III. The Man Who Wrote It Down

III. The Man Who Wrote It Down

Above Plot 38 the lamp in the study grew small, then the street, then the hill, and then the whole of Founder’s Point, which had never been large.

Past the point where the Arcanum would have been, if anyone had been looking for it, the view went on up and up, and then turned over and came back down. ridge fell away, and then the continent, until the whole world was a small bright thing turning in the dark. Hanging beside it, so close that the two almost touched, was another that looked very like it: the older one, as it had been before anyone rebuilt it. The view slid sideways across the gap, the way a hand slides from one page of an atlas to the next, and then went down.

It came down into a world that looked very like the one just left, only newer. The roads were a little too straight and the stone a little too clean, and the far edges of things had the unfinished look of a place that hasn’t been lived in long enough to wear. The people in it were still finding where everything went.drawn with a broader brush. The trees were a trunk and a round of leaf, the hills had soft corners, the stone had no grain, only the idea of one, and the colours were laid on thick and few, as if by someone with a great deal of world to cover and one afternoon to do it. Past a certain distance everything went to haze.

Stormwind went by underneath, all grey stone and flags, the living being confident in bulk. Then forest, then marsh, then a long cold stretch of country where the colours seemed chosen by someone who had given up on them. North, north, north, as far as the map would go, into Tirisfal Glades. In the Undercity beneath the ruins of Lordaeron stood a Forsaken in a cloth robe, holding his place in a small plain book with one finger.

His name was Percy Spamchop, and he was new at being dead. He had woken in Deathknell not long ago with a head that had been left out in the weather, and he was still working out what it could and couldn’t be trusted with. He knew how to speak, and how to write a tidy line. Of who he had been he had almost nothing: a handful of small things that came back one at a time and would not be hurried, and a blank around them that he preferred not to look at directly. He was unsure of most of it and had settled on dryness as the best way to be unsure in company.

He was a warlock, and a good deal more comfortable with shadow than with most people. He spoke as if he had been to a better school than the rest of him,though he had been well schooled, which was one of the things he could not account for,^{↑2 next↓} and he kept a ledger hand: small, upright, every letter finished before the next began.hand, small and upright, which did not change when he was frightened and which he therefore trusted more than his face.^{↑2 next↓} He liked fish and fishing and could not have said why. Two steps behind him, patient and literal, came Mezzlos, his voidwalker. Mezzlos disliked mages, and the Magic Quarter, and anything that smelled of either. He had never once disliked Percy, which Percy had noticed and not mentioned.

The trouble was the thread between where I am and how I got here, which had gone thin in the waking. He could walk a corridor and have it fold away behind him. So he wrote things down: the turns first, then the days, then everything else. It had started as a way of finding his way back. By now it was how the man walking and the man who had woken up stayed the same man.

The best of those days are kept elsewhere.He had already had two days worth keeping. There is the long afternoon in the Rogues’ Quarter, Asking the Way, and a fight in Pyrewood Village, where he died four times and stayed after he no longer had a reason to, Still in Pyrewood. Both can be read without this one.are told elsewhere. This is the day his book ran out.^{↑3 next↓}

—

The Guardian stood where it had always stood, which was the nicest thing that could be said of anything down here.and so was the one thing in the Undercity that Percy could find without writing it down.^{↑4 next↓} Percy stopped in front of it and waited, with Mezzlos two steps behind.

What are you looking for? said the Guardian, which was the only question it ever put to anyone.

“My instructor,” said Percy. “Richard Kerwin. In the Temple of the Damned.“

It pointed. There was no flourish in it. An arm, an open hand, a direction exact enough that Percy could feel the wasted hour settle on him like a coat.so exact that he did not trouble to write it down.^{↑5 next↓}

He followed it out through the ring and into the Magic Quarter. Mezzlos stopped at the threshold of the Temple and sat down, as he did on principle, and said that he would remember the way out. Percy went in alone.

Richard Kerwin did not look up at once. When he did, it was with the weary courtesy of a man who has taught the same lesson to a great many people who had it coming.

“Wise,” said Kerwin, “that you humble yourself before me.“

“Quite,” said Percy.

The lesson took as long as lessons do. When it was over he wrote four lines of it in the book, and found that he was writing them on the last clean page. He turned back through the rest, page after page of small upright hand, and then forward again to the blank leaf and the inside of the cover.

He looked at it for a time. He would need another book. It was not the kind of thing the Undercity sold.

—

On the way back, by the foot of the stairs in the Trade Quarter, where the accounts are kept, someone had pinned a notice to a post.

It was a good notice. It had a Forsaken woman on it, drawn with some tenderness, holding a thick book against her chest while a handful of pale green skulls drifted round her head like smoke. Across the top, in a black gothic hand:

STILL HEAR VOICES? GET BETTER ONES.

And under it: The Arcanum Journal. It remembers who you were, so you don’t have to.

The notice at the foot of the stairs in the Trade Quarter. [Picture description: A weathered notice pinned to a wooden post against green-lit stone, headed Still Hear Voices? Get Better Ones. A skeletal woman hugs a thick ornate book while pale green skulls drift around her head. Four lines surround her: Writes it down before it’s taken, Knows your name even if you don’t, Quiets the whispers, Free to begin. Small print runs along the foot of the sheet.]

Percy did not hear voices. He had checked, at intervals. But he read the rest of it, because he read everything now, and he read the small print first, a habit that had arrived with the hand and the fish and without any account of itself. Writes it down before it’s taken. Knows your name, even if you don’t. Quiets the whispers. Free to begin. And at the bottom, very small: Cost to be advised, then advised again.

He had no idea where he had learned to distrust a price that has not been said aloud. He distrusted it all the same.

Mezzlos came up beside him and read the word Arcanum, which was printed on it four times. “That is a mage’s word,” he said.

“It is a book,” said Percy.

“It is a mage’s book.“

Percy looked at the woman on the poster, with her arms round the thing and her eyes closed. Then he looked at his own book, one leaf from its end, and the days in it that he had worked out for himself how to keep. It held what he wrote and nothing that he had not. ^↑6A book that remembered who you were, and did it before it was taken: he wanted that rather badly, and he knew it, and he had stopped pretending otherwise somewhere around Knows your name.

He took the notice down, folded it in four, and put it in his sleeve.

“I should like one of those,” he said.

“It is a mage’s book,” said Mezzlos.

“Then we shall keep it away from mages.“

Mezzlos said nothing in a way that carried, and followed him up the stairs.