The Reader (10 page)

“Why people are born,” she said. “Or why they die. Sometimes I feel like our stories are all up there, in the stars, and
if only I knew how to listen, I'd understand things more. You know?”

He looked back at her, the low light touching on his scars and healing wounds, the marks of the impressors written all over his body. And she knew she couldn't let him continue to travel with her, not unless he knew the whole story. Not unless he knew what he was getting into.

“Archer.” Sefia pulled her pack toward her. “I'm going to show you something I've never shown anyone before. I don't even think Nin knew what was in here.” She dug through her belongings until she found the book, which she hadn't removed in two weeks. Withdrawing it carefully, she put it on the ground in front of them. “This is a book.”

Archer looked up at her, and in the candlelight she began to read, her words mingling with the sounds of falling water outside: “It had never been done before . . .”

Captain Reed and the Maelstrom

I
t had never been done before.

It would never be done.

Every ship that had tried to make it to the western edge of the world had been lost at sea: the
Domino
, the
Gambler
, the
Rocinante
 . . . all good ships, now rotting somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.

They didn't understand. Why risk a ship like the
Current of Faith
on a voyage from which it would never return?

It was a waste, they said.

A fool's errand, they said.

And if you began this story with the day they set sail for the wild blue west, you'd be inclined to agree.

But to truly understand why Captain Reed took his ship to the Red Waters, and what happened to him and all his crew when they got there, you'd have to begin before the beginning.

You'd have to begin with the maelstrom.

The walls were already starting to tip and shake
by the time Captain Reed reached the seafloor. The maelstrom roared around him, up and up like the walls of a green well, with the bright eye of the sky and the silhouettes of the
Crux
and the
Current
circling far above. Under his hands, the sand was damp and soft as powder.

Dimarion pivoted, his huge bulk framed by foam and spinning water. His clothes were soaked, and the tail of his head scarf snapped behind him like a whip. Between them, the contents of the broken treasure chest lay exposed in the sand: The mallet and brass disc had gone green with age, half-corroded by time and salt water, but the gong was unmistakable. Carved figures paraded around its edge, screaming or singing, holding weapons or ancient instruments, calling for the storm in the center—roiling clouds and lightning.

“How did you—” Dimarion's deep voice was barely audible in the howling of the twister.

Sea spray struck Reed's cheek as he stood, testing the shifting sand with his toes. He grinned. “You think there's a body of water in Kelanna I can't cross?”

“Hah.” Dimarion's gaze darted to the ancient copper coin in the sand. As long as it spun, the whirlpool would remain open. But it was beginning to tilt and wobble, its gleaming faces oblong and unsteady. The maelstrom was coming undone, with little twisters coiling sideways out of the water. Soon the ancient coin would fall, and the walls would cave in, and the
water would crush them in seconds, their broken bodies chewed up inside it for the scavengers. “I don't suppose you have any bright ideas?”

Reed tapped nervously at his thighs, where his guns should have been. His fingers inched toward his knife. “I just landed myself at the bottom of a twister with a man who's tried to kill me twice. Don't reckon any of my ideas are too bright.”

Dimarion drew his revolver. “What good are you, then?”

There was a gunshot. An explosion of light and smoke, and the quicksilver of the bullet splitting the distance between them.

Reed dodged. Sand kicked up behind him as he sprang forward, knife extended.

Blood. Dimarion released the gun and Reed kicked it aside, where it was sucked up by the spiral of water and flung into the sea.

What a sound the water made as it roared around them! The ocean's wordless calling.

Something collided with the side of Reed's head. A fist—a foot—a sledgehammer? Lights popped in his skull. He staggered sideways.

Dimarion caught his arm and twisted. The knife dropped.

Then Reed was being lifted. His feet left the ground. That roar. That voice of wind and water. He got in a hit, maybe two, before Dimarion flung him to
the ground. A cringing crater in the sand, and the sea screaming around him.

Dimarion was on top of him. Bare fists like avalanches pummeling him in the face, the arms and hands, ripping away bits of flesh, bringing up bruises and blood. It was a good thing he didn't have his rings yet, or that would've been the end of Captain Reed.

Reed wriggled sideways and scrambled to his feet, panting. He wouldn't survive if they went to blows again.

Dimarion laughed, heaving himself up like a giant out of the earth. “There's nowhere for you to go.”

Captain Reed shook his head and circled warily, counting his steps.
One, two, three, four . . .
“Don't you remember what I said about water?”

As Dimarion opened his mouth to reply, Reed lunged across the sand, grabbed the gong, and dove into the curving wall of water.

His breath left him. The sea tumbled him over and over like a stone, seeking out his eyes and nose and throat. His leg broke. He couldn't hear, couldn't see, but he felt it snap. Felt the bones splinter. He tried to swim, to kick, but in the maelstrom there was no up or down. Only the spinning and the savage water.

Captain Reed clung to the gong. Things were going hot and dark, but when they found his body washed up on some distant shore, they'd know he'd gotten what he came for.

And when he was sure he was going to die, swept up
forever into the boundless blue ocean, that's when the water spoke to him.

No one knows for sure what it said, but some people think it told him how he was going to die. Some people think he saw it all in a flash, fast and full of light: One last breath of salty wet air. A black gun. A bright dandelion on the deck.

And the timbers of the ship bursting.

And darkness.

For a moment he fought against it, as if he could strike at the vision with his hands, his flailing legs, but soon he was overcome by a sudden and intense peace. It spread through him as blood spreads through cloth, saturating his every fiber.

He was going to die, all right, but he wasn't going to die today.

And that's when he decided to take his ship to the western edge of the world.

Because there were thousands of adventures still to be had, and only a limited number of days left to have them.

Because it was out there.

And why not?

With that thought, he smiled, and closed his eyes, and let the water take him.

S
efia squinted at the darkened page in front of her. The candle had burned low while she read, and now its blackened wick began to smoke out on its own. Sitting back, she placed the green feather between the pages and closed the book. Her eyes were dark and serious in the dim light.

Sometimes she felt like the passages she read in the book had been written just for her, as if they were leading her to some greater understanding, like they'd done the day she learned to read. And there were clues even in old stories of outlaw heroes she'd been hearing about her whole life. But as she traced the symbol on the cover, she couldn't help but wonder: If the book was supposed to be
teaching
her, why didn't it give her the answers she needed? Why didn't it tell her how to find the people who'd destroyed her family?

“What would you do if you knew how you were going to
die?” she asked. “Would you run toward it like Captain Reed, or run from it?”

Archer fingered the edge of his throat and shook his head.

“I'd make sure I finished what I started. If that meant running toward it, well . . .” She shrugged. For a second she wanted to scratch the entire cover away, and the pages beneath, as if destroying the book would destroy her need to understand it. But she couldn't do that.

“I'm willing to do whatever it takes,” she said. “But you don't have to. In fact, it might be better for you if you didn't.”

Archer's eyes widened with hurt and surprise.

She should have told him sooner. Told him who she was and what she had and how no one she knew was safe because of it. She'd tried not to like him, tried to pretend he was nothing to her.

But that wasn't true.

She told him everything—about her father, about the house on the hill overlooking the sea, about the book, and about Nin's disappearance. Because he was in danger. Everyone she came into contact with could be taken, tortured, killed.

“You can get out. You can go home,” she said. Her words wavered. “But this is it for me. I have nothing else.”

His fingers tapped at the uneven edge of his scar, and she held her breath, afraid to disturb the stillness that had settled between them.

Would he leave her?

Did she really want him to?

Outside the cave, the waterfall roared beneath them, growing louder in his silence.

Finally, he raised his hand. She could just make out the shapes of his fingers against the starlight. As she watched, he crossed his middle finger over his index finger, twining them together.

He'd never used this sign before. But as she caught on to his meaning, a sad sort of warmth washed over her.

He was with her.

Not just there with her in the cave, but
with
her in all the ways that mattered.

A smile spread across his face.

She gripped her knees and felt her eyes glittering in the low light. They'd do it together, then, she and Archer.

Learn what the book was for. Rescue Nin. Find the people who'd ruined their lives and exact their revenge.

• • •

A
fter she had learned to decipher that first simple sentence, it didn't take Sefia long to realize that she would never be able to master the words unless she could reproduce them. She had to make the symbols herself, so that she would understand them, their curves, how to use them and make them her own.

She started by making the same marks over and over again, repeating them aloud as she did:
This is. This is. This is. This is this is this is this.

At first the letters were shaky and uncertain, poor imitations of the crisp lines she saw in the book, and she'd wipe them out with the toe of her boot or the broad blade of her hand. She practiced harder.

Later, she wrote with the blackened tip of a stick on the
smooth backs of leaves:
This is a book. This is a book. This is a book.
When she was finished, she thrust them into the fire. Clouds of smoke unfurled beneath the wide green rims as the leaves darkened and withered in the flames, their words becoming faint distorted lines before they turned to ash.

She wrote other things too, words with smooth bell-like syllables, passages she wanted to memorize, but she always returned to the same sentence. The first sentence she ever learned.

As she became a better writer, Sefia stopped erasing her words. She didn't leave them where anyone would find them, but making them wasn't enough anymore; she wanted them to be permanent, like the words in the book, signs that she had been there, that she had existed. She began carving with the tip of her knife on the highest branches of the tallest trees in the most unreachable regions of the forest:
This is a book.

Or, on the stones of her buried campfires:
This is a book.

And, traced invisibly on her inner arm, on the round of her knee:
This is a book. A book. A book. A book.

What she did not know was that the people hunting for her would look
everywhere
: in the tallest trees, on sunken stones. They craved the book the way starving people crave food. Sick with longing for it, they followed her. And every word she wrote, every letter she left behind was a trail, with tracks as clear as footprints.

• • •

T
he flesh of the skull had been removed long ago, leaving behind charred bones like burned pieces of driftwood in
an ocean of blue velvet that lapped at its empty eye sockets, the unnerving hollow of its nose, the protruding teeth fixed into a permanent grin by the attached mandible.

Lon glared at the skull, its silent mocking laughter, and rolled up his overlong sleeves. “I already know how to do this,” he grumbled.

“Then prove it,” Erastis said. He sat at one of the long curving tables, poring over manuscripts laid out like patches in a quilt. His gloved hands cradled the pages as if they might crumble at his touch.

Lon glowered at him. But when the Master Librarian didn't look up, he sighed and focused his mind. In the year since his induction, he'd read every esoteric word, every mundane passage Erastis had thrown at him. In fact, he'd mastered reading and writing so quickly he'd begun training in Illumination three months earlier than any Apprentice before him. Tapping into his extra sense, he searched for the shifting points of gold glimmering just beyond the physical world.

Then he blinked, and the Illuminated world rose around him. He was simultaneously aware of his body, of the Library around him and the skull sitting before him, and of the magnificent tapestry of light that was always there, behind the world he could smell and touch and taste. By accessing the Sight, he could sense both worlds at once.

The Illuminated world was a web of all the things that had ever been and that would ever be done. That's why it nauseated untrained Illuminators: it was an ocean of history, full of eddies and heaving tides, and it would rip you away down the slipstreams of memory. To keep yourself from being swept away,
you needed a mark or a sound or a smell, some referent in the physical world to anchor your awareness to this moment, right here, so your split consciousness could later become one again.

Lon shuddered. Erastis had warned him about the dangers of losing your referent. Of being batted about in the Illuminated world by all the dizzying currents of light, so lost in all the things that had happened before that it would feel like drowning, casting about vainly for a shore you would never see again. Illuminators who lost their referents collapsed, their bodies empty and catatonic, eyes open but not seeing, breathing but not living, until their organs slowly stopped working and they died.

Buffeted about by the spirals of gold, Lon concentrated on the scorch marks. The currents of history spun around him and came into focus, and he knew what had caused them. Heat and smoke, flames so bright they nearly blinded him, and a lone figure treading into the fire, pulling smoldering books from the shelves.

“His name was Morgun,” Lon said, watching the ancient Librarian's robes catch and flare, listening to his screams. “He was the Librarian during the Great Fire, and he died trying to retrieve Fragments out of the flames.”

This was the link between literacy and Illumination, why Erastis had insisted on teaching him to read before teaching him to use the Sight: reading was the interpretation of signs, and the world was full of them. Scars, scratches, footprints. If you could tap into the Illuminated world, you could read the history of each mark as clearly as you could read a sentence from a book.

“That's one thing you can learn from this skull. There are two more.”

Lon blinked again, and the Illuminated world faded. “C'mon, give me a challenge.”

“This is a challenge,” Erastis said calmly. “You're already farther along in your study of Illumination than I was at your age.”

“But it's not a challenge for
me
.” Lon ground his teeth in frustration. “Did you know Rajar got his first commission today? He's out there sailing with his Master right now!”

“Rajar is six years older than you.”

Outside the Library, dark clouds crouched on the glacial peaks, and the wind blew fitfully past the windows. “I'm wasted in here,” Lon said. “I should be out there. In the world.
Doing
things.”

“Nonsense.” Erastis flicked his fingers at him dismissively. “Nightfall is in a few hours.”

Lon tossed his head impatiently as if to buck off Erastis's words. “That's not what I mean! You promised me when I joined you that we'd do great things.” He began quoting from the oath he took on the day of his induction. “‘Protect the Book from discovery and misuse and establish stability and peace for all the citizens of Kelanna.'”

“And so we are. I told you the Master and Apprentice Librarian are the most powerful positions in our order, aside from the Director. Without us, there would be no one to interpret the Fragments. There would be no one to investigate prophecies or develop new techniques for Illumination. It's because of us that Edmon and the others can do what they do.”

“But I'm not
doing
anything!” Lon was about to continue when he saw the girl at the threshold of the Library. He didn't know when it had happened, but as if out of thin air she had appeared in the doorway, clutching two blue-bound volumes in her arms.

His face reddened.

She was small and thin, with big dark eyes and black hair knotted in a bun near the top of her head, exposing her neck. Lon's heart pattered around in his chest. She was arrestingly beautiful. Sometimes when he saw her he forgot to breathe.

She was the Apprentice Assassin, but she didn't have a name. Assassins didn't have names. Assassins knew the hunt and the kill, and nothing else. Instead, she was known as the Second; her Master, the First. Like the other divisions, there were only ever two.

The Second was a few years older than him and had been there longer, so she had more privileges, like being able to check out Fragments from the Library and return them at her leisure. In the year since his induction, she'd never said more than a handful of words to him. Not that she was always around. Like Rajar and the Apprentice Administrator, she and her Master frequently left the Main Branch on errands for Director Edmon. It was only Lon who was stuck here.

But he knew she was talented. Without meaning to, he kept turning toward her, to see her better, to see what she would do.

She moved with quick, delicate motions like a bird or a dancer, shifting from foot to foot in a silent, complicated shuffle, as if she were practicing choreography. A kick, a slide, a tap of her toe on the tile. Then she looked up, saw Lon
staring at her, and stopped. Her eyes bored into his, daring him to keep looking.

He blushed and turned away.

Finally Erastis noticed her by the door. “Come, come in, my dear!” he said, motioning her over to the table. His gloved hands fluttered like large white moths. “You've completed your reading of the Ostis Guide to Talismanic Blade Weapons, have you? What did you think?”

She crossed the tiled floor soundlessly and set the volumes on the table beside the Librarian. “Thank you. I have what I need.”

“Excellent!”

Lon approached the table too, his frustration with the Master Librarian momentarily forgotten. He tried not to look directly at her. “For what?” he asked.

He felt the Second staring at him silently, but Erastis beamed. “The Second will be forging her own bloodsword soon.”

“What's a bloodsword?”

The Second glanced at the Master Librarian, who gestured for her to explain. Frowning, she pressed her fingertips to the edge of the table. “A bloodsword is a weapon that's undergone Transformation. You've heard of those?” When Lon shook his head, she tried again, “A
magic
weapon? Like the Executioner?”

A black gun cursed to kill every time it was removed from its holster, and if you didn't pick your target, it would pick one for you.