There were many flower shops and cafés around Sachet Square, two blocks from the library. The cafés sold coffee, tea, orange juice, and rose-scented pastries. Among them, the Blue Peacock was particularly popular. It stood in the inconvenient depths of an alley, and it was neither the most lavish inside, nor the best for food, nor notably kind to its customers. But it had three advantages that more than made up for everything else: cheap coffee, waitresses famous for their beauty, and credit.
The first brought many people in and out. The second kept many seated for a long time. The third drew artists in particular. Lavinia Bell, owner of the Blue Peacock, was generous about poor artists’ credit. On rare occasions, she even let them pay their overdue bills with their work. An artist might be unknown, but if she liked the work, the whole debt, whatever its size, vanished.
Most of the works that arrived in this way were decaying somewhere in Lavinia’s villa. A rare few, however, had returned hundreds of times their value. Stories like those made the café even more popular. Its walls were crowded with paintings competing for recognition someday. One person called it “the place where the Esenion Exhibition never closes.” The Esenion Exhibition was an annual art competition presided over by the queen.
At around three in the afternoon, the Blue Peacock’s outdoor tables were full, while about half the tables inside remained empty in the comparative gloom where less light reached. Beyond the empty tables, a man sat in the farthest corner.
The man was alone. No, he had company: a table full of books, paper, and an ink bottle. A strong coffee cooled beside him. It was already his third cup. Leaving it untouched, he picked up almond biscuits one after another and crunched them. Then he grimaced, pushed his fingers into his disheveled hair, and lamented.
“Life is bitter, yet such sweet biscuits exist. Ah, the contradiction makes work impossible.”
Someone opposite him replied, “Would a few spoonfuls of sugar turn seawater sweet?”
The man lifted his head and saw someone seated among the empty tables. He had not ordered yet, apparently, for the table was spotless. Nor did he seem to have company. In fact, the space around him was strangely empty. But since everyone would have been sitting at the bright outdoor tables now, the man in the corner nodded without much thought.
“Yes, the world is a salt desert where even the brine has dried away. I’m flailing my arms and legs, trying to swim in it. Sometimes I rise beautifully to the surface, but when I fall back down, it’s still only salt. Most of the time, I’m buried in the ground, with nothing but my head poking out.”
“And once you’re properly salted, someone will put you on the dinner table.”
“Exactly. A young, delicate girl cuts up salted fish with a knife and fork, chews and swallows it, instead of the sweet fruit of paradise. Children like that grow up to fill the world, and that’s why it’s bitter and salty everywhere. Tragedy.”
“Isn’t that why there’s salt in our blood and tears?”
The man in the corner widened his eyes a little.
“Oh, you could write poetry. I’m Luke. What’s your name?”
“Gene.”
The name ought to have told him something that instant. But Luke was absorbed in the conversation they had just been having, staring into the air and counting rhymes. Failing to find one, he tapped the table in irritation and looked at Gene.
“Ever written poetry? No, you don’t look like it. Still, there’s no shortage of young men twisting ropes in the market, or night watchmen knocking on people’s rooftops all night, who turn out better poets than some fellow pulling his hair in a dark attic because he means to write something. That’s why the likes of me exist. To keep me from going out and cleaning up on a tuna boat.”
“That’s a fine thought too. If you haven’t got one thousand eight hundred and thirty-five pion in your pocket.”
Not understanding, Luke chuckled.
“If I had a mere thousand pion, would I be unable to go back to my room, where I’ve piled up every sort of reference like a mountain? Would I be crouching here, making do with coffee and biscuits? Ah, talking makes me hungry. A bowl of lamb stew with plenty of cinnamon and ginger…”
“Why can’t you go back? Do you owe a debt?”
“A debt? Oh, yes, a debt indeed. Not money, but words. I’ve taken an advance from that potbellied fellow Leonis. A cheap slave, that’s me. I still have eighty pages to write, and for that I get a mere six hundred pion. Leonis will earn more than six thousand Serapion from what I hand him.”
One thick Serapion gold coin was worth sixty pion coins. Gene had not known staging a single play could put so much money into an impresario’s hands. There was no theater in his territory. He did, however, know the name of potbellied Leonis.
Leonis had once been an overseer at the Grand Theater of Delphinad. He was a genius of promotion who made not only plays but concerts, circuses, and even paying recitation events succeed. People said everything he touched turned to gold. He had two gambling houses run by others, a restaurant, and shares in the Grand Theater. Naturally, he was immensely rich, but he never knew a moment’s leisure.
His little office beside the Grand Theater was always full: a desk larger than a table for eight, manuscripts heaped on top, snacks half eaten and forgotten for days, pens snapped in fits of anger, slippers kept for throwing at writers who brought him wretched scripts, and Leonis himself, clutching his head and complaining.
“Then you’ll have to write about three more of those six-hundred-pion pieces. I’ll give you three days.”
Only then did Luke seem to sense something, looking steadily at Gene’s face. One corner of his mouth rose, making his cheekbone stand out. His face became at once cynical and mischievous.
“Did Leonis send you? To get the rest of the manuscript?”
“No.”
“Then are you buying? Tell him I’ll come at once for five pion a page. I’ve already given Leonis the beginning, but it’s rotten rubbish anyway, so I can write it again.”
“No.”
Luke’s eyes sharpened. He inspected Gene once more, especially the hands resting on the table. Then his eyes suddenly widened enormously. Springing up, he exclaimed, “You’re that fellow who was drinking something with a big friend in the tavern on the corner late the other night, and talking to the woman sitting behind you, aren’t you? You said you needed money then. So you came to me in the end? Ah, you should have said so that night. I had a hundred pion in my pocket then. But since then, I’ve left home and ended up like this…”
As he spoke, Luke tried to approach Gene, but the chairs scattered between their tables obstructed him. Gene saw his intention before he had taken three steps. Pretending to come toward Gene, Luke meant to push the table across his path and run.
Rising, Gene seized a chair and hurled it in the direction Luke meant to flee. He braced a hand on the table, vaulted over it, caught Luke by the back of the neck, and slammed him onto another table. At the last instant, he remembered Eanna’s request and lessened his strength a little. Even so, Luke, folded over the tabletop, groaned as though dying and rubbed his cheek against the tablecloth.
“Ow, oh dear, my fine cheekbones. If my jaw cracks and I can’t even chew peanuts, who’ll pour porridge into my mouth and care for me until my limbs rot and drop off?”
“What nonsense is that now?”
Listening seriously to this man seemed likely to produce only confusion. A moment earlier, Gene had almost been taken in. Thinking back, though, there had been nothing but vague words: the other night, late, a corner tavern, a big friend. All perfect invitations to imagine whatever one pleased, with no definite person in mind.
“Nonsense? It’s prophecy. My eyes are full of inspiration. Do you know the feeling of fairies whispering the future into your ears? Does it sound as though I’m drunk? But it’s true. I’ve had nothing but coffee. While the daughters of Anir borrow my mouth to reveal their secrets, I’m merely a young priest dancing in moonlight with a garland on his head.”
“You’re talking enough that I suppose your jaw is all right.”
Gene pulled Luke upright, made him kneel on the floor, and set a foot on his thigh. When the first chair flew, the customers at the outdoor tables had all stood and formed a human barricade outside the café. Now they had turned back and were watching tensely to see what would happen between them. Luke, the person most concerned, showed no tension whatever.
“But now inspiration and prophecy have flown away. All I can do is force donkey tracks onto innocent paper. No wonder Anir’s daughters are angry with me. Ah, they no longer want to twitter secrets in my ear. So I can’t get out a line of poetry, never mind an epic. I’ve lost my voice. It simply won’t come out. It isn’t that I don’t want to write. And I am certainly not lazy. Look at that table. My stomach’s weak, but I’ve drunk three coffees. My teeth ache, yet I’ve been eating biscuits… Anyway, look here. Do you understand me?”
Luke suddenly raised his head, so Gene looked at him. That was all Gene did. Luke immediately nodded.
“I asked whether you understood.”
“No. Not at all. Nor am I curious. I have no interest in whatever happens to your manuscript.”
“So you really didn’t come because Leonis sent… because he sent you?”
“Yes. My business is books. Do you know the lower volume of Visions of the Twilight Kingdom?”
This time, Luke looked aggrieved. Some terrifying legend of the back alleys, who had unquestionably been paid a fortune to come and kill him, had forced him to kneel. Why was he demanding a lower volume instead of an upper one? This was not the library’s lending desk… As he thought that, Luke finally began to understand at least a little of the situation. The person who had hired the terrifying back-alley legend and sent him to Luke was a librarian?
In any case, first he had to deny it.
“Well, I’ve never seen a book like…”
“Of course you haven’t. Lord Enkishu Nimushi borrowed it. But I hear he hates reading so much that he doesn’t even touch the books piled in his own study. You know that, I know that, and Leonis knows it too. Don’t we?”
There was no way out. It had begun when Leonis, hearing Luke complain that he could not write for lack of reference material, obtained a sheaf of paper stamped with some noble’s signet. Leonis would have displayed even his own underclothes if doing so would bring an audience. But that would hardly make words appear if they refused to be written.
Luke’s script was not stalled because he lacked references or because Anir’s daughters had gone mute. It was because he was forcing himself to write something he did not want to write.
“Have you really come to retrieve the books?”
“Yes. Where did you put them?”
“Well, that…”
Luke seemed to consider for a moment, then wriggled his shoulder toward the table where he had been sitting.
“Could I find it for you now?”
“Go on, then.”
Luke stood, went to the table, and selected a volume from the pile. He offered it to Gene. The black leather cover bore no title. Above all, it was bound quite differently from the upper volume Gene had already read.
Looking doubtful, Gene accepted it and opened the cover. Luke quickly looked around. Over there, through a suitable gap between tables and spectators, a path lay open. Just as he was about to slip toward it, Gene closed the book and struck the back of his head.
“Are you making a fool of me? This is the memoir of Herzan, the blind chief librarian!”
Forgetting his escape, Luke turned back to Gene with wide eyes.
“You can read Elvish?”
“Is there a rule that says only you can?”
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