Tan wouldn’t have interrupted for the world. He hauled a couch out of her way; then, after a moment’s consideration, stood it on end and leaned it into the little writing room. Then he stood in the doorway, watching with tense fascination as Mienthe completed the first big outer circle and began to bring the spiral inward.
There was a faintly audible alarmed shout. Tan jerked his head up, listening. The shout was repeated, nearer, he was almost certain. Mienthe did not seem to notice, but Tan was afraid the alarm might very soon press itself on her attention. He wished he knew what drawing spirals on the floor was going to do, or, which might be a more urgent question, how long it might take to do it. He had no weapons, and no particular skill with them even if he found a sword tucked away among the gowns in Mienthe’s wardrobe. Chairs propped under the doorknobs of the outermost apartment door and then the sitting room door were all very well, but would hold professional soldiers for no more than moments—Mie might have found inspiration somewhere, but nothing useful occurred to Tan, and the shouting was now distinctly closer—
“Tan!” Mienthe called urgently from the sitting room, having either forgotten the need for quiet or justifiably concluded the precaution was now no use. “Tan! Oh—there you are, good. Get in the center. No, with the book!” She pressed it into his hands and pushed him toward the middle of the spiral that now nearly covered the floor: A dozen long, perfectly smooth turns ran away from the wall toward the center of the room. The black lines glistened as though with fresh ink, but not the best-made quill in the world could ever have held so much or drawn out such a broad, heavy stroke. And then in the next moment the black lines did not look like ink at all, but like shadows, like deep cracks that cut straight through into the heart of the world. He tried to follow the spiral inward with his eyes but found the center hard to see, as though it was very far away. The illusion that the overall spiral led downward as it turned inward was very powerful, even though when he looked across it rather than along its curving length, he could see perfectly well that the floor was level.
“Don’t cut across the line!” she added.
“Don’t cut the line?” Tan muttered. He cast a glance toward the door, which someone had just struck a reverberating blow. “Mie—”
“What?” She did not seem to notice, not even when the door shook in its frame under another blow. She stared instead at the widely spaced curving lines of the spiral. Her expression was intent, not blank as it had been out in the town. But was the difference good or bad?
The door shook again, and the wood cracked.
“Tan!” said Mienthe, but not about the door, and how nice for her to be so caught up in her strange magic that she did not need to suffer fear. She pointed toward the center of the spiral.
With an effort, Tan turned his back on the door and, stepping firmly into the spiral, began to walk around the curving pathway it provided toward its center. He was careful not to touch the glistening black line with his foot, though he wondered, if he did, would the ink smear, or would he simply find his foot plunging through an open chasm toward the center of the earth?
Mienthe exclaimed, “Oh, where did I leave off the end?” but she sounded frustrated rather than frightened. Then she said, “Oh,” sounding much happier. How nice one of them could be happy.
Despite her warning to Tan, she walked suddenly forward right along the line, placing one foot carefully in front of the next. The ink did not smear, nor did she fall. Despite the narrowness of the line and all her care, she walked quickly, so that she threatened to reach the center long before Tan. He did not know whether this mattered, but found himself hurrying to keep up, so that they walked shoulder to shoulder, Mienthe on the outside line and himself on the inside, keeping to the space between the lines.
The crashing at the door now seemed to linger oddly on the air; the sounds reverberated against the air as though from a great distance… Black sparks were falling away from Mienthe’s feet. She seemed to be walking on a layer of translucent glass that lay across deep cracks… To Tan, she did not seem to have created those cracks, but rather to have collected them somehow, pulling them out of the very fabric of the world and arranging them in this orderly shape, but he could not have explained what he meant by this idea or why he thought so. He also thought the cracks were going down, down and in, even though when he remembered to glance up he could see that they were still in the room, that the world outside the spiral seemed unchanged… perfectly unchanged, as though frozen in glass, as a glassblower might lock a delicate flower or leaf into a glass weight, only it was as though the glass had turned inside out, so that everything outside it was locked into stillness and only within the spiral did motion and life remain possible.