The Book of Heroes by Miyuki Miyabe
She cried and cried, while her friends watched and waited. When she was done, U-ri wiped her face with a handkerchief and caught her breath. Someone appeared at the cavern entrance in the rubble—Dr. Latore in his black robes. He was carrying a large copper cup from which a plume of steam was rising.
“You’re awake. That’s good. You should drink this.”
The drink had a sweet fragrance to it. U-ri took a sip, and her throat sang with relief.
“Try touching the glyph on your forehead,” Dr. Latore said, tapping his own forehead with one finger. “It should be able to cure you as well as it does your allies. Hopefully it will be able to mend what damage your vestments could not protect you from.”
U-ri did as instructed and immediately felt a warmth coming from the mark. The warmth traveled through her body, filling her limbs and making her skin glow down to every last pore. She felt the strength return in her as the warmth faded.
“You see? The Lady Allcaste has no need of a doctor.” Dr. Latore smiled. U-ri smiled back, then turned to her friends.
“Ash is going to chew me out again for being a crybaby.”
“Ash?” Dr. Latore asked, lifting an eyebrow. “Oh, you mean Dmitri.”
The doctor swept back his robes and sat down at U-ri’s feet. The sun had begun to dip toward the horizon, but it was still bright outside. Even out here, in the light of day, Dr. Latore proved remarkably handsome.
“Please do not be angry with him for bringing you to meet Gulg—the creature who was once Ichiro Minochi.”
U-ri nodded, gripping her cup tightly in both hands.
“Or with me for not stopping him,” he added quietly.
“No problem, Doctor.”
“I’m afraid Ash needed you to open your eyes, so he used the most direct way possible.”
U-ri nodded again, silently.
“He wanted you to understand that, even should you find your brother and be reunited, that your finding him might not make your brother happy.”
U-ri felt Aju’s furry body rubbing her neck beneath her collar.
“I understand, I think. That is, I thought I understood before, but now I really get it.”
A chill breeze stirred, ruffling the doctor’s thick hair. “Ash has gone in search of Kirrick’s whereabouts. There are many records of Kirrick’s life and rumors about him, even more regarding his death, and yet very little truth. I fear it will take him some time to find anything of value.”
“The history books of the Haetlands aren’t any help?”
“Not really. Most were rewritten by those who wanted Kirrick dead. Such as it always is with history.”
U-ri wondered if the weaver who created the Haetlands wanted it that way. Wouldn’t the weaver be on Kirrick’s side? Would she want the true account of his life told?
Or was the Haetlands already out of its weaver’s reach, its own entity, existing without a creator. Which meant that weavers could only create worlds, not control them. How useless is that?
Dr. Latore looked kindly at Sky where he stood by U-ri, acting as a human shield against the wind. “You came from the nameless land, did you not?”
Sky’s purple eyes flashed, then he looked down like a nervous schoolgirl. He hadn’t expected the doctor to address him directly.
“Sky is a nameless devout,” U-ri offered. “You know of the nameless land, Doctor?”
“Ash told me of it. He knows much.” U-ri noticed the doctor’s voice had a certain reverence in it when he spoke of the wolf. “This is how I know that the world in which I live is a created one—how do you feel?”
U-ri removed her hand from her forehead. She felt infinitely more settled now, and her pulse was steady. It seemed that not only her physical strength but the vitality of her spirit too had been restored.
“Though,” the doctor continued, “I sometimes wish that our weaver had made the Haetlands a slightly more peaceful and livable place.” Dr. Latore squinted up at the clouds above them. “Yet I am still thankful that I have been given a life here.”
That, despite the Haetlands’ dark history.
“U-ri. Have you ever wondered if the world in which you live was not created by someone?”
“Yes, but our world—”
“The source and center of the Circle, yes, I have heard. But might there be not one weaver as with my world, but many weavers, that at this very moment continue to spin their countless stories, continuing the creation of your world?”
U-ri blinked. “Oh, you mean they’re maintaining the Circle by creating new stories?”
“Yes. For better or for worse. You—” Latore placed a hand on U-ri’s shoulder. “You are one of those weavers, U-ri. You may not be an author or historian, nor an artist. Yet these are merely differences in role and standing. Simply by living, we all create our own story.”
“Even me?”
“Yes.” Dr. Latore nodded deeply, then turned again to Sky. “It is why it is not only the weavers who bear sin. Nor just the nameless devout. We are all sinners of a kind. By simply living we sin, for we have no other means to live.”
The doctor stared directly at Sky, and the devout averted his eyes. Aju squeaked lightly, as though he were about to say something to change the topic and lighten the mood—but in the end he said nothing.
“Sky. It seems to me that yours alone is a far purer existence than the rest of ours,” Latore said.
“That is ridiculous!” Sky said, breaking his silence at last. “I am inculpated. And furthermore, I was cast out from the nameless land! I am a sinner among sinners.”
“No, I do not believe that to be the truth of it,” Dr. Latore continued, a look of kindness, empathy, and deep understanding on his face.
Empathy? Suddenly, U-ri became uneasy. She could feel her body reacting to the doctor’s words. Why? Why is he telling all this to Sky?
“You are free,” Dr. Latore continued, heedless of U-ri’s consternation. “The burden you once bore has been lifted.”
“What do you mean by his burden?” U-ri asked, standing quickly and stepping between the two of them, effectively shaking the doctor’s hand from her shoulder as she stood.
“I was told that Sky became a nameless devout because he had committed a sin—the sin of living a story. Is that what you mean by his burden? What’s the truth? I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“U-ri, easy now,” Aju squeaked from her collar, batting her jaw with a tiny paw. The tone of his voice reminded her of how he had sounded before he had become a mouse and she an allcaste—when he had been a book, all-knowing, and harsh.
“It’s all right, Aju,” Dr. Latore said, his eyes still fixed on Sky. “You understand my words, don’t you? No, rather, I see that you are beginning to understand them. You must do this, devout. It is not something from which you can turn.”
U-ri turned to look in Sky’s direction, and he lifted his eyes to meet hers. His eyes were bloodshot and wet with tears.
U-ri swallowed. What is it, Sky? Do you really understand what he’s saying? Is there some deep meaning here that everyone but me can see?
“I am inculpated,” Sky repeated, his voice cracking. He struggled to stand and his robes wrapped around his legs, making him stumble. Still, he stood and began to run toward the cavern entrance.
“Sky!” U-ri ran after him, but Aju hopped to the top of her head, squeaking, “No, U-ri! Stop! Let him be by himself.”
U-ri stopped, feeling dizzy with shock. “What, don’t tell me you understand what he’s saying, Aju? If you do, you better tell me. What was Sky’s sin? What’s his burden? What does the doctor mean that it’s lifted?”
“Man, don’t you know when to shut up?” Aju jumped in the air, landing with a smack back on her head. “Can’t you act like an adult, like an allcaste, just this once? Stop yelping and squealing like a little girl all the time!”
U-ri’s body trembled with shame and rage. “I can’t help it. No one tells me the truth! No one tells me what??
“Look, I—” Aju began, suddenly withered. His tail went slack against her hair. “There’s lots of things I don’t know either. I’m just a little dictionary after all. A youngster. Sorry,” Aju added, sounding like he might cry. “That said, I’m starting to put things together. But, Doctor—” Aju’s nose twitched in the direction of Dr. Latore. “I’m not sure I like this.”
Dr. Latore nodded. “I understand.”
“The books here told me some things.”
“They possess much knowledge.”
“Yeah, well, I wish they had given me some of that knowledge back when this whole thing started.”
The conversation was going over her head again, but U-ri managed to keep ahold of her temper this time. To the contrary, she felt her chest grow cold. Aju might not be making much sense, but she could tell he was frightfully serious and more than a little afraid. She had never seen him like this.
“Even if you had known back then, you would not have been able to put what you knew to use,” Dr. Latore was saying. “Were you to tell your story, you would not have been believed. You would have been forced to wait in silence until such a time as you could be believed.” The doctor fell silent for moment, then added in a quiet voice, “Just as Ash does now.”
Aju scrunched up, becoming nothing more than a fuzzy white ball, then sprang from U-ri’s head and dashed between two pieces of rubble and out of sight.
It was a while before U-ri found her voice. “Doctor, is Aju—”
“Wipe your eyes, U-ri.”
U-ri put a finger to her face. It was streaked with tears. Hurriedly, she rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry. I’m so confused.”
The doctor shook his head, frowning. “No, I was careless. I have said too much and I apologize.”
The wind picked up, ruffling their black robes. The bangs lifted from U-ri’s forehead, revealing her glyph.
“Something happened while I was asleep, didn’t it?” U-ri asked, growing more convinced she was right even as her lips formed the question.
Dr. Latore, his face still strained, managed a smile. “No, no. Nothing really happened.”
He’s lying.
“You’re the one who brought me up from below, right? I remember half of our trip. I remember going through several of the gates, up to the part where we reached the hall at the lowest level of the cavern.” I remember screaming the whole way. “Something happened then, didn’t it? That’s why Sky and Aju were all worked up, and you were trying to calm them down just now.”
U-ri wanted to fall to the ground right there and beg him to tell her what had happened. She wanted him to reach out and yank the veil from her eyes. What made all this so maddening was that even though everything was wrapped in mysteries, she had caught glimpses of the truth, and she wanted to see more. She felt like if she just tried a little harder, if she could just take that first step, she would be able to unravel everything. The answer was right there in front of her if only she could see it.
“U-ri.”
“I know you aren’t telling me out of kindness, Doctor. You don’t have Ash’s cruel streak.”
So tell me. What happened? U-ri put her hand on the doctor’s black sleeve, tightening her fingers around his wrist, when she heard a loud thunk and her feet seemed to lift beneath her.
An earthquake? U-ri jumped. Dr. Latore braced himself, putting his arms protectively around her.
Another tremor passed through the ground. Dust drifted up from the rubble. Part of one of the fallen pillars split away and fell to the ground right beside U-ri and Dr. Latore.
Together, they looked up at the sky.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Labyrinth
The sky was peacefully making its transition to dusk. The tilting sun scorched the edges of the clouds. No, it was more like the clouds had put rouge on their cheeks. They drifted lazily, save in one corner of the sky where a group of them had clustered to form a red-painted thundercloud.
Then lightning flashed across the sky, a brilliant bolt with three arms. It split the sky into pieces once, then twice.
A shadow came over the sun. To U-ri’s eyes it looked like the sun had slipped into a lightning-rent crack in the sky. But when the lightning flashed a third time, she saw that the sun still hung in the sky—except where it had been a golden orb before, now it shone pitch black.
Thunder rumbled so loudly it seemed like the world might split in two. With each shattering roar, the sky fragmented further, until U-ri thought it might fall down from the firmament above onto her head, and she instinctively lifted her arms to protect herself. Dr. Latore stood on unsteady legs and took one or two steps away from the pillar upon which they had been sitting. His eyes were fixed on the far horizon. He took another several steps forward, as though drawn by some invisible force.
“What is the meaning of this?” U-ri heard him mutter.
She stood as well, joining him in staring into the distance. But then she took a step back. Her body tensed, ready to flee.
Far in the distance, in a gap between two hills, she could see the western horizon—the very spot where the sun should be setting beautifully in an hour or two. But what she saw there now defied U-ri’s attempts at comprehension.
At first she thought it was a tornado, but realized that, were it a tornado, it would have to be impossibly huge to appear so large from a distance, and it lacked that familiar sand-pouring-through-the-hourglass shape. So what was it, then? It seemed clear that it was some movement of the wind. It writhed and churned upon the ground, sucking up everything beneath it, tossing all it encountered into the air, tearing everything to pieces.
It’s a giant pair of hands. That was the only way she could describe it. She could even see the fingers, the bend of the knuckles. A giant pair of hands had grown from the western horizon and begun wreaking havoc on the earth. As she watched, the right hand lifted into a fist and smashed something on the ground. Then the left hand picked up whatever it was and tossed it high into the air.
U-ri crouched behind a fallen pillar, using it as a barricade against the gale force winds blowing over her head. “What is it, Doctor?” She had to shout just to be heard, and the doctor was standing only a few feet away. The wind had been blowing toward the north only moments before, but now it shifted to a westerly. It was blowing from the direction of those giant hands. It was hard for U-ri to even keep her eyes open. The gale became a blast as the winds increased in ferocity, whipping up a cloud of sand and small stones off the ground. The debris felt like needles against her skin.
U-ri held up her fingers to protect her face and called out to the doctor again. The giant hands lifted from the horizon, and U-ri spotted recognizable shapes in the detritus falling from them: steeples, such as one might find on a church or a castle. The wind quickly whipped them about, reducing them to dust.
“That is the direction of the capital,” Dr. Latore called back to her.
“Those buildings—are the hands destroying Elemsgard?” U-ri called back at the top of her lungs. Dr. Latore had his head down, braced against the wind, but the wind gusted and he lost his balance. It tossed him back, slamming him into a mountain of exterior wall fragments. The wind pressed him against its rough surface, pinning his arms and legs as though he were nailed to the stone.
“U-ri!” he shouted, his voice barely audible above the roaring wind. “Into the cavern, now!”
I have to help him. I have to go get help. U-ri began to crawl across the ground toward the entrance, when she heard the doctor scream, “No!”
U-ri stood. A breath later, something supple yet strong wrapped around U-ri so tightly that she couldn’t breathe.
Then she was flying through the air. She thought it was the wind tossing her, but she was still right-side up. Her hands were free.
She wasn’t caught up in some tempest—Dr. Latore was holding her again. He had his left arm around her, and with his right he was clinging to the pile
Dr. Latore’s arms were no longer those of a human. His skin was brown, the bones black and bulging out like the roots of a withered tree. His hands had grown so that his palms alone were twice the size of U-ri’s face. His fingers were long, bare and delicate, and they slashed through the air like hooks, clinging tightly to the mound of rubble when they found purchase.
Incongruously, U-ri was reminded of the artificial monkey mountain she had seen once at the zoo. She had watched a mother monkey holding her child in one arm as she made her way across a tree branch.
Dr. Latore climbed with her to the summit of the mountain of rubble that was the Katarhar Abbey ruins. U-ri could see much farther from up here. She looked west and saw a black wave advancing in a line along the ground from the western horizon, making straight for the abbey.
It was as if the giant hands had clapped together, summoning up a great wall of wind. U-ri screwed her eyes shut. Gripping her tightly, Dr. Latore pushed off from the mountain of rubble. Then they were hurtling through the air, while below them the black wind-wall smashed into the ruins.
U-ri watched as the wind tossed up the pillars that had lain on their sides for years, breaking them into pieces until they fell back down to the ground to smash against the rocks. U-ri thought they should make a tremendous noise, yet it did not reach her ears. She was flying through the air. Dr. Latore’s robes fluttered almost elegantly in the evening sunlight. They were high up now—well above the rushing wall of wind.
The doctor swung one of his strangely shaped arms, and it clawed at the air like a black wing, creating an updraft strong enough to briefly reverse their slow fall and lift them up into the air once again.
“U-ri, your glyph!” the doctor shouted.
In a daze, U-ri touched her hand to her forehead. She didn’t know what spell to cast. Aju certainly hadn’t taught her anything. She thought with her own words: Please, please, please, please! Protect us! Return us safely to the ground!