“We only have a month,” Ylfing said. “We can’t go all wild and frantic like yesterday. It’s a waste of time. So we’ll make a list of all the important things you have to tell me, and then you can tell me about each one and I’ll write it down.”
“However you want,” I said. The monk’s-puffs Ylfing had brought lay in my hands. They’d gone cold during my interrogation about Ivo, and now they were nowhere near as appealing. The twist of brown paper they were wrapped in crinkled a little, and I set it aside.
“Well, there’s definitely no time for languages, and I can learn those myself wherever I go. So we’d better start with things I can’t learn myself, or things that are hard to learn, things that take a lot of time.”
“If that’s how you want to do it.”
“So we’ll go alphabetically. By . . . by the name of the place, I guess.”
“The Ammat Archipelago.”
Ylfing nodded and bent over his lap desk. The pen nib scratched. He was a very painstaking scribe. “The . . . Ammat . . . Archipelago,” he mumbled. “Okay. Go.”
“You’re going to be giving away everything you own while you’re there, so don’t get attached to objects, and leave anything you particularly care about on your ship, or in a safe place with a friend somewhere else. When you meet someone, they’re going to give you a gift, and you have to take it, and you have to have something to give back to them—”
“Wait, wait, hold on!” my stupid apprentice cried. “Everything . . . you . . . own . . . Give me just a minute to catch up.”
“Ylfing,” I said, “we don’t have time now to write it down.” It was a great struggle not to shout at him, but we didn’t have time for that, either. Gods, though, the more I thought about Ivo’s little band of revolutionaries, the more frustrated I got that I couldn’t go out and handle them myself. “Why don’t you listen closely and then write it down later?”
“But I might forget—”
“Ylfing. We don’t have time. You know it. I know it.” My chest was getting all tight again, probably just another heart attack or something, nothing to worry about. “I’ll tell you a secret that only master-Chants know: all Chants forget things. You can’t transpose one person’s knowledge into another person without parts of it getting muddled or lost. It’s all right to forget some of it. You just need to learn to recognize what’s important and remember that. Or remember how to remember. It’s not a science, my boy, it’s an art. And art is messy. And that’s okay.”
He took a breath, and then I noticed that he was trembling. At first I thought it was from the cold. I’ve never claimed that I wasn’t a fool. “Ivo says . . . Ivo says he’s going to help Consanza with your appeal.”
“Don’t cry,” I said immediately. I don’t know what I would have done if he cried. I’ve never been very good at it when strangers do it, let alone people I know, even if it is just my lovesick fool of an apprentice. I’m not afraid of it, mind you. It’s just very awkward for everyone. It wasn’t like I could do anything but reach through the bars and sort of pat him on the shoulder anyway.
“I’m not crying,” he said, but his voice was all thick. Made my heart stop in my chest, I tell you.
So: “Don’t do it,” says I.
“I’m not,” he said, and he seemed to have gotten it under control a little more that time.
“The Ammat Archipelago,” I said quickly. “Tens of thousands of islands, hundreds of thousands of tribes. Live in little huts by the water. I’ve told you pieces about them before, I think.” Drilling facts, yes, that’s what he needed. “See what you can remember—magic?”
“Shamans,” Ylfing said. He swiped his sleeve over his face and sat up straighter.
“Go on.”
“They—they have a bond with a spirit, and they can’t cross water.”
“Can’t they?”
“Uh . . .” He sniffed loudly. “Well, they can, the shamans can, if they really had to, but it’d break the spirit bond and they’d have to start over. They’d lose all their ability and start from the very beginning, because it’s the spirit that does the actual work for them.”
“And is it learnable, or blood-bound?”
“The magic? I . . . I don’t know.”
“No one does. Not everyone can be a shaman. It’s rare. And not enough foreigners stick around with them long enough to find out.”
Ylfing nodded and glanced at his paper.
I shook my head. “Ask questions. They’ll help you remember.”
“Yes. Uh. Who—who becomes a shaman? Is there a pattern?”
“They say it has to do with souls. For example, an old soul in a new body, or someone whose soul doesn’t fit right in their body, or a body with more than one soul in it, or half a soul. Or they have a full soul, but it’s a particularly bright one. But who knows what any of that means? This is what I was told.”
We continued in that vein for several hours. Ylfing got some practice at asking the right questions, I got a good lecture into him about things he ought to know. Not too many real facts, after we’d finished discussing the Ammatan. It wasn’t just about collecting bits of information about people—it was about telling it. Matching the person to the right story—you remember what I said before? The right story fits like a familiar shoe.
Towards noon, Ylfing went out to get us a bit of lunch and himself some fresh air. Thank goodness—I don’t know how long it would have taken us to hear the news otherwise. He came back in all aflutter with it. Anfisa Zofiyat, Queen of Pattern, had been arrested by a team of Order guards on suspicion of harboring a fugitive, accessory to witchcraft, and, confusingly, treasonous espionage.
Ylfing scribbled off a message to Consanza and loped out again to find someone to run it across town to her office, against my advice. Didn’t see why he thought it was necessary to tell her about this or ask to talk to her—I suppose it was a significant event, but I was already sentenced. This would only distract her from working on my appeal.
It took another precious hour of the day to settle Ylfing down enough for us to return to work. Boys his age are jittery, flighty, not prone to great sweeps of concentration, unless it’s on the contents of their trousers.
I allowed him to write for this one—told him a great list of all the places he could go that knew about the Chants, places where we were welcomed, places where he should exercise great caution. I finished that list with, “Of course, remember never to get arrested for witchcraft in Nuryevet. You’ll regret it to the end of your days.” It was supposed to get a bit of a giggle out of him, but it just made his nose go red and his eyes well up again while I flapped my hands and squawked at him to get himself under control. Chants can’t go around flinging their emotions about willy-nilly.
He sobered soon after that, and asked how he should . . . Gods great and small, he asked how he should sink his homeland beneath the waves, if the month should pass without much luck.
“Can’t,” said I. “You’d do that at the end of your apprenticeship.”
“I know, but you said I’d never find another Chant again, probably.”
Crossed my arms at him. “No, you probably never will.”
“Even if I went to Kaskinen?”
“Even then! What do you think we have, universities? Perhaps a secret conclave, a coffeehouse where we all meet up? The Chants haven’t been from Kaskinen for thousands of years. They belong to everywhere now. And everyone.”
He fidgeted and shrugged a bit. “Surely there’s people somewhere who know where the other Chants are, then.”
“Only in the vaguest of terms. ‘Oh yes, one of them went east from Mangar-Khagra a month ago.’ Good luck with that. Have you gotten a sense of how big the world is, child? And how small we are? You’d be lucky to run across a second Chant, and luckier still if he or she didn’t have an apprentice along already.”
“Just give me directions! I’ll follow them to the letter. I’ll learn everything I can—please.”
“D
irections?” I snapped. “Directions for the next seven years of your life? And leave you to wander this world on your own with perhaps a tenth of the knowledge you need to be a proper Chant? We haven’t even touched on any of the rites—”
“I’ve never seen you do rites. What are they?”
“All right, they’re not rites so much as . . . tenets. Laws. Reasons for . . . for why.”
“I don’t need a why.”
“Stupid child, of course you need a why. You need a why for yourself, but you probably already have that one. Wouldn’t have left Hrefnesholt if you didn’t have your personal why. There’s other whys. A personal why can change. The others don’t.”
“You mean for why Chants exist? I know that. You tell me that all the time.”
I flapped my hand to wave off his words. “I could tell you there’s a clearing in the woods, and a lake in the middle of the clearing, and an island in the lake, and a tree on the island—and you could see it in your mind’s eye, but I haven’t told you why the tree is important, or the taste of the fruit that grows on it, or the kind of beetle that dimples the surface of the water at the edge of the shore, or the smell of the breeze at the very cusp of spring. I might have told you a very shallow why before, but it’s not the really important part.”
“What is, then?”
“I can’t tell you—it’s not something that can be told in words, boy, otherwise any fool could be a Chant. It’s . . . a story, and the only way to truly know a story is to hear the story, and this is a very, very long one. It’s something that has to be learned. Uncovered slowly. Savored. Like someone beautiful lying beneath a sheet and smiling at you.”
“But I want to be a Chant. I don’t want to go home. I don’t want home, I don’t need it.”
I think I must have been getting pneumonia or something from being in that dank cell so long. There was an uncomfortable lump in my throat. I poured myself a cup of water and swallowed it down. “I’ll teach you all I can in the time that we have. And . . . and the appeal might go well.”
“What if . . . Well, what if it doesn’t?” he said, with a wretched look. “What if I just kept . . . going? Without you?”
I shrugged. “That’s on you, boy. People do.”
“But I wouldn’t be a Chant.”
“I suppose you could call yourself a Chant if you couldn’t bear to do otherwise.”
“But I wouldn’t be a Chant. I wouldn’t be the best Chant.”
“No such thing as the best Chant, boy.” He wrapped his arms around himself. I heard footsteps down the hall. “That might be the guard. Don’t make a fuss if they’ve come to throw you out for the day.” It wasn’t, thank goodness—Ylfing wasn’t in a state to go wandering the streets by himself. He could have gotten mugged or something. (Like when those damn urchins took my turn-toe boots off me in Map Sut, may they have all died early and gruesome deaths.)
“So,” I said to him. “You need to explore the whys. Why can we ply our trade wherever we can speak the language? Why do people feed us when there’s a famine, even when the other beggars on the street starve?” Ylfing opened his mouth, but I held up a hand. “It’s a question for you to think about. Not for today, not for the next week. This is a question Chants ask themselves their whole lives: Why can we do what we do?” He nodded. I gestured for his paper and ink. “Hand those to me and I’ll show you something.” I drew a large square with a gap in one side, and I picked up a few bits of debris from the ground—a chip of stone, a short piece of twig, a leaf that someone had tracked in, that kind of thing. I placed them on the piece of paper and said to Ylfing, “Watch.”
I didn’t really pay attention to what I was doing, I just sort of poked the things around randomly, made them crash into one another, made them go through the gap and around the square I’d drawn. . . . Carried this on for thirty or forty seconds while Ylfing watched intently. Then I used one of the twigs to flick the leaf off the paper onto the floor. “There. What did you see?”
He took a breath. “The big man who owns the house, he was bullying his children, and then one girl went outside to see if anyone was coming, and she and the boy looked around for something, and then they went back inside and saw the man intimidating the other girl, and then they all killed him and got rid of the body.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “That wasn’t what you saw.”
“Yes, it was!”
“No, you saw me playing with a piece of paper and some bits of trash. You saw me moving them around as the whimsy took me. You didn’t see a big man, or a house, or three children. You saw paper, and a leaf, twigs, a pebble. So where’d these characters come from? Where’d the story come from?”
“Don’t pretend I’m stupid, Chant, you made it up. It’s like puppets, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t make up shit, lad. Didn’t even make up this game. Chants made it up generations and generations ago, showing their stupid apprentices what people are like. What did you see?”
“Twigs and a pebble and a leaf and a square drawn on a piece of paper,” he said sullenly, still not convinced.
“And your little human brain grabbed onto them and tried to make sense of them. Entirely random events, and you forced a story onto them.”
“It just happened, I couldn’t help it—”
“Quiet, boy, it’s not a bad thing. Would you listen to me? I’m trying to make a point.”
“Fine. Fine, what’s the point?”
“The point is that I want you to take this paper and—are you seeing Ivo tonight?” His blush was answer enough. “Show this to Ivo. You can use coins or a saltpot instead, or bits of bread and cheese. Whatever you like. Clear your mind, and just toy with the damn things. Just move them around, and then ask him what he saw.”
“Fine.”
“You can try it on Consanza, too, if you like, but I daresay she’ll just say she saw bread and crumbs and paper.” I snorted. “Useless woman. No respect for illusions.”
Ylfing shook off the twigs and pebbles and rolled up the paper. “Is this something to think about for years too?”
“Obviously. You can show it to anyone—drunks in a tavern, farmer’s daughters, nobles and peasants and merchants, women soldiers you meet on the road, smelly shepherd boys. . . . Just don’t bother explaining to them what it means. Don’t point out to them that they didn’t see whatever it is they see. Most people don’t take well to being told the story in their head is wrong. And you can learn something about people from what they see in random movements like this. It’s like reading tea leaves or looking for constellations.”
“Can I explain it to Ivo if he asks?”
I shrugged. “You can tell anyone you like, it’s just not always a good idea. Especially kings and folk like that, people who can have you killed or . . . you know, thrown in jail for witchcraft. Just say it’s a story someone once showed you and you thought it was an interesting little piece of whimsy. And listen to what they tell you about it.” I took a breath. “It’s not going to be easy, if you choose to go it alone. You’re young, you haven’t learned the things that make people people.”
“I know some things,” he grumbled.
Well, he was Hrefni, after all. They have this way about them, always assessing their own skill levels and those of the people around them. Very realistic about it too; only children bother with vanity in Hrefnesholt. So I shifted my viewpoint and spoke to Ylfing as one Hrefni would to another: “You’re not the best and you’re not the worst,” I said, and he relaxed. Amazing what speaking the same language will do for two people trying to have a conversation.
“Yes, that’s true. Do you think I could do it? By myself?”
“I don’t know. If I knew, you wouldn’t be my apprentice anymore—I’d have let you go if I knew you couldn’t do it at all. I’d have had you sink your homeland beneath the waves and sent you off as a journeyman if I knew you could. I don’t know either way. That’s why you’re still here.” He nodded and dropped his head. I pulled my
horse blanket around my shoulders. “Would you like to keep working, or do you think that’s enough twisting of your brain for the day?”
“Both,” he whispered.
“Go take a walk. Buy some more monk’s-puffs. Splash some cold water on your face; it’ll do you good.”
Well, that was the night that everything changed. I even heard some of it, distantly: a great commotion off somewhere else in the prison, shouting and doors slamming and running feet. It sounded noisier than it usually did when new prisoners came in—some of them screamed, but it was mostly quiet except for the creak of cell doors echoing down the long, bare stone chambers, the clash as they slammed closed. People calling out, weeping sometimes.
But this much disquiet and fuss in the night? I’d been there long enough to know that wasn’t usual. It was days and days before I knew what was going on, but for your sake I’ll describe it as it happened.
As I said: a great commotion in the night, and then Ylfing wasn’t allowed in to see me—not that I knew about that, either. He just . . . didn’t turn up. And didn’t turn up. And didn’t turn up. I thought for a few days that he’d been sidetracked or that he’d fallen on misfortune and then that he’d decided he didn’t want to be a Chant after all. I had some wishful fantasy that he’d set up with that Ivo; at least then he’d have an ally at his back. In barbarian countries like these, you need all the allies you can get your hands on—no pun intended.
But Consanza didn’t show up either, and that was odd too.
So all I heard was what I could glean from Vasili, my little friend amongst the guards, who brought me my two meals per day, my allotted basket of pathetic sticks and twisted-straw logs for my fire, and a relatively fresh bucket. Vasili was tense. More than usual, I mean, all the guards were—more sullen and stoic than usual too. I kept asking and asking for someone to send word to my advocate, or to my apprentice, and it was only when I began asking to speak to Vihra Kylliat or to send a letter to Taishineya Tarmos that I started getting any idea that something bigger might be afoot. It was the look in their eyes, a sudden startled twitch when I spoke the names of the Primes. It was the sudden disinterest Vasili had in hearing anything I had to say. It was the distracted air, the efficient way they shoved food at me and left instead of lingering for a verbal jab or a cold, wary glance. I wasn’t worth their breath anymore. I was slated for execution still—both dead and alive, in some sense, stuck in this little iron box underground.
A Conspiracy of Truths Page 18