“There aren’t,” Veck said mysteriously.

  “Who wrote them all, sir? Have you read them all?”

  “Read?” A laugh, or a cough? Nodding me to join him, he pulled out a leather-bound tome, and leafed through. Every page was blank. Yet there was a title tooled on the spine, in the magic language.

  “Kneegu,” I pronounced.

  “It means ‘book’, Pedino. The title will become more specific once the book starts to fill up.” He blew dust from the volume before replacing it. “The dust is words, and words are dust. The dust of time seeds these books and slowly fills them one by one. It records the life of the kingdom: births and deaths, harvests, floods, simple events and strange events. This is a part of magic which I myself still don’t properly understand. Everything that has been is here somewhere. Here is everything-and nothing. All, in its essence, is dust.” He gestured. “Do you mark how the books become smaller and smaller towards that furthest, topmost shelf of all? Up there are books so tiny they are indecipherable even with a glass. I believe those contain records of earlier wars. When our present war is finally lost or won, all the big books in this Bibliotek will collapse into one single book the size of a thumbnail, just like one of those.” “Earlier wars, sir? We’ve never fought anyone else.”

  “Wars in earlier ages of the world, boy. During previous cycles of existence. Do you imagine that this is the first such cycle? Or that it will be the last?”

  “If Bellogard and Chorny could reach stalemate.”

  “Pah! That’s impossible. A vain dream; which will destroy the dreamer.”

  “What is this room, sir? How did it come to exist?”

  “Perhaps it has to exist. The whole of the kingdom is reflected here, as surely as souls diffuse outward. I’ve always been acquainted with it, since the start of existence itself. It does change-despite the dust, or because of the dust. More books fill up slowly. More dust settles out of thin air.”

  “Can you actually remember the start of existence?” I asked.

  “No. When I began to exist, and knew that I existed, my mind already contained memories; just as Bellogard itself had a history of sorts. As witness the Spomenik Monument or the ruins on Razval Rock. You, of course, were born to parents subsequently. All of your memories are genuine.”

  “Those previous cycles, sir: what do you suppose happened during them?”

  “Why, I think that a white city fought a black city. Sometimes the white palace won, and sometimes the black. Whether those cities were named Bellogard and Chorny, I’ve no idea.”

  “Why should they fight over and over again?”

  “They do not necessarily fight. An ideal fights an ideal yet each time the embodiment is new. Perhaps. And perhaps one cycle does influence the next.”

  “But why fight?”

  “That’s how the world is powered, as a stream powers a water-wheel. Without the war there would be no energy to sustain existence. That is why there can never-wust never-be stalemate; or the world would become crippled, dim, and sick, stale as a month-old muffin.

  “What wheel does the stream of war power? Why, it powers this fine city of ours and the whole realm. Thousands of human lives-loves, hopes, creations-are the flour which is ground out by that wheel from the grain of time. Thousands of beasts and birds and buildings, villages and vines and fields, ox-carts and fishing boats: those are the bread from that flour. We are at war so that the kingdom can live. Fruitfully, busily, richly.” He touched another book with his finger. “Before the dust comes again.”

  We adjourned to the bishop’s apartment, where he began to teach me diagonal magic; for when a pawn- squire attacks, he does so crosswise.

  On other days old Beno coached me in the magical language. I’ve already mentioned one potent phrase and a stray word or two, and I don’t intend to utter many more. I might burn a hole in your ears!

  Some, I can’t help but mention. A lot of our place names were actually words in the magic language, sometimes altered a bit by popular usage. Thus: the Dolina valley, the Vodopad waterfall, the Samostan, our own river Rehka. many such names. I hadn’t realized this till Beno explained, but this made-if you’ll forgive the pun-sound sense. If our kingdom was sustained by the magical war, magic place names were the nails by which parts of the world were fastened into place.

  On other days Prince Ruk taught me straightforward magic, the normal technique for a pawn-squire. A prince could take many magic steps at once, a pawn only one. Still, a squire in the right place might prove as devastating as a prince.

  Ruk was high, handsome, and haughty, with wavy blond hair and ice-blue eyes. He was a tower of strength and ungrudging in his training of me, yet with him I never felt the sense of zany imagination that I did with Veck. Veck showed me how to skip mentally aslant and view the world askew; with Ruk there was always the blunt, unswerving thrust of power. Could a squire forget that Ruk had once destroyed his own squire by thrusting through his body?

  Time flashed by. I grew fully familiar with palace ways, and accustomed to what passed for peace; no magical event had occurred since I arrived.

  The king continued to absorb himself in art, conjuring up and imprisoning weirdly warped scenes within bubbles upon which he set a seal of permanence. The queen commissioned new stained-glass windows and glass garments, and occasionally considered her eidolons. The four princesses grew taller and more womanly, though still as mischievous. About once a month Margarita made my body sing in tune with hers.

  A year was soon up, then before I knew it, two. At last I was put through my paces before the queen. Alyitsa sang up her eidolons and I moved amidst them. Veck partnered me in a mock magical attack upon Prince Ruk. Finally I defended the queen herself against a joint attack by Veck and Ruk. Having passed all the tests, I transferred my few belongings to a higher room with a vista across palace roofs and town beyond.

  A week later Veck summoned me to the Bibliotek and told me that I had Her Majesty’s permission to go home for a fortnight. Whilst in town, though, I must do a service for the queen. I must acquaint myself by night with the Seveno district; then on the tenth night I should visit the Zupsko Tavern. An agent of Bishop Slon would contact me and point out a suspected spy. From there on I should use my initiative, to misinform the spy or trap him into revealing information.

  “Such as what?” I asked. “Misinform how?”

  “That’s up to you, Pedino. If I guide you, you’ll merely be a puppet acting out a role.”

  “If Bishop Slon believes this person’s a spy, why doesn’t he take him on? I mean, Slon’s much more powerful than me.” In the past two years I had grown taller and filled out, yet I was still only a youth- to be pitted against a spy. I had pawnmagic on my side, but the spy had expertise.

  Was this a final test? Was the spy only a pretend one, who would report back to Slon on how I acquitted myself? I discarded this idea. I had to behave as though the suspect was an actual spy.

  Veck smiled faintly. Or did he wince? “Bishop Slon is too powerful to deal with a possible spy. He’s too consequential. He can’t be seen haunting Seveno. A squire can.” Veck produced a dagger from under his dalmatic. “For you, from the queen. Your own magical dagger, at last.” (I had been loaned a blade for training, and for the tests.)

  I weighed the weapon in my hand. I spoke a magic word and blue fire sparkled.

  “It has ordinary uses, too, in brawls and tight corners,” Veck reminded me.

  “Am I supposed to. kill this spy? If he is a spy.”

  “You must make your own mind up. Sharpen your instincts.”

  “A spy might think to sharpen his wits on my ribs.” I remembered the queen saying that spies did not assassinate. Maybe not by habit. What if a dagger-fumbling squire challenged or tempted a spy?

  The queen surely wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice me so lightly, to so little advantage? Unless. my own humble manoeuvres masked some fiercer move against Chorny by herself or Ruk or Brant.

  Veck touched his cheek-patch as though he had just felt the prick of a poniard.

  “Don’t be nervous,” he said. “No harm will come to you. Be insouciant and easy; that’s the best way to behave. You’re a squire on holiday. Wear ordinary clothes, incognito. Enjoy yourself. Learn to drink.

  Be a little wicked. Margarita must have shown you how.”

  I believe I blushed.

  The bishop trailed his index finger through dust and anointed me upon the brow.

  I sneezed. Not because I had got some dust up my nostrils, but because of the thought of Margarita, and of other Margaritas who might haunt Seveno by night. Sudden strong sexual thoughts sometimes made me sneeze explosively. This sneeze raised dust from half a shelf of books. Veck wafted it gently away from us.

  “Maybe you just sank a boat on Lake Riboo,” he joked. “Or caused an avalanche down Mount Planina.”

  Did Isgalt, at this stage, possess much by way of a soul? Was there something special which marked her out from her cousins? Her chums, confidantes, and competitors. Perhaps!

  The four royal princesses-Isgalt, Ysa, Aseult, and Izold-were lovely, wilful, naughty creatures who had flitted about the palace giggling and tinkling like exotic crystalline birds, like enchantress sprites from some woodcutter’s tale of the Shooma Forest.

  As they matured they grew more distinct. Isgalt was wistful; Ysa was fiery and short-tempered; Aseult, cheerful and capricious, impulsive; Izold, cunning and capable of cruelty.

  Originally they had seemed more like four humours of the same person, than independent individuals. One was at a loss on her own. The others couldn’t bear any of their number to be separated, or secretive, for too long. Their favourite game of al -which stimulated the most urgent emotional tension, as well as the sweetest, sharpest release-was hide-and-seek. The hectic concealments and chases through all the courts and corridors and little gardens were a physical analogy of what went on constantly in the cousins’ minds: a braid of hidings and confidings, conspiracies and heart-barings, fleeting quarrels and assuagements. Woe betide any kitchen boys or junior flunkies foolish enough to be lured into choosing sides in a prank, dazzled or charmed by one or other of the cousins. Their patroness would soon enough desert them, letting the outsider fend for himself against three peeved princesses.

  Yet Isgalt did seem genuinely to be drawing apart from her cousins, becoming her own person, resisting teasing, blandishment, and cloying reconciliation. Was the reason simply her native wistfulness? Was she losing ground against their ardour, buoyancy, and clever calculation? Or was she rising above the kittenish humours of the others?

  On the eve of my holiday I met Isgalt loitering alone in the Turquoise Gallery. This gallery was tiled in blue, and the domed ceiling was painted sky-blue; the paint had flaked, exposing white cloud shapes. The skylight was a giant eye with a tiny pupil and huge blue iris. The wooden frame formed eyelids. A few hanging cobwebs imitated eyelashes.

  Display stands resembling large wooden eggcups held various bubbles blown and fixed by King Karol. Within, lakes curved into waterfalls and hills rolled upward to become thunderclouds. One ’scape always caught my attention. It was a view of Bellogard from Izlozba Hill to the north. However, the palace and town buildings were stretching up into the sky as though roofs and walls were made of baker’s dough; of glue which an invisible foot had just trodden in. Withdrawing, the offending foot pulled the substance of the city after it, attenuating every edifice into dissolving blobs and threads. A divination of our apocalypse, this? Or merely a random fancy on the king’s part? It was this bubble which Isgalt was contemplating.

  “Squire Pedino! You surprised me.”

  “Apologies, Princess!” Something in her look, which was haunted and wide-eyed, impelled me to add, “Does that bubble disturb you?”

  “Death disturbs me.” She tapped the bubble with silvered fingernails. “Can Bellogard dissolve and disappear like this?”

  “Ah, once you have confronted death,” I said brightly, “then you are truly alive, and human. What does a dog know of death? Or a bird, or a horse?”

  She smiled. “So you view my cousins and myself as fillies? Or is it peahens, or bitches?”

  “Peahens are dowdy,” I protested. “That narrows the field! Bitches or fillies.”

  To distract her I quoted something which Veck had said. “Our world is a fluctuation in a void, Princess. Out of nothing it comes. Back into nothing it goes again. In the interval we exist. Subsequently another world appears.”

  She surprised me by an earnest reply. “Yet our actions determine the length of that interval, do they not?”

  “Aye, they do, I suppose. If we try to prolong the interval merely by procrastination...”

  “The elastic sinews of the world grow slack? As in this bubble here?”

  “I never thought of that! This bubble might warn of slackness, eh? You could be right. Our city losing shape and form. In a way that’s worse than the death of dust.”

  “Than what?”

  “Have you ever hidden in the Bibliotek?” I asked on impulse.

  “That awful dirty place! Certainly not. Princesses would soil their dresses there.” Her smile was wry and mocking. Yet if she was mocking me, I felt that she was mocking herself more. “Hmm, why shouldn’t I soil my dress?” (She was wearing a cloth of embroidered Madonna lilies hung with glass medallions.) “And my hair, and face, and hands?”

  She touched her hair which was yellow, ringleted. She touched her soft downy cheeks as though for the first time she felt her own existence. She licked her rose-petal lips. Tears moistened her blue eyes.

  To me, now somewhat experienced in Margarita’s caresses, there was an innocence to Isgalt’s touching of herself; and also a sudden horrid knowledge. Isgalt was feeling the skull beneath the softness, the raw bleached canvas under the pastel picture.

  “Have you ever opened a book in the Bibliotek?” I asked recklessly.

  “A book? No. Why should I?”

  “Because. because she who would be queen must know the emptiness; so that the kingdom can be firm.”

  “Hmm, my cousin Izold would be a firmer queen than me. Hard, and clever.”

  “And cruel?” I dared to add.

  “Cruel as Chorny’s queen; possibly. Surely darkness should be opposed by light, not by darkness of a different calibre! Yet I can’t believe our own queen will ever fail.”

  “She’s weaker than Dama was.”

  “I would be weaker still.”

  “But kind. When the magic descends, maybe you could hold more than Alyitsa? Perhaps you could reverse Bellogard’s fortunes.”

  “So, Pedino, you’re a queen-maker as well as a squire?”

  “I’m sorry, I presume. My tongue runs away.”

  “No matter. Will you squire me to the Bibliotek? Will you show me those books of yours?”

  So I went with Isgalt to that dusty chamber, took down one of many volumes entitled Kneegu, and showed her its blank pages.

  “Here is the emptiness,” I said.

  “If I’m ever queen,” she replied, “I shall take a pen and illustrate these books. I shall fill their pages with beautiful pictures before the dust can fill them.”

  I had spoken oh so boldly—brashly—to Isgalt about the maturity which staring death in the face conveys; as if by virtue of witnessing attempted assassination at the Samostan and causing death myself at the Razval baths I was an expert.

  I had never confronted my own death.

  This was to happen as climax to my holiday in town.

  First, the holiday itself. For a long time I’d been observing Bellogard from the palace heights, diminished by distance. Suddenly the busy buzz of town life surrounded me again-markets and rushing river, chatter and errand-boys, tradesfolk, the whole motley-and all that had been no more than a tiny, slow spectacle was accelerated and doused with noise and smell and savour, with vigorous sensation. Bellogard still seemed strangely toy-like, as though I had shrunk and strolled into a dolls’ house, a dolls’ town. I had altered my perspectives.

  In my absence sister Drina had become a young lady. In doing so, she seemed to me to have exchanged one type of babyishness for another. She had adopted the more mature childishness of grooming herself for a suitor who would presently relieve her of responsibility for thinking, acting, working, or suffering any upsets.

  Perhaps this was my fault! Even, my crime. When I thought back to how I had tried to protect Drina from the likes of A. Mog (bearing in mind Margarita’s explanation) I realized the extent to which I must have oppressed my sister in many ways, robbed her of initiative, laid out a future course for her by which she would seek, as soon as possible, a brother-substitute.

  Boris Slad, now a trainee banker in his father’s counting house, was courting Drina; and my parents nodded glad approval at the prospective match, which shouldn’t occur for two more years. Dana Slad, fast becoming a belle and source of broken hearts, smiled upon Drina as a would-be sister-in-law. It puzzled me why the rich Slads should be so eager to ally themselves with a pipe-maker’s family. Then the halfcrown dropped. I was the reason. Boris would ally himself royally, by association. So I had doubly decided Drina’s destiny. This grieved me. Margarita might have bedded me at Slon’s request, but her hands were definitely independent agents.

  Viewed in another light, here was a further proof of how the power of life itself diffused outward from the palace, not in any obvious way such as by edicts, honours, patronage, or fashion-nor, alternatively, apprehension caused by dungeons or executioners!-but in the most fundamental, “existential” aspect.

  Back in the house on Chalk Street I felt snuggly at home amidst the aromas of tobacco only to the extent that an orphan lamb (so they say) is comforted by its dead mother’s fleece being roped upon a substitute ewe. The scent persuades, even if the touch is wrong. The familiarity of Bellogard, the pleasant regularity of life, made me feel awkward.

  It wasn’t merely to heed the queen’s instructions that I quickly took myself off to explore Seveno. Formerly that area of Bellogardian life had been a mystery to me. Now, in its very unfamiliarity, it seemed authentic and desirable-a zone where the town redeemed, rather than belittled, itself. That may have been why nominally decent townsfolk patronized the district under cover of darkness. They felt substantiated.