But in the end I stood up. I shook myself, dragged my hands over my cheeks to dry them.
‘Is she better or worse?’ whispered Jotto.
‘Worse, I think.’ Grem.
Treacle had crept up. She half hid herself behind a tree. I’d never seen her look so serious.
I said, quietly, ‘I shall look for him. I shall find him if it takes ten years. I shall kill him.’
Writing that now, it seems absurd. In a way that puzzles me too. My feeling was real, and justified – in a way. What Venn had done – it was like reading my mind – my heart—
Worse than anything, my sheer embarrassment.
You see, he wasn’t – isn’t – you.
You, whoever You are, are far away from me, further away than the moon. And yet – nearer than anyone. Nearer even, perhaps, than Argul. If you’ve read my mind in these pages, I invited you into my head. And you, you had the kindness to accept and enter, and to be with me, through all of this.
Of course, I only made you up when I was alone. But no, I don’t believe that. I believe you are there. Or you will be.
You’re my guest, my friend.
Venn burgled me.
After my outburst, I sat down and said nothing else. I wouldn’t answer either Grem or Jotto. Jotto went off and came back with some iced wine. I said, ‘Thanks.’ Didn’t drink it.
They drew away. Well, they’d all been warned. I was ‘excitable’ and ‘immature’, given to rages, a liar.
I suppose it was the last straw. How many last straws does it take?
As I remember, I meant to rest, and then get up and start my search. I madly thought the calmer I looked, the easier it would be to get away from G and J, and maybe T, when the right time came.
I had no fears now of the moveable palace, of vrabburrs, or of anything.
But the day, like the rooms, moved on and around.
The shadows had got longer, and an afternoon heat-stillness powdered the trees.
Then one of those yellow birds began to go clink-clink. I looked up, and Venn was standing there, just across from me. If I’d had any doubts, I needn’t have. He was holding this book in his hand.
(In fact his name, properly spelled, is Ven’n – being short for Venarion with the ario left out.)
I got up slowly.
Grem and Jotto must have been there. I don’t think I saw them, can’t remember them. Really there was nothing, just a shadow-sunny static void, with Ven’n-Venn drawn like a dark line through its middle.
He was looking at me. I mean properly.
He was seeing me.
He said, ‘Grem says you’ve vowed to kill me.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Suppose I didn’t read it?’
‘Why take it then?’
‘Well, perhaps I meant to read it – and couldn’t. Your handwriting’s pretty awful, Claidi.’
I started at him. I don’t know what I would really have done, and no doubt Grem would have stopped me anyway. Even Venn might have been able to. But in the rush of fire that was throwing me forward, I heard it again. My name. Not Claidissa or Claidis. Claidi.
So I swerved. I grabbed hold of a tree and swung against its trunk, and he said, ‘You have worse enemies than me, Claidi. Look.’
And then he did something to this book, something to its back, and a little bright object, like a tiny flat button, dropped out from inside it, and he caught it in his free hand.
‘What’s that?’ I stupidly asked. Claidi, always asking questions.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is how the Wolf Tower tracked you and found you. By that private pool on your wedding day, where the balloon came down. This was in your book all the time. They could come and get you whenever they wanted.’
‘They – my book.’
This book. They had found me because of something (scientific – magical) put into this book. He couldn’t really tell me how it worked, that is, when he did try to tell me. He said, Imagine a light shining miles away and you just go towards that light – and the thing in the book was like that, only it wasn’t a light. If it had been a light, I’d have seen it.
But because of it, they’d found me. Taken me, brought me here. This book too had been – my enemy?
IN THE DARK
‘What are you looking at?’
‘I’m watching weather coming. Those clouds. The way you can see storms start long before they get here.’
‘Looking for the future eh, Claidi? Perhaps you’re looking the wrong way.’
We just had that exchange, on this high wide balcony facing east. Venn and I. (We’ve been trapped here two days.)
He says clever things like that.
But he doesn’t really talk to you, though. To one. I mean, he doesn’t meet your eyes, when he speaks or as you do, or only for a moment, one huge gaze, and then away. Is it his disgust, or is he – afraid?
He hasn’t known many people, apparently.
Says he prefers reading about people, even being told about people, to being with them.
He said, for example: ‘It’s always preferable to read about a place, rather than to go there. And reading about something, anything, is better than living the experience. One has distance, and there’s time to examine the events. And if one needs to go over them again, there they are, the same, in black and white.’
He then added, ‘After all, isn’t that why you write everything down in your book?’
I replied bitterly, ‘Oh, I’m sharp as a spoon.’
He’d blinked.
It’s a Hulta expression, actually it goes ‘Hu-yath mai rar, ai: She/he’s sharp as a spoon, she/he is’. It seems funny, but Blurn once told me that, in older times, the Hulta used to sharpen the stems of their spoons, in case they ever needed them as weapons, so it’s not as daft as it sounds.
I told Venn this.
He said, ‘You see, that’s very interesting.’
We had this conversation, if such it was, some days
