"It was my fault."

"No," Elyed said. "You did no wrong. Sotyu Ang did no wrong. There is no fault. Things are going badly. It’s not possible always to do right when things are difficult."

Sutty stood silent. She looked around the small, high-ceilinged room, its red rug almost hidden by chairs and cushions; everything poor, clean; a bunch of paper flowers stuck in an ugly vase on the low table; the grandnephew gently rearranging floor cushions; the old, old woman lowering herself carefully, painfully onto a thin pillow near the table. On the table, a book. Old, worn, many times read.

"I think maybe, yoz Sutty, it was the other way round. Sotyu told us last summer that he thought a neighbor had informed the police about his herbary. Then you came, and nothing happened."

Sutty forced herself to understand what Elyed had said. "I was a safeguard?"

"I think so."

"Because they don’t want me to see… what they do? But then why did they — now— ?"

Elyed drew her thin shoulders together. "They don’t study patience," she said.

"Then I should stay here," Sutty said slowly, trying to under-ittnd. "I thought it would be better for you if I left."

"I think you might go to Silong."

Her mind was clouded. "To Silong?"

"The last umyazu is there."

Sutty said nothing, and after a while Elyed added, scrupulous of fact, "The last I know of. Maybe some are left in the east, in the Isles. But here in the west they say the Lap of Silong is the last. Many, many books have been sent there. For many years now. It must be a great library. Not like the Golden Mountain, not like the Red Umyazu, not like Atangen. But what has been saved, most of it is there."

She looked at Sutty, her head a little on one side, a small old bird, keen-eyed. She had completed her cautious journey down onto the cushion, and now arranged her black wool vest, a bird getting its feathers straight. "You want to learn the Telling, I know that. You should go there," she said. "Here, nothing much is here. Bits and pieces. What I have, what a few maz have. Not much. Always less. Go to Silong, daughter Sutty. Maybe you can find a partner. Be a maz. Eh?" Her face creased up in a sudden, tremendous smile, toothless and radiant. She jiggled gently with laughter.

"Go to Silong…"

Other people were coming in. Elyed put her hands in her lap and began to chant softly, "The two from one, the one from two…"

SIX

She went to TALK to Odiedin Manma. Despite his enigmatic telling, despite the uncanny event (which she was now quite sure she had merely imagined) in his class, she had found him the most worldly and politically knowledgeable of the maz she knew, and she badly wanted some practical counsel. She waited till after his class and then begged him for advice.

"Does Maz Elyed want me to go to this place, this umyazu, because she thinks if I go there, my presence will help keep it safe? I think she might be wrong. I think the blue-and-tans are tracking me all the time. It’s a secret place, a hidden place, isn’t it? If I went, they could just follow me. They may have all kinds of tracking devices."

Odiedin held up his hand, mild but unsmiling. "I don’t think they’ll track you, yoz. They have orders from Dovza to let you be. Not to follow and observe you."

"You know that?"

He nodded.

She believed him. She remembered the invisible web she had sensed when she first lived here. Odiedin was one of the spiders.

"Anyhow, the way to Silong isn’t an easy track to follow. And you could leave very quietly." He chewed his lip a little. A hint of warmth, a pleasurable look, had come into his dark, severe face. "If Maz Elyed suggested that you go there, and if you want to go there," he said, "I’d show you the way."

"You would?"

"I was at the Lap of Silong once. I was twelve. My parents were maz. It was a bad time then. When the books were burned. A lot of police. A lot of loss, destruction. Arrests. Fear. So we left Okzat, went up into the hills, to the hill towns. And then, in the summer, all the way round Zubuam, to the lap of the Mother. I’d like very much to go that way again before I die, yoz."

Sutty tried to leave no track, ’no footprints in the dust.’ She sent no word to Tong except that she planned to do nothing much the next few months except a little hiking and climbing. She spoke to none of her friends, acquaintances, teachers, except Elyed and Odiedin. She fretted about her crystals — four, now, for she had cleared her noter again. She could not leave them at Iziezi’s house, the first place the blue-and-tans would look for them. She was trying to decide where to bury them and how to do it without being seen, when Ottiar and Uming in the most casual way told her that since the police were so busy at the moment, they were storing their mandala away in a safe place for a while, and did she have anything she’d like to stash away with it? Their intuition seemed amazing, until Sutty remembered that they were part of the spiderweb — and had lived their adult lives in secrecy, hiding all that was most precious to them. She gave them the crystals. They told her where the hiding place was. "Just in case," Ottiar said mildly. She told them who Tong Ov was and what to tell him, just in case. They parted with loving embraces.

Finally she told Iziezi about the long hike she planned to take in the mountains.

"Akidan is going with you," Iziezi said with a cheerful smile.

Akidan was out with friends. The two women were eating dinner together at the table in the red-carpeted corner of Iziezi’s immaculate kitchen. It was a ’little-feast’ night: several small dishes, delicately intense in flavor, surrounding a bland, creamy pile of tuzi. It reminded Sutty of the food of her far-off childhood. "You’d like basmati rice, Iziezi!" she said. Then she heard what her friend had said.

"Into the mountains? But it— We may be gone a long time."

"He’s been up in the hills several times. He’ll be seventeen this summer."

"But what will you do?" Akidan ran his aunt’s errands, did her shopping, sweeping, fetching and carrying, helped her when a crutch slipped.

"My cousin’s daughter will come stay with me."

"Mizi? But she’s only six!"

"She’s a help."

"Iziezi, I don’t know if this is a good idea. I may go a long way. Even stay the winter in one of the villages up there."

"Dear Sutty, Ki isn’t your responsibility. Maz Odiedin Manma told him to come. To go with a teacher to the Lap of Silong is the dream of his life. He wants to be a maz. Of course he has to grow up and find a partner. Maybe finding a partner is what he’s mostly thinking about, just now." She smiled a little, not so cheerfully. "His parents were maz," she said.

"Your sister?"

"She was Maz Ariezi Meneng." She used the forbidden pronoun, she/he/they. Her face had fallen into its set expression of pain. "They were young," she said. A long pause. "Ki’s father, Meneng Ariezi, everybody loved him. He was like the old heroes, like Penan Teran, so handsome and brave… He thought being a maz was like armor. He believed nothing could hurt her/him/ them. There was a while, then, three or four years, when things were going along more like the old days. No arrests. No more troops of young people from down there breaking windows, painting everything white, shouting… It quieted down. The police didn’t come here much. We all thought it was over, it would go back to being like it used to be. Then all of a sudden there were a lot of them. That’s how they are. All of a sudden. They said there were, you know, too many people here breaking the law, reading, telling… They said they’d clean the city. They paid skuyen to inform on people. I knew people who took their money." Her face was tight, closed. "A lot of people got arrested. My sister and her husband. They took them to a place called Erriak. Somewhere way off, down there. An island, I think. An island in the sea. A rehabilitation center. Five years ago we heard that Ariezi was dead. A notice came. We never have heard anything about Meneng Ariezi. Maybe he’s still alive."