A day later, three men from the Bureau of Happiness and Enlightenment came to arrest Ayward Gazane on suspicion of having The Disease. A few days later Rashel called Dismé and Gayla into the study and told them that Ayward had been found guilty and had been sentenced to body-part donation and chairing.
“He’s in a Chair?” breathed Gayla.
“He’s been sent to the donor center and they’ve taken some parts and put him in a Chair, yes. But he’s quite mobile, really.” She turned hot eyes on Dismé. “Stop that crying, Dismé! Ayward is my husband, not yours. Save your tears for your own family, if you’re ever lucky enough to have one!”
Dismé’s tears came from her revulsion at the gloating pleasure she had heard in Rashel’s voice. Revulsion was also what she felt when she first visited Ayward. He was crouched in the Chair, only visible from the waist up, his head bent over so that he peered into his lap, his left arm and hand buried inside the Chair. She spoke to him, but he did not answer, though she bent near to listen, for it was hard to be heard or to hear over the constant noises the Chair made, bubbling and wheeping and an occasional shrill keening, like wind through stiff grass. Arnole’s Chair had been almost silent, and Dismé found the noise of this one irritating past endurance, as though it had been designed to drive Ayward to despair.
She went to the barn and sat looking at the trees. Ouphs came out of the forest to settle on the glass towers, but she did not even glance in their direction. Oh, if she had only gone away when Arnole said to go. Now she was trapped! Rashel despised Ayward, and Gayla only irritated him. There was no one else here who was in the least sympathetic, and she could not in good conscience abandon him!
Arrangements for Ayward had been made by Rashel. A suite of rooms in the unused north wing of the Conservator’s house was opened up and furnished for Ayward and his young attendant, Owen Toadlast, assigned here to expiate some minor crime through service to the Office of Chair Support. Though Dismé steeled herself to visit Ayward often, not just at the required Cheerful and Supportive visits of the whole family, he did not speak to her or to anyone. Dismé herself had become so laconic since Arnole’s disappearance that she had to make a conscious effort to talk if not with Ayward, at least at him. Each day she made a mental list of ordinary topics, but even this superficial chit-chat fell into an abyss of silence, leaving her virtually mute at all other times.
Rashel noticed, of course. “Cat got your tongue, Dismé?” she asked, in her usual badgering manner. “What’s the matter with you. Not feeling well?”
“I’m fine, Rashel. Just thinking about…” Dismé went down the list of unexceptionable things she could be thinking about. Schoolwork. The weather. What they were having for dinner, or “…things I have to do for school.”
Recently added to the students in Dismé’s class was a preadolescent girl student whose mother worked at Faience. The girl’s record was much decorated with gold stars for, among other things, “Correcting other students’ false ideas.” Her name was Lettyne Leek, and she seemed determined to catch Dismé dispensing “false ideas” or die trying. One day in class dear Gustaf rose to his feet with an expression of wonder, gestured broadly with one hand, cried Hail Tamlar, let there be fire, and set his desk ablaze. Dismé bit her lip to keep from crying out, and her eyes went at once to Lettyne. Oh, if only Gustaf had not done it in public, where people could see him! The teacher was already bearing down on him, and Lettyne, her face screwed into righteous hauteur, was busy making a note of the time and the place and the names of all those who had been witnesses. Oh, poor boy! Now he was in for it!
Though Gustaf had always behaved in exemplary fashion, and though the spell had been mentioned the day previously in enchantments class, nonetheless, the BHE was summoned to take him away to Apocanew, keeping him overnight for interrogation. When he returned to school the next day, he was no longer able to start a fire with a gesture.
“They didn’t ask me to explain how I did it,” he whispered to Dismé. “They just asked about the Dicta, over and over, and did I believe in the Dicta, and didn’t I know I was supposed to have a permit. Then they asked about enchantments, didn’t I know what the necessary elements of enchantments were, and then they said set fire to something, and I was thinking about needing the permit and the necessary elements and I couldn’t remember how I did it.”
“You didn’t think about it the first time,” she said.
“No,” he replied in a puzzled voice. “It just chimed in my head like a bell, and I did it without thinking.”
She gave him a long and measuring look and dropped her voice to a whisper. “Gustaf, if you will go into quiet places, by yourself, it may be you will hear that chime again. But if you hear it when others are around, you must ask it to wait until you are alone.”
He looked at her for a moment in puzzlement, then suddenly nodded in understanding. “It doesn’t come from what we learn here, does it?”
She shook her head.
He smiled a secret smile. “It comes from somewhere else. Somewhere better.”
During her visit to Ayward that night, Dismé spoke of Gustaf’s fire-starting, and Lettyne’s continual effrontery. “The girl is trying to catch me doing or saying something wrong,” she concluded. “She’s ready to pounce.”
To her amazement, she heard Ayward’s gravelly whisper, “Anything reflecting on you would reflect on Rashel. You might be wise to mention all this to Rashel if the opportunity presents itself.”
She put her hand on his cheek and cried, “Oh, Ayward, I’m so glad you’re talking! I’ve been so concerned about you…”
“Shh, Dis. Talking got me into this…” he pounded the arm of the Chair with his right hand, though softly. “I won’t talk to anyone but you and Owen.” He laughed, a painful, rasping laugh that hurt her ears. “I wish this damned rain would stop. Day after day.”
The rain was becoming a trial for them all. The children were depressed and moody, each day’s lessons were like all those before, the hours passed like endless plockutta. At the Caigo Faience, Rashel worked even longer hours than usual, and when she made the required Cheerful and Supportive visits to Ayward’s quarters, she expounded to him in a exalted, mysterious voice about the device that had been discovered under the fortress at Strong Hold.
“A momentous discovery,” she said. “Perhaps the very fountainhead of the dark canon!”
Rashel was deeply involved in the project, but Ayward was against it, or against her doing it, as he wrote to her in dozens of scribbled notes.
“What is this mysterious thing?” Dismé asked him. “Rashel seems very involved in it.”
“Mysterious,” he snorted. “I suppose it is. The Regime decided to add a dungeon or some fool thing under the Fortress, and they’ve dug up a device. Rashel has been given a look at it. She’s shown me a drawing, and the thing is obviously sorcerous, I told her to check the Archives for the P’Jardas account. You wouldn’t know about that…”
She was offended by this offhand assumption. “As a matter of fact, Arnole told me about Hal P’Jardas and his fiery woman. What has that to do with this thing they’ve found?”
“It has to do with a letter P’Jardas sent to the Regime not long before he was bottled. He said he’d been going through his old notes, and he believed the mound where the Fortress was built was the same one the fiery spirit emerged from.”
“So anything in that mound…”
“Anything in or on the mound would be contaminated by sorcery even if not itself magical. They’ve found this pillar thing inside the mound. According to P’Jardas’s account, there were pillars all over the mound. Arnole told me those were taken away when the fortress was first built; the archives have records of the move. Someone should try to find them.”
“But if the thing is sorcerous, shouldn’t it be examined?”
“It’s dangerous,” he cried. “But when I tell Rashel so, she doesn’t listen. If someone else had told her about the P’Jardas account, she
might have paid attention.”
Rashel announced loudly over dinner that there was concern among people in the Regime that Ayward was unrepentant. If that were true, come spring he might be sentenced to a second Chair!
“No,” said Gayla, giving her a horrified look. “Oh, no, Rashel. Don’t. Enough is enough. He couldn’t…he couldn’t stand that!”
“Well,” said Rashel in a severe tone. “It isn’t my decision, Gayla. Ayward knows the consequences of behavior as well as I do!”
Dismé expressed her anger at Gayla. “She married him! Doesn’t she have any sympathy for him at all?”
“She’s required to be cheerful and supportive, Dismé, but not sympathetic,” Gayla said in a bitter voice. “Not with Ayward’s father gone the way he did. If Rashel were sympathetic and then Ayward went, eyebrows would be raised, questions asked. Had she been permissive? Had Owen not done his job well? Had the rest of us, including you, Dismé, made all their required visits during which we were optimistic, cheerful, and kindly? It’s almost always the family’s fault if people leave. If they are well-treated, people do not leave their loved ones.”
Dismé had searched Ayward’s haggard face too often to believe such sentimental blather. “He hasn’t the strength to love anyone,” she said in an angry whisper. “It takes all his strength just to be awake every day until the Chair puts him to sleep at night. They’ve taken everything from him. His work…”
“Whatever that amounted to.”
“You believe Ayward was mistaken? About Inclusionism?”
Gayla threw up her hands with an explosion of hectic laughter. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, child. You know Ayward! He can’t decide between a boiled egg or a fried one for his breakfast. You’ve seen him dither for an hour over the choice of what color shirt to wear! Coming up with Inclusionism saved him from ever having to make up his mind, that’s all!”
Dismé flushed with instant humiliation. Though she had never thought of Ayward in this way, she knew it to be true the moment it was said. Who should have known it better than she? Even so, she had to warn Ayward about what Rashel had said, though she waited until Rashel went on a trip that would keep her away for several days.
Ayward didn’t reply for a long time. “Did she say when?”
“She said this spring, Ayward.”
“Poor Rashel,” he said. “Ah, poor Rashel. So unhappy. So embittered. So willing to destroy anyone to get her way, without even knowing what her way is. I believe that when your father did what he did, and your brother disappeared, she felt betrayed. All her life since has been taking vengeance against their leaving her…”
“What do you mean, betrayed? What do you mean, did what he did?”
“Well, taking his own life that way. Rashel said…”
Dismé said in angry astonishment, “How can you think that, Ayward? Father didn’t…”
He interrupted her. “Hush, my dear. We won’t worry about it now.”
Dismé’s fury drove her out of the house. The rains had given way to an interlude of mist, and she felt as though the outward mist permeated her as well. Rashel had told Ayward that Val Latimer had killed himself! Why would Rashel have said such a thing? Was it only to build yet another drama around herself? To make her life more interesting and vital? Poor child, her dear, dear friends would say. Poor child. Look at what she’s had to bear!
She found herself running along the path that led to the glass towers, almost invisible in the light rain. As she approached the tallest of them, she realized she had literally walked into a great pool of ouphs who swirled and eddied all around her.
“Listen.” The smell of decay. The feel of slime on her lips.
“Please.” Roses, their odor, the brush of their petals.
“Make them…no, make them…no, something else.” Cold, the smell of smoke.
“Wrong, all wrong.” Sickness, aching, feculent reek.
“Break…all…break them…all…please.” Ice. Old Ice.
She felt a wave of frustration, as though all around her, minds tried to find words and move tongues with all the linkages missing. Beings trying to speak, without anything to speak with, or of.
“Oh, let go, let go, let go on, lost here”
“Lost here”
“Lost”
The ouphs poured up the tower, covering it, and the voices washed around her, through her, for the first time creating a sensible and coordinated shout.
“You…must help…only one…help us…not leave us like…are…”
When they went away she knelt on the ground, gasping for breath through an uncontrollable weeping. That last voice. It had been so familiar. So very familiar. A long time ago, hadn’t she decided to do something? Some particular thing…
She found herself at the bottle wall, at its end, where the family bottles had been put when they arrived at Faience. She had the old bucket, her drum, in her hands. A shallow stream was overflowing from the river, draining away under the wall where Val Latimer’s bottle had been installed. She had resolved long, long ago to do this. Why had it taken her this long? It could perfectly well be washed out by this stream, perfectly well destroyed.
She struck her drum sharply, on its side, then again, then again. She summoned Roarer with her whole heart and sang as she drummed again. Her voice and hands together struck like lightning. A bottle cracked, then another. She crouched and drummed a fury, hearing Roarer’s rampage, hearing the bottles crack, the crash and tinkle of their shattering, the slosh and gurgle of what had been inside.
She came to herself sitting back on her heels.
“Thank…blessing…Good child…” The feeling of an entity retreating, fading, vanishing, lost in a swell of fog:
“All, all, all, all, please. Rest, rest. All, all. Now…”
She could not destroy them all. The Regime would know she had done it. She could only…
Furiously she ran to the old shed near the barn where there was a pile of rusty tools including an old shovel, the handle splintering beneath her hand. Upstream, where the river was overflowing to make the slender stream beneath the bottle wall, she dug furiously into the bank to make the flow increase, digging and digging until she could dig no more. Perhaps the flood would be a large one. Perhaps it would do a lot of damage.
She washed the shovel and put it back where she had found it. She washed the mud from her own legs and arms. It was a long time before she could get back to the house. Later she went to the center of the maze and stood before the enigmatic black statue there, believing for a moment that it had actually turned its head to listen. Then it was as before, and she was still alone. There was no one at all she could talk to about this.
Rashel returned from her trip just after the worst of the flood. The rain had gone on for so long that the rivers overflowed, the torrent flooding two sections of the arboretum, the middle of the east garden, a stretch of the yew hedge that made up the southernmost aisle of the great maze, and a great length of the pilgrims’ walk along the bottle wall together with a huge section of the wall itself, which left broken bottles and exposed nutrient pipes that leaked and stank. By the time anyone could get to it, the contents were too far gone to re-bottle.
Ayward complained of the odor, though he said it came from him.
He wrote, “I am drowning in my own stink, Rashel. The stench of what remains of my body, rotting.”
“Nonsense,” Rashel said. “Owen keeps you beautifully clean, Ayward. It’s the bottle wall you smell.”
It wasn’t the bottle wall. It was a sad smell peculiar to Ayward’s rooms that reminded Dismé of the ouphs and the foggy evening at the beginning of the flood. This was an episode which she wished to keep out of her thoughts, just in case someone asked. The damage to the Great Maze, however, drew her full attention. The news that some of the southern edge had washed out sent her running to survey the damage from the inside.
It was true. Midway along the boundary hedge, which was even taller and thicker than th
ose inside the maze, a several-paces-long stretch of the carefully squared yews had disappeared. As she gaped at this vacancy, she heard a workman outside the maze: “The damn thing has no bottom!” She held her breath to listen, at first thinking he was joking, but soon it was clear: they honestly couldn’t find a bottom with the tools at hand.
Rashel soon joined the men outside and directed that a barrier must be placed around the hole at once. This occasioned some confusion. The men could not barricade the inside of the hole from the outside of the maze, for the hedges pressed too closely on either side of the hole, and they could not barricade it from the inside, for they did not know how to get there.
Waiting until Rashel was not among them, Dismé approached the hole from inside, calling to the workmen. “Can you toss the parts in here? I’ll set them up for you.”
The barricades weren’t heavy. One of the husky workmen pitched them across the hole, and Dismé arranged them, quickly, murmuring to the workman that she was not supposed to be in the maze, and she would appreciate his not mentioning it to Rashel. When the workmen left, she crawled to the edge of the hole—prudently anchoring one arm around the nearest trunks that were still in place—to lie prone, peering down.
Below her was a tangle of interwoven roots from which the missing section of hedge dangled upside down. Beyond that was a general darkness, but far down was a glimmer, like sunlight reflected from water. She searched for something she could drop into the hole and found a stone-littered gap at the bottom of the hedge across from it, the customary trail of some small animal, perhaps. Dismé picked up several of the smaller stones and dropped them, one by one, counting until she heard the plop. The count was the same as from the cupola of the museum tower to the bottom of the air shaft, six flights of stairs above the museum, which was itself four stories high.
She started to rise, then froze in place. From below she heard voices: the hollow, reverberating sounds of people talking in cavernous space. No one had mentioned hearing voices! She huddled down once more, trying to make out words and phrases, thinking how much this would interest Ayward while remaining naively unaware of how intensely interesting it actually was. The return of the workmen from their lunch sent her scurrying back to the Conservator’s House.