It wasn’t Ludtaht Ra or the governor’s palace at Soth Szofl, but the place his new keepers called “under the hill” held charms Pearl had never envisioned, even with his Meeric sight.
The room where he’d woken had been a tiny part of the domain of the Permanence—this, of course, was not precisely the name by which they called themselves. It was more a translation of how it sounded in his head. And the name they gave themselves wasn’t a name they spoke. Their thoughts came to him in a manner reminiscent of the Meeric flow, but was something else, as though they didn’t use words in their heads, but pictures. And Pearl was quite good at pictures.
Where he’d woken had been a quiet chamber designed to facilitate his healing, as his sleep had also been designed to achieve. Once he’d awakened, they gave him another, grander room where he was free to pursue what he liked. Like the room where he’d lain sleeping, lights seemed to float there like fireflies, sparkling bits of pink instead of gold illuminating the vaulted chamber.
Anything that came into his head was provided here, as if they’d anticipated every whim that might ever come to him—drawing utensils and fine silk paper by the ream, three-dimensional puzzles made of pure gemstones, scrying crystals…and books.
Pearl had never imagined there could be so many books. He’d never read one before, but after discovering what written words looked like when he’d spoken them onto his paper at Ludtaht Ra, he’d longed to read one. And here in Pearl’s hall was an endless library. Though things seemed to appear in this room as if conjured from his thoughts without him having to actually expend the energy of conjuring, they were not new books. The ancient texts bound in thick leather and embossed in real gold smelled of must and age, and of the chemical breakdown of ink and paper over time that Pearl recognized as the same sort of decay that would one day lead these elements to their own renaissance, like any living creature.
Each book he touched brought with it more than just the words within, which were marvelous in and of themselves, but also spoke to him of those who’d read them before, of the times in which they were written, and of the ephemeral lives of their authors. Some he recognized had been written by Meeric hands—or Meeric tongues—and there were treatises from both Meer and men on the nature of Meerity and divinity, speculations on the origins of each, and numerous Meeric histories. Some grand and noble, others so dark and reprehensible they filled him with dismay. He had to put these aside, afraid the words would get into his head as Ra’s madness had.
The Permanence seemed to have no particular preference as to what he did with his time, insisting they sought only his wellbeing, but Pearl had experience enough with various kinds of folk to know that no one gave anything to him without wanting something in return. He managed, however, to keep such thoughts to himself once he’d determined how they read him. It was the meandering thoughts that rose to the surface they divined, the same way he’d picked a vetma from the chaos of petitioners’ loud thoughts as they’d bubbled upward, and the same way the Meeric flow itself carried the images from the blood of other Meer. Currents and obstructions in the stream of knowledge pushed things temporarily out of the greater flow and into the conscious path of the one meditating upon it.
Through the same method, he determined that not everything the Permanence told him was entirely true. The woman he’d met first had called herself the Caretaker, and he’d since met the Host, the Recordkeeper, the Chamberlain and a number of others all identified by their roles within the hidden realm. These roles, however, were only what they wished to convey—roles, in essence, at which they were playing, like pantomimes on a stage. He hadn’t guessed why they wished to convince him these roles were their true selves, but the roles weren’t exactly lies, either.
The Caretaker, he soon divined, was not a caretaker in the sense of a nurse or one who tended to the needs of the realm and its inhabitants as she’d implied; rather, she was a sentinel whose duty it was to keep Pearl in her sights. He didn’t wish to go so far as to imagine she was a guard over him and that he was her prisoner, but the implication was decidedly there. As long as he harbored no thoughts of attempting to leave, she seemed content to leave him to his own devices.
When he asked after Ume, though, he got the definite impression this was dangerous territory, and he left off asking after the first few times. He had to be content with the Caretaker’s thin-lipped assurances that Ume hadn’t been harmed and that she’d left Pearl here of her own choosing. The fact that Ume had brought him here herself and abandoned him under the hill made him melancholy, and he put her out of his head. It had been a lovely dream to believe someone in the world cared for him as a mother would, but Pearl had long known that such a life was not to be his.
He focused instead on the knowledge he was absorbing from his books and mathematical puzzles. This seemed to please his keepers, and that, it seemed, was all Pearl was meant for. But for the time being, he stayed away from his drawings, despite the whisperings of images that tugged at him like tentacles of sticky mist. He had no wish to see what had become of MeerRa.