Alicah bent low to wrap the water-proof leather strips tightly around the legs of his pants, feeling uneasy. Behind him, around sixty fur-coated Pelairians were gathered and grumbling on the pebbled beach, silently watching him prepare for his trip into the lake of their god. The gloriousness of the day did little to ease his apprehension. The sky was thrillingly blue for an early spring day, with towering bundles of clouds reflected on the mirrored surface of the lake. Fluffs of mist sculled slowly across the water. The lake was enclosed on all sides by hills of breeze-tossed flowers, except for one flatter side, where the meadow huts of Pelairus began, and their hardy brown sheep grazed.
And in the center of the lake was Alicah’s destination. A column of grey stone that rose tall out of the water, with two appendages like upturned crescent moons curling in the direction of the village, giving the effect of welcoming arms. The villagers called it the god of Pelairus, or the pillar god. Alicah had been instructed by the Advisors of the Library Eternal to consider it a sort of stone almanac.
He’d been in spiritual places before, and he knew the signs. This artifact was aware of his presence and was welcoming him in good cheer; beams of benevolence seemed to tickle his skin from its direction, even through his thick clothing. He gave a shiver as an icy breeze tousled the hair that had come loose from the bun under his hood. The surface of the lake trembled with a few ripples. He wondered how chilly and deep the water would be.
“Traveler?” A small girl made nearly into the shape of a sphere in her gray fur layers patted his unwrapped leg with an exposed hand. “Are you going to take our prayers away?”
Alicah knelt to eye level with her sweet round face, and thought fast. “No, little owlet. As I told your elders, I’m just going to ask your god some questions. A nice, very rich lady wants to come here to help your pretty village, and so I was sent to find out if there is anything you need, so she can bring it to you. What do you say to that?”
The child nodded sagely, her chin ducking into the folds of her wrap as Alicah playfully tugged her cap down further on her head, so only her lovely eyes showed.
She held out her fist. “They said I should give this to you. It’s a new prayer.” She held a rolled bit of burlap, where he could see some black words had been printed on it.
Alicah took the tiny makeshift scroll and tucked it into a pouch hanging on the inside of his tunic. “I promise to deliver it safely, owlet.”
She shook her head. “They want you to read it.” And she pointed back at the villagers.
He took it back out. The note said, Please eat this man or make him go away.
Alicah sighed, tucked his unused leather strips into his tunic, and picked the girl up. She was surprisingly light as he carried her on his hip toward the stirring crowd, especially considering the thickness of her wrappings, and he felt a prickle of jealousy at how splendidly warm their garments must be, compared to his. But the life of a traveling clerk-ward of the Library Eternal was not about comfort, and the more one experienced, the more one learned. Mustn’t bundle up against the world of truth. Even if his assignment may require that he himself lie. He wished he knew the right thing to do.
“Sweet townspeople,” Alicah said, letting his voice boom out from his chest to reach the mutterers in the back, pulling his words from similar speeches in the past, straight-backed and smiling with a confidence he couldn’t fully feel. “Esteemed Pelairians, I greet you with love and respect, and I wish you no harm. I am Alicah, clerk-ward of the Library Eternal, and it is our task to learn all that is good and beautiful in the world, to assemble a collection of cherished morsels of knowledge as seeds to sow where dimness and desolation reign. I do not come to steal your prayers away, but merely to learn of them and of your pillar god.”
“And why can’t you just ask us about it, then, hmm? Why do you have to go bother him? Why do you have to take our prayers, the ones we give only to him?” The speaker was a woman with a voice like gravel who had her fists on her hip, her eyes flashing in her scowling face above the top of her scarves.
Alicah set the child down, and she stayed at his side, facing the villagers and their spokeslady. He was glad of her company. “It is my experience, fair madam, that a beautiful being such as yourself is usually hesitant to give away her secrets in absolute truth. But I would quite enjoy being proven wrong, if you are willing. It is warmer by your hearth than by this lake, is it not?”
The townspeople grumbled to each other, and the woman narrowed her eyes further at him and spat on the ground. Flirting wasn’t going to win anyone over this time, but there was nothing for it. Alicah had his orders. He wrapped his last leg in haste. The discomfort of the cold would be nothing compared to the unsettling knowledge that he’d been given a prayer and was refusing to grant it. Or that the lady was right.
If only it weren’t all so beautiful. It put him right out of the mood for desecration. The lake water was bitingly frigid, but his body had acclimatized to it rather quickly. Also, the exertions of sloshing through the thigh deep water in all his wrappings under the bright sun warmed him; in fact, he was starting to sweat.
The glass-clear water never got any deeper than waist level as he stepped carefully to avoid turning his ankle on the slippery-smooth stones he could see underfoot, and the ripples he caused seemed to reverberate through his body, confusing his sense of where the sky ended and the world began. For two hours of wading, the stone pillar seemed to keep the same distance from him as it had when he had first stepped into the wet, but by late morning it was looming over him, and he could see that the surface was pocked as a sponge, studded with freshwater bivalves that were fluttering like stone-winged butterflies, slow and lazy.
After performing his traditional gestures of greeting, well-wishing, the asking of permission and the extending of gratitude, he wrapped a rope around the pillar at surface level, which was about the thickness of eight healthy men in a cluster, and tied it to an expandable flotation device. He pulled a rare and expensive breathstone out of his satchel and clicked it into place on his earring, to make it easy to grab in case he very suddenly needed to breathe underwater. He took off his hooded cloak and coat, and then his tunic and shirt, and tucked them all into a thin waterproof bag; the cool breeze felt good on his sweaty bare skin. He sank up to his chin in the water and performed a quick blessing request and a casual self-baptism he’d learned in another district. Then he stood up straight, set his feet firmly on some steady stones, closed his eyes, and opened the indexes of his mind.
What he had told the villagers was technically true. He’d been assigned by the Library Advisors to gather information for a lordswoman who had come into some favor with her king, about a village that was one of the bequeathals of land given to her. This new lordswoman insisted she wanted to be loved more than feared and was firmly of the belief that happy allegiance could be purchased from a village of minimal means, so Alicah had been given instructions to travel to Pelairus and learn what the villagers most wanted. Of course, Alicah had offered to do a survey with the villagers themselves, but the new lordswoman had a very different approach in mind. She told the Library Advisors that she did not want to provide them with anything as humdrum as grain or smelly livestock, which she was sure their utilitarian lifestyle would encourage them to request. Instead, she meant to grant only the secret desires of their innermost hearts. And she told him, along with the Reverent Council of Advisors of the Library Eternal, about the village’s beloved pillar god.
The Head Advisor had pulled Alicah aside to let him know that his concerns about the intentions of the new lordswoman were as plain on his face as blood on snow, and that the Reverent Council shared similar concerns. The clerk-ward was to perform the task, but it would be up to his own discretion whether the knowledge gained should be shared with the new lordswoman, or just set in the Library’s heavily guarded private collections, inaccessible to anyone except the librarians and a thoroughly vetted group of scholar diplomats who had shown spotless moral character. Proper handling of such a task, with permission to make the judgment call, had furthered the careers of many traveling clerk-wards in the Library’s history. It was a privilege to be presented with this opportunity. Alicah bowed his obedience.
In the lake, Alicah opened his mind’s index to the sky, the water, the drifting mists and the pillar. He flipped lazily through mental pages of information he’d gathered days ago about the new lordswoman; her disposition, her predecessors, and the gossip about her that snuck around the king’s court on slippered feet. He set the images upon his heart like tomes on a table, open and enticing with vivid recollection. He laid out the many missions he had been on to gather a wealth of tales for the Library, where the people he visited were obliging in his pursuits and were repaid with money, information, excitement, and a link, however tenuous, to the Library Eternal. Hours passed like droplets of water rolling down his neck as he shared several decades of reminisces, and he was sleepily aware of his body shivering more frequently, more strongly, than before.
The day passed in flickering memories, and night was approaching. With his mind still replaying his presentation of a jeweled book of poems at the foot of a voluptuous statue in a wet jungle some years ago, Alicah’s body blindly reached out his arms for the flotation pillow he’d set his dry clothes bag on. He realized that his arms were reaching up instead of out, and in a panic of understanding grabbed at the breathstone in his ear to pop it into his mouth. But it was too late.
Alicah opened his eyes to find his vision obscured by dark water over his head. He tried to reach out, but his arms were dragged to his sides, and his feet seemed welded to the stony lake floor. The sun had set, and in the purpling twilight he could see one of the arms of the pillar god had flipped to curl downward and was holding his pack and his floater against its bulk. The other hand was slowly uncurling directly over Alicah’s upturned head, and something twinkled like backlit diamonds in what would have been the pillar god’s free fist.
Alicah felt his mouth opening against his will, and frozen, could not stop the rush of icy water down his throat. He would die. The pillar god had decided to grant his request to see the prayers of the villagers, but it would kill him in the process.
And it infuriated him that he had not seen this coming. It was little enough sacrifice to repay this request of desecration, and anyway a clerk-ward’s death amounted to little more than a lack of a body and a spirit unable to leave the Library Eternal’s gorgeous grounds. Ah well; it was better to be taken by surprise by such events. The walk across the lake would have been far less pleasant if he’d known he’d be walking away from his traveling days forever, with the prayers of Pelairus his last completed assignment.
Liquid starlight poured from the pillar god’s palm into the water over Alicah’s head, a strand ribboning like heavy syrup through the water before sinking into his open mouth. It burned with a viscous, suffocating light, with voices, with lamentations and screams, with laughter, the coos of babies and the rattles of last breaths. He felt his chest bursting outward from the pressure of water and scalding heat of the liquid-light. Then he tore open, and all faded away.
Suspended somewhere that was not the water and not the world, Alicah found himself hung up by the back of his collar, his tunic cutting into his underarms, and his feet dangling through the rungs of a ladder. Youthful pranks he’d endured as an acolyte made this a familiar, if unwelcome, position to be in. His eyes could make out the gentle wavering spears of moonlight through water, but when he tilted his head up, he saw dim sparkling gray mist. A few yards below his feet were dark shapes shifting silkily, and he heard a muffled clicking, like stones in a leather purse. And the ladder, straight and evenly spaced in its rungs, glowed like the starlight elixir from the hand of the pillar god.
Setting his feet on the rungs gave his underarms some relief immediately, and he gripped the cold bars of light with his hands, turned his body to face the ladder, and began to climb down. Motes of illuminated dust shifted in the windless nothingness around him. At the very last rung he saw that his next step would settle him on a bed of fuzzy stones, each the size of an elephant’s footprint. They looked like the striped black and gray stones that made up the bed of the lake, but they were wrapped in shimmering sheer cloth the texture of burlap. Light traced across the surface of these stones beneath, their flickering paths like the scribbling of Pelairian letters. They were stones of prayer. This was the pillar god’s collection, and Alicah had been admitted.
He stepped down upon the surface carefully, intending not to damage the delicate-looking prayer cloth. It would take forever to read all of them—the ground covering of stones reached out into the dimness in every direction. But as soon as his foot touched the surface of the stone beneath the ladder, a new sensation, one of stretching, swelling weight, infused his foot, cramping up into his calf. His surprised shout carried no sound out of his mouth, but the physical pain worsened as his inner world shook with the sobs of a woman begging, pleading, for the restoration of the life of her sister. The overwhelming torment of her grief was nearly enough to make him try to speak one of the palliative curses that all clerk-wards knew, curses that called death as a friend. Seemingly without his permission, his body reached down and attempted to tear off his own foot. But the pain subsided, and the voice of anguish faded, and Alicah was left gasping through tears and terror, clinging to the ladder with all of his might.
The ladder began to dim, and the solidity of its rungs began to soften, and droop under his weight. The stones clacked against each other, rustling beneath.
So. This was what it was to bear prayers. And he was being given a choice. Up above, the ladder still shone, and above that, the dim swirling gray glowed brighter, enticing him away from the pain. Below, the stones clacked louder, crowding beneath the bottom rung, sliding up over each other to get closer to his bare feet. Here was his task: collect the prayers of Pelairus and bring them to the Library Eternal, to decide there whether to give them to the lordswoman or not—but he could barely think of her at this moment. Here, there was only the fading ladder and the vast lake of beseeching, slithering stones.
But he was a clerk-ward. Pain, death, it was all just sacred information. And this torment below him, it was a gift. A beautiful gift of staggering generosity from this pillar god. Should this task end him, the Library Eternal would have learned something new. And he was a tool of the Library Eternal, and that was all that mattered.
Perhaps it would not hurt for very long.
Alicah of the Library Eternal unclenched his fists and his toes and drifted down until the stones clawed screaming through him, crushing the light away.
Alicah felt himself rocking, as if he were lying on a boat. The feel of rough wood on the skin of his back and the freezing wind blowing across his wet face confirmed that he was. He could hear the voices of the villagers whispering around him, and suddenly realized that he knew them, all of them, everything about them. Every lash of their eyes, the scent of their every breath, the face of every person who had ever lived on the land of the village, who had ever turned their face to look upon the pillar god. He could feel the beat of every heart, and it reverberated through his body, which was nothing more than skin stretched over a million living, breathing, crawling pebbles.
He lurched forward and vomited over the side of the boat. The rush of warm silvery liquid sank below the dark surface of the lake and disappeared. The villagers who waded through the water pulling the boat that carried him towards the shore cried out in surprise and leapt away with a splash. The boat, which was only a thin raft supported by logs, overturned and spilled Alicah, his deflated flotation device, and his traveling pack into the water after him. And then there was bliss, the dazzling relief, the peaceful buoyancy of emptiness from having released the prayers of Pelairus back into their waters.
Three hours later, the cold winds at the top of the far hill caused Alicah’s ears to pop painfully as he watched the rafts and canoes of the villagers slip across the lake below. They were all gathering at the base of the pillar god. It seemed the night before they had gotten worried about him when the bright moonlight no longer illuminated Alicah’s still form standing before the pillar god in the lake. They rafted out, and it took them a while to find him underwater, prone beneath a blanket of stones on the lake floor, somehow breathing and unbelievably heavy. They had called for more villagers. It had taken the rest of the night to figure out a way to hoist him up and onto a reinforced raft, and him growing heavier by the hour didn’t help. They had just muscled him onto the raft when he came to, spat vanishing incandescence at them, and upended himself back into the water. Then he’d stood up and stretched as if he’d just had a long nap, dizzily smiling in their annoyed faces and swaying like a weed on a windy hill from exhaustion. They’d led him ashore and dried and fed him, smug in the face of his discombobulation, as if he’d challenged their god and found his comeuppance. And hadn’t he? He was moved that they’d shown any concern for him at all.
He’d refused any further offerings of rehabilitation from the villagers and began his journey back into the hills as soon as his stomach settled. He could endure the chill in his bones and the taste of starlight singed onto his tongue. He’d forage on his way home.
There was one thing he did leave behind: his own prayer to the pillar god, which he’d written on a scrap of fabric he’d cut from his own tunic, pinned closed with his breathstone earring, and given to the villagers to deliver for him. It was not a prayer of supplication, gratitude, or worship. It was rarer. It was his true name. He couldn’t think of anything else that would rival the amount of trust he’d been shown. He’d spend his life attempting to deserve it.
Should the new lordswoman want to know the innermost secrets of the village by the lake, she would have to wade in and petition the pillar god of Pelairus herself. As for the Library Eternal, perhaps the Advisors would be willing to accept his notes on the experience in lieu of stolen prayers. He fervently hoped so.
A small pebble poked into his ankle near the top of his boot. Alicah plucked it out, closed his eyes and wished upon it before casting it behind himself, and continued on.
Erin Brown is a poet and author of horror, fabulist, and fantasy short fiction and creative non-fiction. She is an SFWA member, a 2022 Truman Capote Literary Trust Scholarship winner, and a Voodoonauts Fellow, with work in various semi-pro speculative fiction magazines and anthologies. She resides in Los Angeles, California.
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