The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  Taryn touched Jacob’s arm. ‘How is he?’

  Jacob stayed still for a time, then decided to talk. His expression became unguarded. ‘He’s a good-natured animal. I had to stay on him to keep him human. Or human and sidhe. For my part, it didn’t feel quite right, even though he came back understanding our relationship and embracing it. But it was hard not to think, Here is someone utterly helpless. Since then, I’ve been watching him learn. Hugin is taking time to teach him. I mean that literally. She takes time to do it. I think they’ve crammed twenty years into two. He’s always dizzily delighted to see me, as if we’ve been apart for weeks, when it’s only hours for me. And he never sleeps. No one suggested to him that it’s a thing he should do, that other people always do and he’s just like them. No one told him he doesn’t eat red meat, so he mostly shifts and hunts. He says he’s only hungry for what he kills. He’ll be out after deer and elk. He carries all the leftovers into the new human colonies. He can be a wolf one week, and the next an eagle hunting wolves. He doesn’t really have any sense of contradiction. And that means you can see what he really is.

  ‘We’ve only recently put the gloves back into his hands. Neve thought he’d have some kind of cataclysmic accident if he got them too early. He tells us he can feel all the gates, the newest ones cleaning the rivers, and emptying the oil fields, and some he says are very old and very far away—Neve thinks they must be in the place their ancestors were exiled from.

  ‘He found his library when he located the gate it was hidden behind. A gate of his grandmother’s. She must have made it for him at some point. The library is inside a mountain in one of the wildernesses. One that’s not quite so wild now, because there’s a colony there. The people are pretty much all from Chongqing. The library has windows but no door and looks out over the new houses, the river landing, the river traffic.’

  ‘You’re going to like it very much, Taryn,’ said the person who had been in the room for who knew how long. Even the guard had failed to notice him arrive.

  He came to the table and put his hand on the box, and truly appeared.

  He was too young. The wrong side of twenty. Taryn understood Jacob’s scruples. She stayed very still and quietly fought tears.

  Shift smiled at her in an anxious and eager way, then he frowned and looked at Price. ‘This man has something about his person that has busier atoms than anything else for miles around.’

  Jacob threw his arms around Price, pinning him. ‘Search him,’ he said to Shift.

  Shift went straight to the right pocket and found a heavy tube, metal, matte black.

  Jacob let Price go. ‘So now you’re an assassin?’

  Shift peered at the tube, as if he could see through it. Strapped to his wrist was his father’s glove, the fingers laced through his, all fastened tight across his palm with fresh sidhe metalwork in plain gold. Shift met Price’s eyes and said, almost apologetic, ‘This couldn’t kill me. I can dissolve and reform myself, and in the process rid myself of whatever isn’t me.’

  It shocked Taryn, this plain statement of what his shifting was. He’d always been secretive about it. She watched him toss the tube at his own face. It vanished before hitting him. He was carrying a personal gate.

  ‘Nothing was ever on the table,’ Price said. His face was white with fury. ‘You mean to take our sovereignty. You have no respect for the rule of law.’

  ‘Look,’ Taryn said. ‘I’m going to try this one more time. It’s like that thing in Star Trek. The Starfleet regulation that says the doctor can relieve the captain of his duties. The writers probably got it from the real-life navy. Anyway, human beings are the captain. The doctor is the trees and the grasses and the marshes, and the beasts of the field and birds of the air. We humans were declared unfit for command.’

  Jacob leaned towards her and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Well done.’

  She turned back to Shift. She found she was trembling. ‘Do you remember me at all?’

  ‘I remember feeling afraid for you,’ he said. Then he glowed at her. ‘I’ve been reading your notebooks. They’ve been very helpful. I can’t wait to show you my library. And to talk to you about books. Jacob isn’t much of a reader.’

  She smiled at him, but he discerned the sadness. ‘I won’t be sorry for forgetting, Taryn. I love meeting people I know I love—it’s like the sun coming out. Bigger and bigger skies inside me. Neve says this time I’ll be welcomed by everyone. You welcome me, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. You’re the person I most wanted to see,’ Taryn said. And it was true. She had longed to see him. Him, not Beatrice. Someone new had finally climbed into the throne of her heart.

  She put her hand in his free one. It felt absolutely familiar. ‘You have calluses.’

  ‘I’ve been rowing.’

  ‘So you haven’t shifted recently. What are you eating?’

  ‘Our friends at Prince’s Gate have introduced me to the joy of buttery cornbread.’

  ‘If you move away from the Firestarter, will I still be able to see you properly?’

  ‘You will. This extreme vagueness is temporary. The spell hides me when it supposes I’m vulnerable, Neve says. We’re waiting for it to catch up.’ He laughed.

  ‘There’s some ceremony to all this, Taryn,’ Jacob said. ‘A plan. We’ve come to collect you—Taryn Cornick of the Northovers, Valravn, Hero of Understanding.’

  ‘Though the sisters couldn’t be here,’ Shift said. ‘They’ve been trying to master the Language of Command and their flight feathers fell out.’

  Jacob said, ‘Come to the window.’ Then, to the guard, ‘Can you open one?’

  Snow was falling in the sunlight, soft, insidious, scorchingly cold. The horses were stamping their hooves. Neve lifted her hand—the gold glove flashed like a star. Neve was smiling, and it was a warm smile. Beside her, on a larger horse because he was a big man, was Taryn’s father. His face was pink with pleasure. He was pleased to be by the side of the enchanting woman from his strange screentest adventure, and pleased finally to have been told some things he deserved to know.

  ‘Oh,’ said Shift to Price. ‘Neve says she wants the sword returned. You can take it and the marble tabletop back to the island in the lake at Prince’s Gate. There’s no point you people hanging onto it. No king is going to come.’

  Birdsong, the creek of icy branches, the stamp of hooves.

  Shift said to Taryn, ‘You haven’t asked where you’re going.’

  Taryn said, ‘I’m going with you.’

  Acknowledgements

  Page 10: Excerpt from Doctor Faustus and Other Plays by Christopher Marlowe, edited by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 206.

  Page 40: Excerpt from ‘To Quinctius Hirpinus’, Book Two, The Odes of Horace, translated by David Ferry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), p. 129.

  Page 96: Excerpt from Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood (Riverhead Books, 2017), p. 105. Reproduced with kind permission of the author.

  Page 184: Excerpt from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (Penguin Classics, 2006), p. 39.

  Page 332: Excerpt from The Hag of Beare, anonymous. Translated by Gerard Murphy as ‘The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare’, in Early Irish Lyrics: Eighth to Twelfth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 74.

  Page 474: Excerpt from ‘Near the Wall of a House’ by Yehuda Amichai, in The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell (University of California Press, 2013), p. 126. Reproduced with kind permission.

  This book has its roots in my lifelong interest in stories about the ‘others’ of mythology, folklore, fantasy and science fiction—angels, aliens, golems and, in this instance, a whole society of the other. My wondering and enthusiasm hadn’t suggested an actual book to me until a conversation I had in the Lady Norwood rose gardens with Danyl McLauchlan about arcane thrillers—what we liked about the genre and what we found frustrating. So, thanks, Danyl—our conversation set my scholarly hero,
Taryn, off on a search for an arcane object that really is something, not just cause for a search.

  Taryn’s own book, The Feverish Library, was inspired principally by Lucien X. Polastron’s magnificent Books On Fire; also by The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders by Stuart Kells and Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night. My other key reading was Katharine Briggs’s comprehensive The Fairies in Tradition and Literature.

  Thank you to early readers of this novel: David Larsen, Francis Spufford, Sara Knox and Holly Hunter.

  Thank you to Claire McAlpine for scoping out the Bibliothèque Méjanes.

  And, as ever, the wonderful team at Victoria University Press: my editor Ashleigh Young, Kirsten McDougall, Craig Gamble, Jasmine Sargent, Kyleigh Hodgson, and my husband Fergus Barrowman.

  Thank you Jack Barrowman for the late night mutual story-doctoring sessions. And thanks to Creative New Zealand for your support.