Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 92

out, rearranging his robes and smoothing his long flowing hair.
Falk stood watching the greenish floor of the other room gradually
absorb the urine till it was quite gone.
The sides of the door were very slowly drawing together, closing the
slit. It was the only way out of the room in which he was trapped. He
broke from his lethargy and ran through the slit before it shut. The room in
which Estrel and the other one had stood was exactly the same as the one
he had left, perhaps a trifle smaller and dimmer. A slit-door stood open in
its far wall, but was closing very slowly. He hurried across the room and
through it, and into a third room which was exactly like the others, perhaps
a trifle smaller and dimmer. The slit in its far wall was closing very slowly,
and he hurried through it into another room, smaller and dimmer than the
last, and from it squeezed through into another small, dim room, and from
it crawled into a small dim mirror and fell upwards, screaming in sick
terror, towards the white, seamed, staring moon.
He woke, feeling rested, vigorous, and confused, in a comfortable bed
in a bright, windowless room. He sat up, and as if that had given a signal
two men came hurrying from behind a partition, big men with a staring,
bovine look to them. "Greetings Lord Agad! Greetings Lord Agad!" they
said one after the other, and then, "Come with us, please, come with us,
please." Falk stood up, stark naked, ready to fight—the only thing clear in
his mind at the moment was his fight and defeat in the entrance hall of the
palace—but they offered no violence. "Come on, please," they repeated
antiphonally, until he came with them. They led him, still naked, out of the
room, up a long blank corridor, through a mirror-walled hall, up a staircase
that turned out to be a ramp painted to look like stairs, through another
corridor and up more ramps, and finally into a spacious, furnished roo m
with bluish-green walls, one of which was glowing with sunlight. One of
the men stopped outside the room; the other entered with Falk. "There's
clothes, there's food, there's drink. Now you—now you eat, drink. Now
you—now you ask for need. All right?" He stared persistently but without
any particular interest at Falk.
There was a pitcher of water on the table, and the first thing Falk did
was drink his fill, for he was very thirsty. He looked around the strange,
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