The stranger was big and hearty, and his hair was so coppery that it seemed to have verdigris. He smelled of turned earth, and the skin around his eyes looked too soft, like the frilled flesh under a toadstool’s cap. When he rubbed at his nose, Manrie expected it to come apart and release its spores into the air. She sat on her bed and ate a bun and watched him.

He had come into the room to lay a sparrow’s nest on the table before Aizdha, who sat back and looked at it, a sick expression on his face. He seemed to know Aizdha, and Aizdha seemed to know him. He reached out a moist looking hand to seize one of the buns that Manrie had brought for Aizdha’s breakfast. “I am so sorry,” he said.

Aizdha sighed. “I knew when I saw the hawk yesterday that the fledglings would be dead today.”

“I saw the mother at the bottom of the stairs. Her body had been torn asunder, and her feathers were scattered on the ground.”

Manrie hadn’t seen this when she had gone to fetch breakfast from the kitchens, although she had turned left along the base of the wall, and couldn’t be certain that the dead sparrow hadn’t been deposited somewhere to the right.

“Truly,” the stranger sighed, “this world intends to kill us.”

“It is how things are,” Aizdha said mournfully. “How they’ve always been. This world is a cycle of death and dissolution, and the emergence of new life.”

“Perhaps for those creatures it considers its own,” the stranger said. “But we are not of this world. From the moment our ancestors came through the Door of Hasra, we have had to contend with the land. It has never accepted us.”

“But there’s bread to eat, and fruit, and meat. You make it sound like the land itself was a monster.”

The stranger nodded. “It is. But you cannot fit the whole of it into your bestiary. And so you must describe the parts. The manifestations of the monstrous, rather than the monstrous itself.”

This seemed to trouble Aizdha. He frowned and turned his head to glance at the bestiary, which was sitting at its usual place on the end of the long table that was closest to his bed. He had an odd look on his face, as if he found his life’s work strangely repellent.

“Listen, my friend, let me tell you a thing,” the stranger continued, sitting forward, his expression a mask of sincerity. “When I was a child, a great plague came upon my village. It was as if the air itself had turned to poison. The farmers reported that the ground had turned yellowish in patches, out in the fields. Like moss growing on a tree, only the color of a seeping wound, and pungent.

“My parents died, and my sisters. I was left alone. And then great carrion birds came. No doubt you have studied and classified them, but I knew them only as huge blue birds, as blue as the sky, and impossible to see until they were plummeting towards you. They should have been natural hunters, but they only cared to feast on corpses. Why, I ask you. Birds that are disguised by the sky, but do nothing with this camouflage. We can only understand it as a form of maliciousness. The land showing us how little we matter, our short lives meant only for the gullets of cowardly vultures.

“But I digress. When one of these birds landed on my mother’s corpse I clung to her, and tried to beat at it, and in its malice it seized me and flew high into the air. I was sure that I would die. But I was turned in its claws, and found myself looking down. And do you know what I saw? I saw those patches of yellow in the winnowed fields, and they formed a pattern. They looked at me with a horrible, leering face. I knew that I was looking down on the true face of the land.”

Manrie closed her eyes for a moment. She saw a bloated body lying on the ground, and a piece of sky floating down towards it, like a flake of diseased skin. A memory from her childhood, although she could no longer say whose body it had been. But Aizdha was distracted, frowning in his scholarly way. “Giant blue carrion birds? Gorpsarra. I had the opportunity to dissect one, when I was younger. They have two stomaches. What the second one is for, I could not determine.”

The stranger blinked. He gave a soft, sad smile. “You are missing the point. When I say that the land is trying to kill us, I mean that it has a mind, a will. It has a face. And the object of our studies should be to discover its weaknesses.”

“Do you wish to kill the land?” Manrie asked.

The stranger ignored her, so Aizdha repeated her question. “Do you wish to kill it?”

“To tame it. To keep it docile.”

“To enslave it,” Manrie said.

“I was a slave once,” the stranger told Aizdha, pretending that he hadn’t heard her. “A good and useful slave. I sold myself to a clever merchant. What else could I do? I had no family, no village. The merchant was an upright and fair man, and part of his fairness was that our roles were always clear. Slaves should not talk, he told me, unless asked a question. A good adage.”

Manrie expected Aizdha to wave this away. But instead he murmured, “perhaps,” and for a moment she couldn’t breathe. But then he continued. “Perhaps there is some record of this moss. Have you asked the Archivist of the Second Tower?”

“I have been among the books.”

“I seem to remember reading something…yes, in the Jara Floriary. A strange contagion of the earth, to the west of the mountains. Caused bulbous sores that leaked pus. Is that right? Or was it asphyxiation?” His hand reached out and seized a small scrap of paper, and he wrote hurriedly on it with a stylus. He held it out from his body, as he always did when he was in the midst of excited research, and Manrie rose from her bed and took it. She smirked at the stranger as she did so.

But it was unfortunate that the floriary was in the possession of the Archivist of the Second Tower, for he had always treated her as a slave, and his people did likewise. When she presented Aizdha’s note to a feeble little clerk sitting at the marble desk in the antechamber, the girl brought out her tome of handwriting samples. After a moment of study she looked up. “Not verifiable.”

“What do you mean, not verifiable? You can see it’s his handwriting. And anyway, you know he’s my master.”

“The loop of the t is wider than usual.”

“He was scribbling. In the midst of research. The ees and ohs are tiny, like they always are.”

“Not verifiable.”

Manrie sighed. “Fetch Pluegit,” she said. The girl looked up, and for a moment their gazes locked in silent combat. Pluegit, at least, was terrified of annoying the great scholars, and would balk at the idea of sending Manrie back to Aizdha for such a flimsy reason.

The clerk turned her bulbous eyes back to the handwriting samples. “I will compare it with another entry. Yes, I see. The r looks suspicious, but it will pass. The Jara Floriary. We will fetch it.” She lifted a thin hand and languidly rang a little bell. One of the book slaves scuttled forward from the bench where they all sat, waiting to be summoned. He disappeared through the marble arch into the tower proper, and Manrie went to sit on a windowsill.

“You know, I just came back,” she said to the clerk. She kept her tone light, conversational. “I was in the Gaendolin Hills. At the summer house of Lady Katemzan Daturi. We dissected the husk of a huge insect together. A real monster. It must be somewhere down in the caves, eating with its gigantic mandibles. I was able to determine that it has nineteen legs, which is eerie, don’t you think? Being asymmetrical, I mean.”

The clerk gave a little shiver and then ignored her. Manrie had been creating her own mental bestiary for years, full of the people Aizdha wouldn’t let her list as monsters. The clerk was classified with the other papery-skinned dust dwellers who fed on rules and regulations and amused themselves with causing difficulties.

The Jara Floriary was quite large, and she was allowed to take it to a reading desk so that she could make notes on a few scraps of paper. It was poorly organized, with entries inserted without any order, and she glanced with annoyance at the clerk, who could be a useful monster if she would only apply herself to the task of organizing scholarly mess. There were a number of pages, written in blue ink, that dealt entirely with types of seaweed, and a long section on the great distances that seed pods could travel through the air. Finally she found what she was looking for on thin paper sheets that had been casually inserted into the text between pages that described carnivorous plants. She was just settling down to copy out the information when a shadow fell over her, and she looked up to find the odious stranger looming above her.

He seemed intent on pretending that she wasn’t there. He leaned over and ran a finger along the words, something that you were never supposed to do, as human touch could degrade the inky knowledge. He was breathing roughly through his nose, as if he were in the throes of sexual congress. He smelled musty, and his skin had the sheen of the most poisonous of fungi. “Yes, yes, yes,” he murmured to himself.

Manrie hunched forward and blocked his access to the book. She tensed her body and resumed her copying. If she didn’t exist for him, then he didn’t exist for her. But he seemed to have found what he needed, and he drifted away. When she was leaving the Second Tower she spotted him seated at a table by the window, writing furiously in a book of his own. He had a gold stylus that glinted in the sunlight.

When she returned to Aizdha’s chamber her master was lying in bed with his face to the wall. She went and stood over him, but he didn’t seem to sense her presence. “I’ve copied the pages out of the Jara Floriary,” she told him.

He turned his head and looked at her. Then he unwound himself from the bed, went to his table, and sat in front of the bestiary. But he did nothing more. His eyes strayed to the window and he settled into an eerily placid silence. There was a strange odor in the room, resinous and pungent. But there were no used plates or cups, no open bottles of mysterious liquor, no source for the smell that she could find.

He stared quietly out of the window for most of the day. She busied herself with cleaning his chambers, which had gotten very dusty while she was gone on her travels. Then she sat and carefully pasted the pages that she had brought back from the Gaendolin Hills into the fifth signature of the bestiary, having decided that the nineteen-legged monster belonged with locusts, even if it didn’t fly. As she turned the pages, she was gratified, as always, to see her handwriting and her drawings covering the vellum. When the sun began to set, Aizdha shook himself and asked for water. She watched his face as he drank. Watery light from the old glass in the windows moved across his features. He looked like he was floating up from a deep pool.

“Are you sick?” she asked him.

“No,” he smiled. “No, I am very well.” But he wanted to wash and then sleep. She fetched a pail of water for him from the kitchen, sloshing it slightly on the tiled outer stairs. He would never let her bathe him, not out of any vanity regarding his plump body and thin arms, but to save her embarrassment. The slaves who served other scholars were never shown such consideration.

That night she dreamt that he was moving about the room, picking up objects, examining them, sometimes lifting them to his face and touching them with the tip of his tongue. He picked up a stylus, a chipped water jug, a string of beads that a village matriarch had given him once, each in turn. But he never touched the bestiary. She awoke and opened her eyes and saw him standing over her, blue light rippling across him. He was looking down into her face with an expression of such sadness that it made her gasp. She reached out to take his hand, to reassure him, but there was no one there.

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She lay frozen in the bed, her heart pounding. There were stories in the towns and villages. Shades of the dead walking abroad, as if the graves had become overcrowded and there was no space for them beneath the earth. But Aizdha wasn’t dead. She looked across the long room and saw him lying on his bed. Was his chest moving? She could just make out the still features of his wizened face. Slipping from between the blankets, she padded across the room and knelt beside him. Her fingers found his wrist and she counted his pulse, feeling her own heartbeats calm as she reassured herself that his life was still present, rhythmic, steady.

But she was afraid when she woke up the next morning. She brought him his breakfast, and then she went out, leaving him at his work table, his stylus poised above the notes that she had copied from the floriary the day before. He never stopped her comings and goings, trusting that she would be there when he needed her. He had rarely raised his voice to her, had never touched her in an unwanted way. She was his slave, but she wasn’t like the other slaves. Larta, in the kitchens, often bore bruises on her arms, inflicted by the Master of the Outer Wall. When she strung the curtain so that Manrie could bathe behind it, she was extending a protection that she didn’t have for herself. The kitchen boys, with their lascivious eyes, were often forced to endure the pinches and caresses of the scholars as they carried meals to their chambers and tidied up their night waste. Aizdha was special, and his gentleness, his refusal to demean her, was part of his greatness.

She left the library and went into the city, climbing through its streets to the Pinnacle Gate. Beztrae, the guard captain, smiled at her when she came into his room at the top of the north tower. “Questions from your master?”

She nodded. “He wants to know if you have ever seen a face in the earth.”

Beztrae was married to a small, plain woman who kept a garden in the town, and who had littered his command room with pots of flowers. His gaze strayed to them, and a quizzical, alarmed expression tightened his fine features. “In the earth?”

“Not in a pot of chrysanthemums,” she assured him. “In the mountainside, for instance.” She glanced out the window. “Did the forest, or the rocks, ever rearrange themselves into a face?”

“That would be very alarming.”

“How about mushrooms? Have you ever met a monster made of mushrooms?”

“No…Surely these are questions for one of the scholars. For your master.”

She gave a little smile and shrugged. “He’s collecting information. Sometimes the best information isn’t found in books.”

When she returned to Aizdha’s rooms, the stranger was there again. The two scholars were facing each other across the table, and the stranger had spread a dirty handkerchief on the scarred wood. There was a yellowish, mossy substance on it, mixed with wet-looking black twigs. The stranger was packing this substance into a pipe when she came in.

“Ah, Manrie,” Aizdha said. “We need you for an experiment.”

She paused in the doorway. She could feel her heartbeat quicken. “An experiment?”

“We are going to smoke this fascinating substance. I need you to sit beside us, here, at the end of the table — move the bestiary out of the way. Sit here, and we will extend our wrists to you, and you can feel our pulses. You must keep a careful count of how many times our hearts beat in each turning of the glass.”

She noted that he had placed the minute glass on the table. It was inexact, and neither of them knew how many minutes it really measured. She sat where instructed. The stranger had finished packing the pipe, and he passed it to Aizdha. He reached into his robes and removed another pipe to fill. “No need to count my pulse,” he said, casually.

“No?” Aizdha asked, and Manrie disliked the diffidence in his tone.

“I have smoked betzazarra on many occasions. I am not doing so experimentally. And besides, since I have a tolerance for it, I would skew your results.”

Aizdha seemed to accept this. He turned the pipe in his hand, gazing down into the bowl and poking at the substance with a quivering finger. “Will its effects be like the kealorea that we smoked yesterday?”

“Much different. The kealoria produces a sense of euphoria. The betzazarra lifts one into the realm of dream. You will leave your body and walk where you will.”

Wavering sunlight fell through the ancient window glass and revealed a gleam of eagerness in Aizdha’s eyes . Manrie saw that his scholarly manner from an hour before had been replaced with manic energy. He was always like this when on the verge of a discovery. “Fetch a taper, Manrie,” he said.

It had been too hot for a fire in the room, so she went down the tiled stairs to the kitchen, where a sweating Larta was staring grimly down into a simmering pot. The stone walls of the kitchen maintained a subterranean coolness, but the fire pit seemed to be enticing the outside heat in, and Manrie’s robes stuck unpleasantly to her back as she knelt and lit a thin candle. “Put it in a lantern box,” Larta mumbled, and this was generosity, since every scholar demanded one of the beaten tin boxes, and she protected them fiercely.

Back up the stairs, the tile hot and gleaming, the orphan flowers wilting. It was only spring, and they were in the mountains. As she pushed the door to Aizdha’s chambers open, Manrie blamed the stranger for the unseasonable weather, while knowing that this made no sense. A man couldn’t bring the weather with him. He was seated away from the windows, able to lean back into the shadows of the room. She slid the lantern box onto the table and opened the tin door so that the candle light flickered across his features. But the heat from the flame didn’t seem to bother him.

The stranger stretched out a languid arm and plucked away the pipe that Aizdha was holding. He placed it between his lips, lifted the taper with his other hand, and set the twigs and moss alight. Aizdha seemed caught off guard. He hurriedly extended a wrist to Manrie, and she sat and placed her fingers on his soft skin, feeling the brittle lines of his tendons beneath it. The stranger passed the lit pipe to him and he breathed in deeply, then started coughing. “Easy,” the stranger said. “Pull it into your lungs and hold it there.”

The smoke was cloying and smelled like a bog. Manrie lifted her free hand to pinch her nostrils together, noticed that she had failed to turn over the minute glass, pulled the collar of her robe over her mouth and nose, and flipped the little timer. She counted, her gaze on the sands as they ran down. It was hard to see through the smoke, for both men were inhaling deeply. Two hundred heartbeats before the time ran out. That would have to be her baseline, since Aizdha hadn’t thought to ask her to establish one before he started smoking. No matter. She had counted his heartbeats in the middle of the night. She knew the rhythm of his resting pulse.

The table shifted slightly in front of her. The beam of sunlight falling across it rippled, and one part of her mind remembered that this was normal, an effect of the old window glass. But another part of her mind saw a pattern in the rippling, a rhythm that accompanied Aizdha’s heartbeat. Her fingers on his wrist were leaping slightly, as if his pulse were the footsteps of a giant. His fine arm hairs seemed to be growing and swaying slightly, like a field in a breeze. The bestiary had been pushed to the far side of the table, out of its usual place, and she realized that her arm, and Aizdha’s, were lying on the rectangle of tabletop where it usually sat. She thought she could hear voices from the bestiary, calling out to her — the trumpeting of the tiger swans in the third signature, the hooting of the drum owls, the morose bellow of the tentacled rams at the end of the seventh signature. Their calling seemed to be coming closer to her, and she stared down at the tabletop beneath her arm and thought that she could see their shapes forming in the whorls of the bare wood.

She stood up, releasing Aizdha’s wrist and gasping, “Too many, too many heartbeats.” Her master didn’t seem to notice. He was staring into a corner of the ceiling, a strange, sad grin on his heavy face. Across from him, the stranger seemed to be asleep. “I need air,” Manrie whispered, and turned, and was terrified by the way the door seemed to be moving away from her. But she reached it, and opened it, and went out onto the landing of the stairs. The green and blue tile of the steps assaulted her with reflected sunlight. She could see tiny mites, crawling along the petals of the orphan flowers that sat in their pots along the wall. She looked perilously down at the ground three stories below. It seemed to leer at her. She turned to go down the stairs, slipped, and fell onto her bottom. The shock reverberated through her body and she was afraid to stand back up. She started sliding down, step by step, and the tiles were warm, like human flesh, and she felt that they were embracing her, contracting to push her downwards, like the intestine of a giant beast.

She found the foot of the stairs, and the wall, the old, familiar stones. She moved along them slowly, pressing into their grit with her fingertips, feeling a cold pulse within them. If she put her ear to the wall, she could hear all of the voices in all of the chambers above her. She could hear the boiling of Larta’s pot. She could hear the scratch of a dozen styluses on paper and vellum, and the buzz of the thoughts that directed the writing.

And then she heard a thud, and turned, and saw what looked like a dropped sack of flour, lying in the dirt at the tower’s base. It seemed very far away, but she reminded herself that she was used to going on long journeys for Aizdha, and she forced herself to move towards it, until she stood looking down at her master’s face, his eyes open and staring up at her, his face wavering in sunlight that seemed to be passing through panes of old glass as it fell from the sky.

It was then that one part of her mind awoke and looked about sharply. She was all alone at the base of the wall. The stairs to Aizdha’s chambers were right beside her. The stranger was up there. Had he pushed Aizdha out of the window? If so, all he had to do was blame her, and he would succeed in his murder. The lethargic, drugged part of her resisted, but the woman who had walked through the Gaendolin Hills and received the praise of Lady Daturi insisted on obedience, and she found herself going up the stairs of the tower, going quickly, so that the green and blue tiles flashed by, blending into a sheen of water.

The stranger was still asleep, leaning back into the shadows of the room, his heavy lids closed, his nostrils pulsing in and out like the frills of a living mushroom. She was afraid to move past him but she forced herself to turn sideways, to slide between his chair and the wall. The ceiling slanted down and scraped the top of her head, and for a moment she felt the talons of an enormous bird, descending from the shadows. Her hand reached out and tried to find the stranger’s pulse, pushing into the strange, soft flesh below his jawline. He did not awake, but she could feel no pulse, and she thought that if she cut him, his flesh would part simply and softly, and no blood would well out of it. She slipped to the end of the table and seized the bestiary. All was silent. The window, thrown open and gaping cruelly, omitted no sound from below.

She found a scrap of paper, fumbled with an ink pot and stylus, and then paused, slowing her heartbeat, focusing her mind. She wrote carefully, making the loops of the “t”s thin, the “e”s and “o”s tiny. A few short words, but she struggled over them more than she had struggled over anything in her life.

She did not quite know how she got to the Pinnacle Gate, only that her head began to clear as she hurried through the town. Halfway there she realized that she didn’t have her pack, that she was fleeing with only the bestiary. It was too late. She could feel the maliciousness of the library breathing at her back, the petty meanness of the clerks and archivists, the sour jealousy of the other slaves. She came to the gate and found Beztrae there, standing with two guards. They were inspecting a wagon that had just come through the pass.

“Back again?” he asked her, his handsome eyes twinkling. And then he saw the bestiary. “On another mission for your master?”

“Yes,” she breathed. “Yes.” Then she paused. “Would you walk with me?” she begged him. “Just a little way into the pass. I…my master gave me a message to deliver to you privately.”

The captain glanced at the guards and the wagon driver, then nodded. He stepped with her through the gate, into the deep, shadowed coldness of the road between the cliffs. The chill brought her fully back to herself. They continued a little way down, the stones breathing darkly on either side, the sky a haze of blue high above them. “Listen,” she said, pausing and gripping his arm. “A monster has come into the city. No, don’t worry, he didn’t come through your gate. Or maybe he did, I don’t know. Only he looks like a man, so you wouldn’t know. But I assure you, he is a terrible monster, sent by the land itself to corrupt and destroy our knowledge.”

For all his friendliness, Beztrae was wary. “Your master says this?”

She reached into her sleeve and handed him the note that she had forged. He read it quickly. His hand touched the handle of his long knife. “Where?” he asked.

“My master…my master’s chambers. I had to save the bestiary. I don’t know…I don’t know if my master…”

Alarm had sharpened his features, and they were no longer handsome. “Come back with me to the gate,” he said.

“No. No, I must save what I can.”

“But you don’t have a pack. You don’t have a weapon.” He saw the look of despair on her face and said, “Go to the Vise Tower. I will send you with a message for them, and they will equip you.” He patted ineffectually at his robes. His face fell. “I don’t have any paper.”

Her heart was beating quickly. She felt a sense of desecration even as she held the bestiary out to him and fumbled her stylus from the hidden pocket in the sleeve of her robe. He frowned, looking down at the blank page that she proffered to him. “I can write on the backside of your master’s note.”

“No,” she said quickly. “You must keep it. Evidence.”

His eyes met hers. Then he nodded. He scribbled in the bestiary, then stepped back and gave her an odd, boyish smile. “I always wanted to contribute something to one of the great works.”

“You have,” she told him. “You’ve made certain of its survival.”

She might as well have said “My survival.” But they were the same, now. The bestiary and the living person who could carry on the work. He turned and ran back towards the gate. She watched him, and wanted to weep. Then she turned and began to run up the road between the slabs of stone, towards the Vise Tower, the bestiary clutched, like a warm body, in her arms.