The Book of the Night

by Pearl North

  She powered right through a couple of gusts that might have sent her spinning again, and a moment later, she actually felt the winds lessening. A little flicker of hope flared to life in her heart and she maintained her course. The winds lessened a bit more and she began to make out vague outlines in the cloud of sand and air around her. Encouraged, she pressed on and at last she broke through the storm system—to find herself twenty feet from a dense forest of pines.

  Panic gripped her. The trees were spaced no more than a hand’s breadth apart. If she crashed into them at her current speed, they’d tear her apart. But backing up would put her inside the maelstrom once more and then she’d have the storm and the trees both at the same time—even worse. So she pulled up sharply, hoping to clear the tops of the trees. The strain of it was overwhelming. She felt as if her heart would burst, like her joints were pulled apart, like every blood vessel in her body was burning.

  But she did it. She cleared those trees. Relief made her weak. Continuing her climb, she drew a deep breath. Below her, the storm hit the trees. What she hadn’t counted on was the damping effect of the trees on the winds. Or the way the storm would respond to such a barrier by surging up and over it.

  This time, when the storm took her again, her resources were spent. The first wind that caught her sent her tumbling, her vision a jumble of sand and air and trees. She struck a tree and bounced off of it, her mind reeling. Pain and disorientation added to her exhaustion and she was powerless against the raging winds. The ground rose up to welcome her home at last, and then all was darkness.

  8

  Thesia

  While the tollkeeper held the gun on Haly and Gyneth, they disembarked from their vehicle. He motioned for them to sit on the back of his cart. Still training the gun on them, he took two sets of manacles from the conveyance. “Hold out your hands,” he told them.

  “You don’t need to do that,” said Haly. Her heart pounded. She’d thought she was all done with those things when she left the Singers’ dungeon.

  “I have work to do and I can’t guard you at the same time,” he said. He aimed the gun at Gyneth’s forehead. “You first, behind your back, please.”

  “Gyneth…” Haly began, but then she stopped. What could she tell him? Don’t do it? She looked into the tollkeeper’s dark eyes. They were implacable. He’d shoot if Gyneth didn’t do as he was told.

  Haly heard the click of the first manacle, and seconds later, the other.

  “Now you.” The tollkeeper aimed the gun at Haly.

  What would happen if they both ran? Would he miss them? For a moment Haly stared at Gyneth as all of this passed through her mind. But she couldn’t tell him. One warning and the tollkeeper would shoot. She was confident of that.

  The cold embrace of the iron around her wrists was like the unwelcome return of a despised master. Her heart felt heavier than her hands.

  The tollkeeper looped a third chain between both their wrists and locked it to a loop on the floor of the cart.

  “Let’s see, use of irons, two pounds per person per hour,” muttered the tollkeeper, scribbling away at the form.

  The manacles around her wrists and ankles were heavy, already chafing her skin. Beside her Gyneth stood taut as a wire, his cheeks flushed with barely suppressed outrage. The tollkeeper took a tally of all their possessions and declared them worth five pounds.

  Then he returned to his conveyance and snatched up a crowbar. He twirled it, approaching their wagon.

  He spent a moment or two looking over the box-frame structure, then fitted one end of the pry bar beneath a corner hasp. There was a ping, and the fitting sprang into the air as if it had the lead in Swan Lake. So quickly it was hard to follow, the tollkeeper pivoted the bar and pulled a second hasp free. He caught it in his hat and by the time Haly was done marveling at that, he had spun again, this time leaping to the bed of the wagon. He pulled five nails from the backboard in as many seconds.

  Within fifteen minutes his hat was full and what had been their wagon lay on the ground—a stack of boards and four axle-less wheels. Haly had forgotten her shackles.

  “Use of tools for reclaiming of toll due,” muttered the tollkeeper, “five pounds per minute.”

  The wagon and the horses’ tack yielded one-and-a-quarter pounds of metal.

  Haly and Gyneth sat on the back of the tollkeeper’s cart watching forests and mountains and sheer rock cliffs whizzed by on either side. The noise was deafening, not just because of the clicking of the gears but also because of the rattling of all the metal hanging from the frames.

  Haly leaned against Gyneth, taking comfort from the warmth of him. “We’ll get out of this,” she said, shouting to be heard over all the noise.

  He didn’t answer her. He stared off into the distance, where the line of the road disappeared over the horizon.

  * * *

  Near dusk they came to a place where the road cut right through the middle of a mountain. Sheer cliffs towered above them on either side, banded with colors of different kinds of rock. The cliff walls were pitted with tiny square holes and lights could be seen inside.

  “Do people live in there?” asked Haly.

  “Live and work,” said the tollkeeper. He pointed and Haly saw baskets rising and descending between the openings, suspended from pulley arrangements anchored to the rock, and she noticed smaller holes from which steam and sometimes smoke emanated.

  As they crested a hill the tollkeeper pulled a lever and they coasted downhill. A distant clanging emanated from deep within the mountain, but another sound soon drowned it out.

  Beyond the mountain, a city came into view. It looked like a toy, glittering gold and silver in the fading rays of the sun. Spires and rooftops caught the sun and made her blink. Haly heard a constant whirring hum, as of thousands upon thousands of machines, like the tollkeeper’s conveyance, all spinning at the same time. “That’s Thesia?” she said.

  “Yes, the Clockwork City,” said the tollkeeper.

  She had never heard it called that before.

  The road led down into the city. The twilight streets were lit with lanterns hanging from posts, and up and down the smooth, paved lanes whizzed and whirred a variety of bicycles and motorcars the likes of which Haly had never seen.

  She glanced at Gyneth and saw him staring rapt at a giant wheel with a seat in its center, and a woman dressed in a form-fitting gown and an elaborate hat turning a crank with her hand, propelling herself down the avenue. She turned a corner and nearly collided with a low-slung steam-operated car with six wheels and three smokestacks, each one of them burping smoke in little puffs as it rolled along.

  They passed factories and shops selling everything from buttons to grandfather clocks. Gyneth shouted and ducked. A bird made of brass barely missed him as it flew through the air with a message in its beak.

  Most of the devices were operated by the same kind of spring as the tollkeeper’s conveyance: a spring made of a flat strip of metal, wound into a coil and slowly allowed to unwind in stages, powering the motions of the gears and pinions. “It’s all the clockwork,” she said to Gyneth. “That’s what’s making that sound.”

  Beside her, Gyneth gasped. He tugged her sleeve and pointed.

  Towering above all the other spires and rooftops was a gigantic clock. Toothed disks the size of the dome of the Great Hall at the Libyrinth turned in stately motion as the hands marked out the hours and minutes. There was something terrifying about it—as if it were built on a scale beyond the scope of the human mind. The tollkeeper saw them gawking. “The clockmaker’s greatest work,” he said. “Fortunately we are only going to the Department of Compensation.”

  He brought them to a halt in front of a large building that stood across the city’s central square from the clock tower. The building was faced with toothed gears of all shapes and sizes, interconnected with one another, but to what purpose Haly could only guess. She glanced at Gyneth, and saw his eyes following each gear to the next, searching
for the function of the whole. If anyone could figure it out, it would be Gyneth.

  The tollkeeper removed their chains and walked them, at gunpoint, to the building. As they stepped on the first of the stairs leading to the door, it sank beneath their weight just a fraction of an inch. There was a distinct click, and then one of the largest gears, resting above the double doors of the entranceway, began to turn, driving all the other gears into motion with it. The doors opened and chimes rang, announcing their approach.

  “So that’s it,” said Haly. “It’s the world’s most elaborate doorbell.”

  Gyneth tilted his head, his shrewd gaze following the action of the mechanism. “I wonder if that’s all.”

  Once through the doors, they found themselves in a large circular hall with gleaming white walls. Accents of gilt graced the woodwork, and the floor was white and tan marble in a checkerboard pattern. Haly and Gyneth’s chains chimed against the polished stone as they moved.

  They crossed the echoing marble floor to one of the gilt-limned panels that lined it. At the pressure of the tollkeeper’s hand the panel sank inward with a click and then rose up, disappearing into the wall above it.

  The hallway behind it was decorated in a fashion similar to the grand hall they left behind, but the next door they came to opened with the simple latch mechanism to which Haly and Gyneth were accustomed.

  Inside a row of chairs stood along one wall, facing a long desk and seven chairs that stood on a raised platform at the other end of the room.

  In the middle of the desk sat a wooden box with a slot in the front and a metal cylinder mounted on top of it. A coiled funnel protruded from the back, widening into a flared cone that resembled a large lily.

  “Sit down. The Compensation Council will arrive shortly to hear your case.”

  Haly and Gyneth took seats on the hard wooden chairs facing the desk and the tollkeeper stood at the door, his hands folded behind his back.

  After a little while, a door on the side of the room opened and five people filed in, ascended the platform, and took seats behind the desk. Two of them were men in long black robes—Singers, presumably. They were a sharp contrast to the other three, all of whom were dressed in the epitome of Thesian fashion. That much, at least, had not changed.

  Taking their cues from industrial-era Earth, the two women and the man wore fitted jackets and elaborate neck cloths. The women wore skirts with bustles in the back, and hats piled high with feathers and flowers. The man wore trousers and equestrian boots, and a top hat with a small clockwork train that ran around and around the brim.

  Once they had seated themselves, the tollkeeper stepped before them, extended one leg forward with the toe pointed, and bowed. “Madam Chair, Your Excellencies, it is my honor to present to you our latest case.”

  Haly expected the tollkeeper to introduce them to the compensation board, but instead he took the form that he had filled out after stopping them on the road. He fed it into the slot in the front of the device that was sitting on the table. The paper disappeared inside and the cylinder on top of the box rotated. It was difficult to see from where they sat, but it appeared that needles jutted up from underneath and pierced the cylinder at various intervals. Then, there was a small whoomf and smoke issued forth from the tube next to the horn. It was a smokestack, she realized. Then the cylinder, now covered with small indentations, shifted positions and began to rotate again, this time over a series of thin metal spokes. A voice issued from the trumpet at the top of the box. In a brassy monotone, it said, “Let it be known to the authorities of the Compensation Board that on the fifty-ninth day of the second year, two persons identifying themselves as Haly and Gyneth of the Community at the Libyrinth were found traveling on the Southern Road in an unlawful manner, having failed to pay the toll and, upon apprehension by the tollkeeper, being without resources to pay their fine.” The sound was remarkably clear. So this was how they compromised with the Singers. Haly was struck by the ingenuity of it.

  The voice went on to enumerate the weight they owed in bronze, copper, iron, or silver, and the various fines they owed, in a complicated system made no easier to follow for being delivered orally. “Noncitizen Haly and Noncitizen Gyneth jointly owe the People’s Republic of Thesia the grand total of seventy-five pounds of iron, or its equivalent in other metals or labor, such determination to be made by the Compensation Board,” it finished at last.

  The woman whom the tollkeeper had adressed as Madam Chair removed the cylinder from the device and placed it in a case. “We have heard the tollkeeper’s report,” she said. “I now call this meeting to order. Given that the perpetrators in question are noncitizens, it is customary to give them an opportunity to address the board.”

  Haly and Gyneth stood. “We were invited here by the first administrator,” said Haly, holding out the letter the courier had given them. “We were promised much more than seventy-five pounds, as you’ll see, to come and look into a storm of some kind.”

  The members of the board looked at one another. “There is no such thing as a first administrator,” said the chair.

  A chill went down Haly’s spine. “No. Something’s wrong. You were a monarchy only two years ago, and there was a revolution, and now … now … I had the impression you’d become some sort of republic, with administrators and … no?”

  “We are a republic, and have been for fifty years, ever since the clockmaker general came. It is clear you know nothing of our country. Unfortunately, that does not exempt you from obeying its laws while you are here.”

  Gyneth stood. “We are unfamiliar with the laws and customs of the New Republic of Thesia, but your ignorance is far more dire. Standing before you is the one foretold by Yammon’s prophecy, the Redeemer of the Word,” he said, gesturing to Haly. “The Redemption is accomplished. She has united Word and Song and the Libyrinth is liberated.”

  The members of the board whispered among themselves. Then the chair, who was the oldest of them, leaned forward. “So you are this Redeemer we have heard so much of. Is it true that you hear the voices of the books and that you brought about the Redemption?”

  Before Haly could answer, Gyneth stepped forward. “Yes, it is true. I, Gyneth, subaltern of Censor Siblea himself, was privileged to be present at the blessed event.”

  “I asked her, not you. You will refrain from further speech unless asked a direct question.”

  Gyneth opened his mouth but Haly nudged him. “What he says is true,” she said. “I can hear the voices of books.”

  “What other special abilities do you have?”

  “Other special abilities? What makes you think I have other—”

  “We have heard that you are one with the Song,” said one of the men in robes.

  “Oh. Yes. The Song is with me. I … hear it inside myself.”

  The two Singers bent their heads together and the woman in the middle craned her neck to listen. The two other members of the board, on the opposite end of the table, looked rather put out.

  The whispering came to a stop and one of the Singers said, “Well, surely, that must give you other capacities beyond the mortal realm.”

  Oh. She’d never thought of that. “I … I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? What have you done to explore your gift?”

  The expressions on their faces sharpened Haly’s embarrassment. “Um … the Song gives me strength. It … keeps me centered and helps me make wise decisions.” Sometimes.

  The Singer at the far end leaned over. He was a fair-haired man in his midthirties. “You mean to say you have not explored your gift?”

  Haly shrugged. “I’ve been a bit busy.”

  The woman looked at her colleagues, then struck a wooden block with a little mallet. The sharp sound punctuated the buzzing of conversation. “We will discuss this matter further. Tollkeeper, take the prisoners to the waiting room while we reach a decision.”

  * * *

  The waiting room was small and stuffy. The tollk
eeper directed them to a bench and then took a seat in a chair facing them. A sudden wave of exhaustion swept over Haly. It had been a very long day already, and there was no end in sight. She leaned against Gyneth and closed her eyes.

  “They are ready for you.”

  Haly struggled to awaken. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. She could have done with a longer nap. The room was dim. Outside the window, the sky was dark. “How long have we been in here?” she asked Gyneth.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. He tilted his head and raised one shoulder, to wipe the drool from the side of his mouth.

  “Come along now, hurry. Don’t keep them waiting,” said the tollkeeper.

  “Who’s out protecting the road from unlawful use?” asked Gyneth.

  The tollkeeper ignored him. He held the door open and gestured for them to go through.

  Gyneth leaned close and whispered in her ear. “It’s just him right now, and there are two of us…”

  But they were in the depths of a strange building in a strange city. She shook her head.

  They returned to the room they’d been in before. This time the compensation board was already seated. The chair stood.

  “The traveler’s code is clear on the matter of unlawful travel. Perpetrators are to work off the balance of their fee, plus penalties, in a compensation facility of the board’s choosing. Given the extent of your crime, you owe the People’s Republic of Thesia a debt that will take years to pay off in metal. However, in light of your unique nature, it may be that you can perform for us other services instead.”

  “What kind of services?”

  “That will be determined by the clockmaker general. You will be placed into her custody, to serve her as she sees fit, until such time as your debt is repaid.”