looked up at the stars in the desert. He wondered how far it was to the
crystalline sphere in which the stars were set, like jewels. Was it
farther than the distance between Orvieto and El Kahira?

He recited to himself the invocation, _In the name of the Voice comes
the Light_.

Standing at the window, he drank his hashish-laced kaviyeh in slow sips.
When he knew, by a peculiar intensity in the starlight, that the magic
horse had begun its flight to paradise, he started to walk to his bed. A
sudden impulse took him, and he went to his pack again.

Folded inside a square of blue silk he found the silver locket
Blossoming Reed had given him. Since he had started lying with Sophia he
had stopped wearing it. He remembered the suggestion he had planted in
Sordello's mind, that at the sight of the locket he would kill Simon de
Gobignon. With Sordello and Simon both gone, the locket was useless for
that purpose.

As he held it in his hands, he remembered what Baibars's daughter had
said to him:

_I will always know if you are well or ill, alive or dead, and how you
fare and what you feel. And if you would know how it is with me, seek me
in this._

He lay in bed propped up on one elbow and turned the tiny screw that
held the locket closed. He had meant to think about Manfred and Sophia,
to try to catch some glimpse of the future. It troubled him that he had
taken this bypath. He remembered now how troubled he had been when last
he looked into the locket. He had not meant to use it again.

Now, though, it was somehow too late for him to stop. He seemed to have
no will of his own. He raised the lid of the locket and looked down into
it, at the design incised on rock crystal that looked like an
interweaving of Arabic letters with circles and triangles. He waited to
see what visions the locket would give him tonight.

_The knowledge you run from is the most precious of all._

He gasped.

A pool of darkness opened in the center of the design. The network of
straight and curved lines seemed to crumble into it as the pool spread.
And it began to rotate, slowly at first, then faster. He was looking
into a whirlpool of blackness.

It drew him in. He felt as if his eyes were spinning, then his head;
then he fell into the whirlpool and it sucked him down. He could not
breathe. He was drowning in blackness.

At the last moment, when he thought he would die, suffocated, the black
pool released him and flung him back on his