"I'll take two," I said, fishing in my pocket.

"How very extravagant," said the courtly lady, catching me off guard with an admiring look that was almost erotic.

"I like the finer things in life," I managed.

"Indeed you do, sir," said the vendor, all trace of contempt evaporating like spit in a hot pan.

"Aren't you one of those Outsiders?" the lady asked, now sidling close to me provocatively and giving me a disarmingly direct look. She was a radiant creature with a sultry gaze that belied her pale skin. Large diamonds hung from her earlobes and her hair was gathered up to expose them.

"Well," I began, nonchalantly biting the head off one of my delicacies. I chewed for no more than a second and then it hit me. "Oh my G.o.d!" I spluttered, spitting feathers and chocolate onto the pavement. "What the h.e.l.l is this?"

"Sparrows dipped in chocolate," she answered. "I thought you were familiar ..."

"Real sparrows?" sparrows?"

"Naturally," inserted the vendor indignantly. "Did you expect some kind of subst.i.tute?"

"Oh, G.o.d," I repeated, spitting again, and trying to suck up the bits of dried bone and tissue already halfway to my gut.

"Really!" said the courtly lady, backing away from me rapidly, "your behavior is really quite quite inappropriate." inappropriate."

"Inappropriate?!" I spluttered between coughs that left dribblings of brown phlegm down my tunic. "Inappropriate? You give me chocolate-covered real dead birds and you think that vomiting them back at you is inappropriate? That is the single nastiest thing that has ever been pa.s.sed off as food! G.o.d, I think I have a teeny piece of beak stuck in my tooth. What the h.e.l.l are you people thinking?"

"My first instinct," said the vendor to the lady, "was that he lacked the refinement to appreciate sweetmeats of this quality. ..."

"Mine, too," agreed the other, whose eyes had frozen over as if caught in a blizzard. "I don't know why they allow these people in."

And with that, she stalked pointedly away, though I was too busy hacking up bits of dirt-colored sparrow to take notice of her or the others who were looking me up and down with their noses wrinkled in distaste.

It's funny how one's enthusiasm for shopping can be dampened by a mouthful of chocolate-covered bird. The stores, whose excesses had formerly seemed so fresh and sparklingly inviting, a sumptuous feast for the eyes, a glorious display of wealth and good taste, were now merely excesses: grotesque and ridiculous. I traded my second sparrow for a thumbnail-sized tart with what looked like wafer-thin slicings of strawberry on the top. It was a beautiful little thing a.s.sembled with the skill of a goldsmith and the eye of a painter, and it tasted of absolutely nothing. I would have thrown it away but it had gone down in one swallow. Odd, really. The way everyone else was nibbling on them and extolling the "simply darling" subtleties of flavor, I began to wonder if I'd gotten a bad one. Maybe I hadn't paid enough.

"If you could take a piece of the sky," I remarked to the girl who had sold it to me, "and turn it into something edible, this is what it would taste like."

"They are are wonderfully light, aren't they, sir," she agreed warmly. "Like a piece of the sky: a charming conceit! You have a most ready wit and a shrewd palate, sir." wonderfully light, aren't they, sir," she agreed warmly. "Like a piece of the sky: a charming conceit! You have a most ready wit and a shrewd palate, sir."

"No," I said, "you misunderstand me. I don't mean it as a compliment."

She gave me a blank look.

"I mean," I persisted with overly slow clarity, "they have no flavor or texture. They have nothing that would make any sane person want to eat them, let alone spend a vast amount of money on them. I cannot say they taste like soap or excrement or chocolates stuffed with bits of bird, because they do not taste at all. They are a culinary vacuum and I have already wasted more words on them than they could ever deserve. You ought to sell something with a bit of bite. Try this, for example."

I produced a small piece of the blue cheese I had found in the woodland cave, wrapped in a thin leather cloth. "This is perhaps a bit bold for this place, but give it a try. This is a cheese with real character, a cheese to sample between sips of a dusty red wine, a cheese of boldness, sharp, but still warm, tangy but ..."

I trailed off. As I pushed the cheese under her nose, her face had blanched first with distaste, then swelled to revulsion, and wound up in something oddly like fear. Her eyes flashed from the morsel of cheese to my face. I cannot imagine what she saw there, but it seemed to fill her with dread. She backed away, staring at me with her hand over her mouth, then began to run, sobbing as she fled.

Pa.s.sersby eyed me with hostile curiosity. What had I done? I tried to shrug and smile rea.s.suringly at the faces turned toward me, but this-not surprisingly-didn't help. Maybe I still had chocolate sparrow bits on my shirt.

I made for the library. At least there I wouldn't feel like some absurd fish flopping about on the floor. There I could lose myself in a good book or six. Even a bad one would be better than trying to blend in with these people. It had been an odd day. But as I have learned to remind myself, things can always get worse.

SCENE XIV

The Plot Thickens

I didn't bother trying the main door to the library, but went straight to the side entrance. The door opened as easily as it had before, though a key had been pushed into the lock from the inside, as if someone had tried to lock it without realizing that the mechanism was rusted away. The writing table had been pushed back up against the second door, but it yielded as it had done before and I was in before you could say "minimum security."

"Aliana?" I whispered, with the hushed reverence I reserve for libraries. There was no answer. I walked around a great case of medical books and peered at the main entrance, but there was no sign of her or anyone else, so I wandered through the aisles of piled and shelved volumes, wending my way back to the drama stacks. I settled here and randomly plucked a book from the shelf behind me.

"The Tragical History of Shatrel, Lord of Dambreland, and the Horrid Revenge of Benath Kazrak," I read aloud. "Sounds good to me." I read aloud. "Sounds good to me."

And so I settled and read under the pale, glowing dome for an hour. But when I reached the fourth act, with Shatrel's demonic machinations in full swing, the thing ended abruptly. There were thirty pages missing, cut out at the spine with a knife or scissors. I cursed quietly to myself and replaced it in the shelves. The next one I selected got a careful examination before I started reading, and this produced a curious discovery: The play's final pages were intact, but much of the second act was missing, cut out like the conclusion of the other play. I took down a pile of books and flicked through them. Over half of them had some pages missing: a couple missing only three or four pages, some lacking a good deal more, one being reduced to no more than a dozen leaves.

I put them back and sat pensively. This was not the result of decay, neglect, or the pa.s.sage of time. These books were not accidentally burned, nor had their pages fallen out of rotted bindings or been casually torn out by owners who needed a piece of sc.r.a.p paper. These had been rigorously and systematically mutilated. To someone like me who had seen similar work done by the Diamond Empire in Thrusia, this could mean only one thing: censorship. But of what and by whom?

I often find that I think better on my feet, so I rose and began to pace the library floor. It was a large building and I had seen only a fraction of it. Since there didn't seem to be anyone about, this seemed as good a time as any to see what else was there while I mulled over recent developments.

I saw it like this: Long ago, Phasdreille was the center of a glorious civilization and it produced much that was fair and wonderful to behold. The city architecture by itself would have been ample evidence of this, but so was the literature I had been reading and the paintings I had seen in the king's palace. In more recent years, however, something of the fire that had inspired the "fair folk" had gone out. What I saw now was a society devoid of pa.s.sion and intensity except in their understandable hatred for the goblins: a society ruled by fashion and ostentation, by the shallowest performance and superficiality. In such a culture, even the great literary products of its past could be considered scurrilous and disreputable. So the good people of present day Phasdreille had opted to rid themselves of what they now considered degenerate.

It sounded right to me, but the real test would be to turn up some local history books and see what had happened to create this shift in att.i.tude. Perhaps it was the appearance of the goblins themselves? With this in mind, I began to climb the stone-bal.u.s.traded spiral staircase that coiled up to a great gallery which skirted the dome. It was lined with books and doors into other, darker rooms. Since I wasn't finding the books I had been looking for I began trying the doors. A few were open but led to tiny storage rooms with empty crates and boxes. The rest were locked.

I suppose some part of me had always known this, but my few months adventuring had driven the point home: The best doors are always locked, and how much you want to get into a room is directly proportional to how difficult it is to do so. Tell a child he can go in any room but the one at the end of the dark corridor and, as all good storytellers know, that's where he'll want to go as soon as he's left alone in the house. The same is true of romantic conquest, I suppose: forbidden fruit, and all that. This I offer as explanation for using my handy fruit knife (which hadn't seen much fruit lately) to throw the tumblers in the lock of one particularly interesting-looking door.

It was bigger than the others, heavy and studded with square-headed iron nails that were now quite black. The handle was a great iron ring that hung stiff and heavy, and the lock was old, purposeful but far from intricate. After no more than a couple of minutes probing and twisting in the ma.s.sive keyhole, something turned over and fell back. Breathlessly, I twisted the ring and pulled. The door opened.

Inside it was gloomy, but I could make out a short flight of stairs and then, as I cautiously ascended them, what seemed to be a large room. No, not large, cavernous. It extended back a hundred feet or more and was about a third of that in width. It was lit by tall, narrow windows with leaded and stained gla.s.s depicting heroic scenes. All along the walls were bookcases and desks and boxes and piles of papers. I approached the nearest table and looked at the ma.n.u.scripts arranged neatly on its top.

There was a pile of books of poems by a single author by the name of Brontelm, all of which seemed to be missing pages as the plays downstairs had. Beside the book, however, was a stack of paper. My heart jumped as I guessed that these were the excised pages. They would show me what the city authorities deemed so offensive that the library had to be decimated. I sat down and began to read eagerly, instantly realizing that the entire collection consisted of love poems. Censored love poems! This ought to be good.

My enthusiasm was unmerited. I got through the first ten sheets and stopped. I had read a dozen different poems about haughty mistresses, dark ladies whose crystal eyes shot death to their lovers' hearts, cherry lips which breathed jasmine flowers, and variations on the usual courtly love twaddle, and found nothing to offend, nothing racy or provocative. I had read Thrusian guides to grammar and p.r.o.nunciation with more erotic content.

My gaze strayed to a box beside the table. In this were heaped other tomes, pamphlets, and books of various sizes and types, all old, all irreverently discarded, covers torn off, pages splayed and disheveled, crumpled and ripped. Given the care with which the books were preserved elsewhere, this seemed strange, so I plucked one out of the crate to see if I could figure out what it was that made it little more than refuse. It was written in some unintelligible language full of curls and dots and trailing lines like feathered tails, graceful but strong and forthright so that I found myself wishing I could read it. I carefully replaced the book in the box, but when I looked at the other boxes arranged around the room, a troubling pattern emerged. Every book bore the same graceful and unreadable script, and they were, it was clear, the sad remnants of a great many volumes. The boxes were grouped around a central hearth with a broad chimney which was blackened and choked with ash but quite cold, allowing me to paw through the cinders in the grate. I found the corners of pages and bindings, badly burned, but all showing the same beautiful, unintelligible script.

Libraries are not places you tend to a.s.sociate with book burning. I supposed it was possible that the piles of mutilated ma.n.u.scripts could have been infected with some parasite and had to be destroyed to preserve the rest of the collection, but it was b.l.o.o.d.y odd that every text in the other language had been set aside to be torched. I had seen none of these books in the halls downstairs, and only those in Thrusian seemed to have been painstakingly edited. It seemed clear that everything in this other tongue was being systematically rooted out and destroyed, but why? Maybe those who could read them were all dead, but could knowledge of a language die so completely that its literature was of absolutely no use to anyone? In this extensive library was there no grammar or lexicon to those feathery traces, nothing to make it worth keeping them?

Among the dead embers I found some pages printed with the cursive script that were less badly damaged than the others, and I took them, folding them into the pocket of my jerkin. I left the room quietly, and, in a few minutes, was able to click the lock on the heavy oak door into place. They would never know I had been there, whoever "they" were.

Well, they wouldn't unless they saw me standing around like the lingering ghost of someone who, well ... did a lot of standing around. Sorry, but my mind was too preoccupied with the sound of footsteps on the stairs to waste time thinking up suitable similes. I came to myself and moved quickly, running on tiptoes around the gallery. On the far side of the dome was an archway and a corridor, but until I got there I was completely exposed. The banister around the gallery was made up of slim stone posts with a top rail and it afforded me no cover whatsoever. As I looked hastily around, two blond men reached the head of the stairs. I froze where I was.

They were each carrying a stack of books, leaning back slightly with their chins holding the tops of the piles to their chests. I caught a few muttered words from the sides of their mouths, but they were too preoccupied with managing their burdens to turn around and notice me. I started, very carefully, to move again, and stepped behind the cover of the great marble arch. From there I peered back while the men opened the door to the great room I had just left and disappeared inside. But any hopes I had of nipping out and down the steps were dashed as another pair appeared on the stairs, weighed down with books like the others. I ducked back into the arch and began to pace quietly down the corridor, trying to get away from all this officious activity. As I left the dome behind, the light lessened, but it was still bright enough to make out the doors set into the walls on either side and the larger, bronze-faced doors at the end.

These were set with intricately cast panels polished to a high golden l.u.s.ter, each seeming to show the construction stages of a great building which emerged from behind scaffolding in the topmost frames. Amidst the scenes of its great halls was a panorama of the structure from outside, and in the center of its roof was a broad dome, crawling with laborers. It was the library I now stood in. I put one hand on the handle to try it, and pulled it away hurriedly. It was warm.

I tentatively put the flat of my palm against another bronze panel. That, too, was almost hot to the touch, and throbbed faintly as if blood coursed through the metal and timber door. I was now conscious of a faint hum emanating from within, as if a swarm of bees had settled on the other side. But it wasn't just a sound. I felt suddenly dizzy, disoriented, and when I stepped back, my head swimming, I had to reach out to the walls to steady myself. I found myself leaning on one of the corridor's side doors. As I released my weight onto it, it opened suddenly.

I fell forward and collapsed on the floor. For a second I lay there, confused, then I rolled onto my back and found myself looking up at the long, graceful legs of Aliana.

She squatted down close to me, her face expressionless.

"What are you doing, Mr. Hawthorne?"

"There's a fire, I think, in the room at the end of the hallway. I felt it through the door."

She looked at me for a second and then got hurriedly to her feet. "The bra.s.s-paneled doors over there?" she said, stepping past me into the corridor and pointing.

"Yes," I answered getting to my feet. "I'm not sure, but I touched the doors and I felt something. ..."

She had approached the doors and put her face close to them. Suddenly she turned back toward me and she was moving quickly.

"You're right," she said hastily. "I can smell the smoke, too. That is one of our largest storage areas. We must raise the alarm or we could lose the whole building."

And then she was marching away. I followed her out of the corridor into the dome gallery where she started shouting for a.s.sistance. The book carriers appeared, looking apprehensive and startled.

"There's a fire in the main storeroom," Aliana called. "You two, get everyone out of the building. Mr. Hawthorne, that includes you. The rest of you, help me get some water up here and we'll see how much we can save."

So much for my sneaking about. So much also for my claims to heroism. Here I was being turfed out like someone's elderly mother-in-law while others more capable looked to the valiant defense of the library.

"I can help, too," I began.

"No," said Aliana firmly. She gave me a quick look and added in a gentler, but still urgent, tone, "You are a guest of the king and I will not have you come into unnecessary danger. Please. Let us handle this."

"All right," I shrugged. "But be careful."

She gave me a long, strange look as if caught completely off guard, then moved rapidly back to where the blaze was raging, without another word or a glance back.

I was ushered down and out. Once in the streets, I ran around the building looking for signs of the conflagration. There was a pall of smoke over the building, but it was hard to see how much of it came from the various chimneys that peeped discreetly from around the dome. I caught a pa.s.sing guard and told him of the fire and he ran to contact the appropriate authorities. I sat around to watch.

A few minutes later a horse-drawn cart with a great tank on the back drew up and a group of uniformed men with axes and pails alighted and entered the building. After that, nothing.

Time pa.s.sed and the firefighters emerged, apparently none the worse for their labors. I watched them leave and then returned to the door through which they had come.

Aliana was there. "I thought you'd still be here," she said.

"I'm glad to see you unharmed," I replied.

"It was a minor affair," she said, still not inviting me in, "but it could have been much worse had you not reported the blaze as quickly as you did, though you should not have been here at all." She looked at me from beneath lowered brows, but the reprimand was almost playful.

"Sorry," I said. "But at least I was of use."

"Indeed," she replied. "Much of what was damaged was old binding material scheduled for disposal anyway, but it could have spread disastrously. We have had a narrow escape."

"Narrow enough to justify my asking you to join me for dinner?"

"What?" she asked, caught off guard again.

"Dinner with me. As a kind of reward. For me, I mean. There are a few things I'd like to talk to you about."

"Like what?"

"The battle for one," I said. "And the library. So what do you say?"

"Well, I don't know," she said. She seemed confused, as if this had never happened to her before. "I will have to think about it," she concluded.

"Fair enough," I said.

She smiled and began to close the door. "Farewell, Mr. Hawthorne. Till next time."

"Till next time."

So I hadn't lost all my charm, I thought to myself wistfully. Progress, of a sort, had been made. It was only a matter of time before she succ.u.mbed, and if that didn't get Renthrette's goat I was a pickled fish. Which I'm not. This return to erotic possibilities, however distant, suddenly reminded me of how I had heard of the library in the first place.

I fished in my pocket and drew out the letter which Renthrette had brought and read to me. Since I had never actually finished reading the thing, I unfolded it and looked it over. Being unused to love letters, especially courtly courtly love letters, I was unsure of what to make of it, which was probably why I had all but forgotten about it. Of course, part of me was excited that there was someone here, someone pretty sophisticated and elegant, if her diction and perfume were anything to go by, who was apparently interested in me. This very elegance and sophistication const.i.tuted, however, a pretty major stumbling block for someone as out of his depth in the king's palace as I was. I could fake it a bit, from time to time, and I had as quick a brain as most or all of them, but I didn't have, and didn't want, the training in insincerity. This courtly verse and delicate verbal sparring bored the pants off me (and if that isn't the most inappropriate figure of speech ever invented, I don't know what is), and I wasn't about to work at getting it right for weeks so that some gorgeous tart in silk and rubies could reward me by presenting me with a scarf for me to wear in my hat, or whatever the h.e.l.l they did round here in place of s.e.x. love letters, I was unsure of what to make of it, which was probably why I had all but forgotten about it. Of course, part of me was excited that there was someone here, someone pretty sophisticated and elegant, if her diction and perfume were anything to go by, who was apparently interested in me. This very elegance and sophistication const.i.tuted, however, a pretty major stumbling block for someone as out of his depth in the king's palace as I was. I could fake it a bit, from time to time, and I had as quick a brain as most or all of them, but I didn't have, and didn't want, the training in insincerity. This courtly verse and delicate verbal sparring bored the pants off me (and if that isn't the most inappropriate figure of speech ever invented, I don't know what is), and I wasn't about to work at getting it right for weeks so that some gorgeous tart in silk and rubies could reward me by presenting me with a scarf for me to wear in my hat, or whatever the h.e.l.l they did round here in place of s.e.x.

But I could not pa.s.s up female attention, however odiously it was versified, so I read the rest of the note. After that stuff about the play and the rather promising references to kisses and heaving b.r.e.a.s.t.s, it got down to the serious business of courtly metaphor. My eyes ran over two pages of rare stones, phoenixes, swans (and other-so far as I could tell-unchocolated fowl), sighs like clouds (hers), glances like javelins (mine), and a host of other tedious stock allusions. It was as if my self-proclaimed admirer had been locked in a small room for five years with nothing to eat but the most aristocratic of love poems, something far from unlikely around here. The second to the last paragraph, however, promised more than Renthrette had spotted or chosen to reveal, though I had long since quit trying to read something hopeful into her foiling of my amorous adventures. It ran as follows:

Be but at the gatehouse beyond the bridge as twilight falls and my coach will sweep us into such sweet bliss that angels will pause in their celestial music and sigh that only mortals could partake of such earthly rapture. For as the bluebird spies out her mate as night comes on and twines with him in flight, so will my hand seek yours and joy will bear us into heaven where lovers sing by the light of ...

And so on, and so on. You get the picture. But, you must admit, it wasn't a bad picture, once you got past all that literary throat-clearing. All that intertwining birds business (what exactly is the fascination with birds in this town, anyway?) may promise no more than hand-holding, but either there was a spark of fire there that could light a real inferno, or I'm no judge of writing. I only wished my eloquent seductress had spent less time on similes and more on concrete arrangements. I mean, twilight is not very specific as a time for a rendezvous goes, and no particular day had been mentioned. Would she patrol the gates in her coach, sighing little love clouds out the window for the rest of the week, or what? Well, there was only one way to find out. As the proverbs say: Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and he who hesitates is likely to wind up spending the night by himself. Call me a hedonist, call me an irresponsible seeker of pleasure, a libertine, and a degenerate. While you do so, I'll be at the gatehouse waiting for a coach to take me to heaven by the fastest route I know.

A fast route, no doubt, but not one I had traveled in some time. Or that much at all, to be honest. This was a consequence of spending most of my first eighteen years in a dress (on stage, you understand) and the next with a bunch of high-minded adventurers who lived to denigrate my moral character. I needed to get into the right mood, and-if I didn't want to stifle my would-be lover-a clean shirt.

One problem with my scheduled a.s.signation, of course, was that it meant wandering around the city after dark. The last time I had done that I had almost fallen victim to every a.s.sa.s.sin in the region. I wasn't going to put myself in that predicament again. The solution had already occurred to me, though: I would leave early, while it was still light-well in time for my a.s.signation-and come back in the morning. This would mean being so irresistibly charming that my romantic correspondent would keep me closeted with her until daybreak, but surely I could manage that? Given my recent track record, it was a plan almost certainly doomed to failure, but I might be able to use the threat of my certain death if I returned to the city after dark as a way of keeping me enveloped in my beauteous lady's piteous bosom.

It never really occurred to me that she might not be beauteous. The fancy writing oozed sophistication and style, and all the courtiers I had seen thus far had been real lookers; in fact, I think they pretty much had to be real lookers in order to be courtiers, if you know what I mean. Everyone in the palace was so preoccupied with their appearance that you just couldn't imagine them daring to pa.s.s the time of day with any vile or misshapen old crone, a.s.suming that the city of the fair folk even had the odd misshapen crone. I suppose I should have been outraged by this, but Garnet and Renthrette, who were usually pretty easy to outrage, would slit the throat of anyone who breathed a critical word about the court. If they thought it was all good and moral and wonderfully principled, how bad could it be? However much they played it down, of course, Garnet and Renthrette were attractive people themselves, in a chill and dangerous kind of way, and maybe this unspoken awareness made the exclusion of ugliness from the palace more acceptable to them. Maybe being part of the in-crowd of the court (and I had no doubt that they were part of that crowd now that Garnet was charging around heroically slaying goblins and Renthrette was drifting about in silk and jewels courtesy of the n.o.ble Sorrail) had dulled the edge of their righteous indignation. I don't know. However superficial all this devotion to beauty and the socially decorous might prove to be, I could see the upside: It would not be a vile and misshapen crone picking me up in her coach.

Then Garnet arrived and spoiled things. The only thing scarier than a hostile Garnet is a happy Garnet, because the things that cheer him up would make any sane person run screaming for cover. He strode into my room positively beaming and, more to the point, armed to the teeth. He was cradling his polished helm with its frightful steel mask and great horns in the crook of one arm, and his other hand was rested on the head of the immense axe pushed into his belt.

"Quick, Will!" he shouted unnecessarily. "We leave in ten minutes."

"We?" I asked, guardedly. "What do you mean, 'we'? And where are you going dressed like a grave statue anyway?"

"To battle!" he roared, his mouth wide and his eyes flashing. "And I have procured a horse for you."

"We're going to rescue Orgos and Mithos?" I asked.