The Privilege of the Happy Ending by Kij Johnson

Author:Kij Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Small Beer Press
Published: 2023-08-28T19:52:15+00:00

For the next two days, she waited in growing frustration. She sent messages to the high priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah via the disdainful acolyte assigned to attend her, and by every other violet-robed man she saw, priest or proselyte. She gave her name but did not speak of the College, nor of her status as a professor of the University, for she knew that away from the garden-lands of the world there was often little notion of educating women. Otherwise there was nothing she could do. She learned on the first day that she was the only guest.

She filled her hours. She paced on the polished ledge watching the sky shift, picotage blurring into strange foliation and congeries of fracturing cubes; trying, as she always did, to understand the underlying rules. Since it was not forbidden, she also explored the honeycombed caves of the temple. Many of the corridors and rooms were torch lit, smelling of pitch and sweet resins, but there were deeper, less travelled tunnels illuminated only by lichens that glowed a dull, cool brown; and once, a sickly pink that caused an immediate and intense headache which lasted for hours.

Late the first afternoon, she found a long room lit by a row of windows high upon one wall. There were dark paintings on the walls, glass-faced cabinets, and tall shelves stacked with scrolls and handbooks. She took down a small scroll, written in a script she recognized as Ib’n, which meant it was unimaginably ancient; and indeed the vellum (if that is what it was) cracked as she held it, merely from the pressure of her fingers. She replaced it carefully, and took instead a handbook bound in dun-colored buckram with strange words upon its cover: Daniel Defoe Moll Flanders. They meant nothing, so she flipped the book open—it was her own language; the strange words were names—and she realized it was a book from the waking world. She looked more carefully. Many of the books were similarly alien, and inside the cabinets were unfamiliar objects of steel or brass or a bright glossy substance like lacquer. She reopened the book and began to read, but an aged man in violet robes so old they had faded to lavender entered the room, and castigated her for touching the books. Despite the obvious differences in language, age, and sex, his tone was a mirror of that of Uneshyl Pos, Librarian at the Women’s College; for all librarians are the same librarian.

On the second day, Vellitt found herself near the cavern of Flame itself—she could hear a rich, roaring crackling and see firelight of an inconstant bloody red flickering at the far end of a tunnel—but she was turned aside by a severe-looking man with a great forked red beard, who had something of grandness in his manner and bore beaded crimson gloves upon his hands. He turned away, but she laid her hand on his arm and spoke, “Please. I am seeking two people, a dreamer from the waking world, and one of our own, a young woman of Ulthar.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.