by Mike Ashley
If Thasper had remembered the tall man, he might also have wondered why his arrival seemed to start Dr Altun on the road to prosperity. The people in the poorer district nearby suddenly discovered what a good doctor Dr Altun was, and how little he charged. Alina was shortly able to afford to send Thasper to a very good school, where Thasper often exasperated his teachers by his many questions. He had, as his new mother often proudly said, a most enquiring mind. Although he learned quicker than most the Ten First Lessons and the Nine Graces of Childhood, his teachers were nonetheless often annoyed enough to snap, “Oh, go and ask an invisible dragon!” which is what people in Theare often said when they thought they were being pestered.
Thasper did, with difficulty, gradually cure himself of his habit of never answering questions. But he always preferred asking to answering. At home, he asked questions all the time: “Why does the kitchen god go and report to Heaven once a year? Is it so I can steal biscuits? Why are invisible dragons? Is there a god for everything? Why is there a god for everything? If the gods make people ill, how can Dad cure them? Why must I have a baby brother or sister?”
Alina Altun was a good mother. She most diligently answered all these questions, including the last. She told Thasper how babies were made, ending her account with, “Then, if the gods bless my womb, a baby will come.” She was a devout person.
“I don’t want you to be blessed!” Thasper said, resorting to a statement, which he only did when he was strongly moved.
He seemed to have no choice in the matter. By the time he was ten years old, the gods had thought fit to bless him with two brothers and two sisters. In Thasper’s opinion, they were, as blessings, very low grade. They were just too young to be any use. “Why can’t they be the same age as me?” he demanded many times. He began to bear the gods a small but definite grudge about this.
Dr Altun continued to prosper and his earnings more than kept pace with his family. Alina employed a nursemaid, a cook and a number of rather impermanent houseboys. It was one of these houseboys who, when Thasper was eleven, shyly presented Thasper with a folded square of paper. Wondering, Thasper unfolded it. It gave him a curious feeling to touch, as if the paper was vibrating a little in his fingers. It also gave out a very strong warning that he was not to mention it to anybody. It said:
Dear Thasper,
Your situation is an odd one. Make sure that you call me at the moment when you come face to face with yourself. I shall be watching and I will come at once.
Yrs,
Since Thasper by now had not the slightest recollection of his early life, this letter puzzled him extremely. He knew he was not supposed to tell anyone about it, but he also knew that this did not include the houseboy. With the letter in his hand, he hurried after the houseboy to the kitchen.
He was stopped at the head of the kitchen stairs by a tremendous smashing of china from below. This was followed immediately by the cook’s voice raised in nonstop abuse. Thasper knew it was no good trying to go into the kitchen.
The houseboy – who went by the odd name of Cat – was in the process of getting fired, like all the other houseboys before him. He had better go and wait for Cat outside the back door. Thasper looked at the letter in his hand. As he did so, his fingers tingled. The letter vanished.
“It’s gone!” he exclaimed, showing by this statement how astonished he was. He never could account for what he did next. Instead of going to wait for the houseboy, he ran to the living-room, intending to tell his mother about it, in spite of the warning.
“Do you know what?” he began. He had invented this meaningless question so that he could tell people things and still make it into an enquiry. “Do you know what?” Alina looked up. Thasper, though he fully intended to tell her about the mysterious letter, found himself saying, “The cook’s just sacked the new houseboy.”
“Oh bother!” said Alina. “I shall have to find another one now.”
Annoyed with himself, Thasper tried to tell her again. “Do you know what? I’m surprised the cook doesn’t sack the kitchen god too.”
“Hush dear. Don’t talk about the gods that way!” said the devout lady.
By this time, the houseboy had left and Thasper lost the urge to tell anyone about the letter. It remained with him as his own personal exciting secret. He thought of it as The Letter From A Person Unknown. He sometimes whispered the strange name of The Person Unknown to himself when no one could hear. But nothing ever happened, even when he said the name out loud. He gave up doing that after a while. He had other things to think about. He became fascinated by Rules, Laws and Systems.
Rules and Systems were an important part of the life of mankind in Theare. It stood to reason, with Heaven so well organised. People codified all behaviour into things like the Seven Subtle Politenesses, or the Hundred Roads to Godliness. Thasper had been taught these things from the time he was three years old.
He was accustomed to hearing Alina argue the niceties of the Seventy-Two Household Laws with her friends. Now Thasper suddenly discovered for himself that all Rules made a magnificent framework for one’s mind to clamber about in. He made lists of rules, and refinements on rules, and possible ways of doing the opposite of what the rules said while still keeping the rules. He invented new codes of rules. He filled books and made charts. He invented games with huge and complicated rules, and played them with his friends.
Onlookers found these games both rough and muddled, but Thasper and his friends revelled in them. The best moment in any game was when somebody stopped playing and shouted, “I’ve thought of a new rule!”
This obsession with rules lasted until Thasper was fifteen. He was walking home from school one day, thinking over a list of rules for Twenty Fashionable Hairstyles. From this, it will be seen that Thasper was noticing girls, though none of the girls had so far seemed to notice him. And he was thinking which girl should wear which hairstyle, when his attention was caught by words chalked on the wall:
IF RULES MAKE A FRAMEWORK FOR
THE MIND TO CLIMB ABOUT IN,
WHY SHOULD THE MIND NOT CLIMB RIGHT OUT?
SAYS THE SAGE OF DISSOLUTION
That same day, there was consternation again in Heaven. Zond summoned all the high gods to his throne. “The Sage of Dissolution has started to preach,” he announced direfully. “Imperion, I thought you got rid of him.”
“I thought I did,” Imperion said. He was even more appalled than Zond. If the Sage had started to preach, it meant that Imperion had got rid of Thasper and deprived himself of Nestara quite unnecessarily. “I must have been mistaken,” he admitted.
Here Ock spoke up, steaming gently. “Father Zond,” he said, “may I respectfully suggest that you deal with the Sage yourself, so that there will be no mistake this time?”
“That was just what I was about to suggest,” Zond said gratefully. “Are you all agreed?”
All the gods agreed. They were too used to order to do otherwise.
As for Thasper, he was staring at the chalked words, shivering to the soles of his sandals. What was this? Who was using his own private thoughts about rules? Who was this Sage of Dissolution? Thasper was ashamed. He, who was so good at asking questions, had never thought of asking this one. Why should one’s mind not climb right out of the rules, after all?
He went home and asked his parents about the Sage of Dissolution. He fully expected them to know. He was quite agitated when they did not. But they had a neighbour, who sent Thasper to another neighbour, who had a friend, who, when Thasper finally found his house, said he had heard that the Sage was a clever young man who made a living by mocking the gods.
The next day, someone had washed the words off. But the day after that, a badly printed poster appeared on the same wall.
THE SAGE OF DISSOLUTION ASKS
BY WHOSE ORDER IS ORDER
ANYWAY??
COME TO SMALL UNCTION
SUBLIME CONCERT HALL
TONITE 6.30
At 6.20, Thasp
er was having supper. At 6.24, he made up his mind and left the table. At 6.32 he arrived panting at Small Unction Hall. It proved to be a small shabby building quite near where he lived. Nobody was there. As far as Thasper could gather from the grumpy caretaker, the meeting had been the night before. Thasper turned away, deeply disappointed. Who ordered the order was a question he now longed to know the answer to. It was deep. He had a notion that the man who called himself the Sage of Dissolution was truly brilliant.
By way of feeding his own disappointment, he went to school the next day by a route which took him past the Small Unction Concert Hall. It had burnt down in the night. There were only blackened brick walls left. When he got to school, a number of people were talking about it. They said it had burst into flames just before 7.00 the night before.
“Did you know,” Thasper said, “that the Sage of Dissolution was there the day before yesterday?”
That was how he discovered he was not the only one interested in the Sage. Half his class were admirers of Dissolution. That, too, was when the girls deigned to notice him. “He’s amazing about the gods,” one girl told him. “No one ever asked questions like that before.”
Most of the class, however, girls and boys alike, only knew a little more than Thasper, and most of what they knew was second-hand. But a boy showed him a carefully cut-out newspaper article in which a well-known scholar discussed what he called “The so-called Doctrine of Dissolution”. It said, longwindedly, that the Sage and his followers were rude to the gods and against all the rules.
It did not tell Thasper much, but it was something. He saw, rather ruefully, that his obsession with rules had been quite wrong-headed and had, into the bargain, caused him to fall behind the rest of his class in learning of this wonderful new Doctrine. He became a Disciple of Dissolution on the spot. He joined the rest of his class in finding out all they could about the Sage.
He went round with them, writingup on walls:
DISSOLUTION RULES OK.
For a long while after that, the only thing any of Thasper’s class could learn of the Sage were scraps of questions chalked on walls and quickly rubbed out.
WHAT NEED OF PRAYER?
WHY SHOULD THERE BE A HUNDRED ROADS
TO GODLINESS, NOT MORE OR LESS?
DO WE CLIMB ANYWHERE ON THE STEPS
TO HEAVEN?
WHAT IS PERFECTION: A PROCESS OR A STATE?
WHEN WE CLIMB TO PERFECTION
IS THIS A MATTER FOR THE GODS?
Thasper obsessively wrote all these sayings down. He was obsessed again, he admitted, but this time it was in a new way. He was thinking, thinking. At first, he thought simply of clever questions to ask the Sage. He strained to find questions no one had asked before. But in the process, his mind seemed to loosen, and shortly he was thinking of how the Sage might answer his questions. He considered order and rules and Heaven, and it came to him that there was a reason behind all the brilliant questions the Sage asked. He felt light-headed with thinking.
The reason behind the Sage’s questions came to him the morning he was shaving for the first time. He thought, The gods need human beings in order to be gods! Blinded with this revelation, Thasper stared into the mirror at his own face half covered with white foam. Without humans believing in them, gods were nothing! The order of Heaven, the rules and codes of earth, were all only there because of people! It was transcendent.
As Thasper stared, the letter from the Unknown came into his mind. “Is this being face to face with myself?” he said. But he was not sure. And he became sure that when that time came, he would not have to wonder.
Then it came to him that the Unknown Chrestomanci was almost certainly the Sage himself. He was thrilled. The Sage was taking a special mysterious interest in one teenage boy, Thasper Altun. The vanishing letter exactly fitted the elusive Sage.
The Sage continued elusive. The next firm news of him was a newspaper report of the Celestial Gallery being struck by lightning. The roof of the building collapsed, said the report, “only seconds after the young man known as the Sage of Dissolution had delivered another of his anguished and self-doubting homilies and left the building with his disciples.”
“He’s not self-doubting,” Thasper said to himself. “He knows about the gods. If I know, then he certainly does.”
He and his classmates went on a pilgrimage to the ruined gallery. It was a better building than Small Unction Hall. It seemed the Sage was going up in the world.
Then there was enormous excitement. One of the girls found a small advertisement in a paper. The Sage was to deliver another lecture, in the huge Kingdom of Splendour Hall. He had gone up in the world again. Thasper and his friends dressed in their best and went there in a body. But it seemed as if the time for the lecture had been printed wrong. The lecture was just over. People were streaming away from the Hall, looking disappointed.
Thasper and his friends were still in the street when the Hall blew up. They were lucky not to be hurt. The Police said it was a bomb. Thasper and his friends helped drag injured people clear of the blazing Hall. It was exciting, but it was not the Sage.
By now, Thasper knew he would never be happy until he had found the Sage. He told himself that he had to know if the reason behind the Sage’s questions was the one he thought. But it was more than that. Thasper was convinced that his fate was linked to the Sage’s. He was certain the Sage wanted Thasper to find him.
But there was now a strong rumour in school and around town that the Sage had had enough of lectures and bomb attacks. He had retired to write a book. It was to be called Questions of Dissolution. Rumour also had it that the Sage was in lodgings somewhere near the Road of the Four Lions.
Thasper went to the Road of the Four Lions. There he was shameless. He knocked on doors and questioned passers-by. He was told several times to go and ask an invisible dragon, but he took no notice. He went on asking until someone told him that Mrs Tunap at No. 403 might know. Thasper knocked at No. 403, with his heart thumping.
Mrs Tunap was a rather prim lady in a green turban. “I’m afraid not, dear,” she said. “I’m new here.” But before Thasper’s heart could sink too far, she added, “but the people before me had a lodger. A very quiet gentleman. He left just before I came.”
“Did he leave an address?” Thasper asked, holding his breath.
Mrs Tunap consulted an old envelope pinned to the wall in her hall. “It says here, Lodger gone to Golden Heart Square’, dear.”
But in Golden Heart Square, a young gentleman who might have been the Sage had only looked at a room and gone. After that, Thasper had to go home. The Altuns were not used to teenagers and they worried about Thasper suddenly wanting to be out every evening.
Oddly enough, No. 403 Road of the Four Lions burnt down that night.
Thasper saw clearly that assassins were after the Sage as well as he was. He became more obsessed with finding him than ever. He knew he could rescue the Sage if he caught him before the assassins did. He did not blame the Sage for moving about all the time.
Move about the Sage certainly did. Rumour had him next in Partridge Pleasaunce Street. When Thasper tracked him there, he found the Sage had moved to Fauntel Square. From Fauntel Square, the Sage seemed to move to Strong Wind Boulevard, and then to a poorer house in Station Street. There were many places after that.
By this time, Thasper had developed a nose, a sixth sense, for where the Sage might be. A word, a mere hint about a quiet lodger, and Thasper was off, knocking on doors, questioning people, being told to ask an invisible dragon, and bewildering his parents by the way he kept rushing off every evening. But no matter how quickly Thasper acted on the latest hint, the Sage had always just left. And Thasper, in most cases, was only just ahead of the assassins. Houses caught fire or blew up, sometimes when he was still in the same street.
At last he was down to a very poor hint, which might or might not lead to New Unicorn Street. Thasper went there, wishing he did not have to spend all day
at school. The Sage could move about as he pleased, and Thasper was tied down all day. No wonder he kept missing him. But he had high hopes of New Unicorn Street. It was the poor kind of place that the Sage had been favouring lately.
Alas for his hopes. The fat woman who opened the door laughed rudely in Thasper’s face. “Don’t bother me, son! Go and ask an invisible dragon!” And she slammed the door again.
Thasper stood in the street, keenly humiliated. And not even a hint of where to look next. Awful suspicions rose in his mind: he was making a fool of himself; he had set himself a wild goose chase; the Sage did not exist. In order not to think of these things, he gave way to anger. “All right!” he shouted at the shut door. “I will ask an invisible dragon! So there!” And, carried by his anger, he ran down to the river and out across the nearest bridge.
He stopped in the middle of the bridge, leaning on the parapet, and knew he was making an utter fool of himself. There were no such things as invisible dragons. He was sure of that. But he was still in the grip of his obsession, and this was something he had set himself to do now. Even so, if there had been anyone about near the bridge, Thasper would have gone away. But it was deserted. Feeling an utter fool, he made the prayer-sign to Ock, Ruler of Oceans – for Ock was the god in charge of all things to do with water – but he made the sign secretly, down under the parapet, so there was no chance of anyone seeing. Then he said, almost in a whisper, “Is there an invisible dragon here? I’ve got something to ask you.”
Drops of water whirled over him. Something wetly fanned his face. He heard the something whirring. He turned his face that way and saw three blots of wet in a line along the parapet, each about two feet apart and each the size of two of his hands spread out together. Odder still, water was dripping out of nowhere all along the parapet, for a distance about twice as long as Thasper was tall.
