THEN Guivric passed through this door likewise; and so, with glowing feet and with an odor of funereal spices, Guivric came into the room in which was the Sylan. Glaum-Without-Bones looked up from his writing, tranquilly. Glaum said nothing: he merely smiled. All was quiet.
Guivric noticed a strange thing, and it was that this room was hung with brown and was furnished with books and pictures which had a familiar seeming. And then he saw that this room was in everything like the brown room at Asch in which now for so many years he had conducted his studies and his thaumaturgies; and that in this mischancy place, for all his arduous traveling beyond the Country of Widows and the fearful Isle of the Ten Carpenters and the high Wall of the Sassanid, here you still saw, through well-known windows, the familiar country about Asch and the gleaming of the Duardenez river, and beyond this the long plain of Amneran and the tall Forest of Acaire. And Guivric saw that this Glaum-Without-Bones, who sat there smiling up at Guivric, from under a cap of owl feathers, had in everything the appearance of the aging man who had so long sat in this room; and that Glaum-Without-Bones did not differ in anything from Guivric the Sage.
Guivric spoke first. He said:
“This is a strong magic. This is a sententious magic. They had warned me that I would here face my own destruction, that I would here face the most pitiable and terrible of all things: and I face here that which I have made of life, and life of me. I shudder; I am conscious of every appropriate sentiment. Nevertheless, sir, I must venture the suggestion that mere, explicit allegory as a form of art is somewhat obsolete.”
Glaum-Without-Bones replied: “What have I to do with forms of art? My need was of a form of flesh and blood. I had need of a human body and of human ties and of a human saga of the Norn’s most ruthless weaving. We Sylans have our powers and our privileges, but we are not the children of any god; and so, when we have lived out our permitted centuries, we must perish utterly unless we can contrive to become human. Therefore I had sore need of all human discomforts, so that a soul might sprout in me under oppression and chastening, and might, upon fair behavior, be preserved in eternal bliss, and not ever perish as we Sylans perish.”
“Everybody has heard of these familiar facts about you Sylans,” returned Guivric, impatiently, “and it is your stealing, in this shabby fashion, of my own particular human ties that I consider unheard-of—”
“Yes, yes,” said Glaum, with some complacence, “that was done through a rare magic, and through a strong magic, and through a magic against which there is no remedy.”
“That we shall see about! For what has happened to me is not fair—”
“Of course it is not,” Glaum assented. “The doom which is now upon you is no fairer than the doom which was upon me yesterday, to perish utterly like a weed or an old tom-cat.”
“—And so I have come hither to match my resistless thaumaturgies against your piddling magic, and to compel you to restore to me your pilferings—”