Suddenly I was surrounded by a sea of life and sound, color and light. Naked electric bulbs strung on wires across the streets gave the city a warm glow.
“We knew you’d join us,” the boy from before said as he disappeared into a side alley.
I didn’t know what he meant, but I was beginning to get frightened. I was obviously out of my mind (“My father is a nutter,” Sessina would say), but my feet wouldn’t allow me to turn back. They bore me through the city of their own volition.
Names and places began to populate my brain. I was passing through Meddleriever, down the Wolstrasse. Alchemaster Damiun sat smoking a pipe outside of his ink shop. Damiun loved how the glass-grass smoke sat coolly in his lungs.
How did I know that? Had I read it? Where would I have read it?
This is your city, the voice of the spirit boy said. Within its heart is the treasure you’ve been seeking.
No, I thought, this city is filled with paper. I need gold and gems and spices and perfumes if I want to see Sessina again.
There was a hand on my back and I turned to see the boy. He pressed softly and my feet were moving again.
Victor’s Stationarium—one of the most exclusive shops in the city—was closing for the night, steel-grating dropping over the door and windows. Ampersand Café smelled of roasted coffee and cinnamon pastries. I willed my body toward it but to no avail. I felt like weeping, but there was no water left for tears.
The need to flee—flee the city, the books, the nightmares, the thirst—came over me; to strike back into the desert and come back with the fortune I had promised Sessina so many years ago. How long had it been? Ten years, fifty years, three years? Would she forgive me? But oh Sessina, it would be worth it. You could be proud of your father... if he ever returned.
I had to turn around, but I couldn’t. The further I got into the city, the less my body itched. It felt as if my arms were finally healing. The scraps of paper that had stuck to my body started to slough off, each carrying with it a piece of burnoose. Eventually, the ragged remains of the garment fell away, revealing a burgundy greatcoat and black trousers. I never wore clothing under my burnoose.
Lacuna was coming alive. “G’night Dame Yelena,” I called to the authoress sitting under the walnut tree. She waved back, batting her eyelashes. How did I know her name? Grenna would not appreciate the familiarity in my voice. I would apologize once I returned home to the Grain district.
We don’t live in Lacuna. I don’t even know where the Grain district is. Our row-house was a thousand miles away. It overlooked the River Ars. Sessina liked to throw apple cores into the water and watch the squid try and snatch them as they broke the surface.
“Hey Torin,” little Sami Blaylock yelled from the window above his father’s tailory before tossing me an overripe white peach. I bit into it, juices running down my face. It was sweet, with a slight tang from the gentle fermentation. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. Had I skipped dinner? Why did my mouth feel like a desert?
“Thanks boy-o!” I called back, spinning on my heels. The night smelled of dew and spice, grass and brimstone. They were the smells of my city, and I inhaled them like an addict.
No not my city. I didn’t even know this city but from the books I had read. Lacuna was a city built on paper. Existing in the books, between the pages, words, letters.
Something inside me broke. No, not broke. “Broke” was the wrong word (“A not-to-be-said-word,” Sessina would say, sticking her lip out). It felt like the two fists pounding against each other in my skull decided to set aside their differences and shake hands.
I sighed and the thousand stresses of my journey were exhaled into the city: treasure and fame and pride and failure. When I breathed in, they were all replaced with knowledge. My brain filled with a map to my treasure—the treasure I had been seeking for so long—and I set off toward it.
The Run loomed before me, tin roof mimicking MountLampblack beyond. Cutters were smoking cigarillos outside the tin walls, chatting in warm tones.
The dwarf Kork walked up and offered me a swig from his bottle. The whiskey tasted of smoke and fire and wood. They were the tastes of my city, and I gulped them down like a man dying of thirsts.
“How you be Torin?” Kork asked. “I’m great, by way of asking.”
I smiled and ruffled the dwarf’s gray hair. He had been a facet of the Run since I was a boy. “I am better than you will ever be.”
Kork blew a raspberry and slapped me on the back as we walked toward the Run. Every night I helped straighten the logs that would go through Queen Woodheart. Every morning, I limped home, muscles aching with a sweet soreness. It didn’t pay much, but Sessina and I didn’t need much. I used to have designs on the lost treasures of the Five Cities, but my daughter had changed all of that. “My daddy is a strong man,” Sessina told her friends. Let the Mystics find their fortunes in the deserts. I had found mine in the City of Missing Letters.
* * *
The mystics watched as the Plague worked its way over his body. He hadn’t woken in days, since he had laid hands on the very first book. His skin had turned brown and started to flake. He had pulled the wardrobe down, burying himself in books. They had dissolved his burnoose. Where a page touched his skin, it stuck. The books were eating him.
“We warned him,” a mystic said, sighing.
Another mystic stepped forward. “And we’ll warn the next.”
“And the one after that,” a third said.
A sandstorm raged outside, but the mystics didn’t notice or didn’t care. Their robes didn’t move nor their eyes water. The grains pushed through them, like their bodies were made of mist.
Copyright © 2013 Adam Callaway
Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website
Adam Callaway Adam Callaway’s Lacuna stories, which include “Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin” in BCS #73 and “The Magic of Dark and Hollow Places” in BCS #96, have been reprinted in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, nominated for the Million Writers Award, and named to the Locus Recommended Reading List. He lives in Superior, Wisconsin, with his wife and two dogs.
Read more Beneath Ceaseless Skies
THE LANGUAGE OF TRUE THINGS
by Nick Scorza
The boy’s new master wore a dirty wig, slightly askew—a halfhearted gesture at propriety. His old master and his journeymen, who suffered no insult from guards, priests, or Viceroy’s soldiers, withdrew in fear and stumbling bows from this rumpled little man, who might have been a drunken petty lord but for his owlish stare.
Those cold yellow eyes were fixed on the boy, and he felt he could not escape them, even if he could circle the world to the other side. He did not want to leave with this man. He wished only to remain, to unspeak the word that had made him like a leper in his old master’s house. Tears began to well in his eyes. His new master drew back, as if slapped.
“Why are you crying? You will learn the tongue of gods and angels—the language of true things. Yours will be a life of power. You will no longer muck about with useless paint.”
His old master said nothing to this slight, though the boy had seen him throw a cavalry officer out by the lapels for daring to criticize his brushwork.
“Come along,” his new master said, and he turned to leave, though the boy could not escape the feeling that those eyes remained on him, still watching from beneath the ratty wig. He gathered his few possessions, and, as he left, pocketed a little horsehair brush—a small thing to remember a life he’d only just begun to love.
The streets outside were full of midday crowds, but this gave his new master no pause. They did not go toward the day market, which was the only place the boy had gone as a painter’s apprentice. Instead, he realized with growing horror that his master was leading him down the Way of Gods, where he had not been for a very long time; where he hoped to never go again. The hundred temples, all cold marble or mother of pearl looted from old Vash ruins, were meant to fill onlookers with a pi
ous awe. To the boy each looked like a hungry mouth. One of them was worse than all the others, though; the source of his fear—the Heart of Balan, with its doorless walls inscribed in their endless sacred labyrinth. Its mouth was firmly closed, and it stood out among the other temples like a grotesquely sated parasite.
His master did not turn to see him, but he sensed the boy’s unease.
“Why do you shudder? Balan will not emerge to harm you.”
“My mother....”
Then his master did turn to face him, and the look in those fierce eyes was suddenly kind. He patted the boy’s shoulder.
“I am sorry,” he said. “Very little is worse than not knowing.”
The boy’s father had died a soldier in the Silk Wars; an honorable death, and even better, a comprehensible one. The boy had never known him, but whenever he had enough money saved he left a flower at the memorial statue in the day market.
The boy’s mother had revered Balan, not only above other gods but other men, women, and children as well. His first remembered years had been marked by fasts and endless contemplations of Balan’s riddle. But when war had come to the otherworld, and Balan had fallen with the others, his mother had rushed to meet the god at his temple and pledge her devotion in person. Few of the faithful whose gods fell fared well. Keresh devoured its followers, Ejimah told them their worship of her had been a waste of time; Bel Battleson did nothing but drink and weep, confounding his bloodthirsty flock; while radiant Iores deposed his own Archlector and seized the throne of Nemla for himself.
Balan surfaced in the city of Axa and called his faithful to him, promising mysteries finally revealed. When they had gathered, he sealed his temple, its stone walls sealing over doors and windows. None had entered or left since.
“There are some reasons not to despair,” said the boy’s master. “First, while some things last a very long time, longer than we may imagine, very few things are truly forever, even the lives of gods. An uncertain state has its benefits, as well. I know a philosopher who claims those within a sealed structure like Balan’s temple, subject to his unknown will, must be thought of as both alive and dead at the same time. Until we can see and know, those within must be both things, or even all things at once.”
The boy quickly banished the thought from his mind. If he started imagining what might be happening within the temple, he would go mad. He had to assume his mother was as dead as his father or he would beat his hands bloody on the sealed temple walls. He had to live with the pain of her absence, and the other pain, the one he could not bring himself to voice: he had been raised in her faith, professed it with a child’s iron certainty; yet when Balan had returned and called the faithful, she had left him behind.
* * *
His master’s house was a bulbous misshapen heap of stone and thatch—a rude forest cottage somehow transported to an alley off the street of bookbinders. Birds nested in its eaves. His master’s name, which he only heard from the trembling few who sometimes came seeking his aid, was Master Speaker Martyce.
The boy was given a cot wedged between dusty bookshelves, and told to clean and dust the books, to tend the fire, to fetch water and to scrub the floors. Things all apprentices knew; the stock-in-trade of orphans. One thing was different. Once a day, a journeyman from one of the bookbinders came to teach him letters—Eresti, high and low Nahal, and even old Vash, which took a very long time to make any sense to him and cost him a few beatings for his lack of progress.
Master Martyce kept a little gray lizard in a cage, and sometimes the boy could see the tiny globes of its eyes track him with seeming interest while he formed the words.
Master Martyce’s journeyman was hotheaded and impatient, as most journeymen were in the boy’s experience, and he would frequently curse the boy’s slowness and his own misery for having to tutor an orphan prentice, even if that prentice was a Speaker in training. He still bowed in silence every time Martyce entered and did not question what he was paid.
One day, after the journeyman had left, still cursing his lazy pupil, the lizard spoke.
“Don’t listen. You form the words well. I have not heard that poem in a thousand years, and it is pleasing to hear again.”
Its voice was sweet and airy, not the croaking one would expect from such a creature. It almost sounded like two voices in harmony. The boy caught his breath in awe, then pestered the lizard with questions—what it was and why it could talk—but these clearly bored the lizard, and it spoke no more.
* * *
When the journeyman sighed and pronounced him good enough, Master Martyce had summoned him and had him read from all the languages he had learned: lines from the Eresti seafaring epics, the Nahala philosophical dialogues, both cultures’ meditations on the glory and misery of war. The boy puzzled through a few halting stanzas of the Sur-Vasha.
“All of these words have one thing in common,” Martyce said. “They are all lies.”
Now he held up a book, open to a page floridly illustrated with curling flames.
“What is this?”
“Fire?”
“No, it is only a picture of fire. A beautiful lie, like your old master makes. Words are the same, written or spoken abstractions—they stand for things, only. That is what is different about the language of true things. “
Then Martyce spoke a word, and it emerged from his mouth not as speech but as the crackling roar of a fire, and the boy could feel its heat on his cheeks.
“In the language of true things—the tongue of the otherworld—a word and what it represents are the same. One is equal to the other. To say fire is also to make fire. Now, I want you to speak the word you uttered in your old master’s shop. The word that ceased your life as a painter’s apprentice, and heralded your study of the true language.”
“I... I don’t remember, sir.”
“It is not a question of remembering. You know it. Speak it now.”
He wanted to forget, but in truth he could not. The image came to his mind against his will. He had been tasked with grinding cave beetles for their purple pigment. It had horrified and disgusted him in his first weeks as a painter’s apprentice, but it had soon become routine—a thoughtless task, almost pleasant compared to the delicate work of tying bristle brushes. Then, at the edge of his mortar bowl, he’d seen a twitching motion, a futile scrabbling on the stone. One poor beetle had been alive in the sack of its dead fellows he’d purchased at market, and now it struggled, half-crushed, at the edge of death. The boy was filled with sadness watching the little blue-black insect’s last moments, and his head was suddenly ringing with a word for what he witnessed—a word which was struggling to escape his mouth as urgently as the beetle was the bowl.
He spoke that word again, now, in his new master’s house, and it seemed to contain all the urgent sadness of life’s last few seconds.
Then, like before, he became aware of things—half glimpsed shapes in the walls; things beneath him in the earth, down deeper than he could imagine the city reached. He was surrounded by forms he could barely see—and they were whispering. The first time he had heard the sounds, he had thought it was nonsense, but now he could hear the inflections of the old Vash language, though he could scarcely understand anything more than a few words. Cold was one, and forgotten.
“You hear and see the dead,” his master said. “The old Vash, who built this city, entombed their loved ones within the walls of their houses. Axa is bricked and mortared with corpses. The Eresti, even the Nahal, are but guests here—this city belongs to the dead.”
* * *
The boy retained all his old duties, but now he read on his own. Master Martyce assigned him every book in his ramshackle library, one by one. At times, when he knew he was alone, the boy would try to mimic the word for fire that his master spoke. He managed only hoarse croaking.
“You’ll never get it like that,” the lizard said. “You have to understand it, not as the philosophers do, or the Rukh in their spiral towers, but
as poets do. For starters, you must be burned.”
“What are you?” the boy said.
“Open my cage.”
He backed away, and did not speak to the lizard further.
* * *
“What are gods?”
Every so often, Martyce would call him away from his chores or studies with questions like these.
“Human heroes who attained immortality and power in the otherworld.”
“Some, yes. Others are powerful spirits, who have always called the otherworld home. Still others are ideas given life, or fragments of other worlds long forgotten. Telling which is which is never as easy as it seems. Gods are notorious liars.”
The boy thought of Balan and his endless riddle.
“But don’t they speak the true language?”
“Gods speak many languages—sometimes from many mouths. What are angels?”
“Servitor beings which can be summoned and commanded.”
“Again, that is only part of the story. They are aspects of nature, living laws. They speak only the true tongue.”
“And they have no will of their own?”
“Not as we do. They are not slaves, though, anymore than the wind is a slave. What are spirits?”
“Denizens of the otherworld, as people are of this world.”
“Yes, but they are not like people. They live by strange laws, which to us seem like mere whims. They... they do not understand us well, nor us them. But that is not important. Your studies are progressing nicely.”
His master smiled at him, and the boy felt pleased at his progress—pleased enough to chance a question of his own.
“What is the lizard in the cage?”
“Why do you ask this?” Martyce’s tone was clipped, the smile gone from his face.
“It spoke to me.”
His master’s face twisted into a pinched scowl. The boy stammered out an apology, but this did no good. Martyce seized him by the ear, dragged him outside, and switched him hard across the back with his cane. He did not stop until the boy bled.
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