Whom the whole world doth magnify.'
'Yes!' Hanuman cried out as he crushed Danlo's hand in his hand. 'Yes – the poem, the poem!'
Through the count of five heartbeats, Danlo watched the warrior-poet's eyes fall through the colours of astonishment, elation, awe, and dread. There was an immense sadness about him as he lifted the needle away from Danlo's neck and lowered his knife. He told Danlo, 'You have said the poem perfectly. By the rules of my order, in a moment, you will be free to go.'
The warrior-poet stepped backward a few paces, all the while regarding both Hanuman and Danlo. He looked down at their bloody hands locked together. He slipped the needle back into his pocket, but he kept his hold on the knife. From the corridor behind him came the faint creaking of doors and muffled voices; he paid no attention to these sounds, instead concentrating on the strangled words that Hanuman was struggling to say:
'Why ... should ... he ... free ... us?'
'Because I must,' the warrior-poet said.
'But ... you ... contracted ... to ... kill ... me!'
'We did, and so you might suppose most people would be reluctant to make contracts with us poets for this reason. But the truth is, it has been a long time since we allowed a friend to take a friend's place. A long time. The last time was 212 years ago, at the temple on Jacaranda, before the Valerian Gates. And of the few who have asked to seek the moment of the possible, in all the time of my order, not one has ever completed the poem – until today.'
The warrior-poet looked long and deep at Danlo, who should have been exultant (and mystified) at his completion of the poem. But now Hanuman was coughing against his pain, coughing and struggling to breathe.
'May I retrieve the dart?' Danlo asked. 'So that he can ... sleep?'
'In a moment,' the warrior-poet said. 'There is still one more thing that Hanuman must witness, if we are to obey the ancient forms.'
'What ... thing?'
A harsh smile split the warrior-poet's face. 'A life has been paid for – haven't I told you this earlier?'
'Yes,' Danlo said, confused. 'Hanuman's uncles have paid you to put a knife into his brain.'
'No, that is not true. You misunderstand the nature of our contract. His uncles wanted Hanuman safely killed, from a distance. With poisons or viruses. An inexpensive death, an ignoble death without honour.'
'I still do not understand.'
'We've been searching for Hanuman this past year. We suspected that he had journeyed to Neverness, and then our informants confirmed this. They told us that the harijan were outraged over the death of the boy called Pedar. The names of Danlo wi Soli Ringess and Hanuman li Tosh were associated with this death.'
'And so the harijan also contracted to have Hanuman ... murdered?'
'Of course not. Warrior-poets would not accept contracts from harijan. Our only contract was with the Architects.'
'Then– '
'When we learned of Hanuman's involvement with Pedar's death, we saw that there might be cause to alter the contract. And so I was sent to Neverness.'
'But Hanuman had nothing to do with Pedar's death!'
At this, the warrior-poet pointed his knife at Hanuman and shook his head. 'In truth, I suspected from the first that he had everything to do with Pedar's unfortunate fall.'
'No! – what are you saying?' Danlo held Hanuman's hand tightly and turned to look at him. But, for the moment, Hanuman's face was pale and empty, and his gaze was turned inward upon his own pain.
'I suspected that Hanuman killed Pedar, but of course I couldn't know until I saw his face. And that is the first reason why I bribed that ugly librarian to let me enter this ugly building. So that I could get close enough to Hanuman to read his face.'
'But Hanuman ... could not have killed Pedar!'
'But he did kill him,' the warrior-poet said. 'He murdered him. Look at your friend's face! He hears our words, he understands. Have you learned anything of the cetics' art? The way each face always tells the truth? Read the tells, Young Danlo. No, not just the mouth, the way he bites his lip. Look at his eyes, the pattern of the pupils, dilating, then narrowing at each utterance of the word "murder". He murdered Pedar. Probably with some drug that made him slip on the stairs. He murdered Pedar to save your life. He murdered out of love for you. He had the will to murder in a noble cause – this I suspected when I interviewed the harijan elders. This I discovered when I bound him with acid wire and asked him if he had the courage to be a murderer. With his eyes he said, "yes"! A rare and noble being, this Hanuman li Tosh. And therefore worthy of a rare and noble death. The true death – it's a pity that he may never live his moment of the possible, once you've set him free.'
'Hanuman is not a murderer!' Danlo shouted. 'You are the murderer! You, with your contracts and your needles – your murdering knife!'
The warrior-poet did not dispute the last of Danlo's accusations, but only looked down at the long knife that he held lightly between his fingers.
'My contract,' he said softly.
At that moment, from behind the warrior-poet, the sound of voices floated through the corridor and into the stairwell. The warrior-poet turned, momentarily looking back over his shoulder. Danlo followed his gaze, looking into the darkness past the rows of cells to see a bald librarian and a white-robed novice walking their way. The librarian was an old man who moved in fits and jerks; his head was tilted close to the novice as if they had just finished a journey through shih space but the librarian still thought it seemly to monitor the novice's conversation. Something – perhaps it was Hanuman's moaning – caused the librarian to stop abruptly and jerk his head erect. He looked through the steam and the uneven light into the stairwell directly ahead of him. At the sight of a warrior-poet brandishing his killing knife, he clapped his hands to his face and cried out, 'Oh, no!' Then he grabbed the novice's arm, turned, and ran in the opposite direction toward the main body of the library. The sound of their footsteps echoed through the corridor for a moment, and then died.
'Now the librarians or their robots will come,' the warrior-poet said to Danlo. 'I haven't very long to fulfil my contract.'
'What do you mean?' Danlo quickly asked.
'A life has been paid for. The next few moments won't satisfy the Architects, but a contract is a contract.'
So saying, he stood with his feet slightly apart and stared straight ahead at Danlo. Then he turned the point of his knife toward his own face and smiled to himself.
'No ... do not!' Danlo said.
He started to move toward the warrior-poet, but then the warrior-poet plucked a violet killing needle from his robe and said, 'Please don't come any closer. Only one life has been paid for today, not two. Your moment may come sooner than you know.'
'My moment?'
In the warrior-poet's left hand, he kept the needle pointed at Danlo; in his right, he aimed the knife toward the centre of his beautiful eye. 'I've said that the first reason I entered the library today was to behold your friend's glorious face. This is true. But there was another reason – we poets always love multiple missions. After I was through with Hanuman, I would have come for you next, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. Not to kill, at least not this time. To see. To see for myself who you really are. Because there is a new rule for us warrior-poets, a new rule that is old: We must find and kill all potential gods. Your father brought us to this, did you know? Your father, Mallory Ringess, the Ringess – I was sent to Neverness to determine if you were the son of the father.'
In truth, in that moment of blood and beauty and terror, Danlo did not quite know who he really was. He was a stranger to himself, and his life was a mystery as deep and inexplicable as his sudden memory of the poem.
'His father ...' Hanuman began, but he could not finish his sentence. His hand wrenched at Danlo's, and his face twisted, and it was almost possible to see the waves of agony ripping through his body.
Never taking his eyes from Danlo, the warrior-poet said, 'For you, there is a possibility. You will be who you will be. You will choose, Danlo wi Soli Ringess. Someday, you must choose. And when you do, we poets will be waiting.'
From the main body of the library, down the dark, dingy corridor past tens of sound-proofed cells, there came the faintest murmur of voices, rolling metal wheels and many footsteps.
'It's time,' the warrior-poet said. For the count of three of Danlo's heartbeats, the warrior-poet looked at his knife. His entire awareness seemed to narrow and become one with this glittering, murderous weapon. 'It's strange. I've lived my whole life for this moment. But now that it's come, I find I'm not ready to die.'
'Then ... do not die,' Danlo said. 'Live.'
Everything about Danlo – his love of ahimsa, his marvellous will, his deep, vivid eyes – was urging the warrior-poet into life. But there is an identity of opposites, and irony is the law of the universe. As Danlo stared at the warrior-poet, a sense of kinship and a terrible joy passed between them. At last the warrior-poet smiled at Danlo and said, 'Thank you – now I'm ready.'
'But I did not want– '
'This is my last poem,' the warrior-poet said. 'My death poem – I give this to you in remembrance. Please do not forget it.'
Quickly, for five journeyman librarians armed with lasers were making their way down the corridor behind the cover of an armoured, rolling, tutelary robot, the warrior-poet looked at Hanuman and Danlo, then said:
Two friends
Joined left hand and right,
My death – my life.'
The warrior-poet tilted his head back, facing the light of the flame globes. At the same time, he raised both hands up and together almost as if he were praying to the heavens somewhere beyond the enclosing stones of the library. His straight arms came to a point above him, like the spire of a cathedral. And clasped between his hands was his killing knife, this gleaming needle of steel. For an endless moment of time, he gazed upon the knife's infinitely fine point. Then, with terrible force, he plunged it straight down through his eye. His aim was precise and true, and the knife drove home through bone and cortex down into his brainstem. He died almost instantly, died with the knife's ivory handle sticking out from his forehead as if it were a horn of some mythical beast; he died falling, and falling slowly and forever to the stairwell's floor he died, even as Danlo fell forward in a desperate surge to save his life. But Danlo was too late. The warrior-poet fell to the floor with an explosive outrush of breath and the possibility of infinite pain upon his lips. It surprised Danlo that there was so little blood.
'His moment, oh, his moment – oh, oh, oh, oh!' This came from Hanuman, who was laughing and crying and howling in pain, all at once.
After that the robot came and used a laser to cut Hanuman free. One of the journeymen discovered Master Baran Smith dead in his cell; he went to call for three litters, for Master Smith and for the warrior-poet, and for Hanuman who had collapsed in Danlo's arms. While the oldest of the journeymen – an angry little woman named Kalere Chu – went to retrieve Hanuman's clothes from his cell, Danlo let the other journeymen hold the still-naked Hanuman away from the stairwell's icy floorstones. Danlo went out into the corridor then: it took him only a moment to find the warrior-poet's dart, which had skittered across the floor and come to rest near a heating grate. He returned to Hanuman's side, and before the journeymen could stop him, he stabbed it into the muscle bunching up on the side of Hanuman's neck. As the warrior-poet had said, the drug gave Hanuman almost immediate unconsciousness.
'What are you doing?' one of the journeymen asked him. This was a large, frightened man scarcely more than twenty years old. He was sweating and swallowing continually, as if he were chewing on some unpalatable root that made him sick. He rudely chastised Danlo and pushed him away. 'Do you want to kill him?'
Danlo stood alone resting his bloody hand against the stairwell's cold railing, and he watched Hanuman's tortured eyes finally close into sleep and forgetfulness. 'Go to sleep, my brother,' he whispered. Then he looked down at the warrior-poet who was sleeping his final sleep, who had died the true death. He knew that he would never forget the warrior-poet's last poem. And he would never forget the terrible thing that the warrior-poet had said, that Hanuman li Tosh was a murderer of men.
A wearer of the two rings must always carry two weapons: a knife to cut away the lies of the body and a poem to lay bare the truth of the mind.
– maxim of Nils Ordando, founder of the Order of Warrior-Poets
During the days that followed, as the warrior-poet had promised, the ekkana drug poisoning Hanuman did not leave his body. Because Hanuman would have to bear the acid touch of the ekkana for all his life, he was taken to the cetics' tower, there to learn techniques for blocking nerve signals and controlling his mind-pain. Although Danlo was not allowed to visit Hanuman, a master cetic named Javier Hake kept him apprised as to Hanuman's condition. Hanuman, as the master cetic told Danlo, should rejoice that he was still alive, for of the few persons known to have survived a warrior-poet's knife, even fewer had been able to live with the ekkana burning through their veins. Hanuman's mind and his power of will clearly impressed the master cetic, which was not an easy thing to accomplish since the cetics are usually as imperturbable as stone.
One morning at breakfast – while Hanuman practised aduhkha and other healing attitudes with the cetics, while Danlo worried over Hanuman and tried to remember all the events leading up to their meeting with the warrior-poet – Danlo finally received an invitation to visit Master Bardo's private chambers. Indeed, it was more of a summons than an invitation, and so, after gulping down his coffee and fetching his warmest fur, Danlo dashed out into the cold, grey air. The night's snowfall had whitened the buildings of Borja, and it was snowing still: tiny, irregular, broken flakes that he knew as raishay. By the time he had reached the Novices' Sanctuary, his cap, furs and his long black queue were covered with raishay snow. So cold were the Sanctuary's long stone hallways that the snow remained unmelted as he pulled off his mittens and banged the steel knocker on the door of Bardo's apartment. And then the door suddenly opened to waves of heat that washed his eyes and turned the powdery snow to water.