"The West Passage"

Jared Pechaček's cute medieval manuscript style illustrations add a LOT to the enjoyment of this novel, which is long on descriptions and short on plot.

• Yarrow and Arnica permitted her to look from here, close to the corpse that was their duty, but if she went around to the other side of the rampart to see Black and Yellow Towers, that would be leisure. Suddenly Pell would be shirking. Anyway, Yellow Tower was plainly visible, slashing into the sky like a knife into flesh. That way lay the West Passage.
• * The butterfly made its way to the top of Tamarisk and landed on the shroud. Another followed. Then another. Soon the shroud shimmered with their wings.
  “They like to sip us up,” Arnica whispered. “Anyway it’s less to mop.”
  When the last of the old woman had been drunk down hundreds of tiny throats, Yarrow solemnly mounted the stairs once more. She wrapped the mask in the shroud and carried it back down.
• * His name, which we have not had occasion to learn, for Pell herself never bothered, was Kew. <> He did not precisely want to leave Grey Tower. A titheling from the southern cloisters, Kew had only ever known Grey. Its granite walls, its slate roofs, and the five-pointed crown of the tower itself, were all part of his blood in a way he could only define by going away.
• Nobody, it turned out. The body was of chipped and crackled porcelain. Its abdomen opened on brass hinges to reveal porcelain organs, their paint worn away. Some of them seemed to have been broken and glued back together, and the gallbladder was entirely gone, replaced with a little green sack of beans... Yarrow laughed sharply. “No you’re not. You’ll learn with this, as we all did. Besides, nobody’s dead yet. And if they were, a corpse is terrible easy to mess. Say you’re asked to see the hurt in a kidney, see why someone died of it, and when you’re done you put everything back in wrong and it spills out on the way up-tower? Shame and disgrace on the house, it would be. So we start here, with something you cannot harm.” <> Pell’s cheeks burned, but she swallowed her pride as Yarrow showed her the way everything nestled together, the close-packed strangeness of one’s insides.
• * Under the earth, where nothing had bothered it for a long time, something shifted. Let us, for the sake of knowing it better, pretend three things. First, that there is light beneath the earth for us to see it by. Second, that its motion occurs on a scale comprehensible to people. Third, that something outside nature can be described using words arising from nature. <> The earth packed in all around it, for it was so large that there was, indeed, no other way for earth to behave in its presence.
• A Treatise of the Doctors of Grey House (But as the Doctors Are Dead, It Is Forgotten) Concerning Honey <>: In the courts of Black Tower are many beehives, and ’tis wondrous to behold their variety. On divers flowers are their bees fed, and the Lady in Black Tower hath granted them the privilege of endleſs ſpring, the which is for the better feeding of the bees. It is ſaid that, from the end of the Roſe Era to the end of the Thiſtle Era, this honey was of marvellous virtue, and each era produced its own proper virtue. Howſoever that may be, none hath ſurvived the great downfall of the Bellflowers; except, mayhap, in ſome loſt corner of the palace.
• Before Kew slept, Frin took him to an apothecary who looked more like a set of ears than a person, and the apothecary gave Kew a small lump of honeyed meat.
  “Mellified ape,” he had told Kew. “It’ll do in a pinch, but North bless me, we live in a world seeming made of pinches.”
  “What would you rather have?” said Kew, chewing.
  “Mellified man, of course,” said the apothecary. “Fixes all wounds of violence or accident. A powerful great thing to have around, but it’s long since any man went into the casket for another.”
• The mothers of our mothers’ mothers would have died and gone knowing the Grey Lady as a distant legend, so for a squirt like you, any sort of Lady must be incomprehensible.” <> “All Ladies are,” said Kew. If he spoke any more stiffly, his voice would snap in half.
• Sometimes Yarrow would take it into her head to set some disused room or other in order, and she, Arnica, the girls, and Servant would tie cloths over their mouths and rummage through the dust and cobwebs, poking any miracles they found with the leg of a chair to be sure they were dead. None of these attempts lasted beyond a day: not even Yarrow relished dealing with all the pleading spiders, or the miracles that could make your eyes bleed, or the choking dust. Anyway, nothing could be gotten rid of: it was all sacred for some reason or other.


• The women possessed ancient arts of memory—taught to them, it was said, by the Lady herself. You had to make a place in yourself for knowledge, a little palace, and populate it with striking images. To remember the use of arnica, you might think of a person beaten black and blue, and from their bruises grew the tiny yellow flowers of that herb. The litanies helped; you would sing them to yourself as you walked the corridors of the palace in your memory. Some things, like slabroom lore, were striking enough on their own that Pell didn’t need to add them to her memory so carefully, but she did it anyway, and the rooms of her mind were soon lined with bright caskets full of bodies.
• * In the midst of the garden, the hives wandered. They varied somewhat in size, but all of them were more than a head taller than Kew. The fur on their bodies was glossy and smooth, but shaggy at the neck and tail. Dainty ebony hooves flashed in the sunlight. All of them had pyramidal spires for heads, as tall again as themselves. They were pierced with small windows through which bees came and went like lanterns from the tower.
• Pell stayed. She owed Yarrow everything, and though she could not claim to be fond of the stern woman, she was accustomed to her as to a tricky step in a stairwell.
• * Two duties burdened her now, one practical, one sacred. Yarrow was good at her duties. She was even better at doing them angrily. Fresh purpose came into her step and a granite gleam into her eye. And off she went toward Black Tower. <> Rather than follow the first bit of her journey, let us look at what she did wrong. Her first mistake was heading south. To leave Grey, the only thing to do was head north. The old women had never bothered to tell her this most important principle of travel, so Yarrow, alone and ignorant, passed through ten cloisters before she suspected anything
• The ape looked over its shoulder at her, its tiny dark eyes completely expressionless as it chewed its iridescent snack... Keeping its eyes on hers, the ape stuffed another handful of fluttering insects into its mouth. It chewed a moment, then showed its teeth in a grin full of butterfly guts and bright shreds of wing and gown.
• “I am Jasper, the Last Schoolmaster,” said the owlish person. He chopped each syllable between the little adzes of his teeth.
• “Silence, child. I am the Last Schoolmaster because when you leave the tower and pass east toward Grey, there are no schoolmasters beyond me. There have been no children in this district for many a long year. But a schoolmaster must teach.” <> “So you took on apes as pupils,” said Yarrow.
• The Lady of Grey sang a song of sleep, and Citrine the Yellow fell. She sang a song of stillness, and Wasp the Red moved not. And to Hellebore she did not sing, but lifted her veil to meet the proud eyes of the Lady of Black Tower. Then the Lady of Grey took the miraculous knife of Wasp the Red, and gave it to the guardians as their sword. Then the Lady of Grey took the miraculous mirror of Citrine the Yellow, and gave it to the doctors to strengthen their sight. Then in the presence of her women, the Lady of Grey said to Hellebore, No.
• * She passed the time by reciting as much of the Grey House lore as she could remember. There were the Lullaby of Reeds, the Ninety-Eight Dirges, the Forty Birthing-Songs, the One Hundred and Ninety-Two Botanical Rhymes, the morning and evening rites, the Order of Cleanliness, and that was just the start. She even dug up some old nursery rhyme about the Sisters Six; it went with a clapping game, and at the end someone was supposed to fall down.
• Where did miracles come from? Gifts of the Ladies, of course. At least, that was what everyone knew. But an old story of the Mothers said that the Ladies produced them of their own bodies—uncontrollably, instinctively, like a cat coughing up a hairball—in response to the wishes of their most faithful servants, or simply because the stars were right. The dulcimer had been a fingernail of a Grey Lady, pulled off and given to a minstrel who had no instrument.
• Then Tertius turned right, and Yellow Tower was before them, rancid. The stones themselves seemed to sweat. Green algae fringed its windows and the pits of its incised decoration. The windows gleamed as slick as oil. A sickly rotten smell like compost breathed from the lake at its foot... Peregrine shrugged. “It’s just holiness, little Mother. All the Ladies give that off, though normally it’s endurable. My master once told me it’s the weight of their dreams. And the old one there, she has thousands of years of ’em.”
• The hand went up and up, past acres of yellow silk fringed with forests of lace. The Lady appeared to be sitting with her knees drawn up to her chin, if Yarrow was seeing correctly—if anything so small could perceive anything so huge. Past the knees were ropes of pearls, each as big as a house, resting on landscapes of embroidery broken by ranges of ruffles. Then the collar began.
• From this nimbus of watchful green, the Lady’s head loomed. It was birdlike, covered with feathers that were each bigger than the ferry. There were two eyes in the head as well, but gold rather than luminous green, and they reflected the others as a myriad of starry pinpricks.
• The great sleeping form of the Lady lay curled up like one of her embryos. Her indrawn breath broke the silence. She did not exhale. Her chest expanded further and further. Yarrow and Peregrine stepped back. <> Stitches like hawsers snapped in her bodice. Pearls tumbled and rolled like boulders, grinding the remains of the eggs into a yellow-brown paste.
• At last her inhalation slowed and stopped. With another vast sigh, the Lady burst into ivory-colored birds. They whirled like a cyclone, filling the tower with the deafening rustle of their wings and the sharp sweetness of their voices. Some of them foraged among the squashed eggs for a moment, but most wheeled up, up through calm beams of sunlight and out the windows, and in another moment they were gone. <> The empty dress of the Lady was left in hills and valleys of yellow silk, spotted white with bird shit.
• The page in Goodlie Instruction was illuminated with five roundels and much fine tracery. Azure studied it carefully. Despite the skill, it was obviously a Lily reworking of a Thistle original. Too much white space—these periods of stylistic transition were always a little clumsy. A Thistle artist would never have left that awkward blank at the bottom right.
• We do not know the names of the stars, either, if names they have. Nobody has ever asked them, and surely not even the Ladies of Black would dare to give a name to a star.
• “You lied?” says Frin. “For Thistle honey?” <> Owl begins to say many things that we need not listen to. We have all heard the ravings of a thwarted alchemist, or if not, we can easily imagine them.
• The Lady towered over the other dancers. She had several arms, each outstretched to hold the hand of a partner. Her head was a spoked wheel of eyes, laid on its side with a wavering flame in the center. An exquisite black gown clung tightly to her torso, then flared out into a bell-like skirt, nearly the size of a courtyard, leaving her arms and shoulders bare.
• The perfume of a thousand summers filled the ballroom. Nothing had ever smelled so delicious as that honey, the essence perhaps of flowers that had been dust since the time of songs. Kew felt a chill. The Lady’s eyes shed tears like fountains: among the embroidery on her gown were hundreds of thistles; who could even say what the fragrance meant to her?
• I will let you take a message to her, then. Remember this, along with everything else.
  As clear as an illumination in a book, he felt the memory of this encounter inscribed on his mind.
  She will see this and know what you and I have said to each other. But, little Guardian, you will have already displeased her. You have released the Last Thistle from her punishment in the Ballroom. You have spoken to Ebony. And you have bargained with Obsidian. Whatever her daughter has promised you, whatever you have promised her daughter, she will not like it.
• Then the younger Lady cut off her mother’s arms and from them made Black Tower’s five piers.
  The Iris Lady said, You are the Lady now, if you chain me to the great wheel.
  Then the younger Lady chained her mother to the wheel, and at once winter fell on Grey, spring on Blue, summer on Red, and autumn on Yellow, and the hub of the seasons was Black. And the new Iris Lady went on her way rejoicing in her new virtue, and the old Lady began to turn. At first, she turned too quickly, and summer flickered over the palace like lightning, and winter breathed a single cold breath. Then she slowed, and learned the proper round of days.
• This part is not exciting. We only need to know that they did well, both boys having been raised to follow orders. We might also state that it was torture watching the bakers at work. There were cream puffs, large and golden and crisp, that were taken away and filled with cold custard and topped with pink icing. There was white bread, its crust crunchy and brown, its insides as soft and warm as love... There were bigger pies of songbirds with herbs. There were subtleties of crisp dough baked in individual pieces: scrollwork and oblongs and feathers, assembled to form towers with birds perched atop them. And most delicate of all, one baker drew out a cheese soufflé, shining and as light as a child’s joy.
• “The feast will not be required today,” they said, as if reading from a paper. “The Lady thanks you for your service.”
  They waited. Kestrel, her face expressionless, pulled the lever. The table tilted toward the window. All the fabulous dishes slid out, cascading down, down, down into the West Passage. The wind of their going blew back into the kitchen, delicious and sad. Where anything still clung to the table or windowsill, the cooks swept it off.
  “Well,” said Kestrel, “that’s that. Mynah, Swallow, Blackbird, I commend you on another job well done. Let’s plan the menu for tomorrow. Sir.”
• The Hemlock Era had been a time of stasis. Apple Era had been a time of peace. The Thistle Era had been a time of wonder. The Bellflower Era had been a time of prosperity. And so on back to the Roses. Each era had its overriding virtue. What did Willow have? Did they do anything? If Hawthorn was correct, the palace had been crumbling since the fall of the Thistles, but two succeeding dynasties had attempted, in their own ways, to mitigate it.
• To become mellified, a man must, of his own free will, live upon nothing but honey for years, until he pissed and shat and sweated it. When he was saturated with it, he would be drowned in honey, then entombed in a casket full of it. After a suitable time had passed, his flesh would be carved up. Its powers of healing were miraculous.
• Your wish is granted, she said as she uncorked the jar. Let it be known that Kew of Grey Tower, he who has brought me this miracle, is henceforth Hawthorn, Guardian of the Grey Tower and a Knight of the Lady, and let all do her honor. <> The floor turned upside down, and Hawthorn slid, her body pressing itself onto what was now the ceiling. Frin’s face bent over her, swimming.
• Over its western edge, Yellow Tower shone. In the evening, the point of its shadow touched a block of rhyolite in the parade ground’s center, and some ritual or other was meant to happen then, but could not, for half of the ground was inside the sphere of discomfort.
• Yet if they had relied so on the one lullaby to help them sleep, no wonder their rule ended. Or perhaps the Lullaby of Reeds had simply not been meant for that Lady. Or only for a young Lady. Or. Or. Or many possibilities, all of them some fatal misunderstanding. Yarrow had no way of knowing, and it galled her. She was used to knowing. Or rather, she was used to knowing the limits of her own knowledge. But what happened in the tower lay so far beyond the bounds of her life that she could only call it holy. <> Holiness was a strange and terrible thing.
• The train was coming. Noiselessly, it slid along the track and came to a stop, steam venting from the blowhole in its helmeted head. It had no eyes, but perhaps it didn’t need them with those great silver-scaled arms pulling it along, hand over hand. Surely it could feel its way where it needed to go. Strapped to the back of its neck was a white platform where a Brother of the Order of Transit held the reins,
• * “For North’s sake, put something in its mouth!” <> “I don’t even know where her mouth is,” said Yarrow, picking the Lady up by her waist like a doll. Turning her around, she saw no mouth at all. Maybe under her skirts? She flipped the struggling Lady upside down. The crying grew louder, and the crack spread over the window.
• The infant Lady must have crawled into Yarrow’s pack in the tower, perhaps to avoid the collapse of her sleeping mother. There was no way Yarrow could take her along. How would she explain showing up at Black Tower with the daughter of a dead Lady? A Lady she herself had accidentally killed, no less? She still didn’t know how she’d explain that, either. <> And yet the rules were clear. If a baby was delivered by a woman in grey, but the parents died or were otherwise unable to care for it, she was duty bound to get that baby to an appropriate caretaker.
• Like every part of the palace except the four Passages, the courts of Blue were difficult to traverse. In Grey, to get to Madrona’s district, you had to cross the Court of the Tower to the northern wall; go in at the side door; walk up a staircase to a long gallery; follow that to a crumbling mezzanine in a court where half of a huge stone face glowered; pick your way along the mezzanine, which grew crumblier every year; take the left-hand door in the far wall; go down a short corridor, and come out on the parapet of the wall known as Handmaidens’ Fall. You would end nearly back where you started, only higher up.
• The other end of the walltop brought her into an enfilade of four rooms, each filled with machines. In the first, iron arms twisted sheets of metal into huge lantern-shapes like Servant folding laundry.
• Yes: the Hellebore Lady’s defeat at Grey long, long ago. Not only had a story of the house been taken, it had been recorded. Though whatever machinery drove these puppets was not sacrilegious writing, it wasn’t flesh, either. And worse than all of that, it was a grotesque parody of the actual tale.
• Yarrow was bending over to examine them when the larger frog moved. She jumped away. Its eyes were open. With two paddle-like feet, the smaller frog on its back was kneading its flesh. One by one, like beads on a necklace pulled between one’s lips, more eggs emerged in response. <> The larger frog opened its mouth and, in a deep, primeval gurgle, it spoke.
• “Could be a lot more,” said another frog, whose pond was full of unhatched doorknobs. “Lily’s in charge, is it?”
  Yarrow wrung her hands a moment. “Willows,” she said at last. “It’s the Willow Era.”
  “Next after Lilies, are they?” said the doorknob frog.
  “No,” Yarrow whispered.
  “Then granddaughters of Lilies?”
  Yarrow shook her head. “I’m afraid not.”
  “Won’t go on guessing, then,” said the doorknob frog.
• The channels of obedience were deeply carved in Yarrow’s soul, but even so, this was too easy. She was not commanded; she was compelled.


• * The Ladies reſiſt claſſification. If one were to be ſacrilegious, one might categorize them as one categorizes butterflies; i.e., into folio, quarto, and duodecimo. Under this arrangement, the Five Sisters—perhaps legendary—would be of the folio type.
• The Ladies of Black are ſaid to place a ſtone in their mouth for one ſummer, and at the end of it, they have a daughter. The Lady of Yellow, it is rumor’d, lays many eggs like a frog; but as none of her daughters have ever been ſeen, this is conjecture. The Ladies of Blue take up a chip of their own azurite and give it to a willing incubator; the merging of fleſh and ſtone gives the Blue Ladies an aſtoniſhing homelineſs, compared to their ſiſters from other towers.
• “She only knew me as the Librarian,” said the Lady. “Which is all I was. The last daughter of Hellebore hid with the beekeepers and arranged for them to supply her with honey to hide her virtues. That arrangement has held all through the long centuries, for every one of her daughters who has held the position of Librarian. Forced to be what we were not, we survived, we served the tower, and we waited.”
• * The Beast, whom we have looked in on now and again, was by this point very near the surface. As it came closer, its form shifted and settled. No longer a terrifying mass of unknown qualities, it had taken on attributes we might recognize: an eyeishness, a skinlikeness, a clawishness, an unfurling of membranes, a pulse like a heartbeat, if the blood performed galliards. One might sense a suggestion of flames, a rustle of great wings, a sort of taffeta sheen, a confectioner’s decorative sense evidenced in the placement of long delicate spines; the Beast might pass equally as a subtlety at the banquet tables of the apocalypse, or as a costume at a masque where every player represents three simultaneous crimes. Now enters Madame Murder, all blood and bone, who is also Sir Larceny, all grasping hands and covetous eyes, who is also Treachery, all knives and masks.
• “What a perfect Mother of Grey you are,” he said. “To think of the world in terms of whether it’ll mourn us. Now, Yarrow, I’m about to speak a piece of heresy, and I wouldn’t dare except that we’re good friends. It would not be a tragedy for the palace to end. It would not be sad for us to pass away unremembered. What would their memorial to us read? Here Lies Dust.”
  “Things have happened here!” said Yarrow. “The stories, the songs. Era after era of people living and dying, the Ladies, all the struggles and deeds—those are us. They make us up. Wouldn’t it be horrible for that to vanish? We’re not what we once were, but we once—we once were something.”
  Peregrine cocked his head and squinted one eye. “We were something because we tell ourselves we were. But we can’t even agree on what we were. Do you know what happened on, say, the Night of Bones?”
• She thought obscurely of the apes scattered throughout Yellow, munching butterflies, the flower on the train, the frogs in their pools, Roe’s body in its poor grave of twigs, and the scattered Ladyless people of Blue. She thought of Peregrine, solid and green beside her, tendons shifting in his neck as he turned to spit into the snow, and Frin, exhausted, ragged, determined. Fragile, all of them, compared to this great evil, this Lady-eater.
• “It’s not just that.” Hawthorn flipped through the book. “It crops up in old stories and songs from all over the palace. Hidden there, just waiting for someone to make the connection. Look. Six stones stand in the Garden of the Ladies in Blue. The song they sing in Yellow, There were six sisters to cross the river.”