“So,” I said to Cricket, trying to appear nonchalant, “you’ve been reading.”
She regarded me with a look of utter disdain. Of course she’d been reading. “First, I read the safe books, and I learned to bind the monsters between the pages.”
As if in response, the bookshelf at her side shuddered, its heavy tomes shifting in place. I took an involuntary step back toward the stairs.
“Then I read the others,” she continued. “I didn’t sleep for four days. I know all of Deinaros’ secrets, and some he didn’t even know. He wasn’t all-knowing, after all.”
Shadows encircled her eyes. From within, they glowed with an eerie half-light, a pale moon that hung in her pupils and nowhere else. The sun streamed in through the narrow window behind her, placing a mantle of gold atop her deep blue robe. She gathered the voluminous sleeves about her, drawing her knees to her chest.
I recalled, suddenly, that she was a child—twelve summers old, if that, a foundling from the dreaded flesh-markets of Nyssodes, regardless of whether she possessed the power of a deathless sorcerer. She was so small, perching on the spindly library stool, wrapped in a cloak that would have drowned even a man my size.
“Have you slept since then?” I asked.
She blinked. “I think so.”
I approached her, my hand outstretched. The books shifted again, as though something living was hidden in the shelf behind them, pushing its way to freedom. I tried to ignore it. “You should rest,” I said. “The books will still be here afterward.”
Cricket rubbed at her eyes with the heels of both palms. “There are so many.”
“I know. But you’re young, and you might live as long as Deinaros did. You have time.”
“Three hundred years,” she said. “He lived three hundred years. Maybe a few more. He was going to take my blood to live even longer.”
Wasn’t that what Salmacha’s undead king, and the priest who kept his decaying corpse walking, wanted to do with their wicked book? And I had brought it right to Deinaros.
A terrible thought arose. “The Sage’s Mirror,” I said, “and the knife. Those were to extend his unnatural life, as well, weren’t they?”
Cricket took my hand, and I helped her climb down. Her fingers were cold as ice. The cloak pooled on the floor, shimmering like water. “I don’t know,” she said. “But the Mirror is gone. I shattered it and drove its shards into Deinaros’ heart. I’m sorry.”
“You did what you had to.” I placed my hand on her shoulder and guided her, ever so gently, toward the staircase. The guest quarters on the third floor were gone, but the floor was free of books and of Deinaros’ sorcerous remains. It would have to do. “I didn’t recover the knife. I’ll have to find another way.”
“A way to do what?” she asked. I feared she would trip on the trailing hem of her robe, but she navigated the steps one by one without falling. Beneath my hand, the cloth felt like liquid, like the shallow spread of sun-warmed water across a sandy shore. I pulled back, bewildered.
Deinaros had never told her of my quest, and I had only spoken to her in the vaguest terms. “I’m going to the world beyond the world,” I said, “the realm of gods and spirits. I have to cross the river of memory and breach the gate of bone on a day without a sun. I don’t suppose you’ve come across anything like that in your books?”
I expected her to say no, to dismiss my question as superstitious nonsense, unworthy of this hoard of learning. Instead, she answered, “In the north and south, at the top and bottom of the world, the sun doesn’t rise in winter.”
“I was born in the north,” I told her. “For forty days, the sky is black over the floating mountains of ice each year. I’ve never seen a gate of bone, not in all the years I spent there, sailing in the darkness.”
“Have you ever been to the south?” Cricket asked.
I had to confess that I had not. I’d thought that the great forest across the sea, from whence I had taken the Sage’s Mirror, must have been the southernmost part of the world.
“There’s a harbor,” Cricket said, “the last harbor in the world, where the sea shatters boats upon spires of rock and ice, and the wind howls with the voices of all the lost souls slain there. The seasons are mirrored—when it’s high summer here, it’s winter there, and the sun doesn’t rise.”
It sounded fantastical; a tale of the times of old, when the gods walked the whole earth like the Ascended did in Phyreios and the great world-serpents crawled across the lands, carving valleys and mountains in their wakes. But hadn’t I already seen the trees of Rhakyan, each as tall and wide as the mountains at the top of the world? Hadn’t I spoken with a dragon in a winter storm, and communed with the goddess of the deep on the slope of a sleeping volcano? Hadn’t I crossed the whole breadth of the world already? What was one more journey to traverse the height of it?
I took Cricket down to the third floor and lent her my bedroll for the evening. Without the books nearby to whisper to her, she fell asleep in moments. I took the rest of my money and went to the market to purchase what I thought she might need—blankets, a few staple foods, lamp oil, and, on an impulse, a cloth doll with hair of plaited string and a plain linen dress of the sort Cricket wore the last time I had seen her. I had little reason to know the sorts of things that young girls enjoyed, but Cricket had no toys or anything that belonged to her other than her clothing and the sorcerer’s books.
I returned to the tower and left these things in a careful stack at her feet and went to sweep up the remains of Deinaros the All-knowing.
***
I spent the next month living in the tower, seeing little of Cricket as she pored over tome after tome. I reminded her to eat two or three times a day, and took her lamp soon after sunset, to encourage her to sleep. Cricket kept the doll and placed it carefully in a seated position against the wall, watching over her bed, a post from which I never saw it removed. Perhaps it kept the monsters away. I slept on the first floor beneath the stairs, listening for these creatures stalking above.
I did see one, early one morning, a scaled, six-legged thing only an arm’s length from nose to tail. It scurried from the pages of one open book to another and disappeared into its spine. Only a series of tiny scratches in the vellum proved that it had ever been there at all.
There was little else to be found in Deinaros’—now Cricket’s—books concerning the harbor at the end of the world. I would have to seek it out for myself.
And so I departed from the tower, and from Gallia itself, chasing a rumor of the Lady of Osona, the ship that had carried me across the southern seas, and her intrepid captain. Cricket had tired of my presence, and she had made the tower her home and mastered its library as much as such a thing could be said to be done.
“You could come visit again, someday,” she said.
I could not promise her that I would, only that I would try. I wasn’t sure if I would ever return from this last journey.
She gave me books of maps to aid me on my way, though I could interpret a scant few of them. Their inked coastlines were unknown to me, the text upon them inscribed in symbols I did not recognize. After all this time, I had yet to see so much of the world. For the briefest of moments, standing at the tower’s threshold, I longed for the days when all that existed lay between the mountains of ice in the sea and the mountains of stone on the land. In the summer, in the days without night, I could have crossed from one end to the other in a matter of weeks.
The thought was gone as soon as it arose. It was not by choice that I had left the lands of my birth, but I had chosen not to return, even now. Now, I was truly seeking the other side of the world.
I followed the coast, the way that I had come so long before, after I had crossed the desert. In each seaside town and fishing village, I inquired after Captain Hamilcar and his ship. I even set foot again in Ksadaja, where Kural’s followers had taken to walking the streets of the market, singing a tuneless, droning invocation to their heretic gods. Kural himself was not among them. I tried to avoid their routes, but they caught sight of me anyway, and their piercing eyes followed me as I led Bran between the stalls.
At last, I arrived upon the desert coast, in the capital city of a vast kingdom: Marenni, the jewel of the Sultan of Beddal, whose sword slew a demon of the desert for each of his seven daughters, the cursed flesh offered as dowries on their wedding days. His palace, overlooking the sea, was home to his great-great-grandson, a man so afflicted by illness that he wore a porcelain mask and never left the palace walls. The image of his mask, bone-white and painted with sapphire to give it the appearance of one eternally weeping, adorned the walls at regular intervals. Despite the mournful appearance of these frescoes, the market was full of good cheer, and gold and silver, silk and spice, steel and lacquered wood exchanged hands with barely a glance of acknowledgement toward the sad, painted faces.
Hamilcar was there, along with his crew. He recognized me before I did him, and called out to me across the busy marketplace.
“I was wondering if I’d ever see you again, my friend,” he said, grasping my arm in a warrior’s handshake.
I, too, had spent the last months worried that my path would never again cross his. “I must ask you again for your help,” I said. “I must cross the southern seas and find the harbor at the end of the world.”
His eyes widened and his mouth opened, saying nothing. Then he laughed, throwing his head back in delight. “I would expect no less from you, my friend. Come, let us talk. The crew will want to hear your stories.”
Back to Chapter LXI: The Empty Tower
Forward to Chapter LXIII: The Last, Lonely Harbor
I’m past the halfway point on my reread, and you are well on your way toward the end! Thanks for coming along on this journey!
Space Whales Press 
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