Part II: Depths

Dear Human, I hope you are enjoying the Third Edition of this book! Being a reliable and trustworthy narrator is a job I take quite seriously. It is for this reason that I have not yet told you precisely what happened to Nial and the rest of the pilgrims. From my analysis of the human literature and literary criticism published during the time of the South Sea Nations, I have learned that humans hate it when you spoil the endings. So I, of course, will not.

I also know, however, that for human readers the following is also true: endings, even when unspoiled, matter greatly when they finally arrive. A bad ending, as I understand, can ruin an otherwise great story. I mention this because we are past the halfway mark now. As something of a scholar of human nature, I predict that you are beginning to wonder how the story will end. Will Nial die? Will he be Gathered? What about the other pilgrims? And what about the vows these young lovers have made?

No doubt you know, as a citizen of what remains of the South Sea Nations, that the golden age of humanity collapsed after that second morlish invasion. So, on the whole, it may seem that this book is heading into a dark place. Perhaps your own life is not as happy as your parents and grandparents’. Perhaps you have heard stories of the peace and prosperity that once was. Perhaps that age from which Nial and his pilgrims hail was the peak of happiness for humanity. And perhaps you believe your local priests who are fond of saying that “the End Times are upon us” and that “this is the Age of Darkness.”

I hope, Dear Reader, that this book can be a small candle in that darkness. When the words “The End” finally arrive, I hope you will call the ending “happy,” for in many ways it is. And I hope you will think so in spite of the fact that your own life, in many ways, is not.

Escape

A few hours later, I read Asuana’s note. It said, Nial, a few things. First, I don’t think you killed Sir Mau (despite what Gwen and Otto believe). Second, at the beginning of our journey I thought you were a nuisance (and in some ways you definitely were), but you’ve proven yourself a better travel companion than most I’ve had, in spite of the fact that you lied to me. Third, if it’s true that Father Ori doesn’t wish to Gather you, and if it’s true that (as Brother Benji has recently told me) there is a prophecy regarding you, then perhaps you are exactly where you should be. For now. Wait seven days and then follow us. Do it secretly. The monks have voted that you must stay, but I do not believe you should. I trust their order deeply, for I was inducted into it as a child and was raised in their convent in Seadom. However, they are not always right. Learn what you can from them for seven days. Then follow our trail quickly. And quietly. Try to catch up with us without being intercepted by Ori. May fate be with you.

Within the first day my body was covered in burns and bruises. They’d tied me down in a chair and placed a hot poker on my arm, my cheek, my thigh, my foot, until I’d passed out. When I woke, it happened all over again. All the while they chanted in a language that I began to suspect was morlish after overhearing one of the monks correct another, saying something like, “No, in morlish you put the stress on the final syllable when it’s a verb in the present tense.” But when I tried to ask about it, someone punched me.

After the torture session, they let me go where I pleased, and I could have simply walked out of the monastery. But I trusted Asuana, and if she believed in me then I was determined to prove that I could endure seven days of torture. So instead, I looked for Benji. There were only about seventy monks in all, so it didn’t take me long to conclude that he wasn’t here. I asked Cauliflower Ear if Benji had gone with the pilgrims. He tried to punch me in the face, but I was getting used to that, so I rolled my head at just the right moment and lessened the impact. Then, however, he answered me cheerfully enough, “He has gone with a few of our brethren to ensure that your friends reach the mountain as quickly as possible. They are already behind schedule.”

“I appreciate you letting me roam free, but what if I just follow the path into the mountains?” I asked.

“The path?” said the monk, smirking. “Come with me.”

Then he led me through the rain for half a mile to a place where an explosion of paths shot out in twelve northward vectors. “Follow any one of them, and you’ll come to a six-way fork. After that, a three-way fork. And after that, a dead end—unless, of course, you picked the right path to begin with.”

“Why is it so difficult to find?”

“It’s our duty to guard the shrine. So we’ve cut a labyrinth of false paths from here to there—keeping them well maintained year-round. The shrine is very valuable.”

“I know! Fifty gold pieces per pilgrim,” I said, probing for information with a joke. “The church can’t afford to have people just walk up to it.”

“The church in the South Sea Nations,” said Cauliflower Ear, “is not what it seems. I mean, on its surface it is, but remember, it is the only institution in the South Sea Nations older than the nations itself. And certain orders of the church, like ours, go back thousands of years. We keep many secrets that the Morl Nation would love to access. Why do you think Father Ori became a priest?”

“He’s following the pilgrims as we speak,” I reminded him. “He’ll get to the shrine. But it sort of seems like you want him to…”

He just smiled. “We are not worried. You should not worry.”

The storm had grown angrier in the last week. Clouds roared and punched the ground with light in the distance. When the monk and I returned to the monastery, I received a fist-thrashing for no particular reason I could discern. After dinner I wrote. This was the one upside to waiting; I had plenty of time to write.

***

“I’d like access to the library,” I said. “To learn more prayers and chants and stuff.”

The old monk, who had presided over my trial, ignored me. “There’s something I’d like to show you. Follow me.” With that, he opened a door and disappeared up a stairwell. The gray stone walls uncannily shut out the roar of thunder, so that the only sound was the padding of my bare feet against the stone stairs. The old monk was too small to make any noise. The stairs terminated in an octagonal room. The monk announced, “The bell tower.”

“I don’t see a bell.”

“Future bell tower. It probably wasn’t meant to be a bell tower, but who knows what the ancient builders meant?”

I could see in all directions through windows that trembled in the storm.

“But,” the monk went on, “the bell shipment’s been delayed.”

“Because of the war?”

“Not just the war,” said the monk. “Look.” He pointed through the south window. “Wait for the light…”

I saw a sea of black. When lightning struck the ground to the south, I had to hold the wall for support. “W-what—”

“What happened to the desert? I wonder the same.”

Several miles away, where the open desert had been, I saw buildings. Great stone monuments—houses, bridges, towers, spires, gables, and buttresses—filled the south, as far as I could see in the rain, a sea of a city. “How far does it go?” I breathed.

“I have been reluctant to find out. The brothers who have traveled to the city’s edge tell me that the rain seems to be dissolving the sand as if it were salt. All secrets once hidden beneath the Northern Desert are being revealed. For better or worse.”

I shuddered. “How will we get back? The other pilgrims have lives on the other side of… of that.”

“I’m not expecting my bell any time soon. That city is evidence of a time before our civilization. I fear that its resurfacing is a sign of the End Times. An Age of Darkness is in arrival.”

“Supposedly there’s a prophecy about me,” I probed, “I don’t suppose you know anything about that…”

The monk promptly punched me in the face, generating an amazing level of force from such a rickety body. I hit a stained glass window and slid down. “Yes, I was one of the ones who had the dream about you. But the vote has been cast. So you will never know of it unless it is a true prophecy, in which case it won’t matter if you know.”

He left me bleeding in the bell tower, whistling and cracking his knuckles all the way down the stairs.

***

When I woke, I knew I would throw my first punch that day. I had a black eye, two loose teeth, a busted kneecap, and nose that was probably going to be crooked for life. I was tired of it.

“Come,” said a monk (I think it was Face Lacerations, but it was getting hard to tell because the monks’ bruises were ever-shifting), “today should be fun. No cleaning, no praying. Just study.”

I perked up.

“If you memorize your quota,” said the monk, “you’ll get dinner. If not… well, hunger is like pain. All in the mind.”

When the monk opened the door to the library, I gasped. I had never seen so much paper in one place—not even on the Ariel Angel. Scrolls filled thousands of cubbyholes. Books lurked on shelves that stretched on forever, lit periodically by candles. The library lay under the church, through a tiny basement door that belied the expanse of what lay beyond.

“It’s so much,” I breathed.

“We’ve had a terrible time keeping it dry,” said the monk. “The walls leak. We’ve never had to worry about so much rain before.”

I noticed that whole sections of shelves had been relocated to the middle of the room. Small puddles quivered in dark corners.

“This is your wall,” said the monk.

The wall stretched for ten yards, filled floor-to-ceiling with scrolls.

“Is it poetry by any chance?” I asked.

“Not on your wall. These are church tax reports,” said my keeper.

I knew better than to lose my temper; I didn’t think my aching body could take another blow. As calmly and reasonably as possible, I said, “I can’t memorize that by dinner time. I’m sure you’ll agree that’s impossible.”

The monk delivered a blow to my temple—enough to knock me down. “Boredom and hunger,” said the monk, “are like pain. All in the mind.” A wry smile tainted the monk’s lips. It was too much. I swung. My fist connected with the monk’s mouth. Blood sprayed onto books. I—as surprised as my opponent—almost failed to block when the counterattack came. A rain of haymakers came down. I blocked a few and head-butted the man in the nose, knocking him into a rack of scrolls. Then, as was common practice among the brothers, I kicked my opponent before he could get up. One kick to the stomach. Another to the groin. Another to the face. The monk groaned on the floor. Blood burbled through his lips. “You honor me with this pain,” he said, grinning red. “Thank you, Nial.” Then he passed out.

I began tearing books off of shelves, searching for a map, for any clue to the shrine’s location. Finding hundreds of maps of hundreds of places didn’t make the search any easier. I wanted to examine them all, to read every line of poetry, or fiction, or history. I heard voices outside the library, descending the stairwell from the church. I rushed to the door and slid the latch shut. It was a rusty piece of metal and wouldn’t hold long. I redoubled my search. Where are you, Lilly? I looked for her in every scroll—unrolling them, skimming them, and letting them drop, open and wrinkled to the damp, bloody floor.

Polite knocks began at the door. I tore open an old book so fast that the spine broke. Although I felt the book’s pain myself, I didn’t slow, discarding it and moving on. Polite knocks turned to shouts and finally to banging. The latch rattled. My eyes fell on a map. The title read, Unexplained Archeological Phenomena in and around the South Sea Nations. My eyes traveled north, passed the Northern Desert (where, interestingly enough, no unexplained archaeological phenomena were marked) to the mountains, where the monastery appeared as a tiny smudge. The shrine sat nestled between two peaks—marked as a black pentagram.

I tore out the page and shoved it into my pocket. The door collapsed, flinging rotten shrapnel in all directions. Five monks piled into the room and gaped at the wreckage of their brother and the library.

I braced myself for the worst beating of my life. Strangely enough, it didn’t come. Two of them carried away the monk, while the other three led me out of the library. “W-where are we going?” I asked.

“Today,” said one of them, “you have reached the next level of your training. You may be surprised to know this, but it’s going to hurt.”

In a room furnished with a single chair, two of the monks held me down, while the other extracted a gleaming knife from his robe. The chair creaked and scraped on the floor as I fought to free myself. I preferred getting punched and burned to whatever was about to happen. I panicked when someone immobilized my head in a headlock and began pouring a foul smelling lotion on my hair. The knife descended toward my eyes. Landing on my eyebrow, the knife sent chills through my face. I squeezed my eyes shut—against pain that never came. The knife gently shaved away one eyebrow then the other. Next it moved to my hair. When I dared to open my eyes, I could see my hair falling like rain, being sheared by silver scissors.

Moments later, my head was indistinguishable from those of the other men in the room. It even bore bruises I hadn’t realized were there. Then, all at once, they fell on me, holding me down as someone else used a poker to brand something on my arm. The pain, though, went through my whole body. It throbbed even after they stopped, a dull ache from head to toe on one side. Then they bound my bicep with gauze.

“Now,” said the man with the knife, “you are one of us. A brother in a secret sect known to our members as the Order of the Mad Morl.”

I wasn’t exactly filled with joy. I would never understand them. Monks who beat the daylights out of each other, chanting in morlish all the while? Seeking eternal happiness through pain? Enlightenment through suffering? It made my head ache—or maybe I still had a concussion.

“Tomorrow,” said the man with the knife, “you will know pain and enlightenment like never before. Forget your former life, for it is now that your spiritual journey truly begins.”

Like hell it does, I thought, feeling the folded map in my pocket.

***

Night fell. The monks finished their evening prayers and began to snore. I (not having bothered to forget my former life) crept out of the dormitory into the rain. I was armed against the unknown with a few weapons: a folded map, a backpack full of rice, a magic cooking pot, a canteen, and a horse, all stolen. It had only been three days since the pilgrims had left, but I could not afford to wait four more. I was already limping and sore from head to toe. There was no way I could catch up if I couldn’t walk.

Outside, I darted from eave to eave, keeping to the shadows. The hood of my robe hung low over my face. North of the church, I found the twelve-way fork in the road. I consulted the map in the light of the storm, using the endless flashes that came from the south. Folding the paper before the drizzle could smear the ink, I plunged into the night.

Upon the horse, the pain in my legs began to fade to a distant, ignorable fact. When the animal stepped in a pile of soggy horse droppings that had clung to the path in spite of the relentless drizzle, I breathed with relief. This was the right path.

I traveled through the night at a slow but steady pace. When the sun began to rise over the eastern mountains (where the Morl Nation supposedly lay), evidence of my companions’ progress became more and more common. I spotted a pile of burnt sticks, just off the road—where the pilgrims must have camped. For a moment, I allowed myself to rest next to it, closing my eyes and imagining that I was warming myself next to my friends. And my enemies. Then again, even Professor Octavius’s face would be a comfort to me. The cold rain on my bald head forced me out of my reverie. So I moved on. By nightfall I had officially penetrated the mountain range. Great rocky shadows rose up on either side of me. In the distant north, the sky glowed red—although I didn’t know why. Dragons? I wondered. No. It’s probably an illusion of some kind. Or wild magic. Consulting my map, I realized that I would soon find out what it was. My path would fork after a few miles, taking me north, deeper into the mountains, toward whatever colossus was casting red light into the sky. Within two weeks, I estimated, I would be there. My time on the ship had, if nothing else, made me quite good at estimating distances on maps.

Over the next week, it became my tradition to stop whenever I found the remains of a campsite, spending enough time to write, catching a few hours of sleep, then moving on. My plan was to steadily close the gap between me and them from three days to one. I also planned, on the final day of the journey, during the meager daylight hours, to gallop the rest of the way. I suspected that Father Ori was hot on their heels and that if I maintained a one-day gap until the final moment, I would be safe from interception.

On the seventh day of my journey, trotting north, climbing higher with each step, I came across another campsite. Ignoring the smell of horse dung, I tried to think of Lilly. When I opened my eyes again, I froze. Around the campsite were footprints—naturally—but one set of footprints stood apart from the rest. They were clear and well preserved, protected from the drizzle by a small tree—as if someone had been squatting beneath it, watching. The prints were bare—clearly showing five toes. No one would walk barefoot out here unless he didn’t want to be heard.

My paranoia changed the footprints into a grim picture of my friends being stalked by Father Ori. For some reason, seeing that the Morl also had five toes, anatomy indistinguishable from my own, made things worse. The superficial anatomical similarity was like a cruel reminder of how different morls and humans were. I imagined the creature watching the glow of the pilgrim’s fire from beneath the tree—waiting and yearning. For what, I didn’t know. What chilled me most was that these prints had been made days ago—evidence of a story that had already been written.

And the plot moved forward with inevitable force as I pressed onward, finding more bare footprints every few miles. Yes, my companions had been followed—stalked. So I followed the follower, forcing myself not to gallop, keeping a steady pace that would last. A day later, I came across the first dead body. I almost didn’t notice it—nestled as it was between two rocky outcroppings.

I have to see who it is, I thought, sliding from my horse. Don’t let it be Lilly. Please not Lilly. I hated myself for the relief I felt upon seeing the bald head of one of the monks, throat cut. On the heels of my sigh of relief, my gorge rose and I threw up, stumbling away from the body. Several yards away, I found a backpack, lying forgotten. At the bottom of it, I found a few grains of rice and a sheaf of paper inside a waterproof tube. My curiosity turned to amazement when I saw my name on the first page. Rifling through the sheets, my fingers began to tremble. Each page was a letter addressed to me—my name at the top, Lilly’s name at the bottom.