In a disused room in one of the lower levels of the Broken Spear (40.06) lies a book bound in green leather within a pile of gnollish garbage. Time and gnolls have not treated it well so most pages are illegible but a few can be made out, such as these:
I always wanted a book just like this one to write my secrets in. When I found it in uncle’s chest after he turned blue and died I knew it was just the book to write secrets in, but not all of them. Lizzy told me that I must never write down the true names of the days nor the language of the leaves and when I asked her how I was supposed to write that down she just gave me one of her looks like the one that she gave me when the Alehvaleh came and she told me she would throw me in the black pit if I ever told. I can write about the Beautiful Circles and the Alley Games but never how to do them. And there are the things that I call the secrets of the secrets of the secrets, but I only think about them when I close my eyes and put my hands tight over my mouth so that I won’t whisper them so I would never write those and I don’t have long enough fingernails to write them down in any case. I remember so many secrets but one is from a few years ago when Lizzy didn’t know I was listening to her and she talked to the other one about how I was talking to myself without using any words but I was using words, or at least I was trying to, the people with the faces that moved around used to come and look at me in my cradle and talk with me about their home where the grass rises higher than trees so that it sings when the wind blows through it on its way to the white hills above the moon and I tried to talk to them but the words never came out quite right like when you try to talk when you’re swimming. I tried to do that once in the lake that Lizzy took me to and when she was dancing with the people who came out of the lake I tried to swim and talk to the long mice but it was hard to do that. One day I tried to go back to that lake, it was so strange. That day I walked a new way and the stream I followed lead me into a new country and I caught my dress on thorns because it was dark and after a time there was no more stream, but the trees surrounded where he stream should have been like a tunnel. And I went on and on under the dark trees and at last I came to some brambles and they scratched so that when I had finally gotten through them my skin stung all over. When I finally got through them I came out crying on the top of a hill and I saw that I was now much higher than I thought because I could see black trees surrounding it like those nasty people in the city and the trees had a shape that was different from the ones I had seen before. But up on the hill there were stones, big ugly stones everywhere. They looked like eggs that had fallen from a big bird and they went on and on, all the way to the trees, a long long way and everything had a dark kadr over it so that it was hard to see. Then I walked out into the stones and some were like bugbears putting out their tongues and their arms so that I would stay with them in the stone forever and others were like creeping dwarves with wide smiles that lied and others were like the ceremony that Lizzy told me not to do and others were like dead people. But I kept on walking and walking and I sang the green song that Lizzy had taught me, the ones whose words should never be spoken, only sung, so that I wouldn’t feel scared anymore and I went up to one of the ones that was like a crying orc and I kissed it so that it wouldn’t be sad and after a while I came to one stone, bigger than any of them, great and tall and white like the color of my teeth. And I climbed up and sat down on it and I felt like I had come such a long way like I was on the other side of the Edge of the World were Lizzy had taken me so that I could see the funny jumping elephants or in one of the other places that I had read about in uncle’s books before he turned blue like the one about the king who turned all of his people into flowers or across the ocean in one of those lands that nobody had ever heard about. And I looked down at the smaller rocks that lay all around the big rock that I was sitting on and they seemed to make shapes, circles inside circles, inside circles and I started spinning so that I could move like the rocks did in their circles so that…
Connection:
Hooks:
- What is the book doing in The Broken Spear?
- What is the girl talking about?