"Where did you get it?" Urson asked. "Oh, never mind. I guess we learn that when we go to sleep."
Geo reached for it, but Snake's one hand closed and three others sprang around it. "I wasn't going to take it," explained Geo. "I just wanted to see."
Suddenly the door of the forecastle opened, and the tall mate was silhouetted against the brighter light behind him. "Poet," he called. "She wants to see you." Then he was gone.
Geo looked at the other two, shrugged, and then swung off the berth, made his way up the steps and into the hall.
On deck it was completely dark. As he walked, a door before him opened and a blade of illumination sliced the deck. He jumped.
"Come in," summoned the Priestess of Argo, and he turned into a windowless cabin and stopped one step beyond the threshold. The walls rippled tapestries, lucent green, scarlet. Golden braziers perched on tapering legged tripods beneath plumes of pale blue smoke that lent thin incense in the room, pierced faintly but cleanly into his nostrils like knives. Light lashed the polished wooden newels of a great bed on which sat swirls of silk, damasked satin, brocade. A huge desk, cornered with wooden eagles, was spread with papers, meticulous instruments of cartography, sextants, rules, compasses, and great shabby books were piled on one corner. Above, from the beamed ceiling, hung by thick chains, swayed a branching candelabra of oil cups, some in the hands of demons, the mouths of monkeys, burning in the bellies of nymphs, or between the horns of satyrs' heads—red, clear green, or yellow-white.
"Come in," repeated the priestess. "Close the door."
Geo obeyed.
She walked behind her desk, sat down, and folded her hands in front of her veiled face. "What do you know of the real world, outside Leptar?"
"That there is much water, some land, and mostly ignorance."