The curved walls of the room were broken by a pattern of round glass. She lay in the bed he had given her and stared up as the morning sunlight flashed through the blue and orange discs, and wondered if it was glass at all. The house was very quiet, the thick walls dampening the sounds of the mountain, and it was so cool that she stayed under the woven blanket. She hadn’t been cool for days. Drifting from sleep into drowsy awareness, she felt a strange kind of absence in the room, the feeling that someone had just left it.
Her host had laid out clean robes for her, and she wasn’t surprised that they fit her, for she was as tall as he was. The bestiary was still tucked safely into her pack, and when she looked in to make sure that it hadn’t been disturbed she saw a shifting of dirt and grit in the bottom of the pack, the accumulation of days spent fleeing down the road. She left her things in the sleeping room and walked through the silent house, discovering, to her joy, a “seat of satisfaction” behind a closed door. She sat and relieved herself, then sprang up to watch her night water go swirling down into some hidden place in the earth. She frowned, thinking for a moment that she had seen a movement in the depths of the plumbing.
She found her host in a clay yard behind the house, where he was thrusting a spade into the heavy earth. He was a stocky man, and his every gesture was purposeful and abrupt. When he had met her at the door the evening before, she had thought that he must be expecting her, but now she suspected that he met every moment with the same quick, analytical decisiveness that had led him to pour her a cup of water and hand it to her before either of them had spoken a word. Now the morning sunlight glinted off of his silver hair, and when he looked up from his spade work she saw that he was quite old.
He nodded at her and smiled in a strangely unnatural way. As if someone had told him that there was a proper order to a greeting — a nod, a smile, and then words — and it was necessary to follow this order at all times. “Good morning,” he said. There was a small table set beside where he was digging, and he picked up a cloth from it, unfolded it, wiped his brow, and then carefully folded it again. “There is breakfast in the solarium.”
He led her there. Its walls, like those of her bedroom, were curved, and light poured in through the strange colored discs that patterned the ceiling. “Is it glass?” she asked, waving at it.
He looked up, as if surprised that she had noticed the discs. “I find them in the clay beds. Not glass, something else. There was a great river that ran through this valley at one time. I believe that it still runs somewhere deep under the earth, that we are seated on a roof above a chasm of flowing water. The discs are very strong, but transparent, and, as you see, beautiful. Perhaps…” And he suddenly became awkward, shy. He pulled out a chair for her at a table, and when she sat she found that she was submerged in blue light that fell through a disc just above her.
He seated himself, uncovered a basket of rolls, and removed a cloth from a plate of butter and jam. “Are there cows here?” she asked.
He seemed confused, then very serious when she nodded to the butter. “I have a friend who brings it. He brings me many things. I believe that you will meet him.”
He then sat very still, staring down at the table in front of him. Manrie reached out and took a roll, broke it open, and began to spread it with the butter, noticing as she did so that her fingernails were dirty. His mouth was moving, as if he were rehearsing a series of sentences, practicing the act of speech. “Perhaps,” he said, when he seemed satisfied, “you will allow me to look at Aizdha’s Bestiary. He was very interested in the colored discs, when he visited many years ago. He thought that they might be the scales of some monstrous creature, or perhaps the lenses of monstrous eyes. I have always imagined that he investigated further, when he returned to Libreigia.” And then, as if he couldn’t help himself, he said, “I’m not certain that there are cows anywhere.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, and then endured a pause as he took a roll, studied it, broke carefully into it, and separated it into eight pieces. He arranged them on the table in a line and carefully picked up the crumbs.
“We came naked through the Door of Hasra. Do you know that? It was more than eight hundred years ago, so you probably wouldn’t remember. All we had was our bodies, and words. But the words were from the previous world. We used them to describe the things we found here, but how do we know that the creatures we decided to call “cows” actually resemble the cows of the previous world? We don’t. Cows there might be carnivorous. They might be smaller or larger. They might have seven tails. We cannot know the true cow, only that our ancestors were lonely and grieving and they wanted the things they found here to become familiar to them. So they used words that they already knew.”
Manrie set down the bun that she’d been eating. “Our ancestors weren’t the only ones who grieved,” she murmured. He didn’t seem to hear her. She met his gaze and said, “You can look in Aizdha’s Bestiary. But there’s nothing in it about glass discs, either as scales or as eyes.”
He sat forward, an abrupt, awkward gesture that disturbed his pieces of bun. “Here’s what I really think. The discs are worlds. Other worlds. Sometimes they glow at night. Sometimes the colors erupt on them, or become occluded. They are other worlds, like the stars.”
She was suddenly afraid to look up, to see any changes in the colored discs. She looked down at the table top. Was the light around her shifting from blue to purple? “The stars are other worlds?” she asked softly.
“Sometimes. Sometimes they’re this world, only from a year ago, or ten years ago, or a hundred.”
She glanced up at him. His sturdy, workaday face was calm, his eyes mildly distracted. She remembered Aizdha once gesturing at the path up the mountain that broke away from the road. “The Man on the Mountain lives up there. But we won’t visit him. Not today.”
“Why not?” she had asked, since Aizdha had always led them on long side trips to visit his many friends.
But her master had only frowned and mopped the sweat from his jowls. “He believes too many odd things.”
Now she faced that man. She kept her voice curious but noncommittal. “Why would you think that?” she asked.
Her host blinked, tilted his face to the ceiling, and rehearsed what he would say. “I observe them,” he said slowly. “In my telescope. And sometimes I see myself, moving across a star, working at all my usual tasks. Digging in the clay yard. Shaping the pipes. Digging the hole.”
“What hole?” she asked, and then, to keep the conversation from flitting away completely, she said, “How far back can you see? Can you see us coming through the Door at Hasra?”
He paused and considered. “I think I’ll be able to. When I’m able to look down.” He saw her confusion. “There’s another world, right beneath us. On the other side of the river. Flipped, you see, so that for them we are upside down. I believe that some of their stars show that moment, that day when we came through the Doors of Hasra. Just as some of our stars show…well, things that happened to them, that we can’t make sense of.”
She blinked. Then she pushed her chair back from the table and said, “I’m finished with breakfast.”
He asked her to help him with his daily tasks and led her out a back door of the house. The mountains rose to either side and the dried river bed narrowed as it climbed above them. There was a narrow footpath leading away to the right and winding its way through tall pines. There were wooden cages built on a piece of flattened ground a little way up the path, and he stopped before them and gestured for her to inspect them. A maktikhura lay dead in the first cage she walked up to. She stood staring down at its stick-like body. Flies were buzzing around its snout. She glanced back at him and he hung his head.
“I didn’t want you to look at that one first. I didn’t manage to keep it alive.”
“Why did you capture it at all?”
He blinked. “For Aizdha. For the bestiary.”
“But we’ve seen maktikhura many times. They’re not uncommon in the mountains.”
He closed his eyes and opened them again. She couldn’t tell if he was offended. “There’s a dorleku in that other cage. The one to the left.”
She knelt and looked in at the shelled creature. Its luminous eyes met her gaze, and it blinked. Then it began rearranging the pearlescent plates on its back. She watched them slide from the creature’s resting pattern to its distress pattern. “What are you feeding it?” she asked.
“Lizards. Acorns. Apple cores.”
She nodded. “But why keep it? When was the last time that Aizdha was here?”
Her host tilted his face and inspected the tops of the trees. “Recently?” he asked.
It meant nothing. Aizdha had never come here during the eleven years that she had been his slave. She straightened, and an inrush of grief for her dead master made her stagger. “I’ll sketch it,” she said. “For the bestiary.”
But he had more to show her, and he led her back down the trail, propelling her along with his strange, darting manner. They went around the side of the house, and she was surprised to see that the colored discs in the wall were glowing, as if lit by an interior luminescence. But she knew that the rooms of the house were dark, shadowy, and cold. He led her down the dry river bed, past the strange, half-assembled clay pipes that she had seen when she came up the road the night before. He stopped at the hole she had passed, and in the morning light it looked less ominous, less like a trap set for unwary travelers or a grave that was being dug. There was a ladder that descended into it, and he went down, lifted a pick axe, and drove its sharp tip into dry stone. Perhaps he had meant only to demonstrate his efforts to her, but he got lost in the work, and started to dig in earnest, and after a few moments he asked her to come down into the hole and fill a bucket that was laying there. For a few hours she labored, shoveling chipped stone into the bucket, dragging it to a rope and pulley system that ran beside the ladder, slipping a hook over the handle, and scurrying up the ladder to winch the bucket up the side. It began to wear on her, as he kept snapping out directions. She resented his tone. She had never taken orders from anyone but Aizdha, and the fact that she was masterless did not mean she wanted a new master. Aizdha had always been gentle in his direction, had requested, not ordered, had asked her what she thought of his choices and allowed her to direct her own work. Thinking this, comparing him to her host, caused grief to beat down at her like the hot sunlight.
She rebelled, and sat on the lip of the pit. “What is the hole for?” she called down to him. He didn’t answer at first, but paused and scooped away some of the broken rock with his thick fingered hands. Then he squinted up at her.
“You have seen an hourglass?” he asked, and her mind flashed to the minute glass on Aizdha’s table, the grains running through it on that last morning of his life. She nodded. “That is what we are,” he said. “This whole existence. A grain that has been stuck in the neck of an hourglass. The previous world above and the next world below. I am widening the neck.”
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She stared at him. “And if you succeed?”
He gave her a rare, shy smile. “Then this entire world is freed, and flows down into the world to come.”
“Which is upside down,” she muttered. He didn’t seem to hear her. But he also seemed content to end his work. He straightened and stretched, and climbed up the ladder.
“Come,” he said. He led her back up the riverbed to the clay piping. It terminated in a large, bell-like piece of pipe, and one of the strange colored discs was fitted to its end. This piece of pipe was connected to another, and another, extending back up the hill. He led her along it to the other end, which lay in the dirt, unconnected piping stacked beside it. “We will need to dig some fresh clay, and tear up some muslin.”
“For what?”
“To continue building the pipe.”
“But what is it for?”
Again the shy, awkward smile. “Put your eye to the end of it.”
She had to kneel and set her cheek against the earth. She gazed in and reared back. Then she returned her eye to the end of the pipe. She could see all the way down the riverbed, down to the copse of trees and the narrow trail leading through them from the road far below. She could see the ridges along a leaf, the glint of sunlight on the back of a bark-colored finch, the wood chip pattern of its feathers. She wished that her host wasn’t there, gazing down at her, waiting for her to ask a question. Setting her face into a blank mask, she denied him her wonder. But as they trudged back up to the house and went around it, she studied the discs set in the walls. They seemed opaque. Maybe they needed the pipes to turn them into lenses. Or maybe he had found the one disc that could act as a lens. She would have asked Aizdha. Awe and speculation was something they had shared. She wouldn’t share it with anyone else.
There was a vegetable garden on the south side of the house, with a small chicken coop nearby, and a stack of the odd translucent discs beside it, dug up and left to collect dirt and leaf fall and feathers. Her host bent in the garden and cut a head of lettuce with a small, sharp knife that he drew from the sleeve of his robes. He handed it to her. “Wash it at the pump,” he ordered, nodding at an odd contraption in the center of the garden. When he saw her look of confusion, he went to it and showed her how it worked. She found it fascinating. A long stave of wood, attached to two other staves at either end, with a clay pipe between them. He rocked the handle back and forth, and she watched in surprise as water splashed from the mouth of the clay pipe and fell into a basin that was waiting below it. “Wash the lettuce,” he said again.
“Is this the water from the river?”
“What river?” he asked her.
“The one that runs beneath us.”
He looked at her as if she were mad, and then left her, disappearing into a subterranean ice house.
He wasn’t a fool, and yet he was. His cleverness was evidenced by the pump, the coolness of the fish he brought from the ice house, the efficient fire that he built in an iron basket and set alight using a small contraption made of flint and steel. She thought she knew the tricks of a kitchen, and those tricks included banking coals, nursing heat, never letting a fire truly die. Fire was something that was passed from hand to hand, carried from one place to another. It could be summoned by rubbing sticks together when you were on a journey, but when you were at home it was always present and required no labor. Watching him in his singular task, she realized that all of Libreigia had been a single shared hearth, each fire reliant on neighboring fires, a form of goodwill passed from cook to cook. And she understood the source of his foolishness. He was all alone here, with only his thoughts, and impossible ideas grew from his solitude. Only now she was alone as well, a fugitive from Libreigia, and she saw, clearly, what would happen to her mind if she remained in her own solitude.
After they ate she washed the plates and cups at the pump, but she didn’t return to the pit with him. Instead she wandered through the house, investigating the domed rooms, and trying to discern some pattern in the placement of the strange colored discs in the walls. Sunlight shown through them and speckled the rooms. She found some comfort in returning to the domestic tasks of a slave. She swept the floor. She chased a spider out of a corner of the solarium where they had eaten breakfast. The house remained cool, despite the heat outside, but there was something awkward about it. Each time she entered a room, she had the sense that someone had been in it just a moment before. And she thought, several times, that she heard someone moving around on the other side of an open doorway.
That night, she had a dream. She was lying in her bed, and the discs in the walls began to glow a deep, pulsating blue. She stood on the bed and brought her eye level with the disc just above her. Some part of her sleeping mind resisted this movement, tried to warn her that it was a dangerous dream. But her dream self reached out a hand to touch the disc, and felt no surprise when her hand went through the pulsating blue. As if she were dipping her fingers into warm water. She wasn’t even surprised when she felt someone grab her hand, but when the unseen person began to pull her, she resisted. She was falling backwards, her hand released, and maybe she was laying on the bed, and maybe she was suspended in air, but there was another hand reaching through the surface of the disc, a chubby, ink-stained hand, and then a wrist that she knew, and she could see a heartbeat jumping beneath the tendons.
She woke up, aware that she had been trying to cry out, her body rigid with tension. Her eyes flickered to the wall above her, where the sheen of the discs shown dully with moonlight. *I can’t,* she thought. *I can’t stand that he is dead.*
She slipped from the bed and picked up her pack, thinking that she might flee. But the hallway outside was peaceful, the whole house bathed in sleep. And where would she go? She padded down the hallway to the solarium, where the little table was shadowed within the dim blue light that fell from the discs in the ceiling. Going to the table, she sat for a moment and studied the room. Sleep was still close and waking reason far away, and she allowed herself to imagine that she was inside a giant shell, and that she and her host were simply the meat of an acorn, growing on an enormous oak.
This, she thought, was what had happened to her host. In some twilight between dream and waking, he imagined another world beneath them. Perhaps he heard the running of the subterranean river as he sat in the darkness and imagined that it wasn’t subterranean, but glinting with sunlight, and had people living along its banks, villages where there were dances, and grand feasts, and storytelling. Whimsical companions who would free him from loneliness.
She pulled out the bestiary and found an ink pot and stylus in the grit at the bottom of her pack. She opened the bestiary to the last signature. There was the note written by Beztrae, the guard captain, which she had presented at the Vise Tower. She had received her pack, and some rations, and a knife, and a canteen in return. Beztrae’s note was the first thing ever written in the bestiary without Aizdha’s knowledge or intention. She turned a page. The blue plates provided enough light for her to sketch, and she began to draw her host, trying to capture the blunt solidity of his features, the uneven crop of his light silver hair. She was doing something that Aizdha would never have allowed, adding a human being to the bestiary. But she had always argued against this prohibition of his. In her experience, human beings were monstrous, as monstrous as any of the creatures that her master had catalogued.
She finished her sketch and looked up, and sprang back in her chair. There was a figure standing in the beam of blue light that fell from the disc that was closest to the door. Shorter than her host, fatter. A figure that she knew. “Master Aizdha?” she whispered, and the light sharpened, his features became clear. He was gazing at her with an expression of deep sadness. “I…” she glanced down at the book. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think it could matter, now.” The skin around his eyes crinkled with kindness, as they often had in life, and his lips quirked in the whimsical way that they did when she was misunderstanding some instruction. He held her gaze, and then tilted his head up, slowly and deliberately, until she was staring with him at the blue disc. It seemed to grow, and its light fell in a sharp beam. And then it went out.
She sat for a moment, her heart pounding, then pushed the chair back and stumbled across the room. He was gone. There was no one standing in the dull aura of the blue disc. She craned her head to look up at it, and as she did so the blue began to shift, marbling, turning green and then white and then a nondescript brown. The room itself grew darker. She had to fumble her way back to the table to collect the bestiary and her pack. She had to feel along the walls of the hallway to find her way back to her bed.
When she woke, her host was already gone from the house. She opened the front doorway and looked down the riverbed. She could just make out the bucket and winch glowing beside the pit in the morning sunlight. She watched until she saw him scurry up the ladder. His movements were precise but also slightly ungainly, as if he were a child who was concentrating hard. For a moment she thought that she might learn to enjoy his company, and in that generous spirit she went out into the garden, picked some herbs, and went down into the icehouse, which was neatly arranged and tightly packed. She found a ham and sliced some pieces off of it, then paused in the garden, knelt, dug some potatoes, and slipped into the chicken coop to steal some eggs. She made a fire in his little grill by making a tinder nest and drilling with a sharpened stick into a block of wood, as she would if she were in the wilderness. As the potatoes were cooking she indulged in an act of whimsy, and took two of the strange discs from the stack beside the chicken coop. She washed them in water that she pumped into the basin, watching the way that the rivulets seemed to inspire streaks of color in the depths of the strange material. Perhaps the discs were pustules that rose on monstrous flesh, somewhere far beneath the earth. Or lily pads that grew in still pools beside the upside down river. Today, they would be plates, and she slid the breakfast that she had cooked onto them, and saw iridescent colors flow beneath the white eggs.
She walked down the river bed, carrying the two plates, thinking that she might sit with her host on the edge of the pit as they ate. Something glinted at the base of the mountain, in the copse of trees that screened the riverbed from the road. She was just coming up to the end of the long pipe where it lay in the dirt, so she indulged her curiosity, set the plates down on the rocky ground, and put her eye to the pipe’s opening. A horseman was turning off the road and making his way through the trees. Her breath caught. He was wearing a muslin sack over his head. She could see the fibers of its weave. His posture, the breadth of his shoulders, the way he held his head were all familiar to her. She was certain that he was the stranger who had invaded Aizdha’s rooms in Libreigia, the mushroom man who had given her master strange plants to smoke, who had sat in a trance, after she had found her master dead at the base of the stairs. *Why didn’t Beztrae arrest him?* she thought, but she knew why. She was a slave, and the mushroom man was a scholar. He would be believed and she would not. And he would have told them that she had killed her master.
She leapt up and, irrationally, grabbed the plates of food. Back up the riverbed to the house, running, the potatoes falling from the plates into the dirt. She turned both discs over, letting all the food fall from them, and ran, holding them at her sides, the grease of the meal threatening to make them slip from her fingers. Into the house, down the hall, to the room she had slept in, where she stuffed the discs, unthinkingly, into her pack, checked that the bestiary was there, and rushed with her belongings towards the back door. She paused there, looking up the straggling path that led to the depressing menagerie beneath the trees. She was aware of the sound of hoofbeats, coming up the dry river bed. She was aware that the light in the house had turned blue, and she turned, half expecting to find Aizdha’s spirit standing behind her.
Voices from the front of the house, the horse snorting, booted feet clomping into the dust. If she ran up the path, they could chase her. They would find her. Her host must know every nook and cranny of the mountain. And here, in the house, the discs were casting blue light down onto the floor. She decided, and with five quick strides she was in the solarium, standing in the beam of light that Aizdha had stood in the night before. She could see the back door, see the green rise of land beyond it, and it seemed to mock her foolishness.
He came striding down the hallway, still wearing his muslin sack, and she thought she could smell the wet odor of fungi emanating off of him. She watched his shoulders as he moved to the back door. He was a large man, larger than her host, who came trailing after him. He stood framed in the doorway, studying the hill beyond, and she knew that her ruse had been too simple, stupid, really, and that she would be discovered. The cloth covered face turned towards her. She could feel his gaze through the muslin. He stared right at her. Then his gaze moved past her.
Her host gave a little cry, and the mushroom man turned back to the open doorway. “A movement, up by the cages,” her host said. The mushroom man nodded, and strode out the door.
For a moment she stood still, barely breathing, listening for the crunch of their footsteps on the path. Then she was moving, running back through the house. The horse was standing by the front door, its reins hanging loosely. She slid her arms through the straps of her pack. She paused for a moment with a hand on the horse’s neck, trying to reassure it, although she knew little of horses. Panic gave her a competency that she didn’t possess. Her foot slipped into a stirrup, her leg swung over its back, and she was astride it, gripping the reins, turning it and sending it trotting back down the riverbed.
There was a cry behind her, and running footsteps. She was afraid to gallop, afraid of the slant of the riverbed, of the horse stumbling and injuring itself. She glanced back and saw them emerging from the house. But they couldn’t catch her. And as she went by the pit, she risked a glance at it, and saw, to her surprise, a small spring of water burbling up from the hole that her host had been digging.