“If it’s your destiny, then it will happen.” Ananda pulled a pouch from inside his robe and spilled hulled pistachios into his meaty palm. “Want some?”
Yama shook his head. He said, “It has all changed so quickly.”
Ananda put his palm to his lips and said, around a mouthful of pistachios, “Is there time to tell me all that happened? I’m never going to leave here, you know. My master will die, and I will take his place, and begin to teach the new sizar, who will be a boy just like me. And so on.”
“I am not allowed to go to the execution.”
“Of course not. It would be unseemly.”
“I want to prove that I am brave enough to see it.”
“What did happen, Yama? You couldn’t have been lost for so long, and they couldn’t have taken you far if you said you escaped on the night you were taken.”
“A lot of things happened after that. I do not understand all of them, but one thing I do understand. I found something . . . something important.”
Ananda laughed. “You mustn’t tease your friends, Yama. Share it with me. Perhaps I can help you understand everything.”
“Meet me tonight. After the executions. Bring Derev, too. I tried to send a message to her by mirror talk, but no one replied. I want her to hear my story. I want to . . .”
“I know. There will be a service. We have to exculpate Prefect Corin after he sets the torch to . . . well, to the prisoners. Then there’s a formal meal, but I’m not invited to that, of course. It begins two hours after sunset, and I’ll come then. And I’ll find a way of bringing Derev.”
“Have you ever seen an execution, Ananda?”
Ananda poured more pistachios into his palm. He looked at them and said, “No. No, I haven’t. Oh, I know everything that will happen, of course, and I know what I have to do, but I’m not sure how I’ll act.”
“You will not disgrace your master. I will see you two hours after sunset. And make sure to bring Derev.”
“As if I would forget.” Ananda tipped the pistachios into the dirt and brushed his hands together. “The landlord of the tavern was an addict of the drug that Dismas used, did you know that? Dismas supplied him with it, and he’d do anything asked of him. It didn’t lessen the sentence, of course, but it was how he pleaded.”
Yama remembered Dr. Dismas grinding dried beetles and clear, apricot-scented liquid into paste, the sudden relaxation of his face after he had injected himself.
“Cantharides,” he said. “And Lob and Lud did it for money.”
“Well, Lob had his payment, at least,” Ananda said. “He was drunk when he was arrested, and I hear he’d been buying the whole town drinks for several days before that. I think he knew that you’d be back.”
Yama remembered that Lob and Lud had not been paid by Dr. Dismas. Where then had Lob got the money for his drinking spree? And who had rescued him from the old tomb, and taken him to the tower of Beatrice and Osric? With a cold pang, he realized who it must have been, and how she had known where to find him.
Ananda had turned to watch the soldiers wheel out on the parade square, one line becoming two that marched off side by side toward the main gate, with Sergeant Rhodean loudly counting the pace as he marched at their head. After a while, Ananda said, “Did you ever think that Lob and Lud were a little bit like you? They wanted to escape this place, too.”
Yama wanted to watch Lob and the landlord of the tavern leave the peel-house for the place of execution, but even that was denied him. Zakiel found him at a window, staring down at the courtyard where soldiers were harnessing the stamping horses to the white wagon, and took him off to the library.
“We have only a little time, master, and there is so much to tell you.”
“Then why begin to try? Are you going to the executions, Zakiel?”
“It is not my place, master.”
“I suppose that my father told you to keep me occupied. I want to see it, Zakiel. They are trying to exclude me from it all. I suppose it is to spare my feelings. But imagining it is worse than knowing.”
“I have taught you something, then. I was beginning to wonder.”
Zakiel rarely smiled, but he smiled now. He was a tall, gaunt man, with a long, heavy-browed face and a shaven skull with a bony crest. His black skin shone in the yellow light of the flickering electric sconce, and the muscles of his heavy jaws moved under the skin on either side of the crest when he smiled. As a party piece, on high day feasts, he would crack walnuts between his strong square teeth. As always, he wore a gray tunic and gray leggings, and sandals soled with rubber that squeaked on the polished marquetry of the paths between the library stacks. He wore a slave collar around his neck, but it was made of a light alloy, not iron, and covered with a circlet of handmade lace.
Zakiel said, “I could tell you what will happen, if you like. I was instructed in it, because it is believed that to tell the prisoner exactly what will happen to him will make it endurable. But it was the cruelest thing they did, far crueler than being put to question.”
Zakiel had been sentenced to death before he had come to work for the Aedile. Yama, who had forgotten that, was mortified. He said, “I was not thinking. I am sorry. No, do not tell me.”
“You would rather see it. You believe your senses, but not words. Yet the long-dead men and women who wrote all these volumes which stand about us had the same appetites as us, the same fears, the same ambitions. All we know of the world passes through our sensory organs and is reduced to electric impulses in certain sensory nerve fibers. When you open one of these books and read of events that happened before you were born, some of those nerve fibers are stimulated in exactly the same way.”
“I want to see for myself. Reading about it is different.”
Zakiel cracked his knuckles. They were swollen, like all of his joints. His fingers looked like strings of nuts. “Why, perhaps I have not taught you anything after all. Of course it is different. What books do is allow you to share the perceptions of those who write them. There are certain wizards who claim to be able to read minds, and mountebanks who claim to have discovered ancient machines that print out a person’s thoughts, or project them in a sphere of glass or crystal metal, but the wizards and mountebanks lie. Only books allow us to share another’s thoughts. By reading them, we see the world not through our senses, but through those of their authors. And if those authors are wiser than us, or more knowing, or more sensitive, then so are we while we read. I will say no more about this. I know you would read the world directly, and tomorrow you will no longer have to listen to old Zakiel. But I would give you something, if I may. A slave owns nothing, not even his own life, so this is in the nature of a loan, but I have the Aedile’s permission.”
Zakiel led Yama deeper into the stacks, where books stood two-deep on shelves that bent under their weight. He pulled a ladder from a recess, set its hooked top on the lip of the highest shelf, and climbed up. He fussed there for a minute, blowing dust from one book after another, and finally climbed down with a volume no bigger than his hand.
“I knew I had it,” he said, “although I have not touched it since I first cataloged the library. Even the Aedile does not know of this. It was left by one of his predecessors; that is the way this library has grown, and why there is so much of little value. Yet some hold that gems are engendered in mud, and this book is such a gem. It is yours.”
It was bound in a black, artificial stuff that, although scuffed at the corners, shone as if newly made when Zakiel wiped away the dust with the hem of his tunic. Yama riffled the pages of the book. They were stiff and slick, and seemed to contain a hidden depth. When he tilted the pages to the light, images came and went in the margins of the crisp double-columned print. He had expected some rare history of Ys, or a bestiary, like those he had loved to read when he was younger, but this was no more than a copy of the Puranas.