Memories of Libreigia, but not Manrie’s memories. They belonged to the old scholar. It was summer, and he was descending a badly constructed stairway, each step a hazard. Students swarmed around him. A babble of voices rose from the room below, with the smell of beer and sour wine. People were declaiming, arguing, and high, inattentive laughter cut through the air. He paused, refusing to take another step, as an impatient crowd built up behind him on the stair. He wanted nothing to do with it anymore. Nothing to do with argument, with theories, with scholarly wit and competitiveness. This was the moment when all of his learning and all of his ambition turned to ash.
Later. The smell of autumn leaves on the air. A coolness that wasn’t offensive, but inviting. Cider on the tongue. The first fire of the season built in the grate. His slave moving around, having just come from the laundry. The quiet rasp of cloth being folded.
Then a presence in the room. The sound of the slave’s footsteps, hurrying away. A voice. Different from the last time, yet somehow still the same.
“They say that you have become an invalid. That you rarely leave your chambers. That you no longer ask for scrolls to be brought to you.”
“Yes, master. That is true.”
“Have you given up on our great project, Daas Draebeye?”
He shrugged. He listened to see if the Immortal made some response to this gesture of defeat. The Immortal was quiet for a very long time. Then he said, “I understand. It is always hard to keep despair at bay.”
“I can’t continue living here, Master. But where can I go?”
The question hung in the air. When the Immortal spoke, his voice was wistful. “I went to the Singing Woods. After Taokeihla. I tried to live a normal life. For several generations. But always I held the dream in my mind. And the memory.”
“Was it so beautiful? The Previous World?”
A rueful laugh. “In truth, I don’t really know. I have been alive for more than eight hundred years. And I was very young when we came into this world. I had just begun to explore my own home. To become curious about it. To understand how rich and various its history was. I was hearing new music, eating foods I’d never eaten before, reading books that I’d never heard of before. We came from a school, you know. A place that was very much like Libreigia. It didn’t have towers, of course, but there were many scholars. And the students were much the same. I was a student. And then, one night, we were suddenly all here.”
“At Hasra.”
“Yes. At Hasra. So many of us died, Daas, in those first years. Imagine if this tower suddenly disappeared. You would fall four stories. You would break all of your bones. And we had no one who knew how to set bones. It wasn’t that kind of school. Some of us knew how to hunt, and some of us could make things with our hands. But most of us only knew books, and arguments. So we died. We were cold in winter and thirsty in summer and this world was full of monsters. Everything preyed on us. The food we ate made us ill. Just eating killed many of us. Is it any wonder that we dreamt of a return? Of going back to the Previous World, where all was peace and health and there was always good food to eat?”
He paused. Daas heard him get up and move around the room. “But even then, people made love. They had babies. They adjusted to this world. And soon, they didn’t want to go back. The younger generations. This suffering was all they knew. They wanted to stay. The number of us who were seeking a return dwindled and dwindled.” He was at the window. Daas could hear his finger tapping against the badly set window frame. “It is fortunate that there are always people who are unhappy with the way things are. Always people who I could tell my story to, and who would listen, and who would agree to work with me. My friends. You have kept me sane, these many years. I cannot permit you to despair.”
There were tears in Daas’s eyes. He shifted and heard the logs in the grate shift. A crackle as one broke apart. “Master, what am I to do?”
The Immortal sighed. “Daas, I have sought and sought to find a way back. I have been all over this land. Perhaps there is another door. Perhaps I don’t have to go to Hasra. I have seen things that you cannot imagine. The living waves in the Cove of Dreams. Sunlight glinting off of snow meadows high on the peaks of Exile Mountain. A great river, far to the west, that runs so fast that no one could ever sail on it. I have spent years and expended lives in pursuit of various solutions, various ways to return home. They have all come to naught. But again and again, one of my scholars, my friends, discovers something new. This world is not done disclosing its secrets. It can’t be. If I thought that it was, I would have no reason to go on living.”
He came and sat at the edge of Daas’s pallet. He smelled of cider and melted wax. His smell had changed over the years, with his voice. The hand that he laid on Daas’s forehead was cool and dry. “Daas, my dearest friend, there is a cave, on the other side of the Maeldaparras. Not far from here, in fact. A miner from Yenceyan discovered it. It has the oddest markings on the walls. I’ve seen those marking before. I didn’t know what they were. But there are at least three other caves in this world that bear the same markings. Daas, I need to know what they are. Will you go there for me? Will you study them?”
“Why do they entice you, master?”
“I believe that they were made by our predecessors in this land. By the strange insects whose skeletons we still find from time to time. They, too, were pulled into this world against their will. But they escaped.” He fell silent after saying this, perhaps to let the import sink in. There was something wistful, and even lost, about his silence. It was like the silence of someone who is preparing to tell a lie. Yet the silence continued without any lie being spoken. Daas shifted and reached for the Immortal’s hand.
“I will go if you ask me to. I will study these markings.”
The voice was warm when it spoke again. “Daas, who is so good at languages, who has traced the history of words. You are the only one who could do this for me.”
Catrilisa crossed the mountains with him. He had known her for many years. He had once sat in her chambers when the Immortal visited, and they had stewed meat together in a hot broth over a little brazier. She had been younger then, her voice pitched a little higher, its tone a little lighter. Daas had been charmed by the way she flirted with the Immortal. He had felt no jealousy, and he had been proud of this fact afterwards. When entangled in some thorny question of language, or enraged at another scholar’s insolence, he might say or do something that shamed him. But he could reassure himself by saying “Still, I felt no jealousy when the Immortal flirted with Catrilisa.” It meant that he was still a good man.
She built a little house for them. These were days of warmth and sunlight. She often held his hand to lead him from place to place. He felt the callouses grow on her palms as she cut wood and dug in the earth. He had a mattress that was stuffed with goose down, and a pillow. In the mornings he would go into the cave and sit within the sound of dripping water, his movements magnified in the cold darkness. It occurred to him that the Immortal had condemned him to a hard existence by sending him here. But then the Immortal had eased his suffering by sending Catrilisa with him. She had a terrible singing voice, but she often sang. She liked the taste of watercress above all other flavors. He found it too bitter, but he ate it willingly. She smelled, always, of sunlight and hewn wood.
The cave began to exert its power over him, and she took to bringing his meals into the darkness. She carried a lamp, and he smelled the burning oil before he heard her footfall. The lamp provided meager warmth to their meals. She didn’t sing in the darkness. The sound of dripping water, the deep echoes of the tunnel, subdued her voice. They rarely even spoke.
One day she came and led him out of the tunnel, and he felt sunlight on his face. Draejed was there, whom he knew and disdained. Every year, when he had lived in Libreigia there had been those who chose to help him, to take his elbow and guide him through the towers, to whisper things to him, telling him who was in the rooms he entered, or that someone had left a volume out on one of the library’s tables. And there had been students who derided these helpers. Young people who thought that any acknowledgement of frailty was an insult. Who pretended that any offer of aid was a comment on his blindness. Draejed had been one of these. His presence known only as a cutting, sarcastic, self-satisfied voice. Never a hand on the elbow or a shoulder to lean on.
“All this time,” Draejed said, after they had eaten and Catrilisa had led him into the cave to look at the markings, “and you still haven’t discovered what they mean.” He had an amused but angular voice, the kind of voice that would emerge from a mocking smile.
“We make progress,” Catrilisa insisted.
“What progress?” Draejed asked.
“We have discovered things,” Daas Draebeye said. “We know that the markings are not language as we understand it.”
“So you say,” Draejed answered. “But if it’s not language, what is it? Why make it, if it’s not meant to communicate something?”
“The insects didn’t need language,” Catrilisa said. “Not if the Immortal’s speculations are correct. They could pass their wisdom down through the generations in other ways.”
“Well, he’s never quite said how that was done.” Draejed was enjoying the argument. Of course he was. He had always been the most intolerable of men.
“Since I can find no repeating marks that might be letters or words, and no repeating patterns that might be grammar, I will not call the markings language,” Daas said softly. “But I ask you, does the earth make language as we understand it? There are fissures in the cave walls, variations in the type of stone. Outcroppings. Mineral drips that make figures like melted wax. These things couldn’t be read as words. But they might have meaning nonetheless.”
“So the insects were as inscrutable as a mountain? Is that what you’re saying, dear teacher?”
Draejed only used endearments when he thought you were being stupid. A way of tenderizing you so that he could cut you and digest you with his wit. “There is another possibility,” Daas replied, and he was pleased to hear the condescension in his tone. “The insects made the markings, and did so with intention. They aren’t language that is meant to convey meaning from one generation to the next. So we might think of them as an incantation, or a code, or a key.”
“A key!” Catrilisa said.
“Oh yes. I study them and study them. I am convinced that if we knew where to start, and how to activate them, to speak them or read them or even think them, the door would open.”
“The Immortal must know!” Catrilisa’s voice was sharp with excitement.
“Don’t go riding off in search of him just yet, my dear. I believe that I will succeed. That I will find some way to make the markings turn in the lock, as it were.”
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“But he must be here for that!”
“Oh yes. But if he came now, it might be months, or even years. He would just wander away again.”
“And in the meantime?” Draejed asked, revealing the fear behind his humorous tone. “What are Catrilisa and I supposed to do?”
“You have just joined us, my boy,” Daas said. “You should come back into the caves and contemplate the markings with me. Your eyes might be able to understand what my hands cannot. Although the caves are very dark, and it may be that we must journey through darkness to understanding.”
“I’ll rip out my eyes, then,” Draejed said lightly.
“Don’t be a fool,” Catrilisa snapped. “If you plan to live here with us, you must put aside your ideas of scholarship. You must forget your ambitions. Why else have you come here?”
To that, he gave no answer.
The memory shifted. Draejed was speaking again. He sounded different. As if arrogance had seeped out of him. Dripped away onto the walls, like a mineral deposit. “The secret can’t be in the way the markings feel.”
“No?” a soft question. Daas no longer felt the need to put Draejed in his place.
“You might as well say that it’s in the taste. Or the sound that the stone makes when you put your ear to it.”
“Does the stone make a sound?” This was Catrilisa, and the question was directed to Daas. Her voice was still her own. She was often out of the caves, of course. Creating the homestead. People were coming to it, building houses, working the land. She had resisted them at first. Now she accepted them. When she came into the caves, she smelled of growing things. Sap, the tartness of lemon mint, the deep earthy odor that arose when roots cut through dirt.
“It does,” Daas said. “Just as a tree does. You can hear water, moving through the mountains. And the skittering of the creatures that live all around us. But that can’t be the language of the markings.”
“Why not?” Draejed asked, and it was a genuine question.
“Because, dear boy, it is the sound of the land itself.”
“But if the insects used the land to make their door? I mean, they must have. Carving on stone walls is using the land, isn’t it?”
Daas paused over that. He didn’t know. He would have to consider further. “You must return to Libreigia,” he said to Draejed. “I seem to remember some reference to the caves at Ikardensai. The Singing Caves, south of the Dahladura Marshes. Voices echoing back, words that no one had said.”
“I must?” Draejed asked, and Daas felt a strange love for him. He had become a true inhabitant of darkness. He did not want to leave the safety of the caves.
Months later, when he returned, some measure of his previous arrogance had come back into his voice. “Have you been licking the cave walls, old man?” he asked. His voice was too hearty. As if his former self were echoing within it.
“I have. I have made careful notes of the separate tastes. And I have been listening.”
“Have you considered that the key might be in the smell of the rocks. And that by licking them, you are altering the markings’ odor?”
Manrie felt the old man pause. A moment of deep despair. “I suppose,” Daas said, “that such a thing might be true in a number of ways. Our voices might be disturbing ancient echoes. Our touch might be wearing the stone away farther. Or imprinting it with the oil from our hands. If only we knew more about the insects. They had eyes, but did they see in the same way that we see? Did they have a sense of smell? Did their feelers touch the world in a way that we never will?”
These speculations seemed to draw Draejed’s arrogance away. As if Daas had run a piece of floss through his spirit, and pulled away the accumulation of pride. “We may never know anything,” Draejed said in a low voice.
Daas decided to entrust him with a confidence. “That is why we must not send for the Immortal. If we are honest about the limitations of our knowledge, about our ability to discover the truth of anything, he might despair.”
“He might,” Draejed admitted, and there was despair in his own voice. And then he reported. “There were a great many stories about the Singing Caves. I had to search through all three towers. Old Wondersuch held the most materials, but I even searched Old Sangri.”
“And? What did you discover?”
“There is a text, called *The Song of the Sleepless Nights*. About a lover who goes into the caves to die. While he’s there, he hears a song in a strange language. A wordless song. Parts of it reek like a decaying corpse, and other parts smell like spring flowers. He is battered by it. Scraped by it. His stomach roils and he tastes vomit in his mouth. Then the vomit is turned to sweet ginger and anise seed. It is a metaphor for love, or at least that’s what the Archivist of Old Wondersuch said. But she would say that.”
“And your own tower?” Daas asked gently, not wanting Draejed to state the obvious conclusion of his research.
“I spent the least amount of time there,” Draejed said, and his voice was gruff with shame. “I know the texts in Old Ancient. Our ancestors knew nothing about this.” He paused, then said, almost shyly, “I visited Haerahiz, on my return from Libreigia. He is quite insane, you know.”
Daas Draebeye’s smile deepened. “More insane than we are?”
Draejed chose to ignore this. “He had been digging up discs in a dry river bed. I brought some of them with me. He says that they themselves are doors, or windows, or some other piece of fancy. He claims that there is an upside down world beneath the river. He has been trying to dig through to it.”
“And why would these discs matter to us?”
“Because they may be part of an insect’s carapace. The carapace of one of the ancient insects, that made the markings here, that escaped. He showed me a dorleku that he’s been keeping for Aizdha. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that his discs might be like the plates on a dorleku’s back.” This said with a touch of Draejed’s old arrogance.
“A dorleku is not an insect. It is a creature of this world.”
“Still,” Draejed said, with a touch of offense, “the analogy might hold.”
“And if they were? What purpose did they serve? How would they serve us?”
“I don’t know,” Draejed mumbled.
The memories shifted again. Catrilisa’s voice called excitedly from somewhere near the cave entrance. Daas stood up from his desk and went to the door of his chamber. His hands found the latch and he pulled it open and stood listening. She was running, and he worried that she would trip on the uneven floor of the tunnel.
“Daas, there has been a discovery. Near Hasra, in the Gaendolin Hills. Lady Daturi has sent word. A giant carapace. Nineteen legs, the nineteenth jutting out from its back, and sharp at the end, like a chisel, or a stylus.”
He turned from the door and went to sit at his desk. She followed him. He could feel her nearness. Her breath was warm.
“Daas?” she asked.
“Can you send someone to Libreigia? Can you ask Draejed to return there?”
“Yes. Of course. But it’s important, isn’t it? If that nineteenth leg made the markings. We could use it to make our own. Or to…”
“To understand the words on a page by studying the stylus that formed the letters?” he asked, his lips quirked into a small smile. But he relented. “Is there a way to bring it from Hasra?”
“Oh yes. Yes, of course there is. Katemzan will send it. Daas, is this the moment when we send for the Immortal?”
He said nothing. How could he tell her what he had come to suspect? That it didn’t matter if they knew how the markings were made. He reached out and found her hand. It was dry and calloused. “You have built so much here,” he said softly.
“We have built it. Together,” she told him.
“No. You. I have sat in a cave, speculating. But you have created something. How many people live in the homestead, now?”
“Twenty-three.”
“And are there children? Are there marriages?”
“There are children. But not from the marriages. Huloehn was pregnant last year, but her baby died. Still, people always need a place to call home. And three families have joined us.”
He smiled. “I have always liked children.”
She knelt. Her warm breath tickled his cheeks. “Daas, you’ve been in the darkness for too long. You should come out of the cave. We’ve built a beautiful house around the entrance. Praetson is so good with his hands. It’s a proper house, with a courtyard and a well. We didn’t have to dig very hard to find water. And your tunnel comes right out into a little room.”
“I have been in the house,” he said quietly.
She was embarrassed. “Yes, of course. At midsummer. You were there for the dancing.”
“You forgot because you’ve been so busy with other things. It is good, Catrilisa. You have made a community for people. You have saved them from wandering. Given them a life.”
Her fingers slowly stroked the back of his hands. “Daas, why are you saying this?”
He hesitated. Then he said, “You know the story of the Stupid Slave?”
A little laugh. “The Library is full of Stupid Slave stories.”
He didn’t allow any humor into his voice. “This one is instructive. The one in which the archivist comes into his chambers and find the slave eating rice with his styluses. He thought that they were chopsticks.”
“Yes, I know that one. Why are you telling it?”
“We might have found the right tool,” he said gently. “The creature discovered at Hasra might indeed have made the markings here, and elsewhere. But even if we have the right tool, we might not understand its proper use.”
“You mean that the nineteenth leg won’t help us?”
“I mean that nothing will help us. That the markings can only be understood by an insect.”
She reared back from him. “That can’t be true.”
“It is in fact the thing that is most likely to be true. We already know that another intelligent species has lived in this land. They found a way to escape. Doesn’t that mean that they were more intelligent than we are? Tell me, my dear, if a little mouse left its hole in a wall and ran across a scholar’s clever treatise, would it know that it was skittering over a deposit of knowledge? Could it make any sense out of the letters?”
“We are not mice.”
“We might as well be.”
She was standing, and she was angry. “What will the Immortal say, when he learns of your despair?”
He sighed. “My darling, we have not seen him for more than seven years. Perhaps he has given in to his own despair. Or,” he paused, afraid of her reaction, but then went on, as if compelled, “perhaps he has found a way back to the Previous World, and left us.”
“No!” Her voice echoed through the caverns. He could imagine it disturbing the dust in the markings and shifting their meanings forever. They were silent together, listening to the reverberations. Then she said, “I will ask the others to start bringing your meals. We will talk again when Draejed returns.”
And they did bring his meals, every day. Two young girls. An old woman. Each kind in her own way. Fussing over him. Telling him little stories of the homestead. He lay on his pallet or sat at his desk. He did very little work. Someday soon someone would arrive with a sharp bone. Perhaps Catrilisa would lead him out of his cave to find a cliff wall that he could scratch at and experiment on. Pretending that he didn’t know. Pretending that it wasn’t futile. He would like that. He would like to hear her sing again. But she had other people to sing to now. People she loved.
As he lay in the dark, he knew that he had given into the final temptation. He had become complacent, satisfied with the world as it was. He had no further wish to find a way back to the Previous World.