The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly?—No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there—the end of the book. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields.
Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It’s a room in an old house. Or perhaps it’s a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you’ve been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadows of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it’s merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate. This is the grief that comes when we are abandoned by the angels: silence, in every direction, irrevocable.
Chapter Twenty
The Sound of the World
When the pyre was a tent of smoke, I walked away.
I walked through the prince’s gate and far out over the vastness of the plain. There was no angel to keep me from losing my way. But there was a signal behind me, a smudge of darkness rising to the sky. And at dusk, I knew, there would be a glimmer of light. I walked with my hands in my pockets, listening to my footsteps and my breath. This is the sound of the world. When I turned back at last, the prince’s house stood outlined against the bounty of the stars.
Candles burned in the dining room. Great swaths had been cleared in the dust that covered the table. When I entered, Auram rose, throwing back his cape. He bowed, then raised his head again, triumphant and austere. A ghostly bandage glimmered on his wrist.
“Avneayni,” he said.
Miros, seated beside him, rose.
“Surely I no longer deserve that title,” I said.
“You will deserve it always, my friend!” said Auram. “But come, sit. There is wine, and my manservant has prepared a meal.”
I glanced at Miros.
“Not me!” he said with a hard smile, raising his hands. “I’ve changed professions. I’m going into the army.”
“The army,” I said. For a moment I was lost; then I recalled the words of his delirium, his dream of the secret army of the prince.
“Come,” Auram invited me, extending his good hand. And for the first time I noticed the papers on the table. Bainish newspapers. I walked over and touched the cheap stuff darkened with print, and the ink clung to my fingers like moth dust. At first I could not make sense of the letters: they were too bold, too contrastive, too crude after weeks of the gracefully written books in the library. Then they sprang into meaning like a mosaic seen from a distance, and I sat and huddled over them with Miros.
We read of the Night Market. There were reports of the fire, of the Guard’s attack on unarmed huvyalhi, of the trampled corpses. There was a report of an avneanyi, denied in the next issue of the paper, then revived the following week. I read: “The hand of the Priest of the Stone, too long gripping the fair throat of the Valley.” I read: “The freedom to worship.” I read: “Shame.” There were pages of angry letters, so fierce the paper seemed hot to the touch. It was clear that the winds had turned against the Priest of the Stone.
I looked up. Auram sat jewel-like in his impenetrable disguise, glowing from the exotic stimulant of the Sea-Kings. He smiled. “You see, avneanyi, you have given the prince and his allies what they most desire.”
“What is that?” I asked, suddenly fearful.
“War.”
Miros leaned over the papers, absorbed. The fire hissed, sending up sparks.
“War,” I said.
“Yes, avneanyi. A war for the Goddess Avalei. A war of revenge, for those who perished in the Night Market, for the feredhai, for all of Olondria’s poor and conquered peoples.”
He lifted his head proudly. Now Miros was looking at him too. “The Priest of the Stone has ruled Olondria too long,” Auram said. “Our people can no longer bear it. They cannot bear, anymore, to be kept from all unwritten forms of the spirit.”
An edge came into his voice. “It will be a great war, avneanyi. You ought to stay for it. To see the libraries fall.”
My heart shrank. “Must they fall?”
He shrugged, his eyes an impersonal glitter. “What can be saved will be saved. We are not criminals, but the protectors of those without strength.”
“Those without strength,” I repeated. My blood ran hot; I stood. I could have struck his face there in that funereal dining room. I could have seized the back of his head and brought that beautiful, bloodless mask down again and again on the oaken table. I could have torn down the portraits on the walls, where the prince’s accursed ancestors smirked through the dust with overfed red lips. “But you caused this. You. You knew the Guard would come to the Night Market. You set a trap with those you claim to serve. And with me.”
“I did,” he answered calmly.
“Jevick,” Miros murmured, rising and touching my arm.
“I did,” said Auram, piercing me with his knife-point eyes. “I did. I am not ashamed. You do not know, perhaps, of the schoolchildren of Wein, who were attacked by the Guard nearly fifteen years ago.”
“I do know of them,” I said, shaking with anger.
He opened and closed his mouth, off balance for a moment. Then he said: “Well. If you know, then you know that those children were never avenged. No one was punished for their deaths. That is the leadership of this butcher, the Priest of the Stone. And I will not have it.”
His narrow chest moved under his brocade tunic; his eyes were horribly steady, holding rage as a cup holds poison. “I will not have it. Now all Olondria knows the truth. The Night Market showed them. I bleed for those who fell there, but not more than I bleed for the schoolchildren of Wein. Not more than I bleed for the province where we now sit, occupied and mutilated for a hundred years, not more than I bleed for Avalei’s people, the huvyalhi of the Valley. And do not forget that I risked my own life to start the war that will save them. And yours,” he added before I could remind him. “And yours.”