Inkspell

74. FARID'S HOPE

When the men on guard raised the alarm for the second time, just before sunset, the Black Prince ordered everyone to climb deep down into the mine, where there was water in the narrow passages and you thought you could hear the earth breathing. But one man did not join them: Fenoglio. When the Prince gave the all clear, and Meggie climbed up again with the others, her feet wet and her heart still full of fear, Fenoglio came toward her and drew her aside. Luckily, Mo happened to be talking to Resa and didn't notice.

"Here you are. But I'm not guaranteeing anything," Fenoglio whispered to her as he gave her back the notebook. "This is very likely another mistake in black and white just like the others, but I'm too tired to worry about it. Feed this damned story, feed it with new words, I'm not going to listen. I'm going to lie down and sleep. That was the last thing I will ever write in my life." Feed it.

Farid suggested that Meggie should read Fenoglio's words in the place where he and Dustfinger had slept. Dustfinger's backpack was still lying beside his blanket, and the two martens had curled up to the right and left of it. Farid crouched down between them and hugged the backpack to him as if Dustfinger's heart were beating inside. He looked expectantly at Meggie, but she remained silent. She looked at the words and said nothing. Fenoglio's writing swam before her eyes as if, for the first time, it did not want her to read it.

"Meggie?" Farid was still looking at her. There was such sadness in his eyes, such despair. For him, she thought. Just for him. And she kneeled down on the blanket where Dustfinger used to sleep.

Even as she read the first few words, she sensed that Fenoglio had done his work well yet again. She felt it like breath on her face. The letters on the page were alive, the story was alive. It wanted to take those words and grow. That was what it wanted. Had Fenoglio felt the same when he wrote them?

"One day, when Death had taken much prey again," began Meggie, and it was almost as if she were reading a familiar book that she had only just laid aside, "Fenoglio the great poet decided to write no more. He was tired of words and their seductive power. He had had enough of the way they cheated and scorned him and kept silent when they should have spoken. So he called on another, younger man, Orpheus by name – skilled in letters, even if he could not yet handle them with the mastery of Fenoglio himself – and decided to instruct him in his art, as every master does at some time. For a while Orpheus should play with words in his place, seduce and lie with them, create and destroy, banish and restore – while Fenoglio waited for his weariness to pass, for his pleasure in words to reawaken, and then he would send Orpheus back to the world from which he had summoned him, to keep his story alive with new words never used before."

Meggie's voice died away. It echoed underground as if it had a shadow. And just as silence was spreading around them, they heard footsteps.

Footsteps on the damp stone.