e of Orvieto.

But he need not remain in Orvieto. He raised his head and lifted the
chain that held the silver locket about his neck. Turning the little
screw that fastened the lid of the locket, he let it fall open. It
covered most of the palm of his right hand. Holding the crystal disk
backed by silver close to his eyes, he saw his face reflected back at
him from the convex surface. His image was broken up by a pattern etched
into the transparency, a five-part webwork of interlocking angles and
boxes, spirals and concentric circles. The pattern formed a maze too
complex for the eye to grasp. He believed that the man who used a
stylus, doubtless diamond-pointed, to cut the design into the crystal
must have gone blind in the course of his work. No mosque bore a more
intricate--or more beautiful--pattern on its walls.

His eyes, as they always did when he looked into the locket, tried to
follow the pattern and became lost in it. As the drug extended its
empire within him, it seemed that he could actually see his eyes,
coalesced into a single eye, staring back at him from the net of lines
and whorls that entrapped it.

_The captive eye means that the locket now controls what I see._

He saw the face of Sophia Karaiannides. Her dark lips, luscious as red
grapes, were parted slightly, showing even, white teeth. Her
thick-lashed eyelids were half lowered over burning eyes. Her hair hung
unbound in brunette waves on either side of her face. She had splashed
water on her face, and the droplets gleamed on her cheeks and brow like
jewels.

Daoud had no doubt that he was seeing her exactly as she was at this
moment, somewhere else in the cardinal's mansion. The locket had that
property.

_But I do not want to see Sophia. I want Blossoming Reed._

Then Sophia spoke to him. "Oh, David, why will you not come to my bed?"

Her voice was rich as velvet. His muscles tensed with a sudden hunger, a
long-felt need that Francesca, the woman he bedded with now and then at
Tilia Caballo's, could never satisfy. Sophia, he realized, could give
him what he wanted, what he missed so terribly since leaving home.

_No! Let me see Blossoming Reed._

He shut his eyes, and Sophia was still looking at him. The locket and
the drug together could show a man things he did not want to see, make
him feel things he did not want to feel. Things that were inside him
that he did not want to know.

_The knowledge you run from is the most precious of