Tiadba had tears in her eyes as she lifted the book and smelled its cover. “Can you read it?” she asked Grayne.

The sama held up one finger—yes. “Some of us have translated pages. Many pages.”

“How?” Jebrassy asked.

Grayne beamed. “Of all my strange instructions and duties, I love this part most of all. There is a secret so wonderful that no one will believe you if you tell them—so don’t bother.

“Once, when we were quite young, my crèche sisters and I made up a game. We climbed to the upper Tiers, then ran along the impossible shelves. We laughed and leaped and pulled at the unmoving spines, top shelves, bottom shelves, one up, one down, center shelves…tugged on the odd, unyielding volumes for hours, laughing and leaping and failing and falling, and laughing some more. No one expected we would ever succeed, but we believed, as children will, that if we felt so attracted to them, if there were so many children’s stories and legends about books, there must be some truth behind them—something behind the tantalizing spinebacks.”

Grayne squatted slowly, in private her movements more obviously painful. Jebrassy wondered if he would live long enough to feel that sort of pain. She’s the oldest breed I’ve ever seen…

For the first time, he caught himself thinking that a visit from the Bleak Warden might be a blessing—not a thing to be feared.

“I wasn’t the first to find it—our first loose book on the shelves. It was my best friend, Lassidin—full of curiosity, fastest of all my sisters. A spark among glows, you males say. To me, she was a flame…”

Grayne closed her eyes. “The Bleak Warden claimed her long ago. But she was the first to solve that riddle, watching, in her brightness, always watching, all the time seeing things we did not, puzzling it through, running, leaping, tugging…until she got it right.”

Grayne lifted a crooked finger and hooked at empty air, reliving the moment. “Lassidin grabbed a spine…just the right spine—and before our eyes she pulled down a book. That surprised her so much she fell and landed on her butt. The book flopped open on the dusty floor, revealing a page covered with letters from an ancient alphabet—some familiar, most not. All of my crèche sisters—there were four of us, families could be larger then—gathered around the book and looked, afraid to touch it. Two ran away. Lassidin and I somehow gathered up the courage to take the book to our family niche, where we hid it from our mer and per. At first we told no one. And when we returned to that spot in the Tiers, where the gap had been—we found another book in its place, as false and unyielding as before. We wondered if we had been dreaming, and rushed back to our niches—where Lassidin had placed the book in this old box, with its finger lock.

“By the time we returned to the upper levels, a few wakes later, Lassidin had solved the puzzle of the shelves, and the shelves rewarded her—us—for cleverness. We pulled down the second of many, which we then retrieved and hid away with the first.”

“How many?” Tiadba asked.

Grayne tightened her lips and touched the stiff fur on her nose. “More than one,” she said, a faint smile on her lips. “Fewer than a dozen.”

“Who loosened the books? Why let anyone look at them?” Jebrassy asked. “I thought the Tall Ones wanted to keep us ignorant.”

“A sophisticated question from our young warrior,” Grayne said. “I don’t know the answer. Some say, however, that a great and powerful citizen, far above the Tall Ones, created these shelves to honor his daughter—long dead or missing. They may not have been intended for us at all. At any rate, in time the Bleak Warden came for my sisters, but never for me.” She looked up. “I am the guardian of Lassidin’s box, and all the books we plucked from the walls—all the books we were allowed to find.”

Tiadba turned to the next page in the green book. Her nose drew up in fine wrinkles and she pushed her chin forward. “I can’t read it. The letters are too different.”

“They are old. A few are still familiar.”

Tiadba followed the lines with her fingers, then said, “Here’s one. And another.” Delighted, she showed Jebrassy.

“My crèche sister Kovleschi was meeker and did not chase the shelves with us—but she knew of antique letterbugs, marked on their wing-cases by such letters. We visited the families who kept and prized them, and there we studied the way they formed words—and compared how younger bugs with different, newer symbols formed the very same words.”

Letterbugs could live many breed lifetimes, and were often passed down for generations.

“In time, we were able to piece together a syllabary, and from that, a beginning dictionary. But even then we could read only a few passages. There are still so many that mean nothing to me. Though I’ve memorized them…as many as will hold still. They seem to change, you know.”

Tiadba handed the book to Jebrassy. He, too, examined the first page—and his brow shot up.

“‘Sangmer,’” he read, drawing his finger under one odd word. “Is this about Sangmer?” Sometimes the teachers told frightening stories to breeds who had misbehaved, some involving a traveler named Sangmer, who died after he strayed beyond his neighborhood.

“Perhaps I haven’t been so foolish after all,” Grayne said, eyes twinkling. “Most of our books speak at many points of Sangmer and Ishanaxade. They were partners, and not always happy ones. A tempestuous pair. What little we can read tells us that ultimately they both vanished in the Chaos.”

“And what do the other books tell?”

“More puzzling still, they speak of things no breed can understand. Of the aging of the world outside this one, and of the decline of all-powerful rulers…and how they were forced to retreat to the Kalpa. There is even a brief history of the last years of what seems to have been a shining brightness in an open sky, something called the ‘sun.’”

“I’d like to read that,” Jebrassy whispered. “I’d like to read them all.” He looked around as if afraid that Grayne, the niche, the box—these real books—might just vanish in a puff. With her staff, Grayne pulled the box toward her. “These were ourbooks. They were meant for us alone, to guide us. You will find your own books—and they will accompany you to places we could never go. Perhaps they will even finish the great story.” She narrowed her eyes, near exhaustion. Tiadba seemed stunned, but she took the book from Jebrassy—pulled it from his grasping fingers—and handed it to Grayne, who returned it to Lassidin’s box.

Grayne closed the cover and locked it. “This will be the last march,” the old sama said. “Out there you will go, utterly ignorant, unless you find your books and learn how to read what they contain. You will tell those stories to your fellows. Every march has its stories and instructions. Those are the rules.”

“Whose rules?” Jebrassy asked.

Grayne ignored him. She removed her cloak, revealing thin, bowed shoulders under a smooth black gown, and handed it to Tiadba. “The sisterhood made this, many lifetimes ago, when we were all young. Look inside…sewn within the lining, our crude syllabary and a comparison dictionary. All made by referring to the antique letterbugs. Some of those bugs still survive. You must look for them—borrow them—learn your own words, add what you can to our knowledge.”

“Why us?” Jebrassy asked.

“Better to ask why you, young warrior,” Grayne said. “I would have passed this all on to Tiadba. That was my plan—until she chose to be adventurous. For a time, angry with her, I thought I would die with our box locked, taking my revenge against a world that made no more lovely and sensiblesisters. But I have my instructions.”

Tall Ones?Jebrassy held his tongue on this question, but still blurted, “You guide the marches. You arrange for equipment, you send them…” He could not untangle this knot.