The Fall by Tracy Townsend

Author:Tracy Townsend
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Fall
ISBN: 9781633884984
Publisher: Pyr
Published: 2019-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

23.

As a small boy, Anselm Meteron had suffered from a prodigious and problematic lack of fear. He had been talented enough to do well at most tasks with little tutelage, arrogant enough to pretend at talent where he lacked it, and absolutely unconcerned about being called out for his behavior on either account. A Bishop’s child, he lived well insulated from the concerns which taught other children to tread lightly. Fortunately, Allister Meteron had not been ignorant of his son’s unearned courage. For the boy’s sake, and for the sake of his own reputation, he had the good sense to ensure that there would be at least a few things the boy would grow to fear.

Lectures, for one. Allister’s were of the highest caliber, sparing no syllable for praise that could profitably be applied to correction. Hand-copying, too, was designed for young Anselm’s particular torment. By the age of six, he had cultivated remarkably precise handwriting and a vocabulary sufficient to serve as a stenographer at most of his father’s meetings. His missing finger had long since undone that careful script, but Anselm’s close-trained attention to detail remained.

Last but never least, the young Anselm had learned to fear old women. Those tedious meetings whose note-taking turned his hand into a cramped claw always involved at least one woman older than the Ecclesiastical Commission’s geological findings could possibly account for.

The Grand Librarian of Nippon was just such a woman—small and frail, so bent in upon herself, she was painful to behold. Anselm kept his place at the rear of the audience chamber and let Chalmers do the talking. He examined his manicure with an attention it assuredly did not warrant, barely curbing the urge to crack his nine fingers before settling on rubbing the stump of his missing digit raw, instead. The Old Bear answered when spoken to, brief as always, sliding grudgingly into the position of spokesman for the bodyguards the Reverend Doctor Chalmers had brought to accompany him. Anselm merely waited, feet crossed on a sitting cushion, and did his best not to think how he was sure to fall on his face as soon as he stood up, given how long he’d been sitting on his arse doing not a blessed thing, his legs going numb.

God’s balls.

The audience, Chalmers had assured them, could not possibly take more than an hour.

After the first hour, Anselm no longer cared if regular consultation of his chronometer looked in poor taste. Poor taste might just liberate him from the room full of paper screens and bamboo mats and sitting cushions and stark, angular paintings of herons or storks or some other leggy goddamned birds. Through the oiled paper walls of the surprisingly airy room (wasn’t it a custom to keep musty old people shut away from draughts? Perhaps those who vied to be the Grand Librarian’s successor hoped to off the old biddy with a stiff wind) he could spy the progress of the setting sun, blurring pink along the wooden frames of the open windows.

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