The swords in the sword grave were all laid out in the dark cavern, in sweeping patterns, as if they were stitches in an intricate embroidery. The most recently acquired still gleamed in the torchlight, pretending that they hadn’t been told that they were dead yet. The older swords swirled away in deepening patterns of rust. If you walked along the entire trail of swords, you would arrive at a place where the blades were nothing but stains against the rock. It was said that when the cavern was full, the Sangrahalaya would begin again, placing new swords over these afterimages. But that had never happened, not in six hundred years.
Katemzan and Bahdring the Tinker had brought seventeen swords back with them. They had been far to the south, to a great gorge that cut the land from north to south, just as the mountain ranges carved the continent from the World’s Teeth to the gorge’s northern edge. It was as if someone had once folded the land, had pierced the south with the north’s mountains, then unfolded everything again, leaving a permanent imprint. The gorge went on and on, disappearing into a desert that was impassable, unimaginably hot, and full of monsters. The people they encountered had warned them. No one went there. So they didn’t go there, either. They collected swords. They hid them in the secret compartment of the tinker’s cart. They journeyed back north.
In the evenings, Katemzan would hear the swords speaking to her. This had begun in the first days of their journey, when she had still found the older woman fascinating. Bahdring was so ugly. Her nose was misshapen, a collection of bumps that skewed off in different directions. Her eyes were small and of different shades of blue. Her lips looked like the skin of a withering plum, and her chin was almost absent from her face, so that it seemed like her neck was plotting to subsume her mouth. Katemzan was very aware that she wasn’t the only one who found Bahdring’s ugliness strangely alluring. People looked at her everywhere she went. It was why she was so good at collecting swords. People would come close. They would start chatting. They wanted to ask what it was like to be so ugly. But politeness prevented them from doing so. Bahdring would steer the conversation. She would get them to speak of their sadnesses, their losses. Somehow they would find themselves talking about the dead. The deaths they had caused and the deaths they had seen others cause. And they would surrender their swords. She reassured them with her presence. If she could exist in this world, could trundle her tinker’s cart about without fearing that someone would harm her, they could exist here, too.
At first the swords were simply retelling their stories. The one whose hilt was wound in yellow leather had been used to kill a bandit who had been menacing a town. Yet the man who had yielded it had seemed afraid of it. As if something of the bandit’s spirit had infested the blade. This sword seemed to chortle from the hidden compartment beneath the cart. Katemzan would imitate it as she lay beside the fire, and Bahdring would roll over and look at her and ask what she was laughing about. There was a very thin sword that had been worn by a pompous man who had led an expedition into the gorge. He had died there, and his wife gave the sword to Bahdring before she returned to her people in Pahyangoeda. She had hated her dead husband, and the sword spoke her complaints sharply into the air.
“You imagine too much,” Bahdring told Katemzan, as they came back north. It was as if they were traveling through concentric rings of expanding civilization, as if a stone of peace and culture had been dropped into the land at Hasra, and its ripples spread outward, subsuming the need for violence as they went. In the far south, everyone had a sword. By the time they came to the banks of the Alphaehanandi River, only soldiers had swords. In Taokeihla, swords weren’t permitted within the city. But that city had seen so much violence that the very walls seemed to mumble at Katemzan.
“I don’t imagine,” she said to Bahdring. “I hear.”
Bahdring looked at her sharply. “Try to hear other things than swords,” she suggested.
So Katemzan did. She heard bowls, which were full of happy mealtime chatter. She heard harnesses, which were bored with drudgery. She heard robes and shawls and cloaks. She particularly liked the grumble of yellow dye. When they met the scholar Catrilisa on the road into Ibimendi, she heard scrolls and ink. Then, night after night, she heard the debate between Catrilisa and Bahdring.
They went west for a while, journeying through Ibimendi Pass and into the Sand Hills. Catrilisa was in love with Bahdring. It happened slowly. During the daytime the scholar would wander from the road, collecting insects with a little net and placing them in jars. These jars jostled on top of the tinker’s cart, and when people came to trade with Bahdring they were often in the way. But some people wanted them, and talked about the medicinal properties of the insects as Catrilisa sat in the dirt beside the cart and made careful notes. She sketched the insects, too, and also sketched the thistles and flowers that the insects lived among. There was a particular grass in the Sand Hills that danced and sang. Katemzan didn’t like it, because it drowned out the voices of the jars and the cart and the dirty robes of the people who came to trade. But Bahdring was delighted by it, and Catrilisa picked it for her. She had a secret section of her journal where she sketched pictures of Bahdring, trying to catch the exact pattern of the divergent bumps on the tinker’s nose. Sometimes, when the two older women were asleep, Katemzan would slip Catrilisa’s book from her pack and look at the sketches of her mentor. In the sketches, Bahdring was very beautiful. The paper sang of yearning.
Then they came to the village where everyone was dead. It was only midmorning when they came over the rise and saw the bodies lying in the streets. There were more bodies in the houses. The ravished clothes, the broken bowls, the scratched and scarred walls all cried out. Catrilisa and Bahdring brought the corpses out into the street and laid them out in neat rows. Catrilisa’s face was thinned with dread. Bahdring’s features were shifting around, as if afraid to settle into any expression. Katemzan could only stay in the houses for a few minutes. She couldn’t stay in the street, either. Everything was clamoring out to her. A chorus of fear and grief. She went to the cart and listened to the swords.
“It must have been a prahnivasha,” Catrilisa said that night, after they had buried the dead and left the village behind, returning east the way they had come.
“What’s a prahnivasha?” Katemzan asked.
“A monster that has one mouth that eats food and another mouth that eats sunlight. They live in the Sand Hills and attack villages like that one. People think that they’ll be safe if they go inside. But if a prahnivasha is full of sunlight, it can follow you into a dark room. The walls were scarred by its claws. And it’s only interested in the food in your gut. That’s why the bodies were disemboweled.”
“What did it eat before people came into this world?” Katemzan asked.
“We’re not its only prey. It eats pigs and deer and cattle. Even elephants. But only the half-digested food in their guts.”
“And sunlight.”
“Yes. Sunlight.”
“How do we know that it isn’t still in the area?” Bahdring asked. “Perhaps we’re in its hunting grounds.”
“They wouldn’t have built the village within the bounds of a prahnivasha’s hunting grounds.”
“The villagers could have settled here before the monster’s territory shifted.”
Catrilisa sighed and looked out over the dark hills. “Yes, that’s true. But they don’t hunt at night. Let’s wake before dawn and go east as quickly as we can.”
“Bahdring,” Katemzan asked as they lay beside the fire, “if the prahnivasha attacks us, can we use the swords?”
“You could,” Bahdring said, “and Catrilisa could. But I couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Tinkers are forbidden to use violence.”
“Why?”
“Because we want a different world.”
“There is a different world,” Catrilisa said, resuming their usual debate.
“There was violence in the Previous World, too,” Bahdring said. “In this world, we have a chance to be different.”
They were silent for a moment. “Bahdring,” Katemzan asked, “why does the Sangrahalaya keep secrets?”
“You know why,” Bahdring said. “The Previous World had many wonders. But people used those wonders for evil. We bury the memory of those wonders, just as we bury the swords.”
Katemzan considered. “Could any of those secrets have protected the villagers?”
“No,” Bahdring said shortly.
“Yes,” Catrilisa said. Katemzan could hear her sketches of Bahdring singing from the pages in her journal. They were singing, *If you speak, I will not love you.* But Catrilisa spoke anyway. “The Previous World is different from what the Sangrahalaya says about it. There were no monsters there. People had subdued the land, and could live freely upon it, without fear. They lived a very long time, and babies didn’t die. There was no starvation. There were no plagues. You could sing a song, and someone who was miles and miles away could hear it.”
“That is not the memory of the Sangrahalaya,” Bahdring said shortly.
“In Libreigia,” Catrilisa said, “we don’t think anything should be secret. Scholars share their discoveries with each other freely. That is the only way that knowledge can grow.”
“Perhaps,” Bahdring said, “knowledge shouldn’t grow.” And then she pretended to sleep. But Katemzan stayed awake, listening to the swords. And in the morning, Catrilisa was gone. As if she knew that their debate had come to an end. And that she’d lost it, because Bahdring didn’t love her.
Three years spent journeying, and now Katemzan stood in the Sword Grave and watched Bahdring lay the seventeen swords on the stone floor, and each one sang to her. All of the swords in the entire grave sang to her, even the ones that had turned to rust. Some of them were gleeful. Some were mourning. Some welcomed the darkness and rust. Others wanted to live in the sunlight, as if they could eat it.
When Bahdring was done, they walked out of the Sword Grave together and stood in the road. The Sangrahalaya rose behind them, a series of ancient houses, stacked on top of each other, roofs and ladders, trees growing in pots, sunlight falling through windows onto collections of crowns and bowls and rings and inscribed tablets and scraps of cloth and tapestries. All of it spoke to Katemzan. But the scrolls and books in the highest rooms didn’t speak to her at all. They either had no voice or kept their voices muted. They would not divulge the secrets of the Previous World.
“You can always call on me,” Bahdring said, her voice full of affection. The stark sunlight brought out the rosiness of her skin, the straightness of her teeth, the luxurious length of her eyelashes. Every beautiful feature was accentuated, and her ugliness buried beneath them.
“Do you think you’ll ever see Catrilisa again?” Katemzan asked.
“Catrilisa? No. I doubt it. It was a mistake to travel with her. All the scholars in Libreigia are great fools.”
“She was in love with you, you know.”
Bahdring shrugged. “People often are.” She studied Katemzan’s face for a long moment, as if worried that she might see adoration there as well.
But Katemzan didn’t love Bahdring. She turned away and walked down the path to the Dome House, where the sortition was to take place. All of her cousins and sisters and aunts were gathered there. The great bowl sat in the middle of the room, and the current Lady Daturi sat beside it. When the bell rang, she would draw out a slip of silk, embroidered with the next Lady Daturi’s name. Katemzan could hear the slips of silk singing within the bowl. If she concentrated, she could make her own slip, embroidered with the words Katemzan Prahmpara Droegee Daturi, sing louder than any other. All of the other Katemzans and Katemzanis, the daughters of the great Daturi family of Hasra, would have to accept her as their ruler for the next five years. She hesitated. She was a sword. Perhaps she should be buried. Then she thought of the dead villagers in the Sand Hills. She thought of the words that their torn clothing had spoken, the cries of the broken bowls. She whispered to the silk that bore her name, and made it sing.
It had been nearly a hundred years since the last Lady Daturi had visited the library city of Libreigia, and all of the archivists and scholars were doing their best to produce something that might be considered pomp. The grand atrium of the first tower, known at Old Ancient by the students, clerks, and slaves, had been dusted and mopped and polished, so that the marble gleamed and the high windows had far fewer smudges than usual. Leadership in the library was never a settled thing, and at that time many people would have said that Kohbae Maesratat was the wisest and most able among the scholars. But for a state visit they relied on tradition, and Draejed, the archivist of the first tower, was the one who met Katemzan as she came through the wide doors.
She didn’t like him, and so she ignored him after accepting his compliments with an air of polite distance. Others came forward to greet her. A bald man who was the city’s mayor. The archivists of the other two towers. Those who were considered to be the cleverest among the scholars. Kohbae Maesratat herself, her hair wrapped in a beautiful, spangled cloth that Katemzan would have gladly accepted as a gift. The books and scrolls in the rooms beyond the atrium were speaking to Katemzan, and had half of her attention. They weren’t divulging their knowledge but speaking of their lives, of the discomfort of being stacked, the tedium of being unrolled. The paper and parchment seemed entirely indifferent to the words written upon them. It was sad, in a way. They were like houses who didn’t care about the people who lived inside of them.
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Catrilisa wasn’t in the atrium, but Katemzan saw her when Draejed took her on a tour through the reading rooms. He was an exhausting man. A man who had sharpened his debating skills, but the only point he ever really wanted to prove was his own cleverness. Katemzan hated insecure people. It was why she was here. The Sangrahalaya was in the hands of Slaeterin Moesebai, and no one was more insecure than Slaeterin Moesebai. He would not let her into the upper rooms. The great secrets of the Sangrahalaya were not an automatic gift that the Ladies Daturi were given. Some of her predecessors had been initiated into the fascinations of the Previous World. Some had not. Slaeterin was too afraid to let her come near them.
Well, if the Sangrahalaya wouldn’t ally itself to her, then perhaps the Great Library in Libreigia would. She said as much to Catrilisa that night. All of the ceremonies were over, the tours finished, the banquet endured, and she was left alone in the chambers she had been given, high at the top of the tower, very near to Draejed’s rooms. She hoped that he wasn’t going to attempt a midnight assignation. She had her guard, of course, and her maidservants. But it was said that Old Ancient had many secret tunnels and doors. She sat by the window and listened to the building, and heard the winding whispers in the stone. There was a tunnel and the bookcase in the northwest corner of her room was a secret door that led into it. It did pass Draejed’s door, but he wasn’t in his chambers yet. The carpet in his room didn’t like him, and was always alert to his coming and going. It was resting now, free of his pacing, and worrying about a stain from some sloshed wine. Never mind. The tunnel continued to a hidden stair, and Catrilisa’s chamber was on the third landing.
Catrilisa was very surprised when Katemzan pushed a tapestry aside and came into her room. “I’m glad that you’re in this tower, and not one of the others,” Katemzan said.
Catrilisa had been sitting at her desk, frowning at an unfurled parchment. She stood suddenly and her stool fell over. It began complaining, but in an affectionate way. Catrilisa was very slight, and the stool enjoyed her posterior. “We move around,” Catrilisa said. “Depending on the needs of our research.”
“Your alliances are forever changing,” Katemzan said with a nod. She went and righted the stool. “You didn’t greet me when I saw you in the reading room.”
“Draejed wouldn’t have liked it.”
“He thinks you’re unimportant.”
“I am unimportant.”
“Not to me.” Katemzan went to her and gave her an awkward embrace. The embroidery on her robes enjoyed the feel of the simple spun cotton of Catrilisa’s shift. It wanted to linger but Katemzan pulled away quickly. You couldn’t give in to the desires of clothing.
Catrilisa studied her face. “You look older.”
“I am older. But still sharp.”
Catrilisa abstained from supporting this claim. “You’ve had trouble as the Lady Daturi. But you keep being picked. Even after they made someone else pick the name, this last time.”
“I wouldn’t say I’ve had trouble. Change comes slowly. Hasra is a very traditional place. That’s why I might prefer the wisdom of the Great Library to the secrets of the Sangrahalaya.”
“So you said when you spoke at the banquet.”
“I thought that it would make you happy. Isn’t it what you and Bahdring were always arguing about?”
At the name of Bahdring, Catrilisa winced. “I was younger then, too.”
“Don’t tell me that you’ve been growing dusty and hidebound! Don’t you believe in the freedom of knowledge anymore?”
Catrilisa ignored this jibe. “Katemzan,” she said hesitantly, “I’ve know you since you were seventeen years old. When we traveled together, you said that objects sang to you. What did you mean by that?”
Katemzan flushed. She had been found out. But then, she had come to this room tonight to discover whether she had been found out. Good that she didn’t have to dance around the subject. “Have you told anyone about that?”
Catrilisa nodded. There was a small pairing knife, sticking in a half withered apple on the desk. It began suggesting certain things. “I’ve told one person. A person I would like you to meet.”
“I’ve already met so many people today. I’m rather tired of it.”
“Not today. It would have to be arranged. But you should meet him. He’s a secret, too. Once you meet him, you’ll both have secrets. That’s a kind of protection, isn’t it?”
Katemzan was intrigued. She asked the tower if there was a stranger inside its walls, other than her own entourage, of course. It replied with a clamor of different voices - the complaints of a doily that had been ruined by a new slave, the unhappiness of a stylus that was being held by an unfamiliar hand, the joy of a lantern that hung on a stairway that no one ever used, which had suddenly been lit. Too much to give her any real information.
“Why does he want to meet me?” she asked.
“He’s been paying attention. He was saddened when the tinkers resisted your attempts to make them carry weapons. And by the failure of your rangers to win over the hearts of the people they were sent to protect. And he knows Aizdha, and is interested in the bestiary, and all that can be learned about monsters.”
“He’s a scholar then.”
“He’s much more than that. Will you meet him?”
Of course she said yes.
They met in a dusty subterranean room of the third tower, known as Old Sangri by the students and scholars and archivists. This was a shortening of Old Sangrahaha, and the tower was a deliberate provocation, a place where all the revealed and accidentally discovered secrets of the Sangrahalaya were freely shared. The room was full of badly arranged and slowly collapsing shelves, each bulging with objects and looking like a fat man trying to wear old pants. Yet it somehow reminded Katemzan of the Sword Grave in Hasra. The books and scrolls were turning to dust. As if secrets, once they were revealed, weren’t really that interesting anymore.
She expected the man to resemble the books, somehow. She expected a gray man, with lank hair and a bald spot. When he appeared she was so surprised that she commented on his appearance. “Why, you’re just a boy. And a fat boy, at that.”
He studied her, as if trying to see past the insult. “For now,” he said. “And you are still a young woman. Although your sharpness is beginning to rust away.”
“For now? What does that mean? And why are you wearing those ridiculous earrings?”
“They were the fashion once,” he said lightly. “They will be again. But this is a bad way for us to begin our acquaintance.”
“It may be the end of our acquaintance,” she said. She had a very sharp knife tucked into the sleeve of her robe. It was babbling on and on about a fork that it was in love with.
“I hope that won’t be the case,” he said. There was something very old about his eyes. Exhausted, even. This boy had seen too much.
“That’s up to you. Catrilisa shouldn’t have told you about my special talent. You have to prove to me that you are worthy of knowing it.”
He sighed. “The Sangrahalaya still keeping its secrets,” he said.
“My gift is not a secret of the Sangrahalaya.”
“No, I suppose not. Tell me, Katemzan Prahmpara Droegee Daturi, what have you learned of the Previous World?”
“Oh, the Previous World. Some say it was full of horrors, and some say it was full of marvels. But what can anyone really know about it after eight hundred years?”
“Yet I have a sense that you are opposed to this present world. You seem unwilling to let it bully and attack us.”
“I don’t like it when innocent people die.”
He nodded. “I don’t, either. Ever since we came through the Door at Hasra, I have wanted to escape it.”
She snorted. “As if you were there.”
“I was there,” he said softly.
She studied him. His robes were very silent, as if they had been told not to speak. He wore a ring on his left pinky that wanted to talk about the merchant it had belonged to. And there was a strange object hidden in his left sleeve, a distorted reflection of the dagger that she had at the ready. A thin and twisted thing, and it was speaking, but in a language that she had never heard before. “How were you there?” she asked.
“I am one of the ancients. I came through the Door at Hasra with the others.”
She felt strangely lightheaded. “I have heard of only one ancient who survived from the earliest days.”
“I am that one.”
She had left her robes behind and was naked before the Door. Nothing spoke to her. The little campfire crackled its nonsense sounds into the air. Behind her, the entrance of the tomb seemed to swallow all words. The land itself had never spoken to her. Only the things that people made. As if human labor had invested them with voices.
The ranger had come at dusk. He had told her many things. He had told her that Bahdring was dead.
The city was below her, spread out before her, looking ragged and neglected. The citizenry feared the ghosts. But she didn’t fear ghosts. She thought of the Immortal, who was a kind of ghost, an ancestor spirit that haunted the world. Then she thought of Bahdring, of the last time they had spoken.
Two years ago. A winter night, snow piled high against the buildings. They had met in Katemzan’s little sitting room, a place where every object agreed with every other, where there was no dissonant clamor of disputation among the tea cups and footstools. Except that Bahdring was wearing lined robes, and the fur of the lining was still thinking animal thoughts. Still sinuous and hunting. It amused Katemzan. The ugly tinker was so committed to her pacifism. But she wore the hide of a predator.
“I have often thought, as I’ve traveled through the villages during these last years, that people are changing,” Bahdring was saying. “People are less inclined to mock me.”
“I never noticed anyone mocking you,” Katemzan told her.
“You were a girl.”
“I was seventeen. That’s the age when girls are most aware of mockery.”
Bahdring rubbed at her misshapen nose. “Maybe it’s true that we never really see ourselves.”
“I see myself.”
“You don’t. You hear objects speaking to you and think that you’re known. That you’re surrounded by mirrors. Has it never occurred to you that objects lie?”
Katemzan laughed. “Objects are too self-centered to lie. Just like people.”
“People lie because they’re self-centered. The more self-centered they are, the more they lie.”
“What do they lie about?”
“About their ambitions. About their purpose.”
“Do I lie, Bahdring?”
“You lie more than most.”
“I don’t.”
“You do. It’s my fault. You learned to lie when you were traveling with me, and I didn’t notice.”
It infuriated Katemzan. She put her tea cup down. Her hands were shaking. The porcelain was annoyed. “When have I ever lied to you?”
“When you decided that you knew how to keep the world safe.” Bahdring’s withered lips stretched into a grimace of contempt. “Your rangers.”
“What about my rangers?”
“The people hate them. When they come into a town, the people lock their doors.”
“And you were just telling me that the world is growing kinder.”
“Not because of your rangers. They killed the Heron of Lake Sarahban.”
“What of it?”
“All the fish died. The villagers starved.”
“The Heron seduced the young men of the village. Their faces were imprinted on its eggs.”
Bahdring shrugged. “It’s a strange truth about monsters. People need them. In many places, I might be considered monstrous. But people come to me, always. They want to be near me. My ugliness reassures them. It says to them that there is a border to their own ugliness. I guard that border for them.”
“You just said that they mock you.”
“They mock me because they need my closeness. And they are afraid of it. It is the fate of a monster. To be both loved and hated.”
“Well, there are no borders in Lake Sarahban.”
“Not anymore.”
Katemzan was growing tired of this. She swung her feet off the footstool and ignored its sigh of relief. “The lake has recovered. The fish have come back.”
“The villagers keep the remaining eggs. They prick them with pins and blow out their insides and cover the faces of the young men with a thick varnish. The shells turn brown and the faces fade, but the villagers prize these eggs more than any other possession.” The small eyes darted to Katemzan’s face. “Have you ever heard one speak to you?”
“I have not. I have never seen one of these enchanting eggs.”
“I wonder what it would say to you,” Bahdring said softly.
“How did we become enemies?” Katemzan asked, and she was surprised by the despair in her voice.
Bahdring stood. “As I said, people have been becoming kinder. But not because of your rangers. There are travelers who move through the towns and villages. Scholars. Songsters. Cooks. They bring stories and food and curiosity. They’re not afraid of this world.”
“I’m not afraid of this world.”
The tinker sighed. “All of your power, Katemzan, and you’re still so ignorant. Everything speaks to you, so you never have to hear yourself.”
And now Bahdring was dead. A moon cycle had passed since Katemzan had lost the sortition. She had been the Lady of Hasra for twenty-five years, and now she was just one of many, a daughter of the Daturis, like her successor. It was summer, but autumn was coming. Warmth still hung in the mountain air, but the stones were remembering the cold.
She had come to this campfire in front of the tomb to listen to herself. To be freed from the voices of objects. The tomb itself was silent, but she could hear voices speaking on the far side of the rock. The ancestors, reaching for her mind. The ranger had said that there was a girl who could speak to the dead, who could understand and even answer their demands. Katemzan imagined this girl as she watched the flames. A girl who was like her. Able to hear what no one else could hear. She did not want to meet this girl. She did not want to stay silent on this ridge. She felt the sweep of the land around her, it’s silence, it’s indifference. Bahdring was wrong. The land was monstrous, and it had no borders.