On the morning of the third day they brought Lukan boots, and Lukan grasped the meaning of the boots at once. A man meant to stay in bed is not given boots. Today he was going somewhere.
The first two days had passed in bed, and in words. Rona came every morning, bringing bread, soup, and new words. Water, bread, window, door, hand, head, pain. Lukan counted the words the way a farmer counts seed; by evening he knew how many had gathered in his palm. Rona was patient, and she did not laugh at mistakes. Her broken church tongue and Lukan's broken pronunciation met somewhere in the middle, and that strange shared language was turning, day by day, into a bridge a man could walk on.
On the third day, along with the boots, came Ogmios.
"Can you walk?" he asked in the church tongue.
"I can walk."
"Good. Come with me. I will show you something."
The corridors were stone and did not end. On the walls burned glass spheres without flame, like the one in his room, and Lukan walked trying not to look at them. Along the way they met people; people in grey robes, blue robes, black robes. All of them stepped aside and bowed before Ogmios. But Lukan noticed that the glances sliding out from under the bowed heads came not to Ogmios but to him. A woman dropped the books she carried as they passed. A young man pressed himself too hard against the wall. Everyone was looking at him, and no one wanted to be seen looking.
The stairs climbed up, and up, and up. At last Ogmios pushed open a heavy wooden door, and the sky poured in.
They stood on a balcony. And the world lay below.
Lukan gripped the railing. The city he had seen from his window was, it turned out, only one quarter of the city. White stone stretched as far as sight; avenues, squares, canals, bridges, and thousands of roofs. The golden dome was below him now, and it burned where the sun struck it. And far away, like the edge of the world, that wall enclosed everything. Lukan's village, with its fields and its pasture, would be lost in this view and never found again.
"The city is called Helios," said Ogmios. He was in no hurry. "More than a million people live here. There is a word in your tongue; urbs. This is the greatest form of that word in the world."
Lukan swallowed. The question he wanted to ask had waited three days in his throat, and there was no room left.
"What is this place? How did I come here? How many days would a man walk from Muntenia to here?"
Ogmios leaned on the railing and watched the city for a while. When he answered, his voice was level and careful.
"He could not walk it, Lukan. No man, no ship, and no bird can reach this place from your lands." He turned to Lukan. "What I am going to tell you will be hard to understand. I will say it slowly, so that you do not mistake me. This is not a far country of your world. This is another world. Under your sky, these lands do not exist. Under our sky, yours do not."
Lukan stared at him. He had understood every word, and their sum meant nothing. "The world is one," he said. "The priest said so. God made one world."
"Your priest spoke of what he had seen. I speak of what I have seen." There was no mockery in Ogmios's voice. "Three nights ago, in the hall beneath this tower, forty mages opened an old door. The door looked upon your world. And you fell through it."
Mages. Lukan knew the word; from tales, from his grandmother's stories by the hearth, from the priest's sermons. In the sermons, mages were servants of the devil. The violet light passed before his eyes, the woman of glass passed, the mark on his collarbone ached, and Lukan gripped the railing harder.
"Send me back."
"Lukan..."
"Send me back!" His voice sounded foreign even to his own ears; cracked, high, a child's voice. "My father is there. On top of the ground. I did not bury him. If no one is left in the village, then no one buried him. Send me back, I will do whatever you ask, send me back."
Ogmios did not silence him. He listened to the end, and the silence lasted until Lukan's breathing settled. Then the old man spoke, and he set his words down one by one, like gold on a scale.
"I could lie to you. I will not. Opening that door cost this tower everything it had gathered in a thousand years, and the door opened one way. I do not know the road back. No one in this tower knows it. Today, in this world, I know of no living man who could send you home."
Each sentence closed like a door. Lukan held on to the railing, because his legs were unreliable again, and this time he could not stop his eyes from burning. Hail on the harvest, and the graveside. His father had been wrong; there was a third occasion after all.
"But," said Ogmios.
Lukan raised his head.
"I will tell you two things, and both are true." Ogmios pointed down at the city. "The first is this. Two thousand years ago, a man founded this city. That man was not born in this world. He came from yours, Lukan. He was called here, as you were called, and this tongue, the tongue we are speaking now, was his tongue. In the tower archives lie books written in his own hand. I learned this language from those books. You understand it, because his world is your world. That man began here as nothing; without a tongue, without a soul he knew, exactly like you. And he built the greatest city of this world. The name they gave him lives still."
Lukan looked down at the endless white stone. "What name?"
"It is not said in this tongue. It is said in ours. You will learn it." Ogmios straightened. "The second thing is this. I said I do not know the road back, and that is true. But know this also: the door opened once. No scholar alive can tell you that a door opened once can never open again. There are powers in this world that yours could not dream of. I do not promise to bring your father back, Lukan. I do not lie on behalf of the dead. What I promise you is this: learn this world, learn this tongue, grow strong. Answers open to the strong. And what you have lost..." He paused a moment, as if choosing the word with care. "...may be nearer than you think."
Later, much later, Lukan would wind that sentence back a thousand times. But on that morning, on that balcony, he was seventeen years old, in a world that did not hold so much as his father's grave, and a stranger had said perhaps to him. A rope thrown to a drowning man does not need to be thick.
"What must I do?" Lukan asked.
Ogmios smiled. "For today, only listen. Rona will teach you our language; she knows yours, so she will teach it fastest. I will teach you this world. The rest comes after."
They turned and walked to the door. Just as Lukan crossed the threshold, a sound rose from the city; deep, metallic, coming in waves. A bell. Then another, and another; the sounds ran together, and the whole city below began to ring with a single voice. Lukan stopped.
"Is there a feast day?"
Ogmios had stopped too. In the mouth of the doorway, his face half in shadow, he looked at Lukan and gave the answer as if it were an ordinary piece of information.
"No for you, but yes for them," he said. "They have heard that you came."