City of Saints and Madmen

understand that I must come forward and allow the ruler to rub my head for luck. I must go.

Other entries hint that Tonsure made at least two attempts to escape, each followed by harsh punishment, the second of which may have been partial blinding, and at least one sentence suggests that afterwards he was led secretly to the surface: “Oh, such torture, to be able to hear the river chuckling below me, to feel the night wind upon my face, to smell the briny silt, but to see nothing. ” However, Tonsure may have been blindfolded or been so old and have existed in darkness for so long that his eyes could not adapt to the outside, day or night. Tonsure’s sense of time being suspect, we can only guess as to his age when he wrote that entry.

Finally, toward the end of the journal, Tonsure relates a series of what surely must be waking dreams, created by his long diet of fungus and the attendant fumes thereof:

They wheeled me into a steel chamber and suddenly a window appeared in the side of the wall and I saw before me a vision of the city that frightened me more than anything I have yet seen below ground. As I watched, the city grew from just the docks built by my poor lost Cappan to such immense structures that half the sky was blotted out by them, and the sky itself fluxed light, dark, and light again in rapid succession, clouds moving across it in a flurry. I saw a great palace erected in a few minutes. I saw carts that moved without horses. I saw battles fought in the city and without. And, in the end, I saw the river flood the streets, and the gray caps came out once again into the light and rebuilt their old city and everything was as before. The one I call my Keeper wept at this vision, so surely he must have seen it too?

Then follow the last 10 pages of the journal, filled with so concrete and frenzied a description of Truffidian religious practices that we can only conclude that he wrote these passages as a bulwark against insanity and that, ultimately, when he ran out of paper, he ran out of hope— either writing on the walls or succumbing to the despair that must have been a tangible part of every one of his days below ground. Indeed, the last line of the journal reads: “An inordinate love of ritual can be harmful to the soul, unless, of course, in times of great crisis, when ritual can protect the soul from fracture.”

Thus passes into silence one of the most influential and mysterious characters in the entire history of Ambergris. Because of Tonsure, Truffidianism and the Cappandom cannot, to this day, be separated from each other. His tutorials informed the administrative genius of Manzikert II, while his counsel both inflamed and restrained Manzikert I. Aquelus studied his journal endlessly, perhaps seeking some clue to which only he, with his own experience below ground, was privy. Tonsure’s biography of Manzikert I (never out of print) and his journal remain the sources historians turn to for information about early Ambergris and early Truffidianism.

If the journal proves anything it is that another city exists below the city proper, for Cinsorium was not truly destroyed when Sophia razed its above ground manifestation. Unfortunately, all attempts to explore the under ground have met with disaster, and now that the city has no central government, it is unlikely that there will be further attempts — especially since such authority as does exist would prefer the mysteries remain mysteries for the sake of tourism. It would seem that two separate and very different societies shall continue to evolve side by side, separated by a few vertical feet of cement. In our world, we see their red flags and how thoroughly they clean the city, but we are allowed no similar impact on their world except through the refuse that goes down our sewer pipes.

The validity of the journal has been called into question several times over the years — lately by the noted writer Sirin, who claims that the journal is actually a forgery based on Manzikert I’s biography. He points to the writer Maxwell Glaring, who lived in Ambergris some 40 years after the Silence. Glaring, Sirin says, carefully studied the biography written by Tonsure, incorporated elements of it into his fake, invented the underground accounts, used an odd purple ink distilled from the freshwater squid for the last half, and then “produced” the “ journal” via a friend in the administrative quarter who spread the rumor that Aquelus had suppressed it for 50 years. Sirin’s theory has its attractions — Glaring, after all, forged a number of state documents to help his friends embezzle money from the treasury, and his novels often contain an amount of desperate derring-do in keeping with the fragments of reason found in the latter portion of the journal. Adding to the controversy, Glaring was murdered — his throat cut as he crossed a back alley on his way to the post offi ce — shortly after the release of the journal.

Sabon prefers the alternate theory that, yes, Glaring did forge parts of the journal, but only the sections on obscure Truffidian religious practices — these pages inserted to replace pages removed by the government for national security reasons. Glaring was then killed by the Cappan’s operatives to preserve the secret. Unfortunately, a fire gutted part of the palace’s administrative core, destroying the records that might have provided a clue as to whether Glaring was on the national payroll. Sabon further speculates that Glaring’s embezzlement had been discovered and was used as leverage to make him forge the journal pages, for otherwise, some of his relatives having disappeared in the Silence, he would have been disinclined to suppress evidence as to mushroom dweller involvement. Sabon explains away the few paragraphs dealing with Tonsure’s captivity as Glaring’s genius in knowing that a good forgery must address issues of its authenticity — the journal must therefore contain some evidence of Tonsure’s underground experiences. These paragraphs, meanwhile, Lacond claims are genuine, pulled from the real journal.

Another claim, which has taken on the status of popular myth, suggests that the mushroom dwellers skillfully rewrote and replaced many pages, to keep inviolate their secrets, but this theory is rendered ridiculous by the fact that the journal was left on the altar — a fact confirmed by Nadal, the then minister of finance. This eyewitness account also nixes the first of Sabon’s theories: that the entire journal is a forgery.

To further complicate matters, an obscure sect of Truffidians who inhabit the ruined fortress of Zamilon near the eastern approaches to the Kalif’s empire claim to possess the last true page of Tonsure’s journal. According to legend, Trillian’s men once stayed at the fortress on their way to the Kalif, bearing the journal that, the careful reader will remember, was hocked by the Cappandom. A monk crept into the room where the journal was kept and stole the last page, apparently as revenge for the left femur of their leader having been spirited away by agents of Cappan Manzikert II 300 years before.

The front of the page consists of more early Truffidian religious ritual, but the back of the page reads as follows:

We have traveled through a series of rooms. The first rooms were tiny — I had to crawl into them, and even then barely squeezed through, banging my head on the ceiling. These rooms had the delicate yet ornate qualities of an illuminated manuscript, or one of the miniature paintings so beloved by the Kalif. Golden lichen covered the walls in intricate patterns, crossed through with a royal red fungus that formed star shapes. Strangely, in these rooms I felt as if I had unlimited space in which to move and breathe. Each room we entered was larger and more elaborate than its predecessor — although never did I have the sense that anyone had ever lived in the rooms, despite the presence of chairs, tables, and bookshelves — so that I found myself bedazzled by the light, the flourishes, the engraved ceilings. And yet, oddly enough, as the curious rooms expanded, my sense of claustrophobia expanded too, so that it took over all my thoughts… This continued for days and days, until I had become numb to the glamour and dulled to the claustrophobia.

When hungry, we broke off pieces of the walls and ate of them. When thirsty, we squeezed the chair arms and greedily drank the drops of mossy elixir that came from them. Eventually, we would push open the now immense doors leading to the next room and see only distantly the far wall… Then, just when I thought this journey might never end — and yet surely could not continue — I was brought through one final door (as large as many of the rooms we had passed through). Beyond this door, it was night, lit vaguely by the stars, and we had come out upon a hill of massive columns, through which I could see, below us, a vast city that looked uncannily like Cinsorium, surrounded by a forest. A sweet, sweet breeze blew through the trees and lifted the grass along the hill. Above, the immense sky — and I thought, I thought, that I had been brought above ground, for the entire world seemed to spread out before me. But no, I realized with sinking heart, for far above me I could see, when I squinted, that, luminous blue against the blackness, the lines of strange constellations had been set out there, using some instrument more precise than known of above ground. And yet the stars themselves moved in phosphorescent patterns of blue, green, red, yellow, and purple, and after a moment I discovered that these “stars” were actually huge moths gliding across the upper darkness… My captors intend to leave me here; I am given to understand that I have reached the end of my journey— they are done with me, and I am free. I have but a few