I arrived at Elodin’s next class ten minutes early, proud as a priest. I brought my two pages of careful notes, eager to impress Elodin with my dedication and thoroughness.
All seven of us showed up for class before the noon bell. The door to the lecture hall was closed, so we stood in the hallway, waiting for Elodin to arrive.
We shared stories about our search through the Archives and speculated as to why Elodin considered these books important. Fela had been a scriv for years, and she had only found seventeen of them. Nobody had found En Temerant Voistra, or even a mention of it.
Elodin still hadn’t arrived by the time the noon bell rang, and at fifteen minutes past the hour I grew tired of standing in the hallway and tried the door to the lecture hall. At first the handle didn’t move at all, but when I jiggled it in frustration, the latch turned and the door opened a crack.
“Thought it was locked,” Inyssa said, frowning.
“Just stuck,” I said, pushing it open.
We entered the huge, empty room and walked down the stairs to the front row of seats. On the large slate in front of us, written in Elodin’s oddly tidy handwriting was a single word: “Discuss.”
We settled into our seats and waited, but Elodin was nowhere to be seen. We looked at the slate, then at each other, at a loss for what exactly we were supposed to do.
From the looks on everyone’s faces, I wasn’t the only one who was irritated. I’d spent fifty hours digging up his damn useless books. I’d done my part. Why wasn’t he doing his?
The seven of us waited for the next two hours, chatting idly, waiting for Elodin to arrive.
He didn’t.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Hidden City
WHILE THE HOURS I’D wasted hunting for Elodin’s books left me profoundly irritated, I emerged from the experience with a solid working knowledge of the Archives. The most important thing I learned was that it was not merely a warehouse filled with books. The Archives was like a city unto itself. It had roads and winding lanes. It had alleys and shortcuts.
Just like a city, parts of the Archives teemed with activity. The Scriptorium held rows of desks where scrivs toiled over translations or copied faded texts into new books with fresh, dark ink. The Sorting Hall buzzed with activity as scrivs sifted and reshelved books.
The Buggery was not at all what I expected, thank goodness. Instead, it proved to be the place where new books were decontaminated before being added to the collection. Apparently all manner of creatures love books, some devouring parchment and leather, others with a taste for paper or glue. Bookworms were the least of them, and after listening to a few of Wilem’s stories I wanted nothing more than to wash my hands.
Cataloger’s Mew, the Bindery, Bolts, Palimpsest, all of them were busy as beehives, full of quiet, industrious scrivs.
But other parts of the Archives were quite the opposite of busy. The acquisitions office, for example, was tiny and perpetually dark. Through the window I could see that one entire wall of the office was nothing but a huge map with cities and roads marked in such detail that it looked like a snarled loom. The map was covered in a layer of clear alchemical lacquer, and there were notes written at various points in red grease pencil, detailing rumors of desirable books and the last known positions of the various acquisition teams.
Tomes was like a great public garden. Any student was free to come and read the books shelved there. Or they could submit a request to the scrivs, who would grudgingly head off into the Stacks to find if not the exact book you wanted, then at least something closely related.
But the Stacks comprised the vast majority of the Archives. That was where the books actually lived. And just like in any city, there were good neighborhoods and bad.
In the good neighborhoods everything was properly organized and cataloged. In these places a ledger-entry would lead you to a book as simply as a pointing finger.
Then there were the bad neighborhoods. Sections of the Archives that were forgotten, or neglected, or simply too troublesome to deal with at the moment. These were places where books were organized under old catalogs, or under no catalog at all.
There were walls of shelves like mouths with missing teeth, where longgone scrivs had cannibalized an old catalog to bring books into whatever system was fashionable at the time. Thirty years ago two entire floors had gone from good neighborhood to bad when the Larkin ledger-books were burned by a rival faction of scrivs.
And, of course, there was the four-plate door. The secret at the heart of the city.
It was nice to go strolling in the good neighborhoods. It was pleasant to go looking for a book and find it exactly where it should be. It was easy. Comforting. Quick.
But the bad neighborhoods were fascinating. The books there were dusty and disused. When you opened one, you might read words no eyes had touched for hundreds of years. There was treasure there, among the dross.
It was in those places I searched for the Chandrian.
I looked for hours and I looked for days. A large part of the reason I had come to the University was because I wanted to discover the truth about them. Now that I finally had easy access to the Archives, I made up for lost time.
But despite my long hours of searching, I found hardly anything at all. There were several books of children’s stories that featured Chandrian engaged in minor mischief like stealing pies and making milk go sour. Others had them bargaining like demons in Aturan morality plays.
Scattered through these stories were a few thin threads of fact, but nothing I didn’t already know. The Chandrian were cursed. Signs showed their presence : blue flame, rot and rust, a chill in the air.
My hunt was made more difficult by the fact that I couldn’t ask anyone for help. If word spread that I was spending my time reading children’s stories, it would not improve my reputation.
More important, one of the few things I knew about the Chandrian was that they worked to viciously repress any knowledge of their own existence. They’d killed my troupe because my father had been writing a song about them. In Trebon they’d destroyed an entire wedding party because some of the guests had seen pictures of them on a piece of ancient pottery.
Given these facts, talking about the Chandrian didn’t seem like the wisest course of action.
So I did my own searching. After days, I abandoned hope of finding anything so helpful as a book about the Chandrian, or even anything so substantial as a monograph. Still, I read on, hoping to find a scrap of truth hidden somewhere. A single fact. A hint. Anything.
But children’s stories are not rich in detail, and what few details I found were obviously fanciful. Where did the Chandrian live? In the clouds. In dreams. In a castle made of candy. What were their signs? Thunder. The darkening of the moon. One story even mentioned rainbows. Who would write that? Why make a child terrified of rainbows?
Names were easier to come by, but all were obviously stolen from other sources. Almost all of these were names of demons mentioned in the Book of the Path, or from some play, primarily Daeonica. One painfully allegorical story named the Chandrian after seven well-known emperors from the days of the Aturan Empire. That, at least, gave me a brief, bitter laugh.
Eventually I discovered a slim volume called The Book of Secrets buried deep in the Dead Ledgers. It was an odd book: arranged like a bestiary but written like a children’s primer. It had pictures of faerie-tale creatures like ogres, trow, and dennerlings. Each entry had a picture accompanied by a short, insipid poem.
Of course, the Chandrian were the only entry without a picture. Instead there was just an empty page framed in decorative scrollwork. The accompanying poem was less than useless:The Chandrian move from place to place,
But they never leave a trace.
They hold their secrets very tight,
But they never scratch and they never bite.
They never fight and they never fuss.
In fact they are quite nice to us.
They come and the
y go in the blink of an eye,
Like a bright bolt of lightning out of the sky.
Irritating as it was to read something like this, it made one point abundantly clear. To the rest of the world the Chandrian were nothing more than childish faerie stories. No more real than shamble-men or unicorns.
I knew differently, of course. I had seen them with my own eyes. I had talked to black-eyed Cinder. I had seen Haliax wearing shadow all around him like a mantle.
So I continued my fruitless search. It didn’t matter what the rest of the world believed. I knew the truth, and I’ve never been one to give up easily.
I settled into the rhythm of a new term. As before, I attended classes and played music at Anker’s. But most of my time was spent in the Archives. I had lusted after them for so long that being able to walk through the front doors any time I wanted seemed almost unnatural.
Even my continuing failure to find anything factual about the Chandrian didn’t sour the experience. As I hunted, I became increasingly distracted by other books I found. A handwritten medicinal herbal with watercolor pictures of various plants. A small quarto book of four plays I’d never heard of before. A remarkably engaging biography of Hevred the Wary.
I spent entire afternoons in the reading holes, missing meals and neglecting my friends. More than once I was the last student out of the Archives before the scrivs locked the doors for the night. I would have slept there if such things were allowed.
Some days, if my schedule was too tight for me to settle in for a long stretch of reading, I would simply walk the Stacks for a handful of minutes between classes.
I was so infatuated with my new freedoms that I did not make it over the river into Imre for many days. When I did return to the Grey Man, I brought a calling card I’d fashioned from a scrap of parchment. I thought Denna would be amused by it.
But when I arrived, the officious porter in the Grey Man’s parlor told me no, he could not deliver my card. No, the young lady was no longer in residence. No, he could not take a message for her. No, he did not know where she had gone.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Interesting Fact
ELODIN STRODE INTO THE lecture hall almost an hour late. His clothes were covered in grass stains, and there were dried leaves tangled in his hair. He was grinning.
Today there were only six of us waiting for him. Jarret hadn’t shown up for the last two classes. Given the scathing comments he’d made before disappearing, I doubted he’d be coming back.
“Now!” Elodin shouted without preamble. “Tell me things!”
This was his newest way to waste our time. At the beginning of every lecture he demanded an interesting fact he had never heard before. Of course, Elodin himself was the sole arbiter of what was interesting, and if the first fact you provided didn’t measure up, or if he already knew it, he would demand another, and another, until you finally came up with something that amused him.
He pointed at Brean. “Go!”
“Spiders can breathe underwater,” she said promptly.
Elodin nodded. “Good.” He looked at Fenton.
“There’s a river south of Vintas that flows the wrong way,” Fenton said. “It’s a saltwater river that runs inland from the Centhe sea.”
Elodin shook his head. “Already know about that.”
Fenton looked down at a piece of paper. “Emperor Ventoran once passed a law—”
“Boring,” Elodin interjected, cutting him off.
“If you drink more than two quarts of seawater you’ll throw up?” Fenton asked.
Elodin worked his mouth speculatively, as if he were trying to get a piece of gristle out of his teeth. Then he gave a satisfied nod. “That’s a good one.” He pointed to Uresh.
“You can divide infinity an infinite number of times, and the resulting pieces will still be infinitely large,” Uresh said in his odd Lenatti accent. “But if you divide a non-infinite number an infinite number of times the resulting pieces are non-infinitely small. Since they are non-infinitely small, but there are an infinite number of them, if you add them back together, their sum is infinite. This implies any number is, in fact, infinite.”
“Wow,” Elodin said after a long pause. He leveled a serious finger at the Lenatti man. “Uresh. Your next assignment is to have sex. If you do not know how to do this, see me after class.” He turned to look at Inyssa.
“The Yllish people never developed a written language,” she said.
“Not true,” Elodin said. “They used a system of woven knots.” He made a complex motion with his hands, as if braiding something. “And they were doing it long before we started scratching pictograms on the skins of sheep.”
“I didn’t say they lacked recorded language,” Inyssa muttered. “I said written language.”
Elodin managed to convey his vast boredom in a simple shrug.
Inyssa frowned at him. “Fine. There’s a type of dog in Sceria that gives birth through a vestigial penis,” she said.
“Wow,” Elodin said. “Okay. Yeah.” He pointed to Fela.
“Eighty years back the Medica discovered how to remove cataracts from eyes,” Fela said.
“I already know that,” Elodin said, waving his hand dismissively.
“Let me finish,” Fela said. “When they figured out how to do this, it meant they could restore sight to people who had never been able to see before. These people hadn’t gone blind, they had been born blind.”
Elodin cocked his head curiously.
Fela continued. “After they could see, they were shown objects. A ball, a cube, and a pyramid all sitting on a table.” Fela made the shapes with her hands as she spoke. “Then the physickers asked them which one of the three objects was round.”
Fela paused for effect, looking at all of us. “They couldn’t tell just by looking at them. They needed to touch them first. Only after they touched the ball did they realize it was the round one.”
Elodin threw his head back and laughed delightedly. “Really?” he asked her.
She nodded.
“Fela wins the prize!” Elodin shouted, throwing up his hands. He reached into his pocket and brought out something brown and oblong, pressing it into her hands.
She looked at it curiously. It was a milkweed pod.
“Kvothe hasn’t gone yet,” Brean said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Elodin said in an offhand way. “Kvothe is crap at Interesting Fact.”
I scowled as loudly as I could.
“Fine,” Elodin said. “Tell me what you have.”
“The Adem mercenaries have a secret art called the Lethani,” I said. “It is the key to what makes them such fierce warriors.”
Elodin cocked his head to one side. “Really?” he asked. “What is it?”
“I don’t know,” I said flippantly, hoping to irritate him. “Like I said, it’s secret.”
Elodin seemed to consider this for a moment, then shook his head. “No. Interesting, but not a fact. It’s like saying the Cealdish moneylenders have a secret art called Financia that makes them such fierce bankers. There’s no substance to it.” He looked at me again, expectantly.
I tried to think of something else, but I couldn’t. My head was full of faerie tales and dead-ended research into the Chandrian.
“See?” Elodin said to Brean. “He’s crap.”
“I just don’t know why we’re wasting our time with this,” I snapped.
“Do you have better things to do?” Elodin asked.
“Yes!” I exploded angrily. “I have a thousand more important things to do! Like learning about the name of the wind!”
Elodin held up a finger, attempting to strike a sage pose and failing because of the leaves in his hair. “Small facts lead to great knowing,” he intoned. “Just as small names lead to large names.”
He clapped his hands and rubbed them together eagerly. “Right! Fela! Open your prize and we can give Kvothe the lesson he so greatly desires.”
Fela cracked the dry hu
sk of the milkweed pod. The white fluff of the floating seeds spilled out into her hands.
Master Namer motioned for her to toss it into the air. Fela threw it, and everyone watched the mass of white fluff sail toward the high ceiling of the lecture hall, then fall back heavily to the ground.
“Goddammit,” Elodin said. He stalked over to the bundle of seeds, picked it up, and waved it around vigorously until the air was full of gently floating puffs of milkweed seed.
Then Elodin started to chase the seeds wildly around the room, trying to snatch them out of the air with his hands. He clambered over chairs, ran across the lecturer’s dais, and jumped onto the table at the front of the room.
All the while he grabbed at the seeds. At first he did it one-handed, like you’d catch a ball. But he met with no success, and so he started clapping at them, the way you’d swat a fly. When this didn’t work either, he tried to catch them with both hands, the way a child might cup a firefly out of the air.
But he couldn’t get hold of one. The more he chased, the more frantic he became, the faster he ran, the wilder he grabbed. This went on for a full minute. Two minutes. Five minutes. Ten.
It might have gone on for the entire class period, but eventually he tripped over a chair and tumbled painfully to the stone floor, tearing open the leg of his pants and bloodying his knee.
Clutching his leg, he sat on the ground and let loose with a string of angry cursing the like of which I had never heard in my entire life. He shouted and snarled and spat. He moved through at least eight languages, and even when I couldn’t understand the words he used, the sound of it made my gut clench and the hair on my arms stand up. He said things that made me sweat. He said things that made me sick. He said things I didn’t know it was possible to say.
I expect this might have continued, but while drawing an angry breath, he sucked one of the floating milkweed seeds into his mouth and began to cough and choke violently.
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