Him and Tahman and that elf, they’d sit and drink and watch the two of us go at it like we was the married couple. Like it was a show put on for them.”
“But what happened?” asked Leodora. “What happened in Colemaigne?”
“The story changed is what. We’d come to this very theater and the crowds were huge. Your father’s ego, it must have been as big as the sun resting on the horizon. Gods, but he was revered.
“And then one night I noticed a couple of creatures in one of the boxes out there, watching us. They were hairless, humorless things, like you’d get if you bred the moons Saphon and Gyjio together. Orinda and Burbage conveyed the hearsay that they was archivists from the Library itself, and didn’t that inflate your father’s ego still more. Nobody knew then or now what the rumored archivists look like, see. It made a good story. Bardsham’s reputation had brought them—that we had no doubt of. They carried with them a glorious jewel they called Tophet’s Eye. It’s the sort of thing you’d call a spectacular jewel . . . at least one that had brought bad luck, Tophet being a far-flung name for the god of Chaos.”
She asked, “Why don’t I know the stories of him?”
He winced as if pain stabbed into him. “You don’t know the tales because I kept those from you. I replaced Chaos in every story with some other god or demigod’s name. I didn’t want you to know that name ever. It was never to be spoken on Bouyan. Your grandfather, your uncle and aunt, I was shielding them, too. What they didn’t know, they couldn’t ask after. It seemed then the only way to be safe.”
She nodded with understanding, and he went on.
“Third night there was five of them in that box, all of ’em as pale and cold as marble, and by then the chatter that the Library was come to canonize Bardsham was irrepressible, all over Colemaigne. After our performance they appeared backstage, immediately approached Bardsham, and announced they represented a great and powerful lord on another spiral who would pay an unimaginable sum for us to come and give an exclusive performance for him. The entire troupe had to agree—they were quite specific about that. Well, we’d done the like before, and for far less coin than this secretive lord was offering. It was too good to be true and I said as much. Of course, Leandra and I were fighting, so if I said it was a bad idea, she was bound to say it was brilliant and we must leave at once. Bardsham, drunk on booze and himself, didn’t need coaxing anyways. At that point his vanity was as wide as the Adamantine Ocean. I’m sorry, child, and that’s the whole truth of him.
“He was for it and that was that. Now, you, a baby, weren’t going to make no voyage like that. Or maybe it was your mother having a premonition of what waited for us. She already had a nurse looking after you—Bois’s sister, I think it was. You stayed here with her and Orinda. We sailed willingly off the edge of the world.
“I suppose we sailed for a week or more. Went right past spirals and beneath spans, and soon we were far outside anyplace we knew or had ever heard of. Mostly those Agents kept to themselves, but more than once I saw one of them with that blue jewel, holding it up as if trying to peer through it to see Leandra where she sat. Then one morning we woke up and the ocean was a darker color as if it was full of wine, and the look of those places we sailed beneath was dark and silent, ’cept for the birds perched about, watching us. It was like we’d sailed into another world or into the past, to the places in that tale of Chilingana’s you tell, before any people had come. Whole spirals seemingly awaiting their tenants, that’s how it looked. Then finally we hit this sargasso of dead calm, a whole surface of violet and black weeds that should have tangled us all up but didn’t somehow. My misgivings had grown all the while, as had Grumelpyn’s, although our hosts had given us no cause to worry. They’d fed us well and let us be, and more importantly they kept Bardsham merrily lubricated. Tahman, too, when he wasn’t seasick. Always smiling they were,