has not yet taught me this art," she said. "And I can't recall that I've ever needed it."

Cray shrugged. "It can be useful, especially in deal-ing with ordinary mortals. They have less fear of a familiar form. Of course, if one wishes to inspire fear in them, that is not an advantage." He looked into her cool dark eyes. "Do you wish to inspire fear, my lady?"

"I do not concern myself with ordinary mortals," she replied. "Let them fear me or not, as long as they leave me alone." She turned from him then and strode briskly toward the inner chamber. "Come, Cray Ormoru. You asked for a glass of wine and conversa-tion, and I can think of a dozen places in my palace more comfortable for both than here." She paused and glanced back at him. "Unless you would prefer to stay where your friends can see you." Cray bent over the tapestry and began to roll it. "If you'll wait a moment till I gather this up, I'll follow wherever you wish." He tied the ribbons securely and hoisted the unwieldy bundle to one shoulder.

"You needn't carry it," said Aliza. She made a small gesture toward the floor, and a section near her feet rose up as a slender pillar, sprouted two glassy arms, broke free of the floor with two glassy legs, and marched stiffly to Cray, holding its arms out for his burden.

"This floor is very versatile," Cray murmured, giv-ing the tapestry over to the creature.

"This is my home," said Aliza. "It obeys my will. Perhaps you would be wise to remember that."

"Oh, I shall. I shall."

The crystalline creature followed behind them as they moved farther into the palace.

At first glance, the inner chamber seemed much like the one Cray already knew. It had a level floor, and it was walled by a multitude of planes that rose at vary-ing angles to that floor and to each other. Some of these walls soared upward smoothly, joining a vault-ing, faceted ceiling high above Cray's head; others, especially those that slanted sharply outward at their bases, were cut off by more vertical planes, some of them more than once, and so reached the ceiling in a series of short, angled spans. Light emanated from every horizontal surface, filling the room with the same blue-tinged radiance that spilled out into Ice.

In this chamber, however, there was no mirror-bred illusion of crystalline depths beyond those walls.

There was, instead, the reality. Behind Cray, Ice was still visible, and before him, Aliza's palace spread out in all its glinting, gemlike splendor. He felt as though he were walking through the heart of a diamond.

Plane upon plane was visible ahead, uncountable facets cre-ating a maze-like space that stretched up, down, right, left. In the kaleidoscope of angles, he saw walls that bent so obliquely they could as easily have been called slanted floors, ceilings that could have been tilted walls, floors that were ceilings for rooms below his feet, and ceilings that were floors for rooms above his head. And here and there were stairways, clear as finest glass, embedded among the facets. On the far side of the chamber was such a stairway, cut into an up-tilting section of floor, climbing to a gap where a wall should have been. Aliza mounted these steps, Cray close behind her, and they entered another chamber. This one had four stairways, each leading up or down to another room; Aliza chose the nearest, a right turn.

As they walked, and as his eyes became accustomed to perceiving the boundaries of a room by the reflections in its crystalline walls, Cray noted that the rooms were becoming steadily smaller. The outer one, where he had entered the palace, was larger than any in Spinweb, the size of a king's audience chamber. The one inside that had been perceptibly smaller, though still grand enough for any royal banquet. The next, however, was on a lesser scale, the next still more so, and the one beyond that could have served as Cray's own workroom. It was this room that was the first he found to be furnished.

The furnishings were sparse and betrayed the fact that this palace had only one occupant. In the very center of the room, in the very center of a thick gray carpet, stood a low ebony table broader than a man's reach, its polished surface reflecting the light overhead. Beyond the table stood a well-padded couch upholstered in gray silk brocade and long enough to lie down upon. Beside the couch stood a waist-high ebony cabinet. The rest of the room was empty.

"Sit down," Aliza said, indicating the end of the couch farthest from the cabinet. While Cray settled himself there, she opened the cabinet's double doors and brought out a tall crystal decanter half full of a deep, translucent red fluid. There was a goblet behind it, just one, but she stooped, and a second goblet, identical to the first, thrust up from the floor and into her hand. She set both of them on the table and filledthem from the decanter.

Cray took the nearer goblet. The wine was light, pleasantly tart, and refreshing. As he sipped it, he surveyed the bare, faceted walls all around him. "This room would be a fine place for the tapestry," he said. The crystalline servant had stopped at the doorway and now stood there motionless, the tapestry upon its outstretched arms. "The colors would relieve the severity of gray and black."

"Very well," said Aliza.

"I'll help you hang it, if you like."

"No need." She waved, and a second crystalline automaton sprouted from the floor. Between them, the two creatures unrolled the tapestry and held it up against a vertical section of wall. "Higher," said Aliza, and the creatures' arms and legs elongated until they could raise the tapestry higher than a man could reach. "Yes, there." A row of transparent hooks thrust out from the wall then, each hook catching one of the loops at the top edge of the tapestry, supporting it. When the automata released their burden, it hung straight and close against the crystalline wall.

Cray had to admit, though not aloud, that it looked a trifle peculiar, a multicolored blotch upon the clarity of Aliza's palace. Yet, off in a slightly different direc-tion, the one opposite the entrance they had used to this room, there were many blotches, most of them dark; he supposed them to be furnishings, though their exact nature was impossible to make out because of distance and intervening walls. He guessed that the area in which they were most concentrated was the heart of the palace, Aliza's bedchamber, her kitchen, her workroom. She had not chosen to take a stranger there.

He smiled at her. "I hope you will think of me every time you look at this tapestry."

"I don't believe I shall be able to avoid that," she said.

"Do you spend a lot of time in this room?"

"Some. When I feel like drinking a little wine and thinking. The table is useful for spreading out a great many things and looking at them all at once. The couch is comfortable."

"That it is." He leaned back against the end of the couch and hooked his free arm over it. "And as fine a piece of furniture as I've ever seen. Was it perhaps made by one of the artisans in Covrin Town? The style seems something like theirs."

"I wouldn't know," said Aliza. "Whenever I need furniture, my demon brings it."

"Your demon has been lax, then, judging from all those empty rooms I saw."

She sipped from her goblet. "There's little point in furnishing those rooms. I never use them."

"Oh? Then why did you have them built? I know you did-Leemin told me the palace was much smaller when you were a child."

Aliza inclined her head slightly. "Leemin was quite correct. In fact, when I first came to live here, the entire palace consisted of just one small room. But that room was the seed crystal of the building. Before a year had passed, a second chamber had budded off from it, and after that a new one was completed every few months, each larger than the last. Only lately, since the rooms have become so very large, hasthe rate of growth slowed. But the nature of the place itself is to be ever growing. I have no control over it. Not yet, anyway."

"But how did it begin?" Cray wondered.

"My demon constructed that first room from the substance of Ice and set the spell."

"The same demon that serves you with food and clothing and furniture? That teaches you sorcery?"

"The same."

"You have only the one, then."

"I need no more."

"It must be a very powerful creature."

She shrugged a shoulder. "It has enough power for my purposes. I value its knowledge more than its power."

Cray held his glass up, turned it in his fingers. "Yes, you prefer to manipulate the world around you di-rectly rather than depend upon a demon to do it for you."

She nodded.

"That's a preference I share," he said.

"Oh? I thought your demon friends did your bidding."

"No. Occasionally they give me a little help, but my sorcery does not require them."

She crossed one leg over the other and balanced her goblet on the upraised knee. "And what kind of sor-cery is it that you practice, Cray Ormoru?"

"Various kinds, my lady. I learned from more than one master, and I've also devised a certain amount on my own. I work with metals, but I also work with living things. I have made golden flowers grow on a tree and trees grow where I wished. And I have a degree of power over cloths and yarns as well. For instance, I could make that tapestry unweave itself and reweave in some fresh pattern-though I fear I haven't the talent to create one as pleasant as that. Or I could make this carpet fall apart, or crawl about the room, or stand up and bow. Perhaps you would be interested in a small demonstration of what can be done with just a simple shirt ... ?" He plucked at his own collar while gazing at her inquiringly.