Second Kiss (8 page)

Nonsense and Riddles

O
n
the third day of his insomnia, when Yarra was absent due to a cold, Musea, who usually sat back in her stone chair with both eyes rolled back as she spoke, greeted him with a full-on stare and a big smile. Xemion was not in a very good mood but he returned the smile politely. He prepared a quill, and since Yarra wasn't there to hold the cone, he positioned himself as near as possible to the old Thrall so that he would not miss any of her words. But this particular afternoon she did not begin to speak. Instead she continued to stare at him, a small glint of mischief clearly visible in her huge Thrall eyes.

“When shall we begin to begin?” he asked somewhat tentatively, a little uncomfortable with that strange look.

“I don't know … when?” the crackly old voice asked.

Xemion didn't quite know what to make of this. His brow furrowed in confusion.

“Well?” she persisted.

“What do you mean, ‘well'?” Xemion asked in return.

“Well, aren't you going to tell me the answer to your riddle?”

“My riddle?”

“You know, the one you just asked about when we'll begin to begin.”

“Oh!” Xemion mustered a laugh. “That wasn't a riddle. That was a question. I was just asking you when you were going to begin dictating.”

A look of disappointment crossed the old Thrall's face. “Oh, and I suddenly had such an appetite for a riddle.”

“Sorry,” Xemion offered respectfully.

“But now I
must
have a riddle. Do you know a good riddle?”

Xemion thought for a moment. “I can only think of one riddle,” he said, “but I only know the question part of it … not the answer.”

“Well ask me. Maybe I'll know.”

Xemion hesitated before proceeding to recite the riddle that had been posed by the little locket library on the night he and Saheli had fled from Ilde:

Who'll be gouged,

And who'll be gored

By the sword

Within the sword?

Will its power

Be ignored?

O, who will wield

The paper sword?

Oh, that's so easy,” the old woman chortled. But then she remained silent, teasingly.

“Well, what's the answer?” Xemion asked, though he wasn't sure now if he really wanted to know.

“Spell the word
sword
,” she said eagerly, rubbing her ancient hands together. “You'll love this.”

Xemion obliged. “S-W-O-R-D.”

“Now just take off that first
s
and what's left?”

“W-O-R-D,” Xemion replied.

“And what does that spell?” she asked, the glint of mirth threatening to explode at any moment in her eyes.

“Word,” he confirmed. She laughed out loud and Xemion shuddered. An almost superstitious chill flickered through him and he remembered again that feeling of being mocked he'd experienced when he'd first heard the riddle.

“The word
word
is inside the word
sword
, you see? The word is the sword inside the sword.” Xemion nodded, frowning. “Words can cut. Words can pierce,” she added, raising her eyebrows.

“But what is the paper sword then?” he asked.

“I was just getting to that.” She cackled again with true delight. “Spell it, too.”

Frowning, Xemion began. “P-A-P-E-R-S—”

“Stop!” she ordered him. Xemion halted, and Bargest looked up from his mistress's feet, alarmed by the sharpness of her tone.

“Now, what have you spelled so far?” she asked, a knuckle at her nostrils as she tried hard to contain a laugh.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what have you spelled so far? What does P-A-P-E-R-S spell?”

“Papers?”

“Yes, now go on. What's does the rest of it spell?”

“Word?”

“That's right. So what is the paper sword?” she asked with great relish.

“Paper's word,” he answered quietly. And for a second time a superstitious chill flickered through him.

“And so what is the answer to the whole riddle?” Musea asked merrily.

“I don't know. Who
will
be gouged and gored?”

“You, Xemion.” She was so taken by her mirth at this she had to slap her knee to help express it. “Who has been more gouged and gored by words than you, Xemion?” Xemion visibly flinched at this insight. She nodded and laughed out loud. “You see? You came to learn to swordfight but you've been having a word-fight ever since. And so the answer to the second part is also you. You, Xemion. Every day as you have scribed these old stories you have wielded the paper sword, paper's word — literature.”

Xemion was looking less and less happy as she spoke. And then she said something that no one had said to him before but which several people would say to him later. She said it like it was just a last little teasing bit of gaiety. “Why, you must be severely spell crossed to have attracted a riddle like that.”

“I don't think I attracted it,” Xemion protested weakly. “It was just a coincidence that that riddle came up at that moment.”

“Everything coincides. Everything is just a coincidence,” Musea said knowingly.

“Time for dictation?” Xemion asked, as cheerily as possible. She nodded in reply. Xemion took a sip of water from the bottle that had been left on the table. It had a strangely familiar tang to it, but he couldn't at first place it. He took up his pen and said “Ready,” but when she began to speak, strange syllables Xemion had never heard before emerged from her mouth.

“Musea, Musea, I apologize for interrupting, but I no longer understand you. I don't know what you are saying.”

The ancient face cracked open in her broadest smile yet. “Listen.”

“I can listen but I can't really write it out. I—”

“And remember.”

“But how can I remember such a long thing?”

“You drank, didn't you, from the waters of memory?” She spoke so clearly. He felt a little shocked.

“I did, but how could you know?”

She nodded jovially at the bottle Xemion had just drunk from and he realized why the strange taste was so familiar.

“Show me your hand,” she said.

Obediently but with some annoyance Xemion stuck out his hand. Then she did something that surprised him. He had always assumed that the whiteness of her hands was the result of old age. But all this time she had been wearing white gloves. She used her left hand now to peel off the glove on her right hand. Xemion saw only a moment of its bright red colour before it slipped into his hand, quick and warm. She shook it a while, gazing into his eyes, and then she released it and said, “So remember this.”

Immediately Xemion's hand began to tingle and the strange words began again. Despite himself, Xemion listened attentively to the long, strange sentences that followed.

An End of Stories

A
fter
that strange encounter with the old woman, there was barely a moment of the day when Xemion did not hear some fragment of Musea's strange words slipping through his mind. At night when he lay down to sleep they would go interminably round and round. Even if he forced other words over them, even if he recited poetry over them, or said “No No No” over them, the words would return and trouble him with their strange familiarity. They were like a long nonsense song always verging on becoming clear and making sense but never quite doing so. And, despite his fatigue, something in him wanted to know what they meant, so often he would find himself wide awake and intently listening. The combination of sleeplessness, aggravation, and outright anger resulting from this gnawed away at him and wore him down.
This dawn
, he thought,
I will stomp back to the underdome and demand that Musea explain
. And if she refused, he would refuse to do any more writing. Not even Veneetha Azucena could sway him any longer.

Lost in such thoughts, Xemion actually slipped into a badly needed minute or two of sleep, but he was soon startled by a sound outside, an awesome cry of some kind of animal, which echoed down Phaer Point and all along the moonlit High Street right to his room. And the cry did not stop. It was as though there were too much of it for this world. Xemion rose quickly, already dressed, and dashed in the direction of the underdome.

With the sorrowful echoes leading him on, Xemion made his way to the source of those cries, and it was indeed as he feared, reverberating up from the Thrall chamber. With the same quiet steps he had once executed along still forest pathways, he now made his way down the smooth, worn stone stairs to the underdome.

Sarabin and Yarra were both quietly weeping and wringing their hands as he entered, but the source of the terrible howling, as Xemion had suspected, was the dog, Bargest. Until tonight, the dog had only spoken in soft tones of supplication, but now, with his grief unleashed, his voice was gigantic. Musea had died in the night. Her still form lay slumped in the stone chair, the candle flame flickering eerily over her as the dog, between howls, urgently licked her feet. “Please, Mistress. Don't go now, my mage. Don't leave me like this,” he whimpered.

Seeing Musea lying there, hearing the grief of Bargest fill the great stone bubble, Xemion couldn't help but be moved. But even as the first tear caught in his throat, the thought that her death might free him from his labours infected it with a tiny morsel of relief. Sarabin looked at Xemion, distraught, and nodded. “She is gone,” he managed to say.

“It is a great loss,” Xemion said consolingly. “She was a remarkable woman.”

A big bubble of grief arose so violently in Yarra's ancient throat that he could barely let it out. “Yes, yes,” he blubbered. “And just as she was going to begin a recitation of
The Thaumatological
Lexicon
.”

“We'll never have it now,” Sarabin lamented.

“Don't go. Don't go!” Bargest bellowed anew from the floor, filling the cold stone bubble to bursting with the ferocity of his anguish. The poor beast was so distraught he began to run back and forth in the chamber as though searching for her. “I beg of you. Retrieve her. Bring her back.” He was like a large black lion stalking through the darkness, sniffing his way frantically along the aisles and all in between the rows of seats. “Please come back. I entreat you.”

He only stopped when he heard the sound of approaching footsteps. The air was suddenly filled with a sweet orange blossom scent, and then a figure in a green, hooded cloak entered the underdome. Xemion could barely make out the face within the shadow of the hood as he stood just outside the flickering ring of candlelight. The woman with him leaned in toward Musea and cupped her hands over her mouth in disbelief. She approached the old Thrall woman and bent over her so that her mass of dark ringlets hung over the body like coils of shiny black smoke. Veneetha Azucena slowly took her hands away from her mouth and Xemion could see her lower lip trembling. As she looked up, the light from the flames fully illuminated her face and he could clearly make out the red threads woven into her hair. As she put her trembling hand on Musea's cold shoulder, a cry escaped her. This, in turn, set the dog off baying grievously again, and the sound of the two of them in the chamber was almost deafening.

After a time, Veneetha Azucena closed her eyes, took a long breath, and exhaled evenly as though to release the shock. Still weeping, she knelt down and put her hand on Bargest's back and said, soothingly, “Poor, poor thing.” For a while she knelt between the dog and Musea's body and tears streamed down from her dark eyes. Her face remained still and composed except for occasional trembling at the corner of her mouth. Slowly her stillness seemed to spread to Yarra and Sarabin until they, too, grew quiet. Then she joined hands with the two of them, forming a circle, and they kept one another's gaze for so long that Xemion almost began to feel like a spy.

“So, it is done,” Veneetha Azucena said at last, with a grave nod.

“We tried our hardest,” Yarra whispered.

“There is so much we will never recover now,” Sarabin added woefully, shaking his head.

“And … the book I mentioned to you?” Veneetha asked.

“I'm afraid not,” Yarra squeaked, shrugging helplessly.

Sarabin emitted a sharp coughing sound, looked at her sharply, and cocked his head in the direction of Xemion, who still stood silently at the perimeter of the candlelight.

Veneetha Azucena squinted into the darkness and noticed Xemion for the first time. “Ah, there you are,” she said in her sweetest voice.

“I'm so sorry,” Xemion managed to say.

She nodded.

“It is a great loss,” Xemion added.

She nodded again and looked at him piercingly. “But every loss is tainted with some gain, I suppose.” She flashed a wry smile at him.

Xemion looked puzzled.

“I mean, you cannot be entirely aggrieved with this.”

Xemion almost blushed. It was true. With Musea gone there was no reason to keep him here in Ulde. He swallowed and nodded back at her. She saw the guilty look on his face.

“No need to feel ashamed,” she advised in a soothing voice. “There are cross-spells and contrary currents in everything here, being so close to the Great Kone. There's no action that is not blighted by paradox. You have given good service. You can be proud of that.”

Xemion blushed again, still feeling guilty.

“We will need to give Musea over to her people for a full Thrall burial ceremony, but you needn't feel you have to stay in Ulde for that. We have finally had word from Lighthammer. The mountain passes are now traversable and there is a supply caravan going to the camp in the morning from the crossroads at Brookside.”

Xemion couldn't help it. He smiled.

“Yes. Tell them that Veneetha Azucena herself has sent you and they will take you. And take our gratitude with you.”

Sarabin and Yarra tried to add their own remarks to this but a new series of howling laments from Bargest thwarted their attempts. Veneetha knelt down again and put her hand on the back of the dog's neck, stroking it soothingly. “Poor thing. Poor thing.”

It wasn't until he had almost reached his lodgings that Xemion realized why the title of the lost book kept tugging at his memory. There were a number of books in the library locket that had another text written crosswise to the regular text, utilizing the spaces between the letters and the lines. Normally due to the actions of what Anya had explained was a series of miniature tumblers and timers skillfully woven into the spines of the books by the Nains who had created them, you had to read a whole book before it could be inserted into its new slot on the opposite side of the locket. But this didn't seem to apply to the cross-written texts. Indeed, both Xemion and Anya had tried to read some of these cross-written texts but soon found the specialized language and the enormous length of the sentences impossible to understand. When they gave up on such readings they were still able to insert the book into its new slot on the other side of the locket. He dimly remembered now that
The Thaumatological Lexicon
had been among them. Xemion smiled. He didn't know for sure how they could extract it from the locket, but Sarabin had a sunscope and Veneetha Azucena had a crystal dome in her ceiling! This book could be saved! Xemion picked up the pace joyfully. Once he got back to his room he hurriedly retrieved his practice sword and took the locket from its place beneath his bed and set off with it back to the underdome.