

Three from the Stones

By David Goff

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2016 David Goff

Principal Characters

_Our Heroes_ _:_

Lhiar

Rhoneh

Beyan

_Children_ _:_

Fert

Lehlan

Parah, et al.

Others:

The Tomtoads

The Teacher

The Voice in the Wall

The Voice in the Night

The Voice of the Maddened, et al.

# Chapter I

Who doesn't love to walk those damp streets alone? In each cobblestone a sound, trapped deep, like a flame asleep in wood, until the clogs of your feet stepping, striking, release it —

ngkock—

Ngkock!

A full, sleek orb of a sound. A sound on a path that journeys by you — a little sun. Or like a round, unruptured egg yolk — soft and shining. Trailing no mess, leaking not a drop of itself. Bright and proud and whole while heard, and then — wholly gone.

_Ngkock...!_ _Ngkock...!_ _Ngkock...!_ Down through the city, walk the road, the walls about you high and all at every angle. A forest of stone. High enough, almost, to forget that they end somewhere, up there. That a sky hangs over them.

And through this stone forest roads wind.

Walk toward City Center, down from these tenement blocks that tower over the Crude Stream. Later we will spend some time up there, for it is there, in this tenement-maze, that three of our heroes live. But for now walk on, keep walking on. A moment more — you turn and look back — already those tenement towers have passed out of view, eclipsed by turn after turn taken, by wall after wall rising, like tree after tree.

_Ngkock...!_ _Ngkock...!_ _Ngkock...!_

Make your way, step after step, and maybe, all of a sudden, another step sounds faintly, from up ahead, to join your own. ( _Ngk-kock!_ ) Look up and there, at the next corner, you spy a figure standing, garbed in coats and hood, wrapped in the slowly shifting vapor, framed amid the stones of streets and walls.

So this one too, out strolling, has chosen to take this road.

So.

You spy each other. You owe each other: a single steady glance. A moment's halt. Peering, two figures, in mutual regard.

Then break — one of you will turn away, will find a different road. The other one of you will stay the course.

Walking, walking, and everywhere the dignity of grey wet stones. Nearing City Center a gentle rumble sounds from the hall. On approaching further you find that it is not mere noise but voices — words, in fact. For children are assembled there, engaged in the day's lesson, learning their duties and their privileges, and the ways of the world. And it is there, in their midst, that we will first enter this, our story.

So ready yourself — if you've doubts, it's time to choose! If you will walk with me, then see this with your eyes, make calm your racing thoughts, unplug your ears —

Let us enter. For we begin!

And we start, as every morning, with the sound of children singing.

# Chapter II

Knock two times, three,

And peek the fourth

A fairy liver! Fairy liver!

Seedlings in the soil sown

Shot up their shoots through peat and loam

To wander where the winds moan.

While on its rise one struck a stone

And parting round, like water's foam,

It caught it, brought it, as its own,

A fairy liver! Fairy liver!

From the day it first did enter

Still the stone at the tree's center.

What else was it meant for?

Burgeoning the bark about it

Bears that secret shape enshrouded,

Should you ever doubt it:

Knock two times, three,

And peek the fourth!

Long, slow, dusting round the children's stools, with sideways twists to left and right, the trailing purple gown of a grown one. Arms crossed, hands gloved, head bent. Face masked — white and sheer like a tooth. Attentive to the little ones and their learning. Should that gloved hand tap upon your shoulder—oh-oh! something must be amiss! Something, it seems, could be done better! Look to your others with a pleading look. Someone will see what's wrong, and right it. No child wants a second tap too soon!

No child but for Lhiar, who could care not a bit about learning, or grown ones, or his own great unhappiness. Lhiar, who came to class only to wreak bedlam. Who groaned and squirmed, and made noise, and so was perpetually ignored. Whom, like a broken flower stem, no tap or prod from any hand could ever hope to right, but could only send arcing from one extreme to one extreme. He would savage the songs that they sang. He would wrest things — papers, cakes — from his others' grasp, and tear them up. Then sit and weep. Like a hot spell of weather his others endured him. And pity was their shade and their sweat.

Little ones sing

Grown ones bring!

Little ones grow

Grown ones know!

Joy is the toy the little employ

Pride is the guide the grown ones bide!

Sweeping and long, inch by inch, slow like creeping daylight, the grown one's gown around the stools, over the marble tiles, dusting, swirling. Head, atop draped shoulders, tilted toward the little ones in quiet attentiveness. At the wall a pause: one gloved hand rose to brick H338 — with finger and thumb, gently pulled, until the brick, removed, rested in the clutch of the hand. And from deep inside the wall a voice, like water, tumbled forward, out from where the brick had been plucked:

Barthen, Silversmith,

worked so fine and slender a needle

that he threaded the beads of water,

sewed a gown,

and with it covered himself.

At noon the hot sun beat down

and the water beads

rose from earth to air,

and with them

Barthen, Silversmith.

He rose

and he reached

the Sun's round door.

Bowed his head, stepped through.

One step.

So hot, the door's curtain

burned his body pure, without flaw.

Ever since then he can crouch

in the black of night's filth

and yet remain pristine —

crouch and ever toil,

hammer, working

and reworking the moon.

The brick replaced, the voice plugged, the little ones leaned forward, swallowed, breathed deep, opened their mouths, ready to repeat the tale they'd heard. But before they could utter a single sound:

"Eat the moon with a spoon! Get sick and die!" screamed Lhiar, and he slapped his hands on the marble floor, and lifted one foot high as his head, and slammed it down.

Slow, circling, gently twisting left then right, advancing, dusting, the grown one's gown around the little ones on their stools.

The little ones swallowed a second time, breathed once more, let a silence stretch four seconds, five, until it was this gentle silence, and not Lhiar's outburst, that ranked first among their memories. Then, in unison:

"Barthen, Silversmith, worked so fine and slender..."

# Chapter III

Lhiar rushed home as few do. Rush, and you'll feel the air's resistance — the vapor will press doubly upon you, matting a film of water to the front of your person. Better, most deem, to amble gently, and wear the air about you like the thinnest veil. And yet Lhiar ran, and a film grew the full length of his front. And beneath that film of mist a second one surged, a film of sweat that equally encased him.

He stopped and tilted back his head, mouth open, to face the sky. On his tongue he felt the vapor's tingle. He opened his eyes, and needed blink to ward off the tickle of the settling mist. Blink, blink, and open: way high up, above him and above the buildings, the jets of steam shooting into the sky, visible only as a wavering of the light in the air. And behind that web of steam the sun itself waved, and strained, and glimmered, like a coin at the bottom of a shallow pool.

Lhiar sat down. He felt the damp of the ground in the seat of his pants. He grabbed at a stone protruding from the pavement, but it was cemented in like all the others, and would not be moved. Still, Lhiar squeezed it with his fingers, and pulled, his hand turning red and white from exertion. Letting go at last he sent his arm, in rage, soaring into the air — then with a fast and heavy blow he struck it down again upon the road. A fist it was, at first — a weapon it had been — but in an instant lay transformed: bent fingers on the stones.

# Chapter IV

Every night Rhoneh dreamed. And, but for during his Days in Adversity, he resided while awake entirely in his mind, elaborating on his dreams.

His hands knew the contents of his wardrobe. His fingers knew the place and function of his buttonholes. His feet knew the street stones, and his hips the six turns from his home to his studio. His chest knew to breathe, his ears knew to notice. His whole body he had trained to operate without him. For during each waking hour he dwelt only inward, elaborating on his dreams.

Dreams carpeted him like a world's seas. And he rocked on them a fisherman. Paddling, luring, waiting, garnering. He rocked and waited, line strung around his toe. Patient. Awaiting what would come. For each day yawned wide open and bright before him.

The deep fury of dreams rose up, leagues and leagues; up from the ocean's floor, from far down, swelled and pounded. Yet, by the time it reached him at last, it came only as the lapping of little waves against the side of his boat. Gentle and magical. Or it appeared in the shape of those few fishes willing to rise in the water's surge, up, up, to the hook of his line, to be taken by him. Fishes whose marvelous forms were a testament to the strange shaping power of the ocean's deep.

And as such a fisherman might, only when stirred by some sudden mood or premonition, look from the gentle lapping of the waters upward, upward, to that great, black expanse of space and stars beyond his world — glimpse it, and grapple with it — face its inevitable relevance to his own small life and meaning — just so, only once or twice a week, would something unusual enough occur in the world outside Rhoneh that a dim presence would wander forward from the back of his eyes, peering outward from his mind's oceans to interpret the deep, unbearable space beyond.

The rest of the time he resided entirely inward, elaborating on his dreams.

_A dream_ : A great mountain rose up in front of him, forested. Spiral paths running up its slopes, among them jutting humps of earth. On the far side of the ridge a lower, meandering plateau, dark and gravelly — gnarly bushes shot up like genies from the pores between the stones. The whole of it a continent, a realm.

Rhoneh entered the dream and immediately knew this realm in its entirety — yet, as in waking life, he could not all at once summon the whole of that knowledge. He could only wander in that world. And the things that he found there would remind him that he knew them.

Traversing the wooded slope he came to a lodge perched on tall, dark columns. He knew he had been there before. On entering he sensed that there was something therein which he desired, something he needed to obtain — and yet he found not a living soul inside the house who could show it to him.

He walked throughout. And the sunlight lit the rooms in patches, partitioned them with a jagged geometry into areas of corn-gold and brown. The shadow of a pine tree wobbled over the floorboards.

Rhoneh opened drawers, looked in crawlspaces. He knew what he was seeking, but he could not name or picture it. He searched and waited for it to appear to him. In some of the rooms, in fact, there were people sitting, standing, watching him. Rhoneh saw them — and yet to him they were not quite "people", not animate souls, but objects only. Shadows that wobbled. They did not have that effect on him which people usually have on people: the assuredness that one is being taken into account.

Rhoneh continued to walk and to look. And he ceased to differentiate among the visible, physical objects he saw and the other phenomena he was experiencing: moods, intentions, worries, memories, notions. All of them rose before his eyes, and he _saw_ them. As much as he saw the corn-gold floorboards. As much as he saw the shadow that wobbled. Each of them, all of them, presented themselves.

And he began to link them together — to link not just words to words to make sentences, as was the custom, but also words to symbols, symbols to feelings, moods to images. Braiding long strings together, strings of nonsense — and yet they were not nonsense, not truly, for although he could not say aloud, with his tongue, what it was that they meant, still his mind could hold them, and handle them. Could inquire into them. And, as his mind handled them, all that he found before him had weight. And they had depth behind their opacity.

He sorted through them all. Tried to observe them without thinking too hard about them, because his thoughts would seek to explain them — and, with that, everything would begin to disintegrate. A butcher making his cuts, a child peeling and parceling an orange — so does "thought" slice and splay, and find its meaning in the knife-strokes, to the damage of the thing it strikes. But give "thought" something it cannot penetrate — a cast-iron sphere, a diamond brick — and the knife will glance across it and slip aside. It will try and try, but will glide only, and slip, and grow dull. Many will throw the diamond into the ocean, and keep the knife.

But Rhoneh did not think. He did not peel or parcel. Yes, with all that he saw before him his mind did wander and wrestle — and yet these phenomena remained unnamed and impenetrable. They kept their own form. He did not partition them, but received them, grappled with them as with rubber blocks. Unbreakable, immutable. Only to be felt and handled.

Searching through them, and breathing patience. Gliding through this house, on this wooded slope, in this dream. Inquiring, inquiring...

...until, disappointed, he found himself in the dream no more, but on his side, in his bed, in his room. Awake in the vast world that existed outside himself. The cool air's texture chafing his eyes.

He sat up and looked around his bedroom. The walls, the door, the closet, all exactly as he had last seen them, hours and hours prior, when he had lain down to sleep. Standing, he immediately turned his attention away from them, away from all the objects of the room. And he immersed himself in the impressions that still remained with him from the dream just moments before.

What was it, exactly, that he had wanted? Or, rather, _how_ had he wanted it? For even in the dream, while he was searching, he had not known _what_ it was exactly that he sought — yet there, in that house, he had known exactly _how to want it_. Now, awake and disgruntled, he had lost even the knowledge of that.

So he started to experiment with different desires. Tried to remember how it had felt, that feeling in the dream. It had not been the desire one has for physical pleasure, or for companionship, or for rest and relief. It was altogether different. It would take some time to find it. As one might weed through old trunks in an attic, he sat down inside his feelings and searched among all that he found there. Sorted through them, cross-legged, his cheek resting on his fist. Examined each of the feelings he found, until finally, as if he had read the right caption on a photograph, or played the right note on a keyboard, he felt a joyful surge of recognition.

He was desiring with the right desire. He knew where to begin.

And so, thus oriented, he returned to the dream's realm, to the house on the wooded slope. Desiring, inquiring, opening drawers, leafing through heaps.

At first, though, he found there only normal things, things from his waking life. His combs, his shoes, knives, stones, buttons.

_Things_.

His mind was fidgeting. In the same way that his body might pick at scabs, suck on cankers, tongue them. His mind reinforcing the violence which those objects inflicted on his senses everyday. Combs and buttons, and more combs and buttons, everyday, like scabs on the sight of his eyes. And even now, at the frontier of his dreams, where marvelous depths and fishes awaited him, he could not flee those scabs, could only pick at them, perpetuate them. Open a drawer and there they were, the shoes, the buttons. _Things_. The wounds and burdens of his waking life.

He started over. He concentrated. Listened again to the sound of his desire. Looked at its shape. Immersed himself in it, oriented himself. And returned once more to the house on the wooded slope.

He entered. He walked. Desire propelled him. The walls on both sides drifted past like brooks and clouds. Rooms and hallways swallowed him. He moved over the patchy light on the floorboards, passing windows that glowed white and soft, each one holding silhouettes of trees. And as rooms glided by, words rose. Words that strung and clumped themselves together without discrimination. They came to him, and he handled them like physical objects: like smooth, washed stones that one feels with one's fingers and plays with in one's mouth. Rolling, sucking, tonguing, tossing, groping them. Feeling their shape. Tasting their story.

And he knew that one of them, eventually, would be what he was seeking. One of these words that came to him in this shadowy house with the corn-gold glow — one of them would feel and taste just right — and he would know. And once he knew it, that one word, that smooth washed stone that felt and tasted just so — once he knew it, he would swallow it down into himself, to rest in the deep of his core.

But he had to test them all carefully first, because he had to be certain.

So he spent time with each that came to him. Each of these word-stones. He found the pores and grooves upon them. Learned their nature.

Their salt he tasted on his tongue, savory, and felt the soft, fine texture of their pores. All the while he hungered for the right one, wanted to find it and swallow it and be sated. But still, simply in his testing and tasting of them all, the flavor of each one gave him a certain satisfaction all its own. It was partial, incomplete. But it was a satisfaction, nonetheless.

With each one he wondered: Is _this_ the one sought? Is _this_ the special stone? For some moments he tasted it, and then he set it aside. No, not quite. No, it wasn't really it at all.

He took up a string of words and ran his fingers over them like rosary beads. " _On - ways - big - tithes - sent_." His fingers moved over them. Back and forth over the beads. " _On - ways - big - tithes - sent_." Only " _big_ " wasn't quite the word that he was meaning to say. No, not quite. It was something else. He could identify it, feel the shape of it, but he lacked the name for it. It wasn't " _big._ " No, not really. It was more like a giant in a story that does not exist. Big, but not big — because how could it be big if it doesn't exist? Or, like a kernel or a seed, or like ashes — something that might be big, but not at this moment in time. Long ago or far in the future, maybe, but not now.

Still, without the word, he knew it, he could identify it, for he held it in his own very hand. And he rolled them, all the beads, back and forth, through his fingers, against his lips. Was this it? This string of nonsense? Was _this_ that which he sought? The fish sent up, from far below, to be seized and swallowed?

All at once he heard a loud noise, which startled him. It came, violent and hurtling, like a meteor from the deep, forgotten space outside. The beads broke, the stones dropped from his mouth. The light and shadows melded, reconfigured. He was no longer walking on the wooden floorboards, in the corn-gold light. He was not in the house — in fact there was no longer any house at all, nor any wooded slope, nor any continent in the thick of which it stood.

From far within himself he had drifted upward. He had entered into the sight of his eyes, into the feel of his cheeks and thighs and fingers, and gradually he took over the responsibility of operating his body. He squinted to adjust to the light around him. He adjusted his logic, his bearings. To the information that he was receiving he applied the rules of space and distance, hardness and softness, height and balance, danger and safety.

He looked, and recognized where he was. He was in his studio, six blocks from his apartment. Fingers caked in clay. In his surprise he had crushed the vase that was spinning on the wheel before him. At his side rested the twelve bowls and two vases which he had already molded since the morning. He rose and walked to the window. Looking out he saw the source of the noise that had summoned him from his dreams' deep. There, just outside, a boy, shrieking, curled upon the road, cupping one hand, broken, in his other.

# Chapter V

"It's the Maddened," said Fert. "The sign of the Maddened."

And he drew the last stroke of the sign with his pen. Held the page up for his others to see. "It's a scorpion. Don't you see it? The eight legs? The thorn?"

His others bumped their hands together, trying to trace the sketch with their own fingers.

"How do you know?" said Beyan.

"Know what?"

"That that's their sign."

"The day that they played those voices — you know? Two weeks ago? I followed the sound of it all the way down to the grate over the falls. It was so loud there, the voices had to be coming from close by. I looked all around. Then I heard something softer, something so soft it was like a whisper. I turned and walked toward it. And on the ground I found a paper with that sign."

"Anyone could have dropped that paper."

"No. Not anyone."

"You should have kept looking," said Parah. "You were scared."

"You would be scared too of a scorpion!" said Fert and snatched his paper back.

"Do you know what's scary about a scorpion?" said Lehlan, and his others grew silent before him. "The venom. And do you know what's scary about venom? It spreads. It spreads just like fire. It spreads because nothing can resist it. Think about that. And then think about the thing you like the most. That you love, even. And start to fear it. Because love spreads the same way. It will change you. That's the venom alright, the thing you love. The thing you can't resist."

His others stared, as if waiting to comprehend his words. Not yet finished, Lehlan turned to Beyan who, honey on his fingers, was peeling strips of a pumpkin seed bun and stuffing them in his mouth. "Look at you," said Lehlan. "Chomping and slurping like nothing's the matter. But who's the real scorpion? With each bite you take it's you you're biting. And the venom only runs deeper."

Beyan stopped eating and began to cry, though he didn't know what Lehlan's words meant.

"What?" said Lehlan. "Aren't you sorry?"

With that Beyan let out a loud sob and turned to run home.

He still did not quite understand what Lehlan had said — but faced with the mockery in those eyes and the scorn in that voice, the meaning of the words was too much even to think about. All he could see now was Lehlan's glare, and he could hear those words repeated again and again. "Like nothing's the matter...Aren't you sorry...?" He mouthed them with his own lips as he ran. "Aren't you sorry...? It's you you're biting..."

And, as Beyan ran, the words changed, from Lehlan's words to his own, as he pleaded for a chance to answer: "Why? I'm sorry! Why? I'm sorry!"

And, arriving at home, he opened the hall cabinet and climbed in with the spare linen to cry.

The words he murmured were a sweetness on his tongue. As long as he tasted them they urged him to taste further still...until, slowed by sleep, the words little by little slipped from his lips. The urgency passed, and the zeal; and with them passed the mercy they had given, of atoning.

But as he slowed he met a broader, calmer sadness, which he wore like a stupor, and which afforded him a different mercy, the mercy of sleep, and of dreams that slid like water over him.

# Chapter VI

A soapy film of froth on top. And below one can imagine.

Even up to the sixteenth story it stank, the Crude Stream. Running, through its center, the length of the city. But high from his window Lhiar saw only the bubbles of its surface, specks of silver-purple, slowly swirling, creeping forward drudgingly. The stream crawled its way, spurred forward by jets of vapor that spewed from the sides of the banks.

And like fisheyes from underneath, peeping through the surface, round stones jutted.

Lhiar wiggled his window up and stepped out onto the ledge.

He hugged the pipe with his elbows and ankles and slid down, down sixteen stories, sliding for a full minute before his feet finally stopped him with a blow to his knees, cushioned only little by the mosses and lichens piled on the stones. The heavy warmth of the stream rose straight up past him, channeled to the sky between the two great tenement blocks on either side.

The air seemed to hold Lhiar, so thick it was, so warm and pungent. It shaped itself around him like a jelly, conformed to him, gently propped his spine straight, supported his legs, front and back, each time they bent and straightened, stepping.

The air a warmth, a stench, a thickness. The clamor, loud and ceaseless, of the vapor jets.

A ways downstream some men stood, harvesting the agar, their long staffs raking the surface.

Lhiar clambered onto a boulder at the stream's edge and crawled over it, gripping the contours with his good hand's fingertips, his bandaged hand stretched out and away for balance.

It was different, now that he was here, than how he had seen it from the window. He was quite certain that the two were not in fact the same place, that he had transformed the stream simply by approaching it, as one fogs a glass by holding it too near one's mouth. Or, leaning over a calm pool, erases the glitter of sunlight twinkling across it, by casting a shadow.

As seen from up at the window, the stream had cut narrowly through the tenement buildings, a crystal purple band. Coursing, thin and wavering, through them, like the tongue in a serpent's jaws. Here and there, the rocks had poked up, lonely. The sound a quiet hum.

But then Lhiar had slid down the gutter. Like a breath on glass. And he transformed all that had lain below him. With the breath not of his lungs but of his whole body he had altered it. With his nose, his ears, his eyes, his hands. And now the rushing did not hum, but roared. And the air was as thick around him as the froth below; and each stone was not lonely, but a whole world, wide and strong and rough, bucking up from the stream.

From above so small, all of it; then larger, larger with his approach. And it was not, Lhiar thought, only a matter of perception, not only a matter of: "From far away it seems so..." For they had been small, surely they had, the stones and the bubbles. And now — just look, how big they were!

It made him think of candles, and of objects lit by candlelight. And how when candles light things from afar their shadows are so small, hardly discernible. But, with the candle's approach, bigger and bigger the shadows grow behind them. And who would be the fool to say, "No, the shadows do not grow, really — they only _seem_ to do so!"

So it was, he thought, his sliding down the pole. A candle's approach. Drawing close, and feeding the shadows. For he was the candle, with his eyes and his mind. And if he was that, then these, the stones, the stream, the bubbles — they were the shadows. And so the objects, then — the objects that cast them — what were they?

Lhiar leaped from one stone to another. The air intensified. If he had thought about drinking, or eating, the stench from below might have sickened him. He would have doubled over.

But he did not think about drinking or eating. The offender stayed down in the stream, and sent up to his nostrils only a messenger of itself. Lhiar could tolerate that. The smell beat against him as tall grass swarms against one's calves when trudging through a meadow — encompassing him, tickling him, incapable of being ignored — and yet inseparable from this new place's strange, alluring character, and not altogether a nuisance.

He sat down on the stone. His journey from the window seemed already far behind him.

He heard the roar and smelled the stench of the stream, and he started to wonder where they went when they entered him — the sound and the stench. Where did they go?

He fingered his ears, then his nostrils. But his fingers were chubby and the channels of his skull were slim. He stuck his hand into his mouth, behind the teeth, reaching back, back — but before he could get far he gagged and found himself yanking his hand out, and he vomited a little on the stone.

Curiosity burned in him.

He tried to roll his eyes backwards, to see into his head. He prodded all over his body, his chest, and arms, and back, as one taps at a wall to find a secret chamber.

He sought the best point of entry.

Finally he came to the soft flesh of his thigh. Already infatuated, eager as if on the brink of climax, he gripped and tore a thin flake of stone from the boulder below him, breaking off a fingernail as he did; and with one clean motion he drove the shard into his thigh. First it made only a shallow cut, and Lhiar was stunned for a moment by the shock of the blow. But he judged the pain only a barrier to knowledge, and he raised the shard a second, and a third time, brought it down and further opened the gash in his leg.

Dropping the stone he wiggled his fingers into the wound he had made. He wiggled and dug. Groping. Seeking. But after a moment the burning of his infatuation abated, and his fingers slowed.

He looked up bewildered.

# Chapter VII

Little ones need

Grown ones feed!

For Little ones' sake

The Grown ones make!

Little ones speak and play and laugh

Grown ones tend with trough and staff!

The gown swept the tiles, side to side, slow and meandering, round twenty-nine little ones and one empty stool. Coming to the wall, the grown one looked here and there, searching from behind the mask, opaque and white like a tooth under the hood. Found brick H212. Removed it from the wall.

Into the room the voice swept, steady and even from far inside the chamber. Tireless it came, like a stone tumbling down a smooth slope:

Besk waited everyday on the tip

of the world's tusk. Out, out

he waited by the deepest cave

and the tallest sky.

Waiting, watched the world transpire.

Each day the dew

coated him as it coats the street stones.

And it came to pass that a sweet cake

entered into his hands.

And, though he had never before

seen or felt such a thing,

he knew it to be intended for his eating.

So he ate.

So sweet it was

that when he had finished it

and ever afterward, he sat

without yearning, without waiting.

For it was enough

to know that such sweetness lived in the world.

The brick closed the hole, and the gown swept among the stools. The white mask like a tooth turned from little one to little one, and nodded, and blessed.

School finished, Fert stood outside with Beyan peeling strips off a cranberry tart.

"And what now then?"

# Chapter VIII

Wrapped tight and immobile, achy and feverish, Lhiar could not leave his greeting room. He spent his hours trying to sleep through his restlessness. In moments of self-awareness he clenched his hand and groaned, and slapped the floor.

It was several days before he noticed the song of the tomtoads. And it was another day before he began to listen to it.

There are many stories about the tomtoads, though most people remember, more than any other, Brick H303:

Under the street stones they lived, the tomtoads. Dark and wet their world,

they tamed and bridled worms to clear roads.

Around hearths, in caverns far apart,

they lived clustered, and sang their shared vibration through the passageways.

And this murmuring sound filled and buttressed the world they had built.

But, through the caverns, one crack like a fungus spread

and all the tomtoads might have perished

had not the Old Stalwart barreled his voice mighty and low.

And his song upheld the tunnels until every tomtoad had escaped

to the world of light — every tomtoad but himself, the Old Stalwart,

whose breath ran out, and was buried.

Since then their race have lived in folk's cabinets,

clearing dust and dirt, as once they did, in a different world.

And their soft and grateful song, still bounding from home to home, is,

like air wafting, fresh and gentle to the appetites of folk.

Like dust cascading through a lazy shaft of sunlight — like the deep, soft colors of lamp shades and carpets — like rain upon the roof — the song of the tomtoads lent a touch of rightness to a home. And folk were comforted by it as by a sheet's thin weight while sleeping, or by the gentle draping on one's body of casual clothes. A friend, and a buffer.

And maybe, on occasion, when one's mind relented from its mad climb over "thought-stumps" and through "thickets of notions", one fell backward, softly, into that gentle sound, and rested there, as on a forestbed of moss and tattered leaves.

Lhiar fell, but could not rest.

The touch, as of leaves, itched at him. Made him wrestle with the air. For a day he wrestled. He wondered why the tomtoads could not keep silent — or else screech and rip the world apart. One or the other, either one of the two, just to shatter the continuity.

But, after a day, he slept. And, on waking, it was the song of the tomtoads that drew him into the world, just as light often draws one into the world. First the light is as a dim presence. Then as a steady stream. And finally it introduces one to all the world's sundry things — touches each of the objects all around, and bestows it with a unique shape and hue, the light worn by each in a manner all its own.

As one interprets the world, on waking, through the light, so did Lhiar that day interpret it through that gentle, pervading song.

Nested in a corner of himself, a corner so small and distant that his anger and restlessness had left it undisturbed, Lhiar watched the morning stream by like a river around him. It was outside him — yet he felt himself in it. And if the morning was a river, the song was its glimmering. Though, when he looked closely, the glimmering was not mere bustle and restless chatter. It was the dark green, the purple, the black, circles on the water's surface, circles and ovals — shapes — growing, shrinking, arising, and transforming. He began to watch it, the song. To watch it with his ears.

In this way he began to do what few intend to do — what he himself had no intention of doing. To learn the song of the tomtoads.

# Chapter IX

_A dream_ : Rhoneh climbed over the surface of the world. Clambered, with his palms and his soles, his back to the sun. Rocks, ledges, roots — he grabbed and clung to them, traded one for the next.

He pushed himself away from the surface and floated up — back — into the air, and then collapsed down again — forward — to the surface. Shuffling over the world.

Again and again he tried to push himself away, only, again and again, to be drawn back. And he wondered what was the nature of the thing that drew him.

So he slipped down through a pore in the surface and dug a deep channel, down to the belly of the world. Down, down, the dark way he dug, until ahead of him he saw that the way opened into a spacious chamber, bright and alive like fire. He approached, and there, sitting outside of the chamber, tucked against the wall of the tunnel, amid gravel and shadow, he saw the boy, the one from the street with the broken hand.

Rhoneh stopped to look down on him, and to wonder at why he sat there, so deep down, and yet outside the threshold to the lowest room of light.

And then, suddenly, Rhoneh was not only himself, coming upon the boy, but was also the very walls of the cavern itself, who, silent and thoughtless, had encircled the boy for as long as he had been there, long before the man "Rhoneh" had ever descended to meet him.

And Rhoneh (only it was not Rhoneh — or not just) tried to think back, to remember when it was that the boy had first come. For if he could remember that, then maybe he could comprehend why it was that he was sitting there on the threshold. Neither above in the world nor ahead in the room of light.

He searched back through time, struggling through all the other irrelevant memories that appeared, as one, half-sleeping, kicks one's legs to free them from the sheet, searching....

...until he was no longer the tunnel, nor the figure who had slipped down through the pore of the earth, but was only Rhoneh the human man, in his bed, in that outer world of things. Heavy. Bodied. With teeth and jaws and fingers and spine, when, just moments before, he had seemed fast and bright as a light-shaft, letting smoke and shadows make shapes and pass through him.

He rose from his bed. Stared at the back of his eyelids, with his head in his elbow on his knee. He breathed deep, stood, and began to dress himself. His fingers on the buttons lulled him like a hypnotist's charm — three buttons, four, and he was already gone....

For the length of some moments he was neither in the outer world nor in the world of his dream, but in some dark space, darker than any darkness a human should know. For, in the world of humans, there is both dark and light, and simply through the light's existence, whether here or there, the dark is tempered. Yet Rhoneh had wandered into the far greater darkness of a lightless world, where even our blackest black is only the midpoint between dark and light.

Dark, and yet not void, for it was pregnant with the existence of all that could not be seen or felt in it.

And, slowly, Rhoneh became conscious of himself existing in this space, though not yet wholly as a man, but only as a tongue, crawling in the cavern of some strange beast's mouth. He crawled, the walls about him damp and soft like the moss behind a waterfall. And he slithered over the smooth marble shafts of the creature's teeth, sleek and geometrical, projecting from the floor. They might have been obstacles to him, but they afforded no difficulty; rather they gratified him with the knowledge that they remained there unmoving, severe, stolid, as he crept over them.

Throughout it all he carried the intuition that the walls about him were alive, the flesh of some great creature, though he did not know what.

Until suddenly he was both the tongue — caged and creeping — and also the man around it — whole and encompassing. Traveling through the tunnels of his own passageways, to him both inner and outer.

At some point the darkness before him began to glow: a red, red black. And then a gold. And forms began to inhabit the glow: the curves of the tunnel, textures of the surfaces, texture in the air. And, taking one turn, he saw there the boy seated before him, against the walls of the tunnel — his tunnel — him — wet and smooth.

The boy was a shadow only, for behind him, through the doorway, a fire blazed thick and white like the glint on gold.

"So," said Rhoneh, and the sound of his own voice paralyzed him, for he had not heard it in years.

The boy stood, still only a shadow, and, framed in the oblong doorway with the rich gold-white light beating behind him, he appeared as if he were the cotyledon of some mighty, enchanted seed.

"Waiting for what?" said Rhoneh. "Waiting for what?"

But in that moment a thunder shook the walls of the cave, a thunder not of sound but of remembrance, the same remembrance that came each morning upon waking: that he, Rhoneh, lived in a world of things outside himself. That he was not self-contained.

And as this remembrance penetrated him, the tunnel and the chamber of light began to dissipate.

The sight returned to Rhoneh's eyes. Sensation returned to his fingers. He felt the breath heave his belly toward his thighs, to touch them, and recede. And he recognized the feeling of his own self, heavy, shaped like a man, stranded in the world of space and objects.

As his eyes adjusted he expected to find himself on his workbench with clay on his fingers, the long table at his side, the cabinet against the left wall, the window high on the wall before him. But as he scrutinized the image which his sight had built for him he felt a surging sense of panic, like a hot sludge seeping through him. The terrifying, humiliating feeling of a man who has lost all trust of his faculties.

For the room that Rhoneh saw around him was one he had never seen before.

While he had been occupied with his dream of the boy in the tunnel, some instinct or other agent of his body had taken him to this strange place, on account of a reason utterly unknown to him.

Yet as soon as he recovered from this initial shock, an even greater shock tore through him, as if a taut cord running the length of his spine had been plucked, sounding a note, deep and dissonant, through his core, where before there had been only silence and stillness. For there in the room, seated before him, was the boy with the broken hand, the very boy from the dream.

Rhoneh gasped and fell. And while he had, just a moment prior, felt as estranged from his own physical body as from a stone, or a spider — now, in his utter confusion, it obeyed him fluently. He picked himself up with his hands, sprang out of the room, out of the building, and, finding his bearings, he ran, stride after stride, foot before foot, until he reached home.

He walked all about his room, touched this and that, murmured half-utterances. Everything was disjointed. He could follow no thread of thought for more than a few moments. He could only walk back and forth, and touch things, and push things away.

He could not trust himself. He had thought he could, but he could not. He did not know who was that man whose feet walked under him. He felt as if he had never in fact been a man at all, but only a partial witness to some strange man's life.

And yet he knew that despite the great urgency and weight of this all, he needed to postpone the fear he felt. He knew that, for now, he needed to put this unsettling incident behind him.

For tomorrow he was allotted to serve his Days in Adversity. And for that he would need all of himself.

# Chapter X

The robe like a shadow over the marble floor. A shadow that no body cast. Turning, see there, suspended in its height, white and sheer like a tooth, the grown one's mask, draped amid the folds of the robe. Over to the wall, and then one brick pulled: Brick H326. And from its slot a voice for the little ones:

Garep did not speak, had not spoken since her childhood. In her childhood

she had called aloud her own name — called until her throat was scarred — and yet

no one had carried it. She called, and the air swallowed her voice. Since then

she was silent, and in her silence her throat grew stiff and brittle

so that even a sigh passing through threatened to shatter her.

Speechless, she worked everyday, not ceasing.

She moved stones to lay roads. She fished lettuce from the sea.

She labored and made a city, a people.

And when she had made them she spoke aloud, "One thing remains."

And the words, barreling up through her, split her apart, so that she fell, in pieces,

as light falls through a sewer grate.

Outside, Beyan and Fert played marbles amid the cobblestones. Clacked and bounced until, slowing, they dropped into ruts, rolled, and stopped.

"Losers beg," said Fert.

"Doubles for blindsies," said Beyan.

# Chapter XI

Lhiar had noticed the man enter, sit and stare silently for some minutes, jolt, topple over, and rush out of the room. He had noticed, but did not wonder, anymore than one wonders at a dragonfly that flies in through a window, circles the room, bumps against the wall, against the cabinet, and flies out again. A dragonfly's business is its own.

And Lhiar, for his part, was engrossed in the song of the tomtoads.

He listened as one listens who, awaiting the arrival of a friend, sits with his back to the road. He keeps an ear alive to all passing sounds behind him, weighing them all against the sound he wishes eventually to find: the sound of a man, his friend, from down the road approaching. So Lhiar listened.

And yet, as he listened, he did not know precisely what this sound would sound like when it came.

He waited, anticipating some arrival, some recognition within the song he was hearing — but also not anticipating it: accepting that this recognition may very well never come. Still, though, he did not cease to listen. For just weighing each successive sound was pleasant enough. Like picking up shells on the beach, one after the next, finding each one upon inspection to be broken. Set it back down and forget it. No great loss. Move on and inspect the next.

Lhiar, immobile, pacified, lay, and did not tire of this.

# Chapter XII

"Do you know something?" said Fert.

"What?"

"The Maddened will meet tonight."

"Says who?" said Beyan.

"Says I know who and wouldn't you like to."

"So where then?"

"Where what?"

"Where are they meeting?"

"Just like I thought, in the cabin by the grate on the falls."

"When?"

"Just be there," said Fert, "okay?"

"Fine," said Beyan. But as Fert walked away Beyan stood still, uncertain. It had seemed simple enough with Fert there, telling him this and that; but now, alone, he could not think what this all meant for him.

He started walking home, his mind thick with a tangle of possibilities. He turned back around and chased after Fert, but, rounding the first corner, he could not see him anywhere.

This gave him enough of a moment's pause to reconsider. As if, because he had not found Fert around the very first corner, it was an omen that he, Beyan, was to continue alone.

He set out for the falls, knowing where it was as one knows where lies the moon— yet the best route to get there?

He went this way and that. Passed by alleys, only, moments later, after much contemplation, to rush back and turn down them. If he saw another living person cross a street up ahead of him, even if he deemed himself to be going in the right direction, he would retreat immediately, would try to find a parallel road.

He clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth: if, after twenty clucks, he had not discovered some omen that this was the proper road to take, he turned back. The sign might be anything. A missing brick in the wall of the tenements. It might be that he looked through a window and saw a baby's cradle. It might be that he tripped over a cobblestone, or yawned three times in succession. After each twenty clucks he would decide whether the sign he met was intended for him.

After a long while he arrived, at last, at the grate on the falls.

On finding it, he felt the long, dreadful experience of his having been lost drop away from him in an instant. Like a breath that one expels from one's body, the anxiety left him. But, as with breaths, feelings come one after another, and a new anxiety entered Beyan. For at the grate on the falls he found no one: not Fert, not his schoolmates, not the grave, enigmatic magician he had supposed to be at the heart of the Maddened and all of their plots. No one — only the sound of the falls below.

Beyan sat. He squeezed his fingers. He muttered partial sentences under his breath. "I found the way..." "I thought you'd be..." "Isn't this...?" "I wasn't sure..."

In this way he sat for the afternoon, looking over his shoulder.

# Chapter XIII

At dawn fourteen men, Rhoneh among them, and two women. In the foyer they undressed. Hung their robes, like shadows, and their masks, each sheer and white like a tooth.

All present were well-practiced but for one of the men. The others could tell he was still so young, so new, maybe this was only his second time — his skin was soft and seemed to shine; he was lean; some hairs still on his arms; his eyelids, blinking, sprang open. They envied him, but still they knew that they pitied him more, for they could remember themselves, early on; they recalled how hard it was, the second, the third time, when one knew what was coming and yet felt incompetent before it.

Let him serve three, four more terms, and his abandon may yet plant hope in him again.

The pack of them passed through the middle chamber, held their breath, shut their eyes, passed through the steam curtain to the outer provisions stall. A knife for each. A flint for each. One of them carried loops of cord. One carried casks. One nets. One sundries. An agar pouch for each.

And equipped in this way they stepped out of the city, out, and into the Great Wound, which was the world outside the city walls. For some, their welts were thick enough that they did not feel the tingle. But some felt it, and surely the young one did. His nose twitched, and his fingernails returned time and again to scrape at his thighs.

In squads of five they walked: one in front, one behind, one to each side, and one in the center — the middle one sheltered, thus, by the others, from the swarms of tiny mouths nipping and nagging in the air. They took turns — all but for the sixteenth, who led, directing the course, and did not change places.

Rhoneh tried to keep his attention focused on the things outside of himself. Tried not to fall back inward. He latched his sight onto the footsteps of the one walking ahead of him. Step after step. Sinking and rising from the muck, kicking up crabs, eggs, arthropods, from below the film. In the wake of yesterday's crisis he felt now only a pervading dullness, his emotions spent, so that he was no longer torn apart by doubts and questions.

He trudged, and could trudge endlessly.

To him all was grey — the road and the task and the world and all he had ever been. And yet the greyness was a weight only that he carried on his shoulders, that slowed his step and stooped his eyebrows low. Today the weight did not enter him.

Stride after stride he watched, and waited for the next. But fantasies began to invite him from the corners of his sight, like imps beckoning, peeping from behind trees. He tried to persevere. To stay outside. He started counting to himself. One step, two steps, three steps. He reached fifteen before he noticed that the rhythm of his counting and the rhythm of the footsteps did not coincide. He was not counting the footsteps at all, he was only counting numbers. He was weary. He was slipping.

The group made a turn down a steep bank. With each one's step a layer of muck slid slowly down, down the slope to the ravine below, bringing with it clusters of larvae, mollusks, amphibians and their bones. The weather was fresh, and cool enough when clouds passed overhead, but, still, the group was tiring. With two days remaining ahead of them, already they were tiring.

Struggling, Rhoneh tried to stay alert. He switched tactics and began to sing to himself. A song from school.

" _Was It violet or green?_

Was It grey or bright?

Was It smelled or seen?

Pristine, unkempt,

Or disheveled?

In day or night?"

" _Those are things I couldn't say._

It struck me though

That much I know

And I am changed."

" _Was It before or after?_

Was It weak or robust?

Was It named or unspoken?

Did It baffle, fluster,

or embolden?"

" _Those are things I couldn't say._

It struck me though

That much I know

And I am changed."

" _Did It tarry or flee?_

Did It vex you or please?

Was It cherished or rued?

Tarnished or new?

Was It true?"

" _Those are things I couldn't say._

It struck me though

That much I know

And I am changed."

His mind ran over the words like water over stones, to the point that the distinguishing features of each word eroded away. One word became scarcely different from the next: each one merely a unit plugged into the current of his thoughts.

And, as the song faded, so, too, the sight of his eyes grew dull, and distinguished less and less among the images before him. For his mind had become ravenous, and demanded to be fed more than mere footsteps, rising and falling, in the sludge.

Kicked up from below the mud's surface he saw teeming, as thick nearly as the muck itself, ants, swarming over one another, scuttling over the film, clinging to drops of mud that spurted against the humans' calves. Rhoneh stared at them with what little remained of his attention. And the ants entered into him through the sight of his eyes. And they impregnated his thoughts with the seeds of images, histories, profundities:

These ants, tight-bodied, fit, leathern, tireless; who could be guzzled down the wet throat of a man or any other passing giant; who could, with the drop of a stone, be flung far up into the air, to land on a toadstool, or in a rut, or on the hide of some beast, whence either to perish or else to embark on some entirely new life-path; who scurried and fed leg-deep in oceans of sugar; who never paused to inquire, or love, or doubt, but only barreled through experiences, spurred, unceasing, from this to that, by the imperatives, the hungers, the affinities of their ancestral blood.

The ants: they infected Rhoneh, so that his mind slipped from songs and footsteps, and from the very sight of the ants themselves — slipped back, back into a dark recess where it could brood undisturbed and craft the vast mythologies that belonged to these small, awful, righteous creatures.

He began with an orb: An orb, clear and turgid, like a dewdrop hanging from the tip of a leaf. Just so did the world hang, a drop on a leaf, waiting to fall. It wanted to fall, and yet also wanted still to hang. So it bred young in order that they should fall in its place. And the orb's young were spikes, sharp and fine. And when they fell they cut the air with a thousand wounds so that the air bled torrents, torrents that fell and made oceans.

Yet the ocean drops were lonely in their sameness, in their multitude — tossed, directionless — and they wished to stream again through the veins of the air, as they had before. They grew legs, so as to climb back up, up to the wounds whence they had fallen; up, up, to return to the inside of the sky. But the wounds had healed, and closed, and the legged creatures born of blood were trapped outside, to live in the world, only, and clamber among themselves.

They made food, in order that their yearning to seek might be gratified by things found. They made enemies, so that wars, like a salve, might placate the wrath that still lingered in them. And all the while the world hung over them, a drop on the tip of a leaf, clinging, and yet waiting to fall.

Rhoneh's mind paused, and the pause was space enough for a message to reach him, like a candle lit far off on a boat at the horizon. And the message pulled him forward, returned him from his fantasies, again to the sight of feet stepping rhythmically in front of him. He adjusted to the light and the space, examined the situation in which he and his others found themselves. In his absence, it seemed, they had left the slope and the muck behind, and with them the ants. And the feet before him were different feet, for the fifteen of them had rotated positions.

Vegetation covered the earth around them. Sleek, rubbery pods of green and deep mauve. And some of them, so turgid, had ruptured, and a clear pus dripped down to glaze their stems. Soft, knobby fruits hung from many. On the ground between them were the fallen fruits, already brown and half-devoured, worms swimming through.

Clouds of flies in shapes ever reconfiguring wagged from here to there and lapped the juices. And the bats, wary enough of the humans to clear a path before them, regathered in their wake, shuttling through the clouds of flies to feast.

Rhoneh thanked whatever part of himself had called him back to this, the space outside. For he knew that very soon more would be required of his faculties than simply to place one foot in front of the other.

But, at the same time, he despaired at having abandoned his creations for the sake of this, this dread tedium, this Great Wound. And the endless effort of moving through space.

Having already lapsed once into his inner world it was all the harder to remain outside. So it is with one who, having submerged fully into a warm pool, stands up again, wet and naked, to be lacerated by a cold wind.

He knew he must remain attentive, engaged, both for his own sake and for that of his others. Never more than now was his attention so essential. And yet he felt only mercy toward the transgression he knew he was about to commit. He slipped back into the warm pool, and was relieved.

# Chapter XIV

He thought he could guess. For days he had listened. Had heard each chirp, each click, each coo. Absorbed in his listening Lhiar had not, at first, hoped to find any pattern or sense to the song — no more than a blithe, weary traveler, absorbed in watching a rushing stream, hopes to anticipate what designs will appear next in the froth of the current.

But he could feel the movement of the song. As one riding a horse feels the animal's motions below.

Then gradually he had become more and more aware of the nuances. The movement seemed to come from him; the horse's steps were his own steps, and the progression of this journey of sound that he heard outside of him began to take form as if from within his own mind. Not quite visually — no. If asked to describe the shape or direction of the song he could not. But he could feel it, inside and out. It was his own journey.

As if he were a man sprinting over the brittle surface of a frozen lake, discerning spontaneously, mid-leap, where and how to land his foot, and how next to spring forward, and not land wrongly and crash down through the fragile ice. This was how he heard it, the song of the tomtoads. Discerning — or deciding, it seemed—each note only in the very moment in which it appeared, so that it seemed to be somehow both surprising and also premeditated.

Carried by one after the next of these mad footsteps. Absorbed in the arrival, in the immediacy, of each new sound. And as to all the other sounds successive and previous, as to any kind of reflection or anticipation, as to the overall movement of the song, its future progress, and the course it had taken up to the present moment, Lhiar could at first afford to entertain only a vague, abstract acknowledgment. As vague as a tight-rope walker's acknowledgment of the vast space to either side of the line.

But a radical moment came. And the scope of his sight widened.

Now, suddenly, it was as if he had looked up from the mad racing footsteps and seen before him what could be nothing other than the complete, remaining course of the song's journey. Where it would go, and how. Beginning with the very next step.

The song was a shape, an intention, an idea, in progress. And he saw not just the one step, but the very road, from here in the present moment, stretching far ahead to the journey it meant to fulfill. It made sense. It was only proper. Given what had come already, he could see where it must naturally go.

This great change in his understanding occurred in a single moment. And he prepared himself, radiant, breathless, for the next moment to come, which would be the moment of affirmation. The moment when his ears would perceive the sound that he now could _expect_ to arrive. The moment when his own mind would unite with the mind of the tomtoads.

He listened for it.

But, when it arrived, the note that he heard was so utterly _not_ what he had anticipated that a despair like a gasp, like a vacuum, swept through him. It was as if the ice had split below him — and he fell.

No, he had not mastered it. The road still eluded him. The sense of the song, its meaning, its intention, which he had grasped at and fondled with such hope, now had splintered into shards that cut his hands. No, he could not enter into the song, could not sing with the tomtoads. On the contrary, he now saw, he did not have the least knowledge about any of it.

Lying on his mat his shoulders rose, tense, to his ears. He beat his hands on the floor.

# Chapter XV

If he tried to latch onto them, to make note of them, he lost them. To observe them as a creature that remembers, a creature that catalogs, that clutches hold, was to place too much distance between the images and himself. In the instant that he grasped at them they would slip away.

So Rhoneh did not try to remember the things he saw, but witnessed only, immersed. A spectator to himself.

Resting in silence, as in a dark cathedral, he watched the pictures appear. They were squeezed into existence out of some darkness, to arrive before him; and then, in the next moment, they collapsed back to make room for others. They came to him naturally, propelled, it seemed, by their own motives. From where, or why, Rhoneh could not say.

But gradually he began to assert himself. As one slowly alters the direction of a ship by a finger's nudge at the steering wheel, he asserted his will, with a finger's nudge, over the vessel of his mind. Ever so slightly influenced its course as it navigated that dark current of shapes and feelings.

Still, he did not know what, precisely, would appear. Still, the forms that came were startling, provocative, elating — and yet he now felt somehow responsible for them.

He was setting the parameters, adjusting the apertures through which they flooded him.

Like an experienced birdsman he watched these images appear, and watched for the ones that had not yet come. Waiting in the woods patiently, scattering a carefully concocted mixture of feed, hoping to attract rarities.

The rarities came.

First, out of the darkness, the drawing room of an elaborate house. The room was quite large — large enough to house a small forest. Yet this in itself did not strike Rhoneh as extraordinary, for still, despite the room's size, he could with a single glance take inventory of everything inside it.

And, as a man in waking life might glance down at his hands and be reminded of himself, of his shape, his constitution, and his physical boundaries — just such a feeling entered Rhoneh as he glanced at the room. As if this were some vital and personal characteristic, or some definition. As if whatever else he had experienced in his life, this room represented a thread that had travelled through it all.

He sat down in the middle of the room, and this action seemed to carry an immense weight, for all things hushed around him. As if a chief had taken his seat at the head of his council. And whatever was about to follow, however it was going to express itself, it was, all the same, for one purpose only: to affirm the omnipotence of this chief within his proper realm.

He sat for eons.

The material of the room, then, slowly, began to dissolve into something else. But within Rhoneh nothing stirred. Though everything that he saw began to change around him, still the scene, as far as what it meant for him, did not essentially change. It was as if the room were still, in fact, there — only now it was something else.

It had become an open plain of grey night. And shapes grew from the greyness. Still, Rhoneh sat in the center of his domain, untouched by the greyness, untouched by the wide silence. Untouched by the shapes that took form around him. He himself unchangeable, the chief within his proper realm.

In waking life there are things made by human hands — things like pots and brushes, stairs, nails, curtains — and to look at them is to be reminded of their artifice, of their having been made. And, as for the things not shaped by human hands — trees and clouds and stones — one can, upon looking at them, also be reminded of their having being made, born, grown, ignited, shaped by water and time. But the forms that came out of the greyness of the wide plain were entirely the opposite. To look at them was to be reminded of what was never made. Like splinters or burrs that had latched onto the heaving organic form of the universe, traveling with it, and yet alien, appended, unaltered by its processes of growth and transformation.

Like needles of eternal light in the greyness they danced around Rhoneh. And Rhoneh began to be affected by them. To be moved. To be estranged.

He felt his insides give way like a ledge on a muddy slope, falling, falling, away from himself. And he, in his awareness, was both what fell and what remained. So that he was, more precisely, the rapidly growing distance between two points. An avalanche, a yawn, a schism.

The grey expanse, which just moments before had been his own, his personal realm — perhaps more under his control, even, than his finger, or his eyelid (which might once in a while twitch of its own accord) — this domain had transformed. It had been filled with those primordial, alien shapes. And he the chief had been replaced with himself as he now was, expanding, flailing, like a radio wave hurtling into the dark reaches of space. Growing, and only ever lonelier in its growth...

...until, finally, he found himself outside his dream, in his bodily form, in waking life. Sweating and weary in the Great Wound. Several moments elapsed before he overcame his confusion.

He looked before him and saw eyes, frightened and hostile. Looking down he saw a great rift in the earth, fifty meters deep. His left hand was clasped tightly around a tree trunk at the edge of the gorge and he was leaning over it, one hand extended toward the figure on the opposite bank, whose eyes glared.

Frightened and hostile.

It was a rush of so much important information that Rhoneh nearly collapsed. Yet he did not collapse. He maintained his grasp on the tree and thought furiously, trying to determine what must have occurred in the moments just previous, and what was now demanded of him.

His body felt unnaturally light, and, on searching his person, he realized that the cords of rope he had been carrying were not with him. He glanced at the figure on the opposite bank, but she, too, was without them. The ropes were not to be found. And it came as a certainty to Rhoneh that what had happened was this: that they had needed cross the rift, one by one; that each had passed to the next their provisions, before leaping across to the opposite bank; that Rhoneh, as he passed his ropes, had erred, had passed them to no one, missing the open, outstretched hand and dropping them instead down to the gorge's bottom. Trusting, as an infant trusts: passing the ropes to the air. And the air received them.

So Rhoneh had behaved, in his own absence.

A heat like a fever flushed over him. He looked again, and saw the figure on the opposite side back away to make room.

Rhoneh leaped across.

# Chapter XVI

Silence, but for the sound of the falls below. Silence, despite the hundred bodies in the room.

Beyan was afraid. Already he had seen things he had never seen before. Grown ones had entered. Removed from streetview they took off their masks and folds, and their arms and faces lay bare, thick like bark, and gray their skin. Without hair, without lashes. Their flesh like a mold lumped upon them.

These were the first Beyan had seen of the grown ones, behind their clothes. And for an hour now he had shared the room with them, and also with other young ones like himself, still haired and soft-skinned.

Waiting for it to begin.

Beyan was ready for it, and yet did not know what to expect. It did not occur to him that anything might be asked of him. He had come here, he had given himself up to it, was willing to be led down or up whatever road it would take. The others in the room, they seemed the same way. Ready for it to start, and equally ready to wait endlessly until it did. Until someone started it.

And it happened that one voice began to sound, though whose Beyan could not say, for the voice's keeper did not stand forward, but remained among them, in the midst of the crowd.

"Once, maybe, there were tyrants in the world who made their slaughters and conquests because they knew how much pleasure they would gain from them. Maybe one of them, catching a sweet fragrance blown by a distant wind, razed every forest and city, searching every drawer, every hollow on the way, until he found the substance at the source of that smell. And when he found it, he used it to prepare the finest smelling oils and delicacies, and he reveled in them. And one ounce of all his sins was paid for by the great pleasure they afforded him.

"Another, maybe, once saw a bird fly past with antlers like an elk, and a tail of long silken plaits. Fancying it, the tyrant burned every tree and tower in the kingdom so that the bird would of necessity roost in the parapets of his own castle. And, having lured the bird close, he sat and watched it, and wondered at it, and smiled. And if he had strewn atrocities across the face of the earth with every act he committed in his waking life — still, an ounce of his soul was redeemed by his pleasure in what he took.

"But the tyrants who govern this, our world, are a worse breed. Perhaps a more tragic breed. A petty breed. For they take and take and do not love. They get, at every cost, what they desire, and yet find no pleasure in it. Negligent of the scars they leave. Negligent of their unjust demands. Negligent of the gross abundance around them. Negligent of the very wonders that bombard their senses. They are slaves to their own tyranny."

The voice was young. It cracked now and again. A boy's voice, a child's — yet with razors in its words. And for an instant Beyan thought of the tomtoads, whose voices were so gentle, so melodic. And yet they had not chosen their voices, no, they could only make do with the ones they had. And what words of fury might their sweet music carry?

"You can see their destructions in this very room. Look down, and maybe see the scars on your own bodies, feel the flesh crying, outraged, 'What have they done to me?' Feel the stiffness in your joints, the stiffness they laid upon you.

"And if you are still young, and so far exempt from the miseries of which we speak, the miseries you see around you — then, look well at your hands! For they will change! Feel well the ease of breath and motion, the eyelids still light and spry, needing no strain to be held up, needing not always the greatest exertion to prop up their weight. Feel well — and take pleasure! Yes, take pleasure! You had better — for you may be the very tyrants of whom I speak!"

Tears crowded Beyan's eyes. Tears whose source he could call only, "Emotion," for his reason could not carry him so far as to interpret it as guilt. He was thinking of Lehlan, and of the pumpkin seed bun, and again he was filled with an unknowing, a desperateness. A perception of wrongness he could not identify, but in the midst of which he felt himself trapped.

"Is it just, that our grown ones should bear such tribulation? That they should scorch their bodies so? That they should live two days of each month as upon the narrow blade of a knife — a painful road, aye, that one, to walk, and oblivion only one misstep to either side! Is it just, that they must cloak their bodies? Keep at bay the contagions caught out there, in the Great Wound, which not even the hottest steam may burn away? Is it just, that they must silence their mouths? Keep at bay their heavy words, lest they crush all their others with a like despair?"

An alarm filled Beyan. He looked at the bodies around him, and the grey skin, and he thought about the contagions. Surely some must already have seeped into the air over the past hour. Into the air, and down into his own lungs.

And his panic became an anger, at the grown ones, for having removed their masks and cloaks and exposing themselves. But when he had allowed himself a moment's thought he turned his anger from them to the tyrants. For wasn't it the tyrants, after all, who were at the root of it?

"Is it just? To demand so much? And for what? For whose sake? So that little ones can chew on poppy seed buns. And apricot cakes. Gobble them down and complain there's no more. Or spit them out, throw them on the ground, and whine, 'The honey lacks in sweetness!' If they only knew whence their rolls and jams came, at what cost they were gathered and stewed — their great shame might make men of them!"

Beyan thought of his others, the little ones from school. Thought how, indeed, they were not men, were not women. Were such children. So childish. How they would indeed quarrel over their cakes and rolls, and make complaints, "Not enough! Not enough!" How sometimes even they threw them at each other, so that the pastries were spoiled on the ground.

Beyan thought about them with scorn. And if he thought about himself it was only about the person he had been, once; and, then, unknowing. For now he knew. He had heard the voice of the Maddened. He had seen beneath the grown ones' folds. He was different now. He knew.

And thus, knowing, surely he was not to be counted among those tyrants whom the voice of the Maddened named?

"And what remains now to be known is what more we can — must — do. And what we do we must every one of us do. For that is our only hope for a change."

# Chapter XVII

Fourteen men and two women beside a half moon low in the sky.

They huddled among the sicklenut leaves. Each leaf sleek and long and padded, like a rubber sheath. A rare friend to these folk in the world they knew.

They, the folk, took out their pouches, and from each a pinch of agar. Some of them downed it in an instant, deeming that better. Others held it in front of them and stared for moments, minutes even, trying to savor the experience of the agar not yet on their tongues.

To taste it was as to shiver through sweat. As to lick a metal dust and feel it seep through the tongue to the blood, to the limbs, to the trunk. A rattling feeling. And years did not teach them to love it.

From the knobs of nearby bark insects flung themselves. Shot up on legs like springs, hurled their bodies with the abandon with which one might send stones across a lake to skip and sink.

Some shot up only to fall directly all the way to the ground. Others, if they so much as grazed a surface, sent a ridged tarsus out to catch hold and cling — whether that surface be vegetable tube, or mammalian hair, or stone, or fungal crust. Some, in their falling, dropped into the sheaths that hung from the sicklenut trees.

The humans felt them, and wriggled their bodies, and crushed them against the leaves.

So, through the night — while they, the humans, sought a different abandon.

# Chapter XVIII

A moss grows on wet stones. Spreads slowly. A low plane of bristles, lush, collecting itself, collecting water droplets that, in passing, cling, and are absorbed.

But it does not rise.

This is not to its discredit. Sprawling, in the way that it does, it is what it should be — rich and fresh, nourished, soaking, creeping, collecting. Collecting itself.

But it does not rise.

It soaks for a lifetime.

Then, radically, vertically, in its second life it sends a brown shoot upward, through the middle of the lush green carpet. Fed by its waters. Held in its tufts. Slender as a hair, and delicate — but brazen, for it has ventured upward, into the uninhabited air. Rising through the plane of soaking green.

One might expect this mat of verdure, drenched and opulent, to give birth to something as lush as itself, to something round, to shining spheres like opals, to tender buds of white, or of red, or of deepest black. Sprout berries from its lushness. Round and plump, juices dripping.

Slighter, more modest, austere, even, the brown stalk birthed in their place. Brittle and plain. But it is this otherness that consummates the groundwork a lifetime laid.

Straight, piercing, it rises.

# Chapter XIX

Lhiar could walk again, and did. Slow steps, slow like breaths — and who would choose to pant when one may sigh? For hours through the city-maze he walked, choosing turn after turn, bidding lane after lane engulf him. Wall after wall appear ahead, grow larger, larger, then inch by inch slip past him into the void behind his right and left eyes.

Oftentimes he did not know where he was, in relation to his home. But he was not lost, no, for only one who seeks may be lost. Lhiar sought nothing. It would happen that he would come to a street he recognized, one maybe not so far from the tenement blocks, and then — yes, fine, he would retire. An end to the day's occupation.

And as he went, and came, and arrived, he was never out of range of, nor did he ever neglect, the song of the tomtoads.

No — he had not mastered it.

But after the first day of despair, after that feeling of crashing through the ice, such feelings had fallen from him like leaves. They had fallen down, all the way to himself — and his earth absorbed them. And their having been, and their having abated, nourished him.

No, he had not mastered the song. Could not anticipate it. Could not trace its shape to come, could not pronounce the next sound in the sequence. Could not penetrate its mind. But he sprawled and soaked in it. Listening, listening. And a greater change, he knew, would eventually come — a blossoming, a transformation — though he could not name what it would be.

In the meantime, he saw less and less of the things he had seen before. And he saw more and more of the things he had not seen.

Before, there had been everywhere, all around him, bodings, like eyes, in all things. Eyes in the stones. Eyes in the light. In the children's hands, eyes. In their backs. Eyes of witness and intention.

They glared, like spiders' eyes from shadows, with a patient, thoughtful, ancient malice.

These were the eyes that were not there — but that stared.

And then there were the true eyes, the eyes that were: round, lashed, in the skulls of his others. And these were worse, for they inhabited matter as well as spirit. Their gaze, like frogs' tongues, shooting outward from their faces, capturing whatever passed and, in the same instant, returning inward. Devouring it.

Whenever one of the children turned his or her head in Lhiar's direction, their gaze seemed to cut through the air like a saber. And Lhiar would dodge it, or cry out.

If their backs were turned to him it meant not that they had left him alone. No, they had only concealed themselves. For still, on the other side of that barrier, their eyes and hands, he knew, were working, calculating, crafting some macabre design.

When he was alone — but he was never alone, for always the eyes glared, the eyes of people and of things. So that from every object, from every direction, he needed avert his own eyes lest he wander into some confrontation.

And what were his thoughts, always, if not those of one who can find no respite? Pleas and accusations. Himself he bore as a contraband smuggled through existence.

So it was.

And now — and now. When he met their gaze it was not in defiance, for one in defiance would still be their slave. But the tomtoads' song, like a cool blast, had sharpened his own vision, so that he saw past the glares. Glares that, like blurry halos, had encircled all things. He saw past them, through them, to what lived behind the blur. Eyes, still, they were, eyes still of witness, and intention, and design — but not of malice. And from their sight he did not shirk or scuttle. In return he bore his own self before them. Himself, too, a witness, who turned corners and met masks and faces, and was not less than their equal.

Carried through his living by the song. Carried as on a seaman's craft through powers of wind and wake, which would, were he divested of that craft, swallow him mercilessly. But he was not swallowed. He was borne.

# Chapter XX

Time is kind, and a freedom fighter. There are those who speak of Fate as a limiting force. Like a straitjacket all folk are born into.

Yet it is the agents of Fate that liberate humans from the shackles they hammer, time after time, for themselves.

A civilization exists to nurture its members to spiritual maturity. Yet into all civilizations are born countless souls whom the civilization does not — cannot — nurture.

There was the society of assassins. And the agile, the unhesitating, the ruthless, born into that world, inherited a great wealth. They found in the knowledge and the customs of their civilization a priceless tool, like a wrench or a screwdriver, that was for them; a tool in harmony with their own innate abilities. And with it they could tighten their every bolt.

Into the society of assassins, the weak and the hesitant, too, were born. And they found themselves unnecessary. For what, and how, should they learn?'

They passed through life dusting lint from the assassins' sleeves, and clowning for them.

A select few, maybe, flowed over from the molds their world had cast for them, and found a shape of their own. The rest lamented their lot, or else did not think of it.

But that world of assassins did not last.

For a new world was given space to grow. And in that world the weak and the awkward were given words. And with words they flourished.

They had been given a mechanism, a system, a vocabulary, with which to probe and learn themselves. And to probe others, who had also mastered the words. Before, they had lived in darkness.

Born into that world was an ugly man with an ugly, clumsy voice that mangled the words in his mouth. He could not speak, and so gave up speaking.

The things it was thought people must do, he could not do.

Yet, in smelling, he possessed a remarkable capacity for discernment. He could smell each one of his ten fingers. Clouds, stones, lichens of innumerable shapes and colors he could catalogue through his nose. He perceived all the objects of the world, and their movements and their mingling. And after inhaling the smells through his nose he would let out a sigh unique to each one: a sigh which was the effect each smell had on the feelings and phenomena that lived in him. A sigh which might have been like a word, like a name, if only there were other folk around who knew how to engage or interpret it.

Blindfolded by his others, he stood before crowds and pointed to this and that; identified objects with his nose and not his sight. The crowds applauded. In that civilization of words he lived as a parlor trick. A sideshow.

But, if there has not yet been the world, there is surely yet to be, in which it is through the nuances not of words, but of sighs and aromas, that humans craft their civilization.

And this ugly man, in that life, will inherit the mechanisms, the vocabulary, the wrench with which to probe and learn himself. With which to tighten his own bolts. And to show himself to his others.

So: the endless turning over. The opening.

Patience only. What creature has not yet had its time? Let that one step forward, and a world shall be made for it!

Beyan, in his meek and thoughtless way, wondered whether he had been born into the right world.

He thought of what had been demanded of him by the voice of the Maddened. And he thought about his own qualities, as he perceived them.

He was a weak boy, and he lived desiring acceptance from all of the many, contradictory characters in his life.

Was there not a world in which these qualities would be of use — or, more, vital? He felt that this world, his world, was not it. In this world he felt the demands made of him by his others; by forces, sharp and discriminating. He felt the possibility of his disappointing them. And if disappointment was possible, Beyan thought, then it was inevitable.

From across the room he looked at a wooden chair. He thought about the wood that had let itself be cut and beaten into that shape. It had had no inclination, whatsoever, of being a chair. Yet everyday it was, and did not rebel. Beyan could close his eyes, slip into sleep, and hours later awaken to find the wood in precisely the same shape and position. Endlessly loyal. Keeping the identity it had been given, until fire or the termites came to rechristen it.

Beyan pleaded his fate for such a role as the wood had. To serve, and serve well, through his utter submission to the forces around him. Limp and plastic in the hands of his makers; strong and steady in his lack of volition.

This he could do. Could be a chair. But do not — oh do not! — demand him to step forward! or make a choice! or stake himself on an idea, on a conviction arrived at by his own inner sense of propriety! No — do not — for this he could not do.

As he walked to school he felt a mounting desperation.

# Chapter XXI

The sound as of a horse's gallop, slowed to a tenth of its normal speed, as by a dream.

Yet Rhoneh was awake, he knew, for he felt his weight, and the coarse tingle of the air on his open eyes. He knew this sound. And, if he no longer feared it, still he knew, when it came, to be wary of it. To hold his breath until it passed.

For out there in the night, not far from the sixteen in their sicklenut sheaths, traversed a pack of howlhawks on the chase. The howlhawks were wolves — or were wolves once. But generations, and nature's pranks, had braided their silken fur into long, tangled skeins that flailed from their fore and hind haunches as they ran. Like twisted, tattered sheets their hair streamed and caught the air, so that the howlhawks could glide — not fly, no, not yet, not, maybe, for generations still to come — but glide. One leap, two leaps, and fifteen meters they soared, veering in the air.

Snared in their tangles were leaves, mud, insects, bristles, so that each beast, in its flight, appeared as some primeval forest numen: ugly, elegant, toothed with grinning death.

Rhoneh held his breath, and waited for them to pass.

Silence followed. Silence, and a long exhale.

Rhoneh looked up, saw stars in the blackness. He thought of their distance. How he could never touch them, or sit with them, or dissolve into them. And yet as far as they seemed, he felt that there were things inside himself at least as distant. Thoughts. Connections. Manifestations. They lay at the head of the endless stream that ran through his mind, and he could wade in that stream all his life and not arrive at them.

Yet they were there, he knew, as the stars were there. And if he could not touch them, he knew them still. For there are some things in the world that can be known only from afar. To approach them — if ever he could — would be to change them, altogether, into something else.

The farthest star, the deepest thought. It was in their distance that he knew them.

From the silence a sound startled him. And more than the appearance of the sound in the stillness of night it was the source of the sound that startled Rhoneh, for this was a sound he had come never to expect to encounter in the world. It was the sound of a voice, a grown voice. The voice of one of his others. Singing softly.

"Fairy liver, fairy liver...from the day it first did enter, still it stays there at the center...what else was it meant for..."

Rhoneh was astonished. He could not recollect having ever heard a grown voice. Only little ones', from his days in school. And the voice from the brick wall, which was neither old nor young, but like water.

The singing ceased, and there was silence for a moment more. But then the voice returned.

"Do you know — I do feel things...Panics, and dullness — and outrage...I wear and change them like clothes...But underneath them — underneath — I am not unhappy."

Rhoneh was flooded with a sympathetic shame. For he would as soon have soiled himself in front of his companions as have spoken his mind. A grown one's words and inner life were one's own dark mass.

Yet Rhoneh felt no affront at his other's confession. Gaping, he continued to listen.

"I think — just now — of the howlhawks...And the taste of blood....And the taste of air — and of agar. The sweet and the foul....I drink them....I crave....And still — now — I last...I feel humble...to last so...And I feel shame...And I feel dignity...."

A moment's pause, only.

"But one thing — so strange — why we do not speak...must not...I cannot think why...There are reasons — surely — why it is so — or causes, at least....But none could satisfy — me....I want to speak....Will you...not...speak then?"

At this last Rhoneh shuddered, for he had feared this, this invitation. What at all could he say, to do justice to the things he felt? To do justice to this other soul who had laid bare itself, and implored? The longer he waited, the less adequate any words seemed. And then there was the question — if he struck some answer — could he even bring himself to deliver it? Did he not deem it a sin? Could his lips even move to form the words, from shame and disuse so unaccustomed to speech?

The space and the silence grew longer between the two figures in their adjacent sheathes.

Then, at last, a voice from in the night — "I understand."

# Chapter XXII

With sideways twists to left and right, sweeping, creeping around the little ones and — now — three empty stools. For some of their classmates, they all knew, must have come of age. And they would not be seen anymore.

Beyan's body was still and tense. He prayed for some great cataclysm to shake the world. Something that would render himself insignificant and a victim. For as the schoolday went on he could not believe that he was going to do the thing it was demanded of him to do. And yet, in not doing it, he felt wretched.

The robe swept the floor, slow and smooth and steady — and stopped at the wall. A gloved hand raised, finger extended, to find the destined brick.

But, before it could — a commotion.

Parah had leapt from his seat and hurtled toward the front of the room. Draped high in its folds, the mask turned to face the clamor. With a diving motion Parah sprawled his hand across the grown one's mask, to draw it from the face. But his grip was clumsy, and when he first tore his hand away, in his urgency, it left the mask up in its folds, as it had been. Stunned by his failure Parah paused a moment, and stumbled half a step to the side. But he reached up again and snatched the sheer, white surface from the grown one's face, sending to the floor with a _cli-link_ the combs that had held it in place. The grown one stood, meanwhile, unresisting, his hand still raised in mid-search among the wall's bricks.

Parah, clutching the mask, turned toward his others and pointed at the grown one's face.

"Look at what you do to the ones who love you! Look at the scars — the whole body a scar! You eat your sweets without thinking twice. You gobble them down as if you were doing the world a favor. But where do they come from, your sweets, your delights? From out there, where the grown ones must endure rashes and stings to find them. Torn at by swarms of miniature mouths. And, returning, they scald their bodies to kill whatever larvae have seeped into the wrinkles of their callused flesh. And all the while, on what do they feed, our grown ones? Not on your sweets, found out there in adversity. No, not on your sweets, though it is they who gathered them with their own hands. While you feast on cakes of berries and honey, they eat what grows in abundance here, within our own city walls, only moments away, the agar of the Crude Stream—! And you could eat it too! Indeed, so long as you do not — so long as you eat anything else, foraged outside of these walls — how can you abide your conscience, knowing that you have done this?"

He pointed again at the face exposed among its black folds. The face stared back. Without wrath. Without humor. Without sympathy. Without judgment. Steady eyes from under heavy, swollen lids. Parah for the first time looked up at what he himself had revealed. At first he was taken aback. Then he was quickly turned to anger: for the face of this one whose cause he had risked much to champion showed no sign of affirmation.

A sheepishness mingled with Parah's anger. He dropped the mask and ran from the room.

The grown one stooped to collect the mask, and returned it to its place amid the folds. A thin crack like a solitary hair ran across and down it.

The gloved hand moved again — moved from the brick it seemed to have chosen before, now to seek out a different one. Removed it. And the voice washed into the room.

# Chapter XXIII

Fourteen men and two women closed their eyes, and stepped through the steam curtain.

The day previous they had spent in the orchard in the rift, collecting pumpkins, cherries, walnuts, sesame seeds. A handful scoured the outskirts, digging in the ground for tubers.

Their bounty consolidated and tied to their backs, they endured a long walk through the night before arriving again at the city walls mid-morning.

Rhoneh felt fortunate that shame had been the most severe of the consequences he met. He found his bed and slept half a day.

Upon awakening, the first thought he encountered was that he must seek out the boy. That could be his only recourse. Seek out the boy whom he had sought previously — though, then, without knowing.

He recollected the experience from days prior when, in his confusion, he had raced home from the boy's room. And now he managed to piece together the road that led back to him.

This way, and that, and this — and at last he had arrived at what must be the boy's door. Rhoneh stood for some minutes, waiting for an answer to the question of what he expected of himself, of the boy, of the impending encounter. He opened the door before he found one.

At once he knew he had chosen wrongly. This was not the correct room. The walls were of an entirely different shade.

But Rhoneh let the door swing open, and as he gazed down into the depths of the room, he saw a figure kneeling. And the figure looked up at him. Still draped in folds the figure was, but the sheer white mask was removed and held in the hands, so that the face lay bare.

Unaccustomed he was to the sight of a grown one's face, other than his own — indeed, besides during the Days in Adversity, when all trudged in the nude through mud and wind, he could not remember having ever seen one. For several instants he thought he was looking in a mirror. His hand jerked instinctively towards his own face to determine whether indeed it lay exposed. But his hand struck his mask, and he was freed from the illusion: no, the figure in the depth of the room was not himself.

He gave a last moment's stare, then backed away and shut the door.

It occurred to Rhoneh for the first time what exactly his others might think when they looked at him. If he had wondered at all about this before, he had assumed that he was only to them as much as an alien, a fleeting shadow, foreign, impenetrable, without substance or history. For Rhoneh's matters were for himself alone. He judged his others as utterly outside and unknowing of the contents of his life.

Yet now he thought that, whatever they knew or did not know of him, they might, nonetheless, acknowledge him. Acknowledge _him_ as something in _their world._ Simply by seeing him, dig a channel, or run a siphon, between their ocean and the ocean of his own life. And his life would seep into theirs.

It may well be that they would see no alien upon looking at him. Rather, as he had just done, they may see glimpses of their very selves.

This caused Rhoneh no little uneasiness.

For it allowed his others to appropriate him, or some part of him, into their minds. To mix his body's form and movements with whatever strange thoughts dwelt there inside those skulls.

And, meanwhile, their minds remained dark to his own knowledge.

Rhoneh sat down on the stones, his thoughts a bland, tired haze.

He had never demanded of himself that he be useful to others. But he had considered himself at least his own. His own to claim as wilderness and sanctuary. And if there were aspects of himself that were not his, it was because he chose not to claim them. They were void. He left them to belong to no one.

But increasingly this week it had become apparent that whatever in fact he was, it was not for him to know. Hardly more for him than for any other.

His life seemed to lie in pieces scattered across time and space. And he was a ghost wandering among the rubble, unable to stoop and snatch anything as a personal souvenir.

Rhoneh laid his head against the wall of the tenements. And though he had only just woken an hour before, he willed himself to sleep.

# Chapter XXIV

And sleep did as a man beseeched it, as often it does not. It renewed him.

Waking, he looked out on the rubble of his life, the strangeness, the brokenness. He looked as a child looks at an expanse filled with heaps, rusted beams, hovels, wet planks, gutted sheds. For him they needed belong to no one in particular. They needed be nothing other than what they were. Not broken were they, no — they showed just what shapes they wore.

And it remained only for him to explore in their midst, and be shown. Whatever, later, he might build of it all, he need not begin now.

Rhoneh rose to his feet and again sought the door to the boy's room, eager to discover what would come of the confrontation.

# Chapter XXV

At school's end many of the little ones gathered outside to discuss what had transpired, and what was in Parah's mind, and what would become of him.

"He's starting an army."

"He's left to build his own city."

"He's wandering and fasting."

"He's growing an underground garden."

"He's done for."

"Says who?"

"Isn't it obvious?"

Beyan did not answer. For Beyan had run to seek solitude at the grate on the falls.

So, in the end, he had not needed to do it. The dreaded thing. It had been done for him.

But that was hardly better, for now what would become of Parah? And, still, what would become of himself? He thought of the voice in the dark room. "What we do we must everyone of us do..."

Beyan slouched and picked at his fingers. One hand groped urgently for his inner pocket where it retrieved a small, wrapped sugar scone. Beyan stared at it, and wondered.

Couldn't he eat it now, since in the end he had not staked himself on anything, on any principle? To eat it was not to violate who he was. It would violate only some thoughts he had had — and where had those thoughts led him?

Besides, the grown one at school had not taken Parah's side. He had done nothing at all. And surely he was to be trusted more than Parah?

But Beyan's thoughts returned to the previous night, and the bodies in the dark room, and many grown ones among them, who had come, hunched, swollen, to hear those words that cut like glass.

Beyan's mind hurt from confusion. Whom must he obey? Why was it so difficult?

His eyes happened to fall again upon the sugar scone in his hands, and it displaced his other thoughts. He stared, then brought it to his mouth and bit it, chewing aggressively, so that it was not the taste or texture he noticed so much as the movement of his jaws.

It was not because he had come to any conclusion that he ate it. It was not because he thought he would enjoy it.

He did not know why he ate it.

# Chapter XXVI

Walk, return, and lie.

Such were the contents of Lhiar's days and nights, and days and nights. Yet always, more and more, he was as he had never been.

Before, in his angst, and squirming, and oaths and deeds and destructions, it was as if he were spending his life in a dark, mildewed hollow. Still and torpid. Cobwebs collecting on him. Such, in his anger, in his chaos, was the striving of his soul. A mummification. A dark, restless, sleepless dream.

And in the past days now he had never known such striving. Such industry. Simply in his listening. Without deeds. Without oaths.

He felt — he knew — that he was crafting something.

Like a vast, intricate labyrinth carved in bone. Like a cave dug in rock, and its dark walls chiseled into elaborate shapes, openings, figures, ribs, spirals.

Such was the striving of his soul.

Likely no other person would ever witness this cave of his. These sculptures. These intricacies. But that was of no consequence. All of it was there. He had etched it into a corner of the universe, his corner, it was real, and he was shaping it. With the daily efforts and attentions of his mind he made forms and convolutions as marvelous as any a human had before cut into stone or soil.

Still, though, Lhiar waited for the radical transformation.

He felt it. It was imminent. He could feel every contour, every ripple of the tomtoads' song as it flowed over him. Painting strokes, strokes of an image he could always _almost_ yet _never quite_ make out.

And he began to wonder: was it enough to soak in the sound? to be nourished by it? to let events take their course, let the change rise on its own through him? Was it enough just to listen?

Or must he take some action, make some leap, from here, on the brink, to there, the other side, so close? And if so, what?

Lhiar wondered.

And as he wondered a figure entered the room and sat before him.

Lhiar looked at the whiteness of the mask, and he could feel the eyes that lay hidden behind it. Eyes that seized him like frogs' tongues and took him back, back to the other side of that mask. Back, devoured, into some impenetrable realm, where to be treated with what graces or torments or strange alchemies Lhiar could not begin to guess.

But that was their business. What they took was theirs to take. And Lhiar, undaunted, remained his own.

The figure reached its hands up and slipped away the combs, and drew the mask from his face. And Lhiar saw it was the face of a man. He was startled at first to see the rough, thick skin that hung, and the bulging, lashless eyelids. But he did not look away.

In this fashion the two regarded each other, before the man at last spoke.

"You were in a dream of mine — I don't know why.....I know why...."

He choked on his voice, which rasped from disuse.

"I saw you — in the street — with your hand smashed...And I dreamed of you....I dreamed of you....I had a question....You were in a strange place —I couldn't grasp it.....I had a question....And when I awoke — I was in this room — with you — and I did not know how — or for what...."

He was silent. Lhiar watched him. Rhoneh opened his jaws wide and stretched his tongue. He blinked, long. His eyes seemed meant to be shut.

He opened them and continued.

"And what it was — in the dream — is not what it has — become....The question....The question — now is — why I sought you....Or how I found you.....And perhaps — even more.... what will come of this...."

Lhiar listened, but had no answer. Rhoneh was silent for some time, and the two observed each other, having settled into the circumstances of their encounter.

Rhoneh resumed.

"I had thought myself — the fisherman...The fisherman — of my own sea...When I caught you — it was not I — who caught you....Not I — who hung the — bait — who whipped the rod....And it seemed to — me, then — that I was neither — man — nor fish, but — the line that runs — between sea and sky — through the ocean's deep — and into the light....What I caught I caught — but who wielded me — and why — I could not say..."

Lhiar thought of himself, and of the tramping below of horse's feet, which were also his own.

"Why you....Why you — not something else — someone else....It seems to hinge — on that...To what was I — drawn — in you....? For I feel that that — will answer for — me — who cast the line — and why."

A halt. But then he added, as if to himself only:

"Yet no man — fishing — knows what he will find — and has no cause — to cast out — but — for that — he hungers....And what man knows — why he hungers....?"

Silence for some time between them. The silence not a barrier, but a solvent. Through it all Lhiar remained attentive to the man, but also stayed with the soft and distant song, which held him like sunshine at his back.

"Man," said Lhiar, "I don't know about your dreams. But when you go you may come again if you like, if you think it will tell you something."

Rhoneh nodded at the floor. After some time he rose and left.

Lhiar, on an impulse, got up and went to the window. He looked down the cleft to the snaking Crude Stream. The stones jutted from its frothing surface. Downstream some men stood on the banks with their long shafts, raking and harvesting the agar.

The stone facades rose from every side, gray, with the faint pink or grey-green touch of moss and lichens.

Lhiar thought about things built. Things shaped. And he thought, having recently learned to see with new eyes, to walk with a new step, what remained was to wreak with new hands. To lay things. To mold shapes. Like walls, that stood on cornerstones.

Or were these enough? the shapes at work inside of him? Did they not require some partner, some shadow, out in the world to be witnessed?

And if the intricacies of his mind Lhiar did not cut into stone, like the vast, winding city streets — then what? What would he make of them?

# Chapter XXVII

Rhoneh came everyday. He sat, removed his mask and gloves. Sometimes flecks of dried clay sprinkled on the floor.

Lhiar learned to regard him as any other household circumstance. The man did not demand any special attention. Sometimes he would speak, and typically Lhiar would listen, though not from any obligation, or courtesy. But with ears to listen why not?

"I think about birds," said the man. "Birds, in the moments falling from their nest. The falling, the urgency. At first one moves one's body in conventional ways. Opens the mouth. Rolls the eyes. Tightens the claws. Still one falls — it does nothing. And one struggles to move in unconventional ways. A new impulse stirs the wings. They respond. And one sees what one may do.

"I think about the time I came to you first. I felt such fear and strangeness. I know that fear had lived always in me — unknown to me, but living. And it was only on finding you that that fear was stirred.

"There are movements, of my body and soul, I know, some dreadful, some wonderful. They remain hidden from me. I have not yet found how to work them. And I wonder what drastic actions must I take before I may have writhed enough to master them?"

His voice at first gravelly had grown thick and smooth. He said,

"I dreamed last night. I dream every night. Last night I dreamed my body was like husks of old corn. Dry, flaky, layered. Wisps and fronds. From my fingertips, my lips, my elbows, my crevices, my hair. Dangling. Pushing outward. Knots and fibers, papery sheets. Bending in the wind."

He trailed off, and stared at the floor. He was silent for some time.

When the man was silent, Lhiar focused more attentively on the song — always, it seemed, on the brink of conferring its form, its message. Wrapping its shape around Lhiar; a gentle breath around a flame.

In this way the boy and the man grew accustomed to one another.

After some days they began to take walks. Rhoneh, in his full garb, and the boy in his clogs and drapery. Silent, side by side.

Lhiar looked ahead, his mind threaded by the song; but the beads of his thoughts took the forms of the stone buildings, of the alleyways, of the agar rakes, of the clay dust that fell from the man's fingertips.

He thought of things wrought.

Things wrought, that stayed. Like the facades, the cabinets.

He thought, too, of things wrought, that vanished. Cranberry tarts. The tomtoads' tunnels. The steam from the jets, shot, seen for an instant, only to fade in the white sun.

He thought of all of them. The wrought things.

Some of those things that stayed stood with a voice that could speak, to anyone passing, the story of their birth and nature. And some things spoke nothing of what they were, or had been.

A man turned a corner and, looking ahead, saw two figures walking toward him, side by side, in the grey mist.

The man waited a moment longer than ordinary, regarding them.

Then, turning back, sought a different way.

# Chapter XXVIII

Beyan could stand no more.

Why did they wear the masks. Why did they scald their bodies so. And hunt for cakes. What did the Maddened want. Why did the children not eat the agar. Why had the teacher been silent. What had become of Parah. What was demanded of him, Beyan.

Why did so few others seem concerned about any of this? And, of those concerned, why was none so thoroughly confused as he?

What did people feel? What did they need? Whose desires were right?

At length he resolved to see for himself the world outside, and the labors of those folk who suffered in it. He knew the place where they met. The exit.

In the dark he rose and hid there, waited. Watched — as the light came, so came the folk, now one, now another, robes trailing, masks sheer and white in the folds. At the threshold they met, and when the last had come they proceeded into the middle chamber.

Beyan peered in, saw them disrobe, hang their every belonging on hooks in the wall. He watched, one by one, their thick bodies pass through the steam curtain, blur, and vanish into the room beyond.

When the last had crossed, Beyan scurried into the room.

He leaned close to the curtain, which hissed with a quiet intensity. He could just discern, through its billowing, the forms of the humans on the opposite side. Taking bundles off the walls. Hauling them over their shoulders.

Beyan breathed deeply, regarding the hazy screen just inches from his nose.

Then he plunged through.

At once he fell to the floor, shrieking, his hands palming his face. He hadn't shut his eyes. Why not? Wasn't it obvious he must? And yet he had not. He was weak and stupid, and now he could not see, because of what he had done to himself. He bawled and groped at his sockets.

At the moment of contact the lids had snapped shut of their own accord, but there had been the slightest instant when they lay exposed to the fast hissing, the fury of the jets. And, besides his eyes, his whole body burned with a great though lesser burning. All his flesh seemed to run from itself, ran to the eyes as if trying to dig back to what they had been before, moments earlier, when the knowledge of what could transpire might yet have saved them.

"I didn't know!" wailed Beyan. Choking, feeling. "I didn't know!"

Some figure had run to him, had begun caressing him violently. There was a tumult of sounds around him. He felt himself lifted. Held close to some body. He felt a gentle pinch, as of warning. Then his body reacting, again, to the fierce lash of the curtain as they returned back and into the city.

The hands, as gently as they held him, seemed to tear at his flesh. With each step his body was jostled against the body of his conveyor, and Beyan, in his darkness, imagined his skin was being grated away.

Still he moaned, though his voice had been exhausted from a screech to a whimper.

"If I had known....I didn't know....If I had known....I wish I'd known....Why couldn't I have known...?"

He felt himself lowered and laid onto some bed. Then footsteps into the distance, and the closing of a door.

He lay and writhed for a long spell in a dark fire.

By the time he slept he had long since ceased thinking, discerning, resisting, exerting any effort, expressing any desire, acknowledging any possibility.

After a long while — he did not know how long — he was awakened by a sound. He opened his eyes. At the touch of air their ache turned again to burning. But he could discern light, and in the light a form moving. A form he could interpret as bearing the shape of a human. It made some movements here and there, producing the sound of some clinking and thumps.

A warmth and a fragrance reached Beyan from where the figure stood. And with them came a thought — the first coherent thought he'd had in what seemed like several ages of darkness. The thought of nuts and honey. Prunes. Sesame. And freshly baked bread.

# Chapter XXIX

Thirty or so stools, and who can keep track the ones newly left or newly filled?

Around them, slow and sweeping, with sideways twists to left and right, the grown one's gown. And up, suspended in its folds, the mask, sheer and white, like a tooth, a thin crack across it like a strand of hair.

A pause at the wall, and a gloved hand rising, perusing, one finger outstretched. The brick found, grasped, taken, and the voice, like water, from far inside the wall:

Night a black stream. And stars the stones it washes.

Seld, immersed, swam from star to star.

Looking back, thought, "Which the one whence I came? All look alike."

And, facing forward, "Which the one I seek

to reach, and mount, and rest my weary limbs? All look alike."

But he swam still, supposing he would find

what he would find.

He swam and swam, but of the stars none grew bigger. He reached out

and found he could grasp them, their size indeed was so.

No larger than salt crystals.

As through sand he let his fingers flit and flirt with the little lights.

Took of them a pinch, and swallowed.

To feed him, to fortify him for the long swim ahead.

The stars, if not his respite, were his strength.

Outside, school ended, marbles clacked on the street stones. Bouncing, finding grooves, butting, slowing. Little ones on sticky hands dropped down to peer at angles and advantages. The light mist around them seemed to hold them as they stood, as they moved.

"Greens get the pickings," said Brell.

"It's only fair," said Fert.

"Then last dibs for onesies," said Dala.

And with that, let us leave them, our friends to their play.

Or stay, if you like. But I — I will go. For one world in which to dwell is not enough. And there remain voices to unleash from other stones.

But return I shall. And should you chance to find me you may walk with me a while, if you will.

And if you will not — then pause, and look, at least, my way.

