I frowned, or tried to, unsure whether it showed on my straw face.“The Land of Flowered Hills.”
“Oh.” She corrected the etching with a long, sharp implement. “Our earliest records have it the other way. This sort of thing is commoner than you’d think. Facts get mixed with rumor. Rumor becomes legend. Soon no one can remember what was history and what they made up to frighten the children. For instance, I’ll bet your people didn’t really have an underclass of women you kept in herds for bearing children.”
“We called them broods.”
“You called them—” Misa’s eyes went round and horrified. As quickly as her shock had registered, it disappeared again. She snorted with forthright amusement. “We’ll have to get one of the historians to talk to you. This is what they live for.”
“Do they.”
It was becoming increasingly clear that this woman viewed me as a relic. Indignation simmered; I was not an urn, half-buried in the desert. Yet, in a way, I was.
“I’m just a teacher who specializes in sniffing,” Misa continued. “I find Insomniacs we haven’t spoken to before. It can take years, tracking through records, piecing together bits of old spells. I’ve been following you for three years. You slept dark.”
“Not dark enough.”
She reached into the summoning circle to give me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “Eternity’s a lonely place,” she said. “Even the academy’s lonely, and we only study eternity. Come on. Why don’t we take a walk? I’ll show you the library.”
My straw eyes rustled as they blinked in surprise. “A walk?”
Misa laughed. “Try it out.”
She laughed again as I took one precarious step forward and then another. The straw body’s joints creaked with each stiff movement. I felt awkward and graceless, but I couldn’t deny the pleasure of movement.
“Come on,” Misa repeated, beckoning.
She led me down a corridor of gleaming white marble. Arcane symbols figured the walls. Spell remnants scented the air with cinnamon and burnt herbs, mingling with the cool currents that swept down from the vaulted ceiling. Beneath our feet, the floor was worn from many footsteps and yet Misa and I walked alone. I wondered how it could be that a place built to accommodate hundreds was empty except for a low-ranking scholar and a dead woman summoned into an effigy.
My questions were soon answered when a group of students approached noisily from an intersecting passageway. They halted when they saw us, falling abruptly silent. Misa frowned. “Get on!” she said,waving them away. They looked relieved as they fled back the way they’d come.
The students’ shaved heads and shapeless robes made it difficult to discern their forms, but it was clear I had seen something I hadn’t been meant to.
“You train men here,” I ascertained.
“Men, women, neuters,” said Misa. “Anyone who comes. And qualifies, of course.”
I felt the hiss of disappointment: another profane, degraded culture. I should have known better than to hope. “I see,” I said, unable to conceal my resentment.
Misa did not seem to notice. “Many cultures have created separate systems of magic for themale and female. Your culture was extreme, but not unusual. Men work healing magic, and women sing weather magic, or vice versa. All very rigid, all very unscientific. Did they ever try to teach a man to wail for a midnight rain? Oh, maybe they did, but if he succeeded, then it was just that one man,and wasn’t his spirit more womanly than masculine? They get noted as an exception to the rule, not a problem with the rule itself. Think Locas Follow with the crickets, or Petrin of Atscheko, or for an example on the female side, Queen Urté. And of course if the man you set up to sing love songs to hurricanes can’t even stir up a breeze, well, there’s your proof. Men can’t sing the weather. Even if another man could. Rigor, that’s the important thing. Until you have proof, anything can be wrong. We know now there’s no difference between the magical capabilities of the sexes, but we’d have known it earlier if people had asked the right questions. Did you know there’s a place in the northern wastes where they believe only people with both male and female genitals can work spells?”
“They’re fools.”
Misa shrugged. “Everyone’s a fool, sooner or later. I make a game of it with my students. What do we believe that will be proven wrong in the future? I envy your ability to live forever so you can see.”
“You should not,” I said, surprised by my own bitterness. “People of the future are as likely to destroy your truths as to uncover your falsehoods.”
She turned toward me, her face drawn with empathy. “You may be right.”
We entered a vast, mahogany-paneled room, large enough to quarter a roc. Curving shelf towers formed an elaborate labyrinth. Misa led me through the narrow aisles with swift precision.
The shelves displayed prisms of various shapes and sizes. Crystal pyramids sat beside metal cylinders and spheres cut from obsidian. There were stranger things, too, shapes for which I possessed no words, woven out of steel threads or hardened lava.
Overhead, a transparent dome revealed a night sky strewn with stars. I recognized no patterns among the sparkling pinpricks; it was as if all the stars I’d known had been gathered in a giant’s palm and then scattered carelessly into new designs.
Misa chattered as she walked. “This is the academy library. There are over three hundred thousand spells in this wing alone and we’ve almost filled the second. My students are taking bets on when they’ll start construction on the third. They’re also taking bets on whose statue will be by the door. Olin Nimble’s the favorite, wouldn’t you know.”
We passed a number of carrel desks upon which lay maps of strange rivers and red-tinted deserts. Tubes containing more maps resided in cubby holes between the desks, their ends labeled in an unfamiliar alphabet.
“We make the first-year students memorize world maps,”said Misa.“A scholar has to understand how much there is to know.”
I stopped by a carrel near the end of the row. The map’s surface was ridged to show changes in elevation. I tried to imagine what the land it depicted would look like from above, on a roc’s back. Could the Mountains where the Sun Rests be hidden among those jagged points?
Misa stopped behind me. “We’re almost to the place I wanted to show you,” she said. When we began walking again, she stayed quiet.
Presently, we approached a place where marble steps led down to a sunken area. We descended, and seemed to enter another room entirely, the arcs of the library shelves on the main level looming upward like a ring of ancient trees.
All around us, invisible from above, there stood statues of men and women.
They held out spell spheres in their carved, upturned palms.
“This is the Circle of Insomniacs,” said Misa. “Every Insomniac is depicted here. All the ones we’ve found, that is.”
Amid hunched old women and bearded men with wild eyes, I caught sight of stranger things. Long, armored spikes jutted from a woman’s spine. A man seemed to be wearing a helmet shaped like a sheep’s head until I noticed that his ears twisted behind his head and became the ram’s horns. A child opened his mouth to display a ring of needle-sharp teeth like a leech’s.
“They aren’t human,” I said.
“They are,” said Misa. “Or they were.” She pointed me to the space between a toothless man and a soldier whose face fell in shadow behind a carved helmet. “Your statue will be there. The sculptor will want to speak with you. Or if you don’t want to talk to him, you can talk to his assistant, and she’ll make notes.”
I looked aghast at the crowd of stone faces. “This—this is why you woke me? This sentimental memorial?”
Misa’s eyes glittered with excitement. “The statue’s only part of it. We want to know more about you and the Kingdom Where Women Rule. Sorry, the Land of Flowered Hills. We want to learn from you and teach you. We want you to stay!”