Loe raamatut: «The Redemption of Althalus», lehekülg 6

All things considered, though, this particular afterlife wasn’t so bad. He was warm and well-fed, and he had Emerald to talk to. He might have wished that there was some of Nabjor’s mead around someplace, or that some sister of the naughty-eyed girl in Nabjor’s camp might pay him a call now and then, but as time went on, those things became less and less important. He’d heard some pretty terrible stories about the afterlife, but if it didn’t get any worse than it was right now, Althalus felt that he could learn to be dead with it – he realized that ‘learn to live with it’ didn’t exactly fit in with his current situation. The one thing that nagged him was the total lack of any possibility of hunting down the man who’d killed him. Since he was now an insubstantial ghost, he wouldn’t be able to hack the rascal to pieces. But then he realized that he might just be able to haunt his unknown assailant, and that might be even more satisfying than butchering him.

He wondered if he might be able to persuade Emerald to agree to that. He could promise her that they could come back here to their private afterlife after he’d haunted his murderer to death, but he was almost positive that she wouldn’t put much store in promises made by the ghost of a man so famous for lying at every chance he got. After he’d thought his way through the idea, he decided that he wouldn’t mention the notion to his furry roommate.

Then the sun came back to the roof of the world, and the notion that he was dead began to fade. Eternal darkness sort of fit in with his concept of an afterlife, but the return of the sun made him almost feel that he’d been reborn.

He could read the Book fairly well by now, and he found it more and more interesting. One thing did sort of bother him, though. Late one spring afternoon, he laid his hand on the Book and glanced at Emerald, who appeared to be sleeping with her chin resting on her paws as she lay on the table beside the Book. ‘What’s his real name?’ he asked her.

Her green eyes were sleepy when she opened them. ‘Whose name?’ she asked.

‘The one who wrote the Book. He never comes right out and identifies himself.’

‘He’s God, Althalus.’

‘Yes, I know, but which one? Every land I’ve ever visited has its own god – or its own set of gods – and they all have different names. Was it Kherdhos – the god of the Wekti and Plakands? Or maybe Apwos, the god of Equero? What is his name?’

‘Deiwos, of course.’

‘Deiwos? The god of the Medyos?’

‘Of course.’

‘The Medyos are the silliest people in the world, Emerald.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘You’d think that the people who worshiped the real true God would have better sense.’

She sighed. ‘It’s all the same God, Althalus. Haven’t you realized that by now? The Wekti and Plakands call him Kherdhos because they’re interested in their herds of sheep or cows. The Equeros call him Apwos, because they concentrate most of their attention on the lakes. The Medyos are the oldest people in this part of the world, and they brought the name with them when they first came here.’

‘Where did they come from?’

‘Off to the south – after they learned how to herd sheep and plant grains. After they’d lived in Medyo for a while, they expanded out into those other places, and the people in the new places changed God’s name.’ She rose to her feet and stretched and yawned. ‘Let’s have fish for dinner tonight,’ she suggested.

‘We had fish last night – and the night before.’

‘So? I like fish, don’t you?’

‘Oh, fish is all right, I suppose, but I get a little tired of it after we’ve eaten it three times a day for three straight weeks.’

‘Fix your own supper,’ she flared.

‘You know perfectly well that I don’t know how to do that yet.’

‘Then you’ll just have to take whatever I put on the table, won’t you?’

He sighed. ‘Fish?’ he asked with a certain resignation.

‘What a wonderful idea, Althalus! I’m so glad you thought of it’

There were many concepts in the Book that Althalus couldn’t understand, and he and Emerald spent many contented evenings talking about them. They also spent quite a bit of time playing. Emerald was a cat, after all, and cats like to play. There was a kind of studied seriousness about her when she played that made her absolutely adorable, and she filled up most of the empty places in his life. Every so often she’d do something while she was playing that was so totally silly that it seemed almost human. Althalus thought about that, and he came to realize that only humans could be silly. Animals generally took themselves far too seriously to even suspect that they were being ridiculous.

Once, when he was concentrating very hard on the Book, he caught a slight movement out of the corner of his eye and realized that she was creeping up on him. He hadn’t really been paying much attention to her, and she’d only let that go on for just so long before she’d assert herself. She came creeping across the polished floor one furtive step at a time, but he knew that she was coming, so he was ready for her when she pounced, and half-turning, he caught her in mid-air with both hands. There was the usual mock tussle, and then he pulled her to his face and held her tightly against it. ‘Oh, I do love you, Emmy!’ he said.

She jerked her face back from his. ‘Emmy?’ she hissed. ‘EMMY!?!’

‘I’ve noticed that people do that,’ he tried to explain. ‘After they’ve been together for a while, they come up with pet names for each other.’

‘Put me down!’

‘Oh, don’t get all huffy.’

‘Emmy indeed! You put me down, or I’ll claw off one of your ears!’

He was fairly sure she wouldn’t, but he put her down and gave her a little pat on the head.

She turned sort of sideways, her fur bristling and her ears laid back. Then she hissed at him.

‘Why, Emmy,’ he said in mock surprise, ‘what a thing to say. I’m shocked at you. Shocked.’

Then she swore at him, and that really surprised him. ‘You’re actually angry, aren’t you?’

She hissed again, and he laughed at her. ‘Oh, Emmy, Emmy, Emmy,’ he said fondly.

‘Yes, Althie, Althie, Althie?’ she replied in a spiteful tone.

Althie?’

‘In your ear!’ she said. Then she went off to the bed to sulk.

He didn’t get any supper that night, but he sort of felt that it might have been worth it. He now had a way to respond when she started acting superior. One ‘Emmy’ would immediately erase the haughty look on her face and reduce her to near-inarticulate fury. Althalus carefully tucked that one up his sleeve for future use.

They declared peace on each other the next day, and life returned to normal. She fed him a near-banquet that evening. He understood that it was a peace-making gesture, so he complimented her after about every other bite.

Then, after they’d gone to bed, she washed his face for quite some time. ‘Did you really mean what you said yesterday?’ she purred.

‘Which particular thing I said were you thinking of?’ he asked.

Her ears went back immediately. ‘You said you loved me. Did you mean it?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that. Of course I meant it. You shouldn’t even have to ask.’

‘Don’t you lie to me.’

‘Would I do that?’

‘Of course you would. You’re the greatest liar in the whole world.’

‘Why, thank you, dear.’

‘Don’t make me cross, Althalus,’ she warned. ‘I’ve got all four paws wrapped around your head right now, so be very nice to me – unless you’d like to have your face on the back of your head instead of the front.’

‘I’ll be good,’ he promised.

‘Say it again, then.’

‘Say what, dear?’

‘You know what!’

‘All right, little kitten, I love you. Does that make you feel better?’

She rubbed her face against his and started to purr.

The seasons turned, as seasons always do, although the summers were short and the winters long up here on the roof of the world, and after they’d gone around several times, the past seemed to recede until it was only a dim memory. In time, the days plodded by unnoticed as Althalus struggled with the Book. He began to spend more and more of his time staring up at the glowing dome overhead as he pondered the strange things the Book had revealed.

‘What is your problem?’ Emerald demanded irritably once when Althalus sat at the table with the Book lying almost unnoticed on the polished surface in front of him. ‘You’re not even pretending to be reading.’

Althalus laid his hand on the Book. ‘It just said something I don’t understand,’ he replied. ‘I’m trying to work it out.’

She sighed. ‘Tell me what it is,’ she said in a resigned tone. ‘I’ll explain it to you. You still won’t understand, but I’ll explain anyway’

‘You can be very offensive, did you know that?’

‘Of course. I’m doing it on purpose – but you still love me, don’t you?’

‘Oh – I guess so.’

‘You guess so?’

He laughed. ‘Woke you up, didn’t I?’

She laid back her ears and hissed at him.

‘Be nice,’ he said, putting out his hand and scratching her ears. Then he looked back at the troublesome line. ‘If I’m reading this right, it says that all the things Deiwos has made are of the same value in his eyes. Does that mean that a man isn’t any more important than a bug or a grain of sand?’

‘Not exactly,’ she replied. ‘What it really means is that Deiwos doesn’t think of the separate parts of what he’s made. It’s the whole thing that’s important. A man’s only a small part of the whole thing, and he’s not really here for very long. A man’s born, lives out his life, and dies in so short a time that the mountains and stars don’t even notice him as he goes by.’

‘That’s a gloomy thought. We don’t really mean anything, do we? Deiwos won’t even miss us after the last one of us dies, will he?’

‘Oh, he probably will. There were things that used to be alive, but they aren’t any more, and Deiwos still remembers them.’

‘Why did he let them die out, then?’

‘Because they’d done everything they were supposed to do. They’d completed what they’d been put here to attend to, so Deiwos let them go. Then too, if everything that had ever lived were still here, there wouldn’t be any room for new things.’

‘Sooner or later, that’ll happen to men as well, won’t it?’

‘That’s not entirely certain, Althalus. Other creatures take the world as they find it, but man changes things.’

‘And Deiwos guides us in those changes?’

‘Why would he do that? Deiwos doesn’t tinker, pet. He sets things in motion and then moves on. All the mistakes you make are entirely yours. Don’t blame Deiwos for them.’

Althalus reached out and ruffled her fur.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘It takes forever to get it all straight again.’

‘It gives you something to do between naps, Emmy,’ he told her, and then he went back to the Book.

CHAPTER SIX

The past receded even more in his memory as the Book claimed Althalus. By now he could read it through from end to end, and he’d done that so often that he could recite long passages from memory. The more it sank into his memory, the more it altered his perception of the world. Things that had seemed very important before he’d come here to the House at the End of the World were no longer relevant.

‘Was I really that small, Em?’ he asked his companion one evening in the early autumn of another of those interminable years.

‘What exactly are we talking about here, pet?’ she asked, absently washing her ears.

‘I was convinced that I was the greatest thief in the world, but along toward the end there, I wasn’t really much more than a common highwayman hitting people on the head so that I could steal their clothes.’

‘That comes fairly close, yes. What’s your point?’

‘I could have done more with my life, couldn’t I?’

‘That’s why we’re here, pet,’ she told him. ‘Whether you like it or not, you are going to do more with it. I’m going to see to that.’ She looked directly at him, her green eyes a mystery. ‘I think it’s time for you to learn how to use the power of the Book.’

‘What do you mean, “use”?’

‘You can make things happen with the Book. Where did you think your supper comes from every night?’

‘That’s your job, Em. It wouldn’t be polite for me to stick my nose into that area, would it?’

‘Polite or not, you are going to learn, Althalus. Certain words from the Book carry the sense of doing things – words like “chop” or “dig” or “cut”. You can do those things with the Book instead of with your back if you know how to use it. Right at first, you’ll need to be touching the Book when you do those things. After some practice, though, that won’t be necessary. The idea of the Book will serve the same purpose.’

‘The Book’s always going to be here, isn’t it?’

‘That’s the whole point, dear. The Book has to stay here. It wouldn’t be safe to take it out into the world, and you have things you have to do out there.’

‘Oh? What kind of things?’

‘Little things – saving the world, keeping the stars up in the sky where they belong, making sure that time keeps moving – things like that.’

‘Are you trying to be funny, Em?’

‘No, not really. We’ll get to those things later, though. Let’s try the easy ones first. Take off your shoe and throw it over by the bed. Then tell it to come back.’

‘I don’t think it’ll listen to me, Emmy.’

‘It will if you use the right word. All you have to do is put your hand on the Book, look at the shoe, and say “gwem”. It’s like calling a puppy’

‘That’s an awfully old-fashioned word, Emmy.’

‘Of course it is. It’s one of the first words. The language of the Book is the mother of your language. Your language grew out of it. Just try it, pet. We can talk about the changes of language some other time.’

He dubiously pulled off his shoe and tossed it over by the bed. Then he laid his hand on the Book and said ‘gwem’ rather half-heartedly.

Nothing happened.

‘So much for that as an idea,’ he muttered.

‘Command, Althie,’ Emerald said in a weary tone. ‘Do you think a puppy would listen if you said it that way?’

‘Gwem!’ he sharply commanded his shoe.

He didn’t really expect it, so he wasn’t ready to fend the shoe off, and it hit him squarely in the face.

‘It’s a good thing we didn’t start with your spear,’ Emmy noted. ‘It’s usually best to hold your hands out when you do that, Althalus. Let the shoe know where you want it to come to.’

‘It actually works!’ he exclaimed in astonishment.

‘Of course it does. Didn’t you believe me?’

‘Well – sort of, I guess. I didn’t think it’d happen quite that fast, though. I kind of expected the shoe to come slithering across the floor. I didn’t know it was going to fly.’

‘You said it just a little too firmly, pet. The tone of voice is very important when you do things this way. The louder and more sharply you say it, the faster it happens.’

‘I’ll remember that. Getting kicked in the face with my own shoe definitely got my attention. Why didn’t you warn me about that?’

‘Because you don’t listen, Althie. It’s just a waste of breath to warn you about things. Now try it again.’

Althalus put miles on that shoe over the next several weeks, and he gradually grew more proficient at altering the tone of his voice. He also discovered that different words would make the shoe do other things. ‘Dheu’ would make it rise up off the floor and simply stand in front of him on nothing but air. ‘Dhreu’ would lower it to the floor again.

He was practising on that one day in late summer when an impish kind of notion came to him. He looked over at Emerald, who was sitting on the bed carefully washing her ears. He focused his attention on her, set his hand on the Book, and said ‘Dheu.’

Emerald immediately rose up in the air until she was sitting on nothing at all at about the same level as his head. She continued to scrub at her ears as if nothing had happened. Then she looked at him, and her green eyes seemed very cold and hard. Then she said ‘Bhlag!’ quite sharply.

The blow took Althalus squarely on the point of the chin, and it sent him rolling across the floor. It seemed to have come out of nowhere at all, and it had rattled him all the way down to his toes.

‘We don’t do that to each other, do we?’ Emerald said in an almost pleasant tone of voice. ‘Now put me down.’

His eyes wouldn’t seem to focus. He covered one of them with his hand so that he could see her and said ‘Dhreu’ in an apologetic sort of way.

Emerald settled slowly back to the bed. ‘That’s much better,’ she said. ‘Are you going to get up, or did you plan to lie there on the floor for a while?’ Then she went back to washing her ears.

He more or less gathered at that point that there were rules and that it wasn’t wise to break them. He also realized that Emerald had just demonstrated the next step. She hadn’t been anywhere near the Book when she’d knocked him across the room.

He continued to practice with his shoe. He was more familiar with it than with his other possessions, and it didn’t have any sharp edges, as some of the others had. Just to see if he could do it, he’d put a pair of wings on it, and it went flapping around the room blundering into things. It occurred to him that a flying shoe would have been a sensation in Nabjor’s camp or Gosti Big Belly’s hall. That had been a long time ago, though. He idly roamed back through his memory, trying to attach some number to the years he’d spent here in the House, but the number kept evading him for some reason.

‘How long have I been here, Em?’ he asked his companion.

‘Quite some time. Why do you ask?’

‘Just curious, I suppose. I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t here.’

‘Time doesn’t really mean anything here in this House, pet. You’re here to learn, and some of the things in the Book are very difficult. It took your mind a very long time to fully grasp them. When we came to one of those, I’d usually let your eyes sleep while your mind worked. It was a lot quieter that way. Your arguments were with the Book, not with me.’

‘Let me see if I understand this. Are you saying that there’s been times when I went to sleep and didn’t wake up for a week or more?’

She gave him one of those infuriatingly superior looks.

‘A month?’ he asked incredulously.

‘Keep going,’ she suggested.

‘You’ve put me to sleep for years on end?’ he almost screamed at her.

‘Sleep’s very good for you, dear. The nice thing about those particular naps is that you don’t snore.’

‘How long, Emmy? How long have I been penned up in here with you?’

‘Long enough for us to get to know each other.’ Then she heaved one of those long-suffering sighs. ‘You must learn to listen when I tell you something, Althalus. You’ve been here in this House long enough to learn how to read the Book. That didn’t really take too long, though. It was learning to understand the Book that took you so much time. You haven’t quite finished that yet, but you’re coming along.’

‘That means that I’m very, very old, doesn’t it?’ He reached up, took hold of a lock of his hair and pulled it down so that he could see it. ‘I can’t be that old,’ he scoffed. ‘My hair hasn’t even turned white yet’

‘Why would it do that?’

‘I don’t know. It just does. When a man gets old, his hair turns white.’

‘That’s the whole point, Althalus. You haven’t grown old. Nothing changes in this House. You’re still the same age as you were when you first came here.’

‘What about you? Are you still the same age you were as well?’

‘Didn’t I just say that?’

‘If I remember right, you told me once that you haven’t always been here.’

‘Not always, no. I was somewhere else a long time ago, but then I came to wait for you.’ She glanced back over her shoulder at the mountain peaks looming out beyond the south window. ‘Those weren’t there when I first came,’ she added.

‘I thought mountains lasted forever.’

‘Nothing lasts forever, Althalus – except me, of course.’

‘The world must have been very different back in the days before those mountains,’ he mused. ‘Where did people live back then?’

‘They didn’t. There weren’t any people then. There were other things here instead, but they died out. They’d done what they were supposed to do, so Deiwos let them go. He still misses them, though.’

‘You always talk about Deiwos as if you knew him personally.’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact we’re very well acquainted.’

‘Do you call him “Deiwos” when you’re talking together?’

‘Sometimes. When I really want to get his attention I call him “brother”.’

‘You’re God’s sister?’ That startled Althalus.

‘Sort of.’

‘I don’t think I want to push that any further. Let’s go back to what we were talking about before, Em. Just how long have I been here? Give me a number.’

‘Two thousand, four hundred, and sixty seven – as of last week.’

‘You’re just making that up, aren’t you?’

‘No. Was there anything else?’

He swallowed very hard. ‘Some of those naps I took were a lot longer than I’d thought they were, weren’t they? That makes me just about the oldest man in the world, doesn’t it?’

‘Not quite. There’s a man named Ghend who’s quite a bit older than you are.’

‘Ghend? He didn’t really look all that old to me.’

Her green eyes went very wide. ‘You know Ghend?’

‘Of course I do. He’s the one who hired me to come here and steal the Book.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she almost shrieked at him.

‘I must have.’

‘No, as a matter of fact, you didn’t. You idiot! You’ve been sitting on that for the last twenty-five hundred years!’

‘Calm down, Emmy. We’re not going to get anywhere if you turn hysterical.’ He gave her a long, level look. ‘I think it’s just about time for you to tell me exactly what’s going on, Emmy – and don’t try to put me off this time by telling me that I won’t understand or that I’m not ready to know certain things yet. I want to know what’s going on and why it’s so important.’

‘We don’t have time for that.’

He leaned back on his bench. ‘Well, we’re just going to take the time, little kitten. You’ve been treating me like a house-pet for quite a while now. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t have a tail, and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t wag it every time you snapped your fingers. You don’t have me completely tamed, Em, and I’m telling you right here and now that we aren’t going any further until you tell me just exactly what’s going on.’

Her look was very cold. ‘What is it that you want to know?’ Her tone was almost unfriendly.

He laid one hand on the Book. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we start out with everything? Then we can move on from there.’

She glared at him.

‘No more deep, dark secrets, Emmy. Start talking. If things are as serious as you seem to think they are, then be serious.’

‘Maybe you are ready to know what’s going on,’ she conceded. ‘How much do you know about Daeva?’

‘Just what it says in the Book. I’d never even heard of him before I came here. He’s very angry with Deiwos, I gather. Deiwos seems to be sorry that he feels that way, but he’s going to keep on doing what he’s doing whether Daeva likes it or not – probably because he has to.’

‘That’s a novel interpretation,’ she said. She mulled it over a bit. ‘Now that I think about it, though, there seems to be a lot of truth in it. Somehow you’ve managed to redefine the concept of evil. In your view, evil’s no more than a disagreement about the way things are supposed to be. Deiwos thinks they’re supposed to be one way, and Daeva thinks they’re supposed to be another.’

‘I thought I just said that. It’s the business of making things that started the fight then, isn’t it?’

‘That might be an oversimplification, but it comes fairly close. Deiwos makes things because he has to make them. The world and the sky weren’t complete the way they were. Deiwos saw that, but Daeva didn’t agree. When Deiwos does things to make the world and the sky complete, it changes them. Daeva believes that’s a violation of the natural order. He doesn’t want things to change.’

‘What a shame. There’s not much he can do about it, though, is there? Once something’s been changed, it’s been changed. Daeva can’t very well go back and unchange it, can he?’

‘He seems to think so.’

‘Time only moves in one direction, Emmy. We can’t go back and undo something that happened in the past just because we don’t like the way it turned out’

‘Daeva thinks he can.’

‘Then both of his wheels just came off the axle. Time isn’t going to run backward just because he wants it to. The sea might run dry and the mountains might wear down, but time runs from the past to the future. That’s probably the only thing that won’t change.’

‘We can all hope that you’re right, Althalus, because if you aren’t, Daeva’s going to win. He’ll unmake everything Deiwos has made and return the earth and sky to what they were at the very beginning. If he can make time go backward, then things he does now will change things that happened in the past, and if he can change enough of the past, we won’t be here any more.’

‘What’s Ghend got to do with all of this?’ Althalus asked her suddenly.

‘Ghend was one of the early men who came to this part of the world about ten thousand years ago. That was before men had learned how to cook certain rocks to make copper or how to mix tin with copper to make bronze. All their tools and weapons were made of stone, and Ghend’s chief put him to work cutting down trees so that the tribe could plant grain. Ghend hated that, and Daeva approached him and persuaded him to abandon Deiwos and worship him instead. Daeva can be very persuasive when he wants to be. Ghend’s the high priest of the Demon Daeva, and the absolute master of Nekweros.’ Emerald looked up suddenly. Then she sinuously flowed down from the bed, crossed the floor and jumped up to the sill of the north window. ‘I should have known,’ she said in an irritated voice. ‘He’s doing it again.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Come here and see for yourself.’

He rose and crossed to the window. Then he stopped, staring incredulously. There was something out there, and there wasn’t supposed to be. The world didn’t seem to end there any more. ‘What is that?’ he asked, staring at what appeared to be a white mountain.

‘Ice,’ she replied. ‘This isn’t the first time it’s happened. Every so often Daeva and Ghend try this way to slow things down – usually when they think Deiwos is getting too far ahead of them.’

‘That’s a lot of ice, Em. When I was coming here, the clouds were a long way down. Did that water down there start rising?’

‘No. It froze solid a long time ago. It snows on it every winter, and the snow doesn’t melt any more. More snow piles up and presses down on it, and it turns to ice.’

‘How thick is it?’

‘About two miles – maybe three.’

‘I meant how thick, Em, not how far away.’

‘So did I. Once it gets thick enough, it’ll be above the level of what you call the edge of the world. Then it’ll start to move. It’ll grind down mountains and spill down onto the plains. Nothing can stop it, and man won’t be able to live in this part of the world any more.’

‘Have you seen this happen before?’

‘Several times. It’s just about the only way Ghend and Daeva have to interrupt what Deiwos is doing. We’re going to have to change our plans, Althalus.’

‘I didn’t know we had a plan.’

‘Oh, we’ve got a plan all right, pet. I just hadn’t gotten around to telling you about it yet. I thought we had more time.’

‘You’ve already had twenty-five hundred years, Em. How much more did you think you were going to need?’

‘Probably about another twenty-five hundred. If you’d told me about Ghend earlier, I might have been able to adjust things. Now we’re going to have to cheat. I just hope it doesn’t make Deiwos angry with me.’

‘Your brother’s awfully busy, Em,’ Althalus said piously. ‘We shouldn’t really pester him with all the picky little details, should we?’

She laughed. ‘My thought exactly, pet. We were made for each other.’

‘Are you only just now coming to realize that? The simplest way for us to cheat would probably be for me to just slip on over to Nekweros and kill Ghend, wouldn’t it?’

‘That’s an awfully blunt way to put it, Althalus.’

‘I’m a plain-spoken man, Em. All this dancing around is just a waste of time, because that’s what it’s going to come down to in the end, isn’t it? Ghend wanted me to come here and steal the Book so that he could destroy it. If I kill him, we can destroy his Book, and then Daeva has to go back and start all over.’

‘How did you find out about Daeva’s Book?’ she asked sharply.

‘Ghend showed it to me back in Nabjor’s camp.’

‘He’s actually carrying it around out in the real world? What’s he thinking of?’

‘Don’t ask me to tell you what somebody else is thinking, Em. My guess is that he knew that I’d never seen a Book before, so he brought one along to show me what they look like. The pictures in his Book weren’t at all like the ones in ours, though.’

‘You didn’t touch it, did you?’

‘Not the Book itself. He handed me one of the pages, though.’

‘The pages are the Book, Althalus. You’ve touched both Books with your bare hands?’ she demanded, shuddering.

‘Yes. Is that significant?’

‘The Books are absolutes, Althalus. They’re the source of ultimate power. Our Book is the power of pure light, and Ghend’s Book is the power of absolute darkness. When you touched that page from his Book, it should have totally corrupted you.’

‘I was moderately corrupt already, Em, but we can sort that out later. What do you think about my idea? I can slip across the border into Nekweros without anybody ever seeing me. Once I’ve put Ghend to sleep, I’ll burn his Book, and that’ll be the end of it, won’t it?’