The Wise Man's Fear

CHAPTER FORTY Puppet

“The most important thing is to be polite,” Simmon said in a hushed tone as we made our way through a narrow hallway lined with books. Our sympathy lamps shot bands of light through the shelves and made the shadows dance nervously. “But don’t patronize him. He’s a bit—odd, but he’s not an idiot. Just treat him like you would treat anyone else.”

“Except polite,” I said sarcastically, tiring of this litany of advice.

“Exactly,” Simmon said seriously.

“Where are we going, anyway?” I asked, mostly to stop Simmon’s henpecking.

“Sub-three,” Wilem said as he turned to descend a long flight of stone steps. Centuries of use had worn down the stone, making the stairs look as bowed as heavy-laden shelves. As we started down, the shadows made the steps look smooth and dark and edgeless, like an abandoned riverbed worn from the rock.

“Are you sure he’s going to be there?”

Wil nodded. “I don’t think he leaves his chambers very much.”

“Chambers?” I asked. “He lives here?”

Neither of them said anything as Wilem led the way down another flight of stairs, then through a long stretch of wide hallway with a low ceiling. Finally we came to an unremarkable door tucked into a corner. If I hadn’t known better I would have assumed it was one of the countless reading holes scattered throughout the Stacks.

“Just don’t do anything to upset him,” Simmon said nervously.

I assumed my most polite expression as Wilem rapped on the door. The handle began to turn almost immediately. The door opened a crack, then was thrown wide. Puppet stood framed in the doorway, taller than any of us. The sleeves of his black robe billowed strikingly in the breeze of the opening door.

He stared at us haughtily for a moment, then looked puzzled and brought a hand to touch the side of his head. “Wait, I’ve forgotten my hood,” he said, and kicked the door closed.

Odd as his brief appearance had been, I’d noticed something more disturbing. “Burned body of God,” I whispered. “He’s got candles in there. Does Lorren know?”

Simmon opened his mouth to answer when the door was thrown wide again. Puppet filled the doorway, his dark robe striking against the warm candlelight behind him. He was hooded now, with his arms upraised. The long sleeves of his robes caught the inrush of air and billowed impressively. The same rush of air caught his hood and blew it partway off his head.

“Damn,” he said in a distracted voice. The hood settled half on, half off his head, partially covering one eye. He kicked the door shut again.

Wilem and Simmon remained straight-faced. I refrained from any comment.

There was a moment of quiet. Finally a muffled voice came from the other side of the door. “Would you mind knocking again? It doesn’t seem quite right otherwise.”

Obediently, Wilem stepped back up to the door and knocked. Once, twice, then the door swung open and we were confronted with a looming figure in a dark robe. His cowled hood shadowed his face, and the long sleeves of his robe stirred in the wind.

“Who calls on Taborlin the Great?” Puppet intoned, his voice resonant, but slightly muted by the deep hood. A hand pointed dramatically. “You! Simmon!” There was a pause, and his voice lost its dramatic resonance. “I’ve seen you already today, haven’t I?”

Simmon nodded. I could sense the laughter tumbling around in him, trying to find a way out.

“How long ago?”

“About an hour.”

“Hmm.” The hood nodded. “Was I better this time?” He reached up to push the hood back and I noticed the robe was too big for him, the sleeves hanging down to his fingertips. When his face emerged from the hood he was grinning like a child playing dress-up in his parents’ clothes.

“You weren’t doing Taborlin before,” Simmon admitted.

“Oh.” Puppet seemed a little put out. “How was I this time? The last time, I mean. Was it a good Taborlin?”

“Pretty good,” Simmon said.

Puppet looked at Wilem.

“I liked the robe,” Wil said. “But I always imagined Taborlin with a gentle voice.”

“Oh.” He finally looked at me. “Hello.”

“Hello,” I said in my politest tone.

“I don’t know you.” A pause. “Who are you?”

“I am Kvothe.”

“You seem so certain of it,” he said, looking at me intently. Another pause. “They call me Puppet.”

“Who is ‘they?’ ”

“Who are they?” he corrected, raising a finger.

I smiled. “Who are they then?”

“Who were they then?”

“Who are they now?” I clarified, my smile growing wider.

Puppet mirrored my smile in a distracted way and made a vague gesture with one hand. “You know, them. People.” He continued to stare at me the same way I might examine an interesting stone or a type of leaf I’d never seen before.

“What do you call yourself?” I asked.

He seemed a little surprised, and his eyes focused onto me in a more ordinary way. “That would be telling, I suspect,” he said with a touch of reproach. He glanced at the silent Wilem and Simmon. “You should come in now.” He turned and walked inside.

The room wasn’t particularly large. But it seemed bizarrely out of place, nestled in the belly of the Archives. There was a deep padded chair, a large wooden table, and a pair of doorways leading into other rooms.

Books were everywhere, overflowing shelves and bookcases. They were piled on the floor, scattered across tables and stacked on chairs. A pair of drawn curtains against one wall surprised me. My mind struggled with the impression that there must be a window behind them, despite the fact that I knew we were deep underground.

The room was lit with lamps and candles, long tapers and thick dripping pillars of wax. Each tongue of flame filled me with vague anxiety as I thought of open fire in a building filled with hundreds of thousands of precious books.

And there were puppets. They hung from shelves and pegs on walls. They lay crumpled in corners and under chairs. Some were in the process of being built or repaired, scattered among tools across the tabletop. There were shelves full of figurines, each cleverly carved and painted in the shape of a person.

On his way to his table, Puppet shrugged out of the black robe and let it fall carelessly to the floor. He was dressed plainly underneath, wrinkled white shirt, wrinkled dark pants, and mismatched socks much mended in the heel. I realized he was older than I’d thought. His face was smooth and unlined, but his hair was pure white and thin on top.

Puppet cleared a chair for me, carefully removing a small string puppet from the seat and finding it a place on a nearby shelf. He then took a seat at the table, leaving Wilem and Simmon standing. To their credit, they didn’t seem terribly disconcerted.

Digging a little in the clutter on the table he brought out an irregularly shaped piece of wood and a small knife. He took another long, searching look at my face, then began to methodically whittle, curls of wood falling onto the tabletop.

Oddly enough, I had no desire to ask anyone what was going on. When you ask as many questions as I do, you learn when they are appropriate.

Besides, I knew what the answers would be. Puppet was one of the talented, not-quite-sane people who had found a niche for themselves at the University.

Arcanum training does unnatural things to students’ minds. The most notable of these unnatural things is the ability to do what most people call magic and we call sympathy, sygaldry, alchemy, naming, and the like.

Some minds take to it easily, others have difficulty. The worst of these go mad and end up in Haven. But most minds don’t shatter when subjected to the stress of the Arcanum, they simply crack a little. Sometimes these cracks showed in small ways: facial tics, stuttering. Other students heard voices, grew forgetful, went blind, went dumb. . . . Sometimes it was only for an hour or a day. Sometimes it was forever.

I guessed Puppet was a student who had cracked years ago. Like Auri, he seemed to have found a place for himself, though I marveled at the fact that Lorren let him live down here.

“Does he always look like this?” Puppet asked Wilem and Simmon. A small drift of pale wood shavings had gathered around his hands.

“Mostly,” Wilem said.

“Like what?” Simmon asked.

“Like he’s just thought through his next three moves in a game of tirani and figured out how he’s going to beat you.” Puppet took another long look at my face and shaved another thin strip of wood away. “It’s rather irritating, really.”

Wilem barked a laugh. “That’s his thinking face, Puppet. He wears it a lot, but not all the time.”

“What’s tirani?” Simmon asked.

“A thinker,” Puppet mused. “What are you thinking now?”

“I’m thinking you must be a very careful watcher of people, Puppet,” I said politely.

Puppet snorted without looking up. “What use is care? What good is watching for that matter? People are forever watching things. They should be seeing. I see the things I look at. I am a see-er.”

He looked at the piece of wood in his hand, then to my face. Apparently satisfied, he folded his hands over the top of his carving, but not before I glimpsed my own profile cunningly wrought in wood. “Do you know what you have been, what you are not, and what you will be?” He asked.

It sounded like a riddle. “No.”

“A see-er,” he said with certainty. “Because that is what E’lir means.”

“Kvothe is actually a Re’lar,” Simmon said respectfully.

Puppet sniffed disparagingly. “Hardly,” he said, looking at me closely. “You might be a see-er eventually, but not yet. Now you are a look-er. You’ll be a true E’lir at some point. If you learn to relax.” He held out the carved wooden face. “What do you see here?”

It was no longer an irregular piece of wood. My features, locked in serious contemplation, stared out of the wood grain. I leaned forward to get a closer look.

Puppet laughed and threw up his hands. “Too late!” he exclaimed, looking childlike for a moment. “You looked too hard and didn’t see enough. Too much looking can get in the way of seeing, you see?”

Puppet set the carved face on the tabletop so it seemed to be staring at one of the recumbent puppets. “See little wooden Kvothe? See him looking? So intent. So dedicated. He’ll look for a hundred years, but will he ever see what is in front of him?” Puppet settled back in his seat, his eyes wandering the room in a contented way.

“E’lir means see-er?” Simmon asked. “Do the other ranks mean things too?”

“As a student with full access to the Archives, I imagine you can find that out for yourself,” Puppet said. His attention focused on a puppet on the table in front of him. He lowered it to the floor carefully to avoid tangling its strings. It was a perfect miniature of a grey-robed Tehlin priest.

“Would you have any advice as to where he could start looking?” I asked, playing a hunch.

“Renfalque’s Dictum.” Under Puppet’s direction, the Tehlin puppet raised himself from the floor and moved each of his limbs as if he were stretching after a long sleep.

“I’m not familiar with that one.”

Puppet responded in a distracted voice. “It’s on the second floor in the southeast corner. Second row, second rack, third shelf, right-hand side, red leather binding.” The miniature Tehlin priest walked slowly around Puppet’s feet. Clutched tightly in one hand was a tiny replica of the Book of the Path, perfectly fashioned, right down to the tiny spoked wheel painted on the cover.

The three of us watched Puppet pull the strings of the little priest, making it walk back and forth before finally coming to sit on one of Puppet’s stocking-clad feet.

Wilem cleared his throat respectfully. “Puppet?”

“Yes?” Puppet replied without looking up from his feet. “You have a question. Or rather, Kvothe has a question and you’re thinking of asking it for him. He is sitting slightly forward in his seat. There is a furrow between his brows and a pursing of the lips that gives it away. Let him ask me. It might do him good.”

I froze in place, catching myself doing each of the things he had mentioned. Puppet continued to work the strings of his little Tehlin. It made a careful, fearful search of the area around his feet, brandishing the book in front of itself before stepping around table legs and peering into Puppet’s abandoned shoes. Its movements were uncanny, and it distracted me to the point where I forgot I was uncomfortable and felt myself relax.

“I was wondering about the Amyr, actually.” My eyes remained on the scene unfolding at Puppet’s feet. Another marionette had joined the show, a young girl in a peasant dress. She approached the Tehlin and held out a hand as if trying to give him something. No, she was asking him a question. The Tehlin turned his back on her. She laid a timid hand on his arm. He took a haughty step away. “I was wondering who disbanded them. Emperor Nalto or the church.”

“Still looking,” he admonished more gently then before. “You need to go chase the wind for a while, you are too serious. It will lead you into trouble.” The Tehlin suddenly turned on the girl. Trembling with rage, it menaced her with the book. She took a startled step backward and stumbled to her knees. “The church disbanded them of course. Only an edict from the pontifex had the ability to affect them.” The Tehlin struck the girl with the book. Once, twice, driving her to the ground, where she lay terribly still. “Nalto couldn’t have told them to cross to the other side of the street.”

Some slight motion drew Puppet’s eye. “Oh dear me,” he said, cocking his head toward Wilem. “See what I see. The head bows slightly. The jaw clenches, but the eyes aren’t fixed on anything, aiming the irritation inward. If I were the sort of person who judged by looking, I’d guess Wilem had just lost a bet. Don’t you know the church frowns on gambling?” At Puppet’s feet, the priest brandished the book upward at Wilem.

The Tehlin brought its hands together and turned away from the crumpled woman. It took a stately step or two away and bowed its head as if praying.

I managed to pull my attention away from the tableau and look up at our host. “Puppet?” I asked, “Have you read the Lights of History by Feltemi Reis?”

I saw Simmon give Wilem an anxious look, but Puppet didn’t seem to find anything odd about the question. The Tehlin at his feet stood and started to dance and caper about. “Yes.”

“Why would Reis say the Apura Prolycia Amyr was Emperor Nalto’s sixty-third decree?”

“Reis wouldn’t say any such thing,” Puppet said without looking up from the marionette at his feet. “That’s pure nonsense.”

“But we found a copy of Lights that said exactly that,” I pointed out.

Puppet shrugged, watching the Tehlin dance at his feet.

“It could be a transcription mistake,” Wilem mused. “Depending on the edition of the book, the church itself might be responsible for changing that piece of information. Emperor Nalto is history’s favorite whipping boy. It could be the church trying to distance itself from the Amyr. They did some terrible things toward the end.”

“Clever clever,” Puppet said. At his feet the Tehlin made a sweeping bow in Wilem’s direction.

I was struck by a sudden idea. “Puppet,” I asked. “Do you know what is behind the locked door on the floor above this one? The large stone door?”

The Tehlin stopped dancing and Puppet looked up. He gave me a long, stern look. His eyes were serious and clear. “I don’t think the four-plate door should be of any concern to a student. Do you?”

I felt myself flush. “No sir.” I looked away from his eyes.

The tension of the moment was broken by the distant sound of the belling tower. Simmon cursed softly. “I’m late,” he said. “I’m sorry Puppet, I’ve got to go.”

Puppet stood and hung the Tehlin on the wall. “It’s time I got back to my reading, regardless,” he said. He moved to the padded chair, sat, and opened a book. “Bring this one back some time.” He gestured in my direction without looking up from his book. “I have some more work to do on him.”