The Passage of Pearl Read online

  Her stomach rumbled, though, and the handle of her bag was noticeably cutting into her hand. She shifted her hold and wondered when the calluses would appear. She could wear the backpack the way it was supposed to be worn, certainly, but she didn’t fancy the sensation of entrapment that went with it and so she didn’t. She stood in the grand hall, scuffing her feet across the mosaic. Stupid. Where was she going to get food this late into the day and with the parade clogging up the streets? Nowhere, probably. Or in some sleazy bars in back streets she really didn’t want to visit. Should’ve brought food from home, she told herself, for all the good hindsight did her.

  At least the orange splotches were getting better as the parade moved off into the distance and onto another street. That was something. Her stomach rumbled again and the guard swivelled to face her, almost like he’d heard her. “You just going to stand here?” he asked, not unkindly.

  “Yeah. Maybe.” She paused, then continued. “I’m waiting for it to be safe to go out onto the street.” She could always buy some fresh fruit and bread from the market somewhere, or, with Liberation Day being celebrated, something wonderfully nice and hot. A fish sandwich maybe. Pearl’s stomach liked the idea anyway. A thread of soft brown snake to the ground to her left. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “I just asked if you’re hungry.”

  “Just a bit. I forgot which day it was and the cafeteria’s crammed.”

  “Kids today don’t hold with the traditions of the past,” the guard muttered. Pearl knew she had to be one of the kids included, but the man didn’t look terribly annoyed with her. “I’ll be off-duty for lunch in a few minutes. I can get you something if you like.”

  Pearl started, but smiled when she interpreted the words. “That’d be really kind of you. I’m not picky.” Not entirely true, but she didn’t want to be demanding.

  The man laughed. “You’re paying yourself, you know.”

  Pearl balled her fist, or at least the one she hadn’t already clenched around her bag, wishing she were right-shaped. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.” Probably a good idea to put the bag down, she thought, and so she did. The guard looked her up and down a moment then gestured at a small bench hidden in the shadows.

  “Have a seat. I’ll be a few minutes.”

  Pearl nodded and settled down where the man had indicated. She tucked the bag between her legs, the better to keep it with her, and she kept her back cautiously away from the wall. She wondered if she should try to make small talk, but the guard had turned his back on her. About half a minute later she learned that it was because someone new had come into the library and had been stowing away their bag. Relieved, she dug up the book she’d taken with her to read on the ride into the city. She’d only gotten a few chapters into it; it didn’t seem to make as much of a relief from her courses as she’d hoped, but it was interesting even so.

  About fifty pages later someone tapped on her should and she almost snapped the slightly-hairy hand off before remembering that wasn’t polite behaviour. And, anyway, he’d promised her food. Pearl stuck her finger near the line she’d finished at and looked up. The guard tilted his body away a little. “What d’you want?” he asked.

  “Oh. Just…” Pearl considered, then made herself meet the man’s eyes and smile. “Just a sandwich with ham or something, please.”

  “All right. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  “Thanks.”

  The guard gave her an exaggerated salute and sauntered off towards the cafeteria. His replacement was a young, blonde woman who looked vaguely familiar and smelled, very strongly, of cherries and roses. She ignored Pearl, though, and therefore Pearl ignored her too. Instead, Pearl ducked her head back into her book and tried to pay more attention to her surroundings while she was reading. It was harder now. The hall was far quieter and all she had to help her stay out of her book was a soft butterfly blue circle of, presumably, a nail file. The guard woman seemed the type. Letting herself go entirely and be more aware of everything but the words of her books was equally tempting, but she wouldn’t be able to read at the same time.

  Anyway, it didn’t matter because the man who’d promised her food returned. He was carrying three plates as expertly as if he’d been a waiter in a previous employment and stopped at the desk. He murmured something to the woman, too low even for Pearl to make out, but presumably it dealt with the plate she took from him and the zigzag-wasp pattern of chinks. The exchange gave Pearl enough time to stuff her bookmark between the pages and tuck the book back into her bag, however, and by the time the guard stopped in front of her she was holding her wallet. She thanked him, paid him and tried not to be annoyed when he plunked down at the other end of the bench with a whole, if small, three course meal that included mostly-rare steak while all she had was a cheese and ham sandwich. She’d have disdained the cheese if she’d been less hungry, but as it was she ate the whole thing, cheese and all. At least the sandwich was a wonderfully big size and she knew that it’d cost him more than he’d had her pay him back. She pushed the pang of guilt away. His money, his loss.

  “So,” the guard said once she’d finished and licked the crumbs off her fingers, “what are you studying?”

  Her stomach demanded she take what was left of his steak (and possibly eat him too; she was that hungry) but she pointedly ignored it. “Literature. I’m a fourth year.”

  The guard stuffed a forkful of salad in his mouth and ate it before responding. “Are you enjoying it?”

  “Very.” And then, because he seemed willing to listen to her, she launched into the research she’d come to do and watched his eyes turn large like saucers at her deluge of information.

  “Sounds impressive,” the man said when she ran out of things to say in her rambling. He didn’t seem particularly impressed, but Pearl didn’t mind. She didn’t have too many people who wanted to listen. She ran circles around her plate with her fingers. Hungry, her stomach demanded, but she ignored it.

  “Did you study anything?” she asked after half the guard’s salad and most of his remaining steak had gone.

  “Nah. I’m not made for a bookish life.” That made Pearl laugh. “Not the job I envisioned for myself,” he continued, grinning. “But I like it. It’s good to see the younger generation get ready to face the world and improve it, and it doesn’t involve a lot of hassle.”

  The guard seemed to be finished talking with her after that, so Pearl let him eat his meal in peace. She stuck her nose in her book again and sat so quietly that she knew people’d forget she was there.

  Indeed, in a little while the female guard took all their places back to the cafeteria and the elderly man left without a word. Pearl revelled in the silence, though when she’d finished the chapter she’d started just before lunch she forced herself to put the book away again and return to her hunt for some more sources.

  It was twilight when she emerged from the library to go home, and she only left because she’d been too severely tempted to bite a fellow student’s hand for reaching for a book at her head-height while she was putting hers back.

  The road home delivered her nothing but two painful, red hands and a finished book. And some groceries she could prepare fast and easily. Though that did mean her meat wasn’t quite the way she wanted it. It didn’t bother her too much, though, and she spent the rest of the evening working on the first draft of her essay. If she were to judge, it was a pretty decent essay, but it wasn’t quite where she’d wanted it to be just yet. No matter. She had time.

  Her class the next morning were all right, informative if not particularly thought-provoking, and the Obligatory Social Gathering wasn’t too bad either. Still, Pearl was glad to escape her class and course mates and get back to working on her essay. One of her tutors had told her of a book that she might find interesting, though not necessarily useful, and she’d promised herself that she’d get to spend an entire day looking for a copy in the library if she got her work for the next day finished already. Only if she go
t it finished, and she did, well past the time at which she normally went to bed. In her evening prayers that night she included a thankful note for the scholarship that let her study without getting a side job to keep from starving.

  Of course the next day was cloudy and colder than she liked to go out in, but she was only going to the library, only going to nose around the books inside. When she got there, the guard at the desk waved at her. She waved back lightly - he’d been nice to her the day before and she liked him - then briskly continued walking towards the first floor of the library. It was blessedly quiet and normal. She found the book easily enough, right where it was supposed to be, and this time she hadn’t forgotten to pack herself a decent lunch.

  Lunch, however, was rapidly forgotten as she started to read through the book in question. It wasn’t at all what her tutor had promised her, wasn’t even about the same topic, and, judging from the ink and pencil notations in the margins, it didn’t even belong in the library. Pearl checked the cover several times, but it said it was a copy of Rupert Thelosnion’s Rhythm and Structure each and every time she did. The text the book contained was simply anything but Rupert Thelosnion’s Rhythm and Structure.

  When it was time for the library to close, Pearl had barely gotten through half of the book. Though it was slim and what she understood of it was fascinating, the book was written in an ancient dialect Pearl had no experience with prior to that day. The notes (some of them) helped her with a few of the more difficult passages, but the meaning fled almost as fast as she’d deciphered it. And so Pearl did something she’d never believed she’d do: she tried to sneak the book out of the library. She didn’t have a choice. The Thelosnion it was pretending to be was found in the restricted part of the library or she’d have tried adding it to her library haul. Amazingly, she got away with it too. The train ride was spent fretting over being discovered and the rest of her evening at home was dedicated to transcribing and translating lines of the ancient text into a notebook.

  Pearl skipped her Myth and Poetry class the next day to translate more of the text, though she couldn’t even begin to understand what she’d written down herself when she reread her scribblings. The book, she was certain, was magical and should never have been in their library in the first place. Her university was a mundane one. Magical arts were studied at a different college - somewhere at a safe distance from the city and its towns in case a magical experiment went wrong and blasted the area into a wasteland - and magical books, though not illegal in the city as a whole, were forbidden on the city’s university grounds as there were no legal, practicing sorcerers among their number.

  Despite the book making it impossible to remember all she’d read, something of it stuck in her mind all the same. The book dealt with one of the oldest myths of the world, one that they even shared with the wingborn, one that, as far as Pearl knew, had always been accepted as true history. But what stuck in her mind from this book was something different, the sense that their history wasn’t true. Pearl wasn’t sure when she’d stopped scribbling in her notebook and started adding her gibberish notes and handwriting to the sparse yet unused margins and between the already used space, but she had. It felt right; adding to the margins helped Pearl order her thoughts, even as she neglected her studies (and herself) the further she got into the book. If she could only make complete and proper sense of it… she’d be famous. She’d prove to everyone that her scholarship was well-deserved, even if she’d never again prove anything as good or as exciting as an essay that would turn the whole world upside down and inside out. It was a chance worth neglecting everything for.

  It was her self that saved her. Had Pearl merely been Marishka Baker like it said on her registration cards, she’d have read on and on and never stopped even as the rest of her life faded from her thoughts. Had she merely been Marishka as her registration cards told people, she’d have forgone sleep and food and drink entirely. Yet the essence of her soul demanded that she move and eat and taste the air surrounding her. It demanded that she groom herself into something cleaner and drink and sleep. Eventually, the stuffy one-room apartment was too much and too small for her self to tolerate and she fled outside into the fresh, crisp air, away from the lure and call of the deceptively slim volume. The newspapers told her that she’d been cooped up inside for a little over a week, though it felt infinitely longer. Pearl jogged a few small laps through the nearby park to feel the air move around her, fighting against her body’s urge to collapse, before seeking out a small restaurant and ordering herself the largest piece of meat they had on offer (despite the early hour) and almost choking on the speed of her eating.

  After letting her food settle she ran some more, delighting in the weak winter sun on her face, and when she was contented she went to another restaurant to eat another meal. All afternoon, she stayed in the park, continuously finding excuses not to return to her apartment. Here was a flower she’d never noticed, there swans were swimming in the pond, a songbird she didn’t recognise sat in a tree, leaves fell from the sky, she needed new socks, a scarf…

  By evening she’d figured out that she was scared of the book that she’d left behind and of what it could do to her, had already done. She had to throw it out. It’d be a shame, though, with the book as important as it was. Pearl dithered and debated with herself until the moon was up and her body was again ready to sleep. Still unwilling to go home and knowing there were no hotels open in the area - which she wouldn’t be able to afford that night anyway since the banks were already closed - Pearl sought out a warm-looking spot in the park. Finding one that wasn’t already occupied by a beggar was surprisingly hard; she’d never known so many people sought refuge from the cold, even though she’d grown up poor.

  She walked all over the park and even ducked into a few nearby alleys, wanting little more than to sleep the whole of the winter season away, without any luck. Either it was too cold for her comfort or the spot was already taken. Yet finally she came across a small, shrivelled and still-awake woman who took pity on her and directed her to a spot behind a trash container, sheltered from the wind. It wasn’t particularly warm, but it was tolerable and Pearl curled up and tried to sleep. It took her a while to get comfortable, but she did manage that in the end. However, sleep remained elusive, the noises seemed to stand out in the stillness, and her thoughts refused to slow.

  When morning dawned, cold and hard and hungry, Pearl was exhausted. She also had a Plan. She’d stolen the book out of a library - though it looked nothing at all like a library book now - and she’d take it to a sorcerer, preferably one who wouldn’t ask too many questions. Magic should, if nothing else, be better equipped to handle the book than she was. At the very least she’d take it to the library at the mages’ college and hide it away for someone else to find.

  First, though, she had to go home and find a way to take the book with her safely. Unsure she was able to handle it, Pearl wandered the streets towards the bank to withdraw some more money and got herself the first breakfast (and fitting clean set of clothes) she could buy. She hoped being more comfortable within her body would help her fight off the temptation, but she knew it was only another reason to delay going home. Finally, a little after noon, she forced herself back to her apartment, bag of groceries in her hand. It was hard, when she got there, not to dive straight back into the translation she’d started, but Pearl forced herself through it. She made herself shower, groom and eat a late lunch. Then she (reluctantly) wrapped the magical book up in a couple of dry towels and stuffed the bundle in her groceries bag. She’d never survive keeping it in her backpack if she had to carry it all the way.

  She also packed a book (in a different bag and without the towels) that she’d always loved, banking on her familiarity with and affection for the story to carry her through the worst of the journey into the city. She removed all her writing utensils from the bags she wanted to bring, as well as all her small notebooks and little bits of paper. That all settled, she dug through the A
-to-Z to find a sorcerer who sounded promising, looked up the route on a map, tried to memorise it as best she could and set out.

  The walk to the train station was easy; it was noisy enough that she needed to focus on her surroundings and could ignore her desire to turn around and go back. The train ride itself was trickier because letting herself get lost entirely in her book, while effective, also made her miss her stop several times. Finally she just gave up catching the right one, and that made finding the shop she’d wanted utterly impossible because she had no idea where she was and there was no one around to ask for directions.

  Pearl’s hands itched increasingly to take out the book and scribble in the margins (using her own blood if necessary), so going home with the book still in her possession and trying again the next day wasn’t an option. Her only hope lay in visiting the library at the magical university, so off she set to catch a train that would take her almost up to the campus. Eventually, finally and thank the gods for university library hours, she found herself staring at a small, wiry man with round glasses perched on his nose, looking nothing at all like Pearl’s idea of a sorcerer. But he was in charge of the college’s library and she’d brought him a book.

  It was pretending to be something in an alphabet she couldn’t read now. The librarian looked the book over and went through the pages. The margins were blank. A perfectly normal book on magical theory, presumably. A perfectly normal magical book. Pearl was tempted to take the book home with her again, but at the same time the thought of being so trapped in her room again made her twitch.