Venn looked at me, slightly longer than usual. So I looked away.
He said softly, ‘You know, I really couldn’t read a lot of it, Claidi. Your handwriting – is a little like another language.’
I frowned. ‘Just tell me about the thing in the book.’
‘It’s a Tag. You’ve been patient, waiting so long to ask me.’
I’d forgotten actually. Incredible, but a fact.
However, now he said he’d answer whatever he could, including the questions I posed in my ‘journal’.
And when he said that, for a second everything seemed much easier, because he’d read this book. How strange. How awful. But it did.
THE QUEST FOR THE LIBRARY
Her name is (was) Ustareth. His mother.
That was question number – let me look back and see – No. 4) or part of it. As to who she was, no one I’d know, it goes without saying.
I think I’ll answer these questions here, in the order I put them before. (He would approve of that, writing it down and then writing it out again with the solutions, in the right order. I’m not doing it because he would approve.)
Here goes.
1) Why am I here? Not because I asked to come here. He doesn’t know. He said this: ‘They sent you here to worry me, I think. I don’t – didn’t want visitors. But mostly they did it to punish you. You messed them about. So they’ve messed you about.’
2) When can I leave? No, he didn’t answer that. I didn’t ask it, in fairness. Because now there seems so much to sort out here, perhaps I have to stay a while.
3) Why did V’s mother – Ustareth – make the rooms move? Her experiment. To see if she could. To have fun. To stop herself being bored.
4) Who was she – answered. Or as much as I can, so far.
5) Why did she go and where? He’d said because she was fed up with it all. Into the jungle, so presumably through the jungle and off somewhere else? But he looked very odd over this one, which is reasonable. Didn’t press it.
6) and 7) The hard light in the lamps – yes, the waterfall creates the power for this, as it does for some of the clockwork, and for certain other things … we didn’t somehow quite sort out if this included the food. But it turns out Jotto doesn’t always cook, he simply has to go and collect it –? Then he arranges it and brings it. I’ll have to go through this one again, I didn’t follow it really. Oh, and the waterfall power thing is something about hydro-something. No, I didn’t understand that at all, though Venn went over it two or three times. It works though.
8) Talking to Venn. I am.
9) That question about the furballs. (V says what the Gardener shouts at the monkeys means ‘May your fur turn to iron’.) (Fine.)
We talked a very long time before I went off exhaustedly to sleep.
The worrying thing is, because he read this book, or some of it (most of it I suspect) he partly knows me.
But I don’t know him.
And yet – I almost feel I do – also because he read this. And that I can’t explain to myself.
As if in exchange, he did say a lot about his childhood. In clever, off-hand sentences. It sounded, underneath, miserable, but also – glorious. All that freedom. But, the not having a mother.
He knows I didn’t ever know my parents.
He said, ‘We have to go to the Rise library. There’s information there, things about the Tower Families, the history of the Towers, and so on. It might help you. The trouble is, of course, finding the library. It, naturally, moves too. And quite randomly. It’ll be murder.’
‘Tell me about the flying letter.’
‘I don’t think I can. I mean you won’t understand.’
‘Try.’
‘Claidi, I mean I don’t understand. I never have. And I’ve only ever got three. Four, counting the lying one about you. They just – appear – out of the wall.’
‘Oh.’
So the flying letter and the thing, which Venn calls a Tag, and which they put in this book, remain a mystery.
Who put the Tag into the binding though?
Probably Ironel Novendot. But I suppose even Nemian could have done it. To make sure I didn’t stray. Perhaps when he saw I was getting interested in someone else, in Argul. Perhaps Nemian slipped the Tag in under the binding as we travelled. The book wasn’t always with me, but in a wagon.
It left no mark I could see. But then the book was already a bit travel-worn. And how would I ever think such a thing was possible and so look out for it?
‘I’ve seen such things before,’ Venn said. ‘So I checked. It didn’t surprise me, to find it.’
The House had candles and oil lamps. And Peshamba had crystals that watched you, and dolls – but not like Jotto. The City on the River had nothing much … just watchers, lift-lifters worked by slaves, and balloons. And the doors could recognize you. And they had the Law.
‘They all have the Law,’ said Venn. ‘In some form. The House had all those rituals you disliked so much. And there are other places, with other rules.’
I said, ‘What about here?’
‘No, there’s nothing like that here. Perhaps my – when she came here, Ustareth, she hoped to escape the Law and the rituals.’
Something nags at me. If you dare read this again, Ven’n, though I don’t think you will (I hope you won’t), then here it is. The Rise does have its own version of the stupid and mindless Law-type rituals and rules, designed to get in the way and make life difficult and chancy. It’s the rooms moving about. Isn’t it?
We prepared for the trek solemnly and with care. As if for a great expedition into unknown lands.
Jotto and Grem were to carry a lot of things, including water-bottles – there are bathrooms everywhere, but you can’t
