Some chatter fluttered up from the ground floor, but Ekain found the third floor blessedly silent. Both of his hands ached, one from the handle of his cane and the other from the railing of the stairs. Sitting on the tiny stepladder – squatting, really, at his stature – with his stiff leg stretched out before him, he drew the breath in and out of his lungs. Despite the pain that seared up through his left hip, the one he had favored on the climb, he forced himself to breathe steadily and maintain his erect posture.
It was not a Huane’s way to puff and blow like a sweaty gale-storm. He had promised himself four years ago that he could always go as slowly as he needed to, provided that he accomplished his business and did so as elegantly as befit him. He had never once failed.
Ekain massaged the muscles of his left leg underneath the thick fabric of his white robe, but it was of no use. Though they quivered and screamed with protest, they would not relax, neither from the gentle coaxing of his fingertips nor from his barely-audible cajoling: “Beah yalteeyarar,” he whispered, “beah…” Finally, his hands flickered away; his lip twitched only slightly, and a faint pulse of red shifted through his field. He shot a glance to one side at his cane, which leaned against the shelf behind him, but he knew that it would also be of no use. The leg was already so stiff that he would be dragging it behind him, and the rest of him would be aflame by the time he climbed back down.
And so he concentrated on the leg, and then, eyes fluttering shut – a string of Monite fell from his lips. In this case, the homing was more complex than the actual spell, but Ekain had performed this dance many times; he knew his target as well as he knew the muscles he had massaged with his hand. The stream thickened the air with fizzing energy. His face twitched in only the slightest of winces as his leg spasmed with the jolt.
“Tedaahthah,” he muttered, sounding for a moment – perhaps just half of a moment, even – as tired as he felt. Smoothing his robe, he took his cane from behind him, then shifted in his seat, preparing to stand. The spasm in his leg had not passed, and never would; but he found he could move it a little more now, just enough that his balance was sufficient to walk.
With a great effort, Ekain pushed himself to his feet, long fingers curled tight around the handle of his cane, and began down the aisle again. He was tucked away in the narrow space between two shelves, far enough from the terrace and the echoing hall beyond that the air around him felt as muffled and as private as a tomb. As thick with dust, he thought, too, and the smell of old parchment was all around him.
In his Brunnhold days, he had spent much time in the Library. It was perhaps not as familiar as the School of Confisalto, but it was a landmark in the map of his history all the same. Then, it had seemed a place of silence, a labyrinthine tomb in the best of ways. He had missed the deep caverns and broad canyons in which the Ba Bieth was performed, shaped from the earth by Eyhaye. The Library was a hulking, dark shape against the sky, and the galdori had built it so that its spires stretched like needles toward the clouds, so that its arches inside swept so far up that they disappeared into cobwebbed, moth-eaten darkness. It had been shelter from the hot Yaris sun of Anaxas, and from the Stacks, where the other students had drunk and caroused, unabashed of all the humans about them.
It had been difficult, too, to balance confisalto with the immaculate grades he had felt were required of him; he had spent many long nights laboring in the Library, with only this heady perfume of dust and old parchment for company. He had thought more and more of those nights, and that balance, since he had attended the showcase in late Bethas. Since then, his days had been packed with functions and paperwork, but it had left a mark in his mind that the winds of work could not erode to smoothness.
That was why he had decided to come here today, even though his exercises that morning had been difficult, even though he was more tired than he had been in days. He hoped his weariness did not show. He had only dusted his face with the lightest of cosmetics, the faint red around his eyes that he had favored since his days on stage, but he was clean and put-together, his robes with their glittering gold trim freshly-pressed and white as snow. Perhaps his only real concession to the earliness of the morning was the single, thick braid of white that hung down his straight back. He had not had the time or the energy to bind it up in the elaborate knotwork to which it was accustomed, but he had just come from his morning exercises, and he supposed that it would do.
It would have to do. He was bound for Vienda, for Batyhur and his physicians and his usual work, in only a week. He had only the next few days to finish his research at Brunnhold, and he worried that the end of the St. Grumbles’ festivities would fill whatever time he could not wrest for himself tooth and nail. Though it had been difficult, it had been imperative for him to reach the third floor: the twenty-second century Physical theorists were here, and he found he quite unexpectedly required the guidance of an old voice from his school days, then ignored in favor of dance.
He paused beside a shelf, raising a hand with a sweep of cloth. He ran the tips of his nails along the spines of the books. “Marchesi, Marchesi… de.” With a delicate motion, he slid the volume out of its place. A brief glance at the cover told him that he had selected the correct volume, and he tucked it under his arm.
He had turned to walk back, intending to take a seat in a nearby reading room, when he found something – or rather someone – in the midst of the aisle, blocking his way. Ekain peered down at the student through narrowed pink eyes, his long face utterly blank.
“Excuse me?” he murmured in his high, soft voice, his Gioran accent making the vowels long and warbling.