Free Lord of the Hollow Dark by Kirk Russell

through which Marina had passed last night.
    He brought his heels together and bowed. Despite his clerical collar and black garments, there was something faintly military about the Archvicar, and about his servant Phlebas, too. “You look so smart this morning!” the Archvicar greeted her. “I trust you had a good rest.”
    “No,” Marina told him, “I’m sorry, but actually I dreamed almost all night long.”
    “Did you now? So did I-horrid episodes. Ordinarily other people’s dreams bore me”—the Archvicar simulated somnolence—“but do you know, I should like to hear about yours before we stroll. There’s a little ancient parlor just along this gallery; it may have been the old priors’ solar. It has the advantage that no one could get at your back unexpectedly there. Shall we sit there in the sunlight for a few minutes? Along the way, I can show you some of the better pictures in the Lodging. The first Lord Balgrummo-that Scots peerage was a Charles II creation-made this gallery, they say, by throwing together some rooms surviving from the Priory.” They commenced their slow way along the gallery. “I was told that Mr. Apollinax expects to talk with you tomorrow morning, Marina,” Madame Sesostris remarked. “He’s meeting with the twelve disciples just now.”
    “Oh, should I be with them?” Marina was alarmed: she might be missing some elucidation of the doctrine of the Timeless Moment.
    “No,” the Archvicar assured her, “the Master has told me that he intends something different for you.”
    Marina wished that she might see the Archvicar’s eyes behind those strange spectacles of his. “I’d like to ask Mr. Apollinax about my dream.”
    “Perhaps I would be interested in what he might have to say,” the Archvicar told her. “Might the dream be a transference from his fancy to yours? But you’re not quite ready for such discussions. Now do look at those pictures on the walls here. That’s a Romney, rather a fine one, that portrait of the hard-eyed old gentleman: General Sir Angus Inch-burn, in India with Hastings. And over there, I believe-my poor eyes can’t be trusted-yes, it’s the Holbein the second Lord Balgrummo acquired. Now on the left, notice that little Cranach, with the grotesques and the flames: the last Lord Balgrummo particularly relished that, even if his father had given too much for it.”
    They had arrived at the priors’ solar, with its Gothic window tracery. “What a cheerful sunny room!” Marina exclaimed. “And the picture on the opposite wall-who is that?” It was an antique painting of a man in the prime of life, with a handsome head and a red beard. He was seated, and the legs looked curiously foreshortened. A sword lay on a table beside him.
    “You’ve picked out the oldest painting in the house,” the Archvicar said. “The artist is unknown, although probably a German painter, and presumably this was done in the Ger-manys. The man in the picture is David Inchburn, Third Laird of Balgrummo, called the Warlock, who died somewhere under this house. It’s been heavily restored, I suspect, having been damaged in the sack of the Lodging in 1578. It passed then into the possession of the earls of Morton, but the ninth Lord Balgrummo bought it back. He grumbled about being compelled to pay a thumping price for property stolen from his own house. All the same, he could well afford the price, for in his day the Balgrummo Pits were one of the most profitable coal mines in Scotland.”
    “That German painter was good at faces but not at figures,” Marina commented, pointing to the awkward legs of the Third Laird.
    “Blame God, not the German.” The Archvicar motioned to the others to be seated, and took a chair himself. “He was called ‘Dwarfie’-although not in his presence, you may be sure. All the same, he was a great mercenary captain, and a centaur when mounted.”
    A curious feature of the painting was a separate small portrait of a lovely