Libyrinth

  As he cleared away the breakfast dishes, she went to where she had hidden The Diary of a Young Girl under her pillow. She slipped it into the sleeve of her robe and took her customary spot on the bench at the foot of the bed. “Do you want to hear more of Anne’s story?” she asked Gyneth.

  He turned to look at her. The tension that had hung between them since yesterday’s recital seemed to evaporate, and he nodded his head and took his place at her side.

  About fifteen minutes into the recitation, she slipped the book from her sleeve and opened it to the page from which she’d been reciting. She expected him to react immediately, perhaps to jump up and call for Michander and Siblea to throw her back into the dungeon, but instead he leaned over and glanced at the object in her hands. “What is that?” he asked her.

  Of course. He’d never been out of the Corvariate Citadel. He’d never been to a “liberation.” He’d never seen a book before. She didn’t answer him right away. Instead she put her finger to the line of text she was reciting, and moved it along as she spoke the words, “I sat pressed closely against him.”

  Gyneth bent over closer, peering at the symbols above her finger. Suddenly he sprang up and dove beneath the bench, seizing the iron box from beneath it. He lifted it up and the lid fell off. He looked at the empty box and then, with a cry of rage, threw it across the room. It crashed against the wall beside the door.

  “Yammon’s tonsils! What have you done, you lit witch?” He pointed a shaking finger at the tome in her hands. “That’s the book, isn’t it?” Without waiting for her to answer, he put his hands to his eyes as if he would claw them from his face. He moaned and fell to his knees. “What have you done to me?”

  Well, she’d expected him to be upset, but . . . “It’s okay,” she said lamely. “I haven’t done anything to you. Just shown you some written words, that’s all.”

  “That’s all?” He lowered his hands and stared at her. He was crying. “That’s all? I’ll go blind now, thanks to you! Thanks to you I won’t hear the Song anymore. Why?” He shook his head in bewilderment. “Why would you do that to me?”

  “I-I’m sorry. But none of that is going to happen! You’re not going to go blind! I’m not blind, am I? None of the other Libyrarians are blind. That’s just stupid. And as for not hearing the Song, I can hear the Song and I read.”

  Gyneth simply shook his head and slumped back on his heels. He buried his face in his hands again. “It’s different,” he said. “You’re the Redeemer.”

  “That’s right, I’m your Redeemer. Do you doubt what I tell you?”

  He was silent. Obviously he did. “All right, then,” she said. “How soon do you lose your eyesight?”

  He blinked up at her. “What?”

  “You’ve seen written words. You said you would be struck blind by it. When?”

  His mouth worked. “Ri-right . . .”

  “Right away? Are you blind, then?”

  He shook his head, but looked no less lost as he glanced around the room and then down at his hands. Haly set the book down on the bench and came and sat on the floor in front of him. She took his hands. “So that’s one thing you’ve been taught about the written word that you now know to be wrong.”

  He took a deep breath and blinked rapidly, mastering himself with visible effort. “Y-yes, Holy One,” he whispered.

  “You wait, Gyneth. The Song will be sung the day after tomorrow. You go to services then, and you will hear it, I promise.”

  He didn’t agree or disagree this time. He glanced at the iron box lying on the floor beside the door. “How did you get it open? It was supposed to be safe in there.”

  “I’m the Redeemer. I command powers you don’t even know exist.”

  He took another deep breath. “Why did you show me?”

  “Because I trust you.”

  He shook his head. “You shouldn’t. I should tell Censor Siblea what you’ve done.”

  “Then he’ll take the book away and you’ll never know what happened to Anne.”

  Gyneth nodded and looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “And he might punish you, Redeemer or not.”

  Haly swallowed and remained silent. Gyneth rose but she stayed where she was, sitting on the floor, and watched as he collected the tray from beside the door and left.

  All that night Haly waited for Siblea or Michander to show up, take Anne Frank’s diary away from her, burn it, and then either haul her off to the dungeon or give her another curving scar on her face, but they didn’t. In the morning when Gyneth arrived with her breakfast, he set it down on the table and retreated to his spot by the door, where he waited in grim silence. She tried to catch his eye but he stared straight forward and pretended she wasn’t there.

  She picked at her eggs and potatoes, not really hungry. At length she said, “I’m sorry I didn’t warn you.”

  He swallowed but didn’t reply, and he still wouldn’t look at her.

  “I’m finished,” she said. “You can take the tray away now.”

  The following day she attended services with Siblea and Gyneth in the great amphitheater. She looked down at the hundreds of people on the floor far below, and in the balconies lining the walls, and tried to imagine there being even more of them, as she’d been assured there would be on the day of her presentation. She had that same woozy feeling she’d had the first time she’d looked over the edge of the balcony, and the same little voice inside urged her to jump. She turned around to face Gyneth, who stood in his customary spot near the door to the private balcony. He looked past her, just as he’d been doing since she’d shown him written words. In a few minutes, the truth of what she’d told him would be revealed, but it was obvious he did not believe that. He stood expressionless, like a person condemned. She wanted to say something, grab his hand, anything to reassure him that he wasn’t damned, but she couldn’t because Siblea was there. She turned around again and took her seat.

  The Song swept over her, just as it had before, and she gave herself up to that soaring, swooping, unending sound that wrapped the whole world in its beauty, and brought all things together in harmony. When it was over, she turned around to find Gyneth standing quite as still as he had been before, only now, far from being blank, his face was suffused with wonder and relief. There was a fierce light in his eyes as they met hers, as of one who has seen the truth and will never bow to lies again.

  The first thing to understand is that words are made of letters, and letters are . . . sounds,” said Haly. It was the next day, and she and Gyneth sat on the bench at the foot of her bed, Anne Frank’s diary open between them. “So each little group of letters is a word. And the words sound like the letters they’re made of . . . mostly. Look.” Haly pointed to a word on the page. “This word is ‘cat.’ ”

  “Cat,” repeated Gyneth, peering at the letters on the page. “I don’t know what I thought words would look like when they’re murde—written,” he said. “They look like they’re broken. No wonder everyone thinks they’re dead.”

  “But they’re not. It’s just that you’re not used to looking at them. It’ll take a little while for your eyes to learn how to see them so that they match up with the sounds they represent. But you’ll learn, and then you’ll hear them, too.”

  He looked at her, his eyes bright with hope. “Hear them?”

  “Yes. You will see them and hear them, and they will live in you.”

  He was silent. His gaze slid from her back to the open book. Slowly, he nodded. “Is that a word?” he asked, pointing at the page. “It’s just one letter.”

  “Yes. It is a single letter, but it is also a word. It is the word I. This word”—she moved her finger to the next one—“is ‘sat.’ Say them.”

  “I sat.”

  “Good. The next word is ‘pressed.’ ”

  “I sat pressed.”

  “And the next one is ‘closely.’ ”

  “I sat pressed closely.”

  She was very aware of the warmth of
Gyneth’s thigh against hers. Did he notice her? she wondered. She watched him carefully as they finished the phrase, “I sat pressed closely against him.” His cheeks flushed bright pink, he breathed rapidly, erratically, but then, he was committing the cardinal sin of his religion. She studied the curve of his lips as he spoke the forbidden words, and she wished they were just a pair of clerks at the Libyrinth.

  “You’re doing really well,” Haly told him when they took a break to stretch and drink some water.

  Gyneth gave her a smile, then sighed. “You know, things were easier when all I had to do was obey my teachers and love the Song. Now I have all these questions, and they torment me.” He crossed his arms and paced the room, his voice growing more agitated with every word. “I did not go blind, and I still hear the Song, but I wonder if your teaching has not cursed me all the same. Now I find myself questioning everything.”

  Haly leaned against the window seat. “Like what?”

  He bit his lip and stared at her, as if trying to arrange the words in the proper order before speaking. “Have you noticed that the censors don’t really seem to care about the Redemption?”

  Haly laughed. “I’d say they’re going to an awful lot of trouble over something they don’t care about.”

  Gyneth shrugged. “I mean, they’re excited because you’re going to recite The Book of the Night, and then we’ll have the secret for making Eggs—it’s all they talk about. But they’re not really talking about becoming one with the Song. I mean, if we’re really all one with the Song, then I’m not sure why we’d need a maker of Eggs.”

  “Good point,” said Haly, wondering how to guide Gyneth further down the path of reasoning that he’d started on. As it turned out, she didn’t need to.

  “I think they’re using the Redemption for their own ends. I’m not sure they even believe in the Song. I think . . . they’re using the Song to mesmerize us. To justify destroying the . . . Libyrinth and grabbing all the power for themselves. I-I-I want to be one with the Song, I do. But I’m not sure that’s really what’s going to happen.”

  “The Song is beautiful, Gyneth. No one could help but love it, no one could help but want to be immersed in it forever, but . . . the situation is like the potatoes in Anne Frank’s diary.”

  He gave her a puzzled frown.

  “Anne’s ideas soared. And then eventually she’d come back to the state of the potatoes they were eating—rotten, fresh, plentiful, or sparse. See, you need both—the soaring and the potatoes.”

  A smile curled the corner of his mouth. “Holy One, this humble servant is incapable of following the purity of your logic.”

  She blushed. “What I mean is, you can’t eat a miracle, but at the same time, people have needs beyond the material. There has to be both.”

  “So there isn’t really going to be a Redemption, is there?”

  Haly took his hands. “It won’t be what you imagined, but that doesn’t mean we have to let the censors turn it all into boiled potatoes, either.” She paused. “Shall I tell you what I want the Redemption to be?”

  He squeezed her hands. “Yes, tell me.”

  “All my life, I’ve had the books of the Libyrinth to guide and comfort and teach me. I want everyone to have that. I want everyone to be able to read. I will liberate the Word, but not through song. I will liberate one word at a time, one person at a time, and of all the devout chorus, you are the first. You are doing better all the time, Gyneth. Soon you will hear text as if it were song.”

  The next morning the bottom of the breakfast tray was covered with sand. Gyneth gave no indication that anything was out of the ordinary as he set the tray down and placed her dishes before her. It wasn’t until they sat down for their lesson that he brought the tray with him, along with the fork. With the end of the fork he painstakingly wrote “I sat,” in the sand. “I thought it might help me remember the words,” he said, and the look he gave her was both nervous and exultant.

  Nod had the sense to stay out of sight when Gyneth was there. Sometimes he crept out behind Gyneth, or through the window, and went who knew where for hours on end. Haly tried to get him to spy for her, but with only limited success.

  “Ili sees? What does Nod care what Ili sees? Nod has enough with what Nod sees. Does she know these Singer beasties turn everything into music?”

  “No, Nod. Not Ili sees. Ilysies. The country . . . ? Like where Libyrarian Selene comes from?”

  He scampered up the bedpost and leaped from there to the chandelier, and swung upside down from his knees, blowing raspberries at her.

  The door burst open and Gyneth entered at a trot, his face bright. “Holy One, the censors are ready to present you to—” He stopped dead, staring at Nod. His pupils dilated and he took a step back before rallying. Grim-faced, he seized hold of the marble-topped table beside the door and leaped between Haly and Nod. “Get away from her, you demon!” he shouted, swinging the table at Nod, who sprang to the top of a bedpost, baring his teeth at Gyneth and shrieking inarticulately.

  Gyneth screamed back, charging after him, climbing onto the bed and swinging the table.

  “Gyneth! Stop!” cried Haly, running after him, trying to grab his arm.

  She missed on the first swing, but fortunately, so did Gyneth. He left a large dent in the ceiling beam, and a few splinters of wood rained down on the bed.

  “Gyneth! No!” Haly grabbed both his arms and hauled him down off the bed. “Stop it!” He stared at her, stunned, as she tried to wrest the table from him. “Nod’s not a demon! He’s an—” She stopped herself. Would “imp” be any more reassuring to him? “A friend,” she finished.

  Gyneth looked wildly from Haly to Nod, who scurried beneath the bed, muttering peevishly. “You consort with demons,” he said. It wasn’t a question. He turned from her. She watched his fists clench and unclench at his sides. “Oh, Holy One,” he murmured. “You teach me to read, and I am not damned. Everything you teach me is the exact opposite of what the censors have taught me. In you my own faith is made unrecognizable to me. Now I wonder if it will survive the revelation of such a Redeemer as you.”

  “Nod is from the Libyrinth. He keeps it clean. He can be annoying, but he won’t hurt you,” she said. The words were inadequate.

  Censor Siblea appeared in the open doorway. “Gyneth, is our Redeemer ready? We must hurry. They are gathering in the—” He stared at Haly and Gyneth, frowning as he registered the expressions on their faces. “What is wrong?”

  Haly looked at Gyneth. He could reveal Nod’s existence to Siblea, and consign her to the dungeon for the rest of her days. Gyneth blinked and brushed his hands on his robes. “Nothing, Censor. There was a mouse in the room. It frightened our Redeemer, and I attempted to kill it, but it escaped.”

  Haly felt her heart start up again, swelling with every beat.

  Drums echoed through the vast amphitheater. Haly resisted the urge to hide behind Siblea. They were in the mouth of the statue of Yammon, behind the platform where the chorus sang the Song. “There is nothing to fear, Holy One,” he reassured her. “You know the song you are to sing. When the high censor introduces you, you will step forward and sing it. That’s all.”

  That and travel to the Libyrinth to perform the Redemption, after which the Singers would destroy her home. There had been word that The Book of the Night was no longer in Ilysies. Gyneth told her they had it on good authority that the princess—it took her a moment to realize that must be Selene—was taking it to the Libyrinth.

  But why would Selene do that? Haly had given herself up to the Singers so that Selene could get the book to Ilysies where it would be safe. Why would she jeopardize that now? All the previous night Haly had lain awake, beseeching the Seven Tales that it wasn’t so, that this news was only a misdirection on Selene’s part—a clever ruse like the Goat might perform, or perhaps simply a mistake, the province of her own guardian, the Fly.

  “Members of the Righteous Chorus, the time of the Redemption has come.” Or
rin’s voice floated back to them from the platform. “I present to you your Redeemer, Halcyon the Libyrarian.”

  The roar of the crowd was deafening, drowning out even the drums. Haly stepped out onto the platform. Hundreds of feet below, masses of Singers cheered and swayed, a human ocean of religious hysteria. She did not think anyone would hear her, but when she opened her mouth, the entire amphitheater fell silent, and her small, high voice rang out clear and true. “Now the time foretold has come, when Song and Word will be as one. Righteous chorus lift each voice. The Redemption is at hand—rejoice!”

  When the last note faded the cheering burst forth again—a sound that was a song of its own sort, an unstoppable tidal wave of passion and longing.

  That afternoon Haly sat at her window, watching the soldiers. When their practice was finished, the figures filed out through a gate into the city. The gate shut, and the small fraction of men who remained moved to a similar gate on the other side of the courtyard, which they slowly lifted to reveal a ramp descending into darkness. Other men appeared at the top of the ramp, hauling on ropes. Gradually, like the interminable rise of the seventh moon, a circular, gray shape emerged from the darkness.

  It was the horn from the dungeon, now completed. At the end of its curving funnel, where the mouthpiece would be on a normal horn, was a small oval bulb no bigger than Haly’s head. While the team of Singers with the ropes positioned the Horn of Yammon, those who had opened the gate wheeled a stone slab at least fifteen feet thick into position at the opposite side of the courtyard. The slab was at least as thick as the walls of the Libyrinth.

  A Singer came forth holding a glowing Egg in his hands. Haly wondered if it was the same Egg that had been recovered from the vault. He climbed a scaffold up to the bulb at the tip of the horn, opened a panel on its surface, and placed the Egg inside. He closed the panel, turned a dial at the base of the bulb, and retreated back down the scaffold. The men hastened away from the horn and stood watching from the top of the ramp.