Alphabet of Thorn

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Yes,” she said, her eyes straying to the book of thorns beside them. She heard Laidley sigh and met his eyes quickly. “Yes,” she said again. “I will. Today. Thank you, Laidley.”

  The midday gong summoned them; he said, “Come to the refectory with me.”

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  “Come with me. You missed supper last night.”

  “No, I—” She stopped. She had indeed; she had slipped out later to pilfer food from the kitchens for herself and Bourne. Laidley showed no signs of leaving without her. She glanced around covertly between strands of hair. No sign of Bourne. “Laidley—”

  “Come,” he said, getting to his feet. “If you want me to help you, you can’t let those thorns skew your life into something unrecognizable. There’s enough in Raine to fear already without adding a dead emperor.”

  He held out his hand. She took it after a moment, allowed him to hoist her to her feet. His face had flushed shyly at the touch; he glanced at her, then away. I have to tell him, she thought. About Bourne. I have to—

  “Your hands are cold,” Laidley said.

  She folded them into fists, followed him out. “I know. Laidley—”

  “What?”

  If I tell him, she thought, then two of us will know, and it will be twice as dangerous for the three of us.

  “What?” he asked again as they wound through the hallways, following the smells of mutton and hot bread.

  “Nothing.”

  She heard Master Croysus’s vigorous voice above all the noise in the refectory before they even reached it.

  He was standing between the fire and the librarians’ table, eating mutton stew and dispensing news at the same time. His eyes flashed at Nepenthe when she entered; he saluted her with his spoon, chewing and talking at the same time.

  “The queen’s counselors think that her army will stop the Lord of Seale long before he reaches the plain. They are gambling on it. If he is not stopped and he reaches the plain, then we will all be trapped here.”

  “Why doesn’t she—”

  “Because she doesn’t dare. If she lets the rulers summon their own armies, they may not be content with fighting only Ermin of Seale. With her army busy elsewhere, any one of them could attack the First Crown.” He swallowed visibly, spooned another bite into his mouth. “All this is making me nervous,” he added. “I eat more when I’m nervous.”

  The librarians queried one another silently. Where would we go? their faces asked. How could we rescue thousands of years of writing collected here from every realm that has ever existed?

  “The library has been under siege before,” Daimon said calmly. “Several times. We bolt the outer doors and tighten our belts.”

  “It may not come to that, if Ermin of Seale is stopped quickly enough,” Master Croysus said.

  “Is there any Crown,” someone wondered, “absolutely loyal to the First Crown, whose army the queen could depend on to fight for her?”

  Everyone thought; nobody answered. Nepenthe, filling her bowl, tried to warm her fingers against the crockery. She sat down; as always, Laidley sat beside her. Someone gusted to her other side, put down a newly-filled bowl.

  “There you are,” Master Croysus said. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ve been distracted. I’ll work on the fish this afternoon.”

  “I wish you would. If the queen changes her mind and lets us go, we’ll all be in a graceless scramble to get out. I would hate to abandon the fish. Did you figure out what the pearls meant?”

  She had to unscramble that hastily. “Oh. No. But it did occur to me that it might be someone’s name.”

  “Possibly, possibly…” He was eyeing her strangely; his thoughts were not on the fish. “This afternoon, you will be at your desk?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll bring that book to show you, then.”

  “Yes,” she said again, wondering what he was talking about. She ate another bite, then stood up, remembering Bourne. “I have to go.”

  “You just got here,” Laidley protested. “You need to eat.”

  “I’ll be back. I left something—my pens—”

  “I’ll get them.”

  “No,” she said, so sharply that he froze midway up, and the entire table of librarians turned to stare at her. She gazed back at them wordlessly. Daimon broke the silence.

  “Ah. Nepenthe. There you are. We were wondering.”

  “I’ll be back,” Nepenthe told him breathlessly.

  She ran all the way down to the depths of the library, to the dusty, silent chamber where she had left Bourne and the thorns. It seemed empty when she reached it.

  “Bourne?” she said hesitantly, anticipating invisible mages everywhere.

  “I’m here,” he said with equal caution. “Am I invisible?”

  “Yes. Where are you?”

  Bedclothes shifted. She went to them, tried to sit and bumped into something. “That’s my head,” Bourne said. “I’m invisible, not incorporeal.” He caught her hand, guided her down. “Did you bring me anything to eat?”

  She pulled a bread roll out of her pocket. “That’s all I could get. Laidley and Master Croysus were sitting with me.”

  “Thanks.”

  Air bit into the bread, rendered it invisible bite by bite. She watched mindlessly a moment, then stirred her thoughts. “I’ll get something more for you later. Bourne, should I tell Laidley you’re here? He thinks—he doesn’t know—”

  “He thinks that I abandoned you and you need him.”

  “I do need him. Just not for that.”

  “So I heard.” Both his breath and what was left of the bread roll hung suspended a moment; she guessed he was gazing at something. “Nepenthe. What did you mean when you asked him if he could look at history and time from a different angle? If he could do that, what might he see?”

  She pondered that, glimpsing in brief lightning flashes what she saw. What she thought she saw. She drew back from it impatiently, shaking her head. “It makes no sense—it isn’t possible.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Nothing. Just—” She pushed cold fingers against her eyes, continued hollowly, “Laidley must be right. Kane couldn’t have written the book. It’s nothing but epic and history and poetry all jumbled together, much of it from centuries after Axis died. Axis was a magnificent and terrible figure, someone to fear when there’s nothing much else on your mind. Maybe it was just a scribe in a library like this one, surrounded by books and stones, loving words but wanting more life in his life—her life—who invented the mythical alphabet of thorns and became Kane and opened every world for Axis to conquer, so that even the scribe’s quiet world would not be safe from him.”

  The bread roll, half-eaten, was suspended in Bourne’s fingers. She looked at him a moment before she realized she was seeing him. Then she jumped, and so did he. “Bourne!” she hissed. “You’re visible!”

  “I am?”

  “Go back—do whatever you do—”

  His eyes looked very strange, flat and oddly dark. “Is that what you see in those thorns?”

  “I don’t know yet what I see! That’s why I need Laidley’s help. Bourne, you can’t keep shifting from visible to invisible and back—won’t Vevay notice?”

  “Possibly.” He put the last of the bread in his mouth and chewed slowly, still gazing at her. “No,” he said.

  “No, what?”

  “No, don’t tell Laidley I’m here. Even Laidley, honest as he is, is as human as the rest of us.”

  “What do you—”

  “If he knows I’m here, invisible because Vevay is searching for me, he may decide to help himself by helping her. But let him help you. I’ll help you, too. Now.”

  “Now what?”

  “Read me what you’ve translated since I saw you last.”

  “I can’t now.” She rose quickly, hovered over him, troubled. “Laidley will come looking for me here, i
f I don’t go back. He might bring Master Croysus. Bourne, you must learn to vanish and stay vanished.”

  “How can I when you tell me things like that?”

  “It’s only that,” she explained incoherently. “Nothing more than a tale. That’s what I was trying to say. Bourne, please—I must go.”

  He nodded, his eyes still peculiar, glimpsing, it seemed, what she was trying not to say. “Let me read what you’ve translated while you’re gone. It will give me something to do.”

  She put the papers in order hastily, thrust them at him. “Don’t let Laidley see them move,” she warned. “And don’t forget to hide yourself.”

  “I won’t,” he said absently, coiled on the rumpled pallet and already beginning to read again. She sighed noisily and went back to the refectory.

  Neither Laidley nor Master Croysus were there. But she had not met them coming, so she guessed that they had gone their ways to work. She ate a few more bites of stew, while filling her pockets with bread and cheese for Bourne. Then she went back to her desk where she had left the fish, determined to finish her work among them before she admitted one more thorn into her head. She stared at the manuscript for a long time before the fish began to speak again, light glancing off their bright colors, their strange marks, drawing her back with them into their underwater mysteries.

  She was pondering the last of them, matching fish-words here with fish-shapes there, coming up with sheep and oats and water bags, when she felt Master Croysus displacing air and exuding smells of mutton and smoke around her. She straightened; he dropped a tome on her desk, nearly upending an ink jar.

  “Here you are,” he said with satisfaction, letting the broad, heavy parchment pages fall open over the fish.

  What looked like a sketch of a very old statue looked imperiously back at her on the page. It was little more than a sculpted head growing out of some oddly coiled leaves. The stone hair was thick and wavy, the eyes wide set above broad, curved cheekbones, the nose and jaw at once delicate and predatory. It was no one, Nepenthe decided, who would ever willingly set foot in a library.

  “Who is this?”

  “You,” Master Croysus repeated.

  “It is not.”

  “It looks exactly like you. Isn’t that what you see when you look in a mirror?”

  She ruffled her hair, trying to remember. “There aren’t many mirrors around here. Anyway, who was she?”

  “She is ancient. The book itself is at least six centuries old. It’s a history of the writer’s travels through obscure parts of his known world. He had a gift for drawing, as you can see by the odd birds and plants and ruins he sketched as he wrote. This section deals with his journey down what he called the Serpent, a great river flowing into the Baltrean Sea. The head is of a princess of what was in ancient times Great Eben.”

  Nepenthe looked at him mutely, then down at the sketch again. Her eyes felt dry suddenly, oddly gritty, as though the desert sands of Eben had blown across time into the library.

  Master Croysus contemplated the head a moment longer, then shut the book with a crash. “I’m glad I remembered that; it’s been haunting me since I saw your face and recognized it. Have you finished with my fish?”

  “I think so.” She pointed at the last of them; her finger shook slightly. “The pearly fish seems to be the name of the owner of several wagon-loads of skins.”

  “Ah. Why are you trembling?”

  “I’m cold.”

  “Yes. So am I. It comes of perpetual uncertainty.” He opened his leather case, laid the fish manuscripts tenderly back into them. “Thank you, Nepenthe. If I ever come back here, I will gladly bring you whatever language is confounding me at the time. If I ever get out of here, that is…”

  He dropped a few coins onto the desk where the fish had been. She was still sitting there, staring at the newly-minted queen, not wanting to move, not daring to begin to think again, when she heard her name out of nowhere. She started wildly.

  Laidley said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I’ve been trying for the past hours to find an answer to your question.”

  “What question?” she whispered.

  “About Axis and Kane. About when they died.” He shrugged lightly, trying to look untroubled by anything except the carelessness of history. “Nobody wrote it down, that I can find. No final epic battles, no grievous wounds or illnesses, no sorrowing people, no great funerals, no—nothing. For all anybody seems to know, they might never have died.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  When the emperor finally returned to Eben after his victory in Gilyriad, he followed his predictable patterns. He rested for a few days; he fathered another child, his fifth by now; he tended to the affairs of Eben; he grew restless; he summoned his generals and counselors to pore over the new shape of the map of the world and talk about war; he withdrew into his private chamber with Kane.

  He said, “There are no more worlds to conquer on your maps. Find me another map.”

  Kane had prepared herself for many months for this demand. She had pulled secrets from the works of the witches and ancient poets of Gilyriad; she had read everything she could borrow or steal from lands between Eben and Gilyriad. She had followed wayward rumors of time and magic into impenetrable forests, harsh crags, and deserts all around the Baltrean. Finally she had penetrated the dangerous and enigmatic mysteries of the Labyrinth of the Serpent, in whom time was supposed to begin and end, and which was guarded by sorcerers from other levels of time. She fought them and saw veils of time part as one fled from her relentless power. She followed him.

  And so she answered the Emperor of the World, who, for the first time in his life expected to be disappointed: “My lord, I have found you another world.”

  He looked at her silently. His face was at the peak of its strength and beauty; it became the mask Kane shaped for him to wear for the rest of his life, in all the worlds he conquered. He knew her better than anyone: the tones of her voice, her expressions, what her postures signified, or the folding of her fingers. She alone called him by name. Now she addressed the ruler of the world as his most trusted counselor, and she expected him to treat her words as carefully as she spoke them.

  He asked her, “Where?”

  She knew him as well, knew by the utter stillness in his face, as the brazier light molded and illumined it, that he had begun, in thought, to venture beyond the world he knew.

  “The name of the kingdom is Cranoth.”

  “Cranoth.” He looked down at her as she sat among cushions beside the brazier. They were still dressed; neither had poured wine, nor tasted the sweets and fruit that servants had left there for the emperor. Unspoken mysteries loomed between them; he sensed them, could not move through them until she showed him what it was she saw. “I haven’t heard of Cranoth.”

  She answered, “It does not yet exist.”

  For a breath or two he was stone; not an eyelash moved, only the soft golden light searching the curve of his mouth, the faint lines at the corners of his eyes.

  Then he crossed the distance between them, had crossed it before she herself began to breathe. He knelt in front of her, his face shedding decades; he was the child on the banks of the Serpent again, his expression rippling with wonder and joy at something she had done. He took her hands, pressed the backs of her palms against his forehead, against his lips. She felt him trembling as he pressed her hands against his heart.

  “You can do this for me,” he said incredulously. “You can open time.”

  “I have done it,” she said, and told him about following the warrior-mage of the Serpent’s Labyrinth into his own land, the northern kingdom of Cranoth.

  “But how did you get back?”

  “I forced him to show me the way. He spoke to me freely once he understood that he had no choice and that I already had the power; what I wanted was the knowledge. Every moment, he said, is like a wheel with a hundred spokes in it. We ride always at the hub of the wheel and go forward as it turns
. We ignore the array of other moments constantly turning around us. We are surrounded by doorways; we never open them. The sorcerers of the Labyrinth have spent centuries studying the mysteries of time, of past and future. Only one of those dedicated to the Serpent is actually from Eben. All the others are from realms scattered through time, who meet at the hub of the Serpent. Some are from our past; most are from our future. They are all connected to the hub of our moment. This moment. The next moment becomes a different hub; the spokes will lead to different moments. If every moment is a world, and worlds change with every changing moment then you, my emperor, will never be without a world to conquer, for as long as you desire.”

  He swallowed, mute again, still trembling at the richness and immensity of the gift she had given him.

  “How?” he asked finally, for he was his father’s son and liked to see his battles clearly before he fought them.

  “I will open each spoke of time and explore the realm it leads me to. That way, I can judge which lands will be worth conquering.”

  “And my army?”

  “Where I can go, so can you, and so will your great army. It will flow through time and appear without warning anywhere you choose. It will be as though you come out of the sky, or the wind. And you can return always to the moment you left. You could conquer fifty realms and come back each time to this fire in the brazier, to the candle burned this far, to this untouched goblet. No one will ever pursue you, you can take whatever you want, keep the land under your rule if you choose, or leave behind only your name for the rulers to quake over and the poets to add to the history of their world.”

  Axis filled the untouched goblet with a hefty splash of wine, drained it. His face still seemed shaken, vulnerable. But Kane felt his own enormous powers, his strength and fearlessness, his unending ambition to find death and conquer it or become it, which, poets said later, became the same thing in the end.

  He set the cup down and took Kane’s hands again. “You are the Empress of Time,” he breathed, kissing her fingers one by one.

  “No, I am Kane. The Hooded One. The faceless sorcerer who does your bidding always, who exists to serve you.”