Objects, too, have trickled through the doors between worlds, blown by strange winds, drifting on white-frosted waves, carried and discarded by careless travelers—even stolen, sometimes. Some of them have been lost or ignored or forgotten—books written in foreign tongues, clothes in strange fashions, devices with no use beyond their home worlds—but some of them have left stories in their wakes. Stories of magic lamps and enchanted mirrors, golden fleeces and fountains of youth, dragon-scale armor and moon-streaked broomsticks.
I have spent most of my life documenting these worlds and their riches, following the ghost trails they leave behind them in novels and poems, memoirs and treatises, old wives’ tales and songs sung in a hundred languages. And yet I do not feel I have come close to discovering them all, or even a meaningful fraction of them. It seems to me now very likely that such a task is impossible, although in my earlier years I harbored great ambitions in that direction.
I once confessed this to a very wise woman I met in another world—a lovely world full of trees so vast one could imagine whole planets nestling in their branches—somewhere off the coast of Finland in the winter of 1902. She was an imposing woman of fifty or so, with the kind of ferocious intelligence that burns bright even through language barriers and several flasks of wine. I told her I intended to find every door to every world that ever existed. She laughed and said: “There are ten thousand of them, fool.”
I later learned that her people had no number higher than ten thousand, and claiming there were ten thousand of a thing meant there was no purpose in counting them because they were infinite. I now believe her accounting of the number of worlds in the universe was perfectly correct, and my aspirations were the dreams of a young and desperate man.
But we need not concern ourselves with all those ten thousand worlds here. We are interested only in the world that Adelaide Larson sailed into in 1893. It is not, perhaps, the most fantastical or beautiful of all possible worlds, but it is the one I long to see above every other. It is the world I have spent nearly two decades searching for.
Authors introducing new characters often describe their features and dress first; when introducing a world, it seems polite to begin with its geography. It is a world of vast oceans and numberless tiny islands—an atlas would look strangely unbalanced to your eye, as if some ignorant artist had made a mistake and painted too much of it blue.
Adelaide Larson happened to sail into the near-center of this world. The sea beneath her boat had possessed many names over the centuries, as seas often do, but was at that time most often called the Amarico.
It is also customary to supply a name when introducing a new character, but the name of a world is a more elusive creature than you might suspect. Consider how many names your own Earth has been assigned, in how many different languages—Erde, Midgard, Tellus, Ard, Uwa—and how absurd it would be for a foreign scholar to arrive and give the entire planet a single title. Worlds are too complex, too beautifully fractured, to be named. But for the sake of convenience we may loosely translate one of this world’s names: the Written.
If this seems an odd name for a world, understand that in the Written, words themselves have power.
I do not mean they have power in the sense that they might stir men’s hearts or tell stories or declare truths, for those are the powers words have in every world. I mean that words in that world can sometimes rise from their ink-and-cotton cradles and reshape the nature of reality. Sentences may alter the weather, and poems might tear down walls. Stories may change the world.
Now, not every written word holds such power—what chaos that would be!—but only certain words written by certain people who combine an innate talent with many years of careful study, and even then the results are not the sort of fairy-godmother-ish magic you might be imagining. Even a very great word-worker could not casually scrawl a sentence about flying carriages and expect one to come winging across the horizon, or write the dead back to life, or otherwise subvert the very underpinnings of the world as they are. But she might labor for many weeks to craft a story that would increase the likelihood of rain on a particular Sunday, or perhaps she could compose a stanza that would hold her City’s walls fractionally more firm against invasion, or guide a single reckless ship away from unseen reefs. There are half-forgotten stories, too faint and unbelievable even to be called legends, of greater magics—of writers who turned back tides and parted seas, who leveled Cities or called dragons down from the skies—but these tales are too unlikely to be taken seriously.
Word-magic comes at a cost, you see, as power always does. Words draw their vitality from their writers, and thus the strength of a word is limited by the strength of its human vessel. Acts of word-magic leave their workers ill and drained, and the more ambitious the working—the more it defies the warp and weft of the world as it is—the higher the toll. Most everyday sorts of word-workers lack the force of will to risk more than an occasional nosebleed and a day spent in bed, but more-gifted persons must spend years in careful study and training, learning restraint and balance, lest they drain away their very lives.
The people who have this talent are called different things on different islands, but most of us concur that they are born with a particular something that no degree of study can emulate. The precise nature of that something is a contentious subject among the scholars and priests. Some have claimed that it is related to their certainty of self or their scope of imagination, or perhaps simply the intractability of their will (for they are known to be obstreperous people).8 There is also great disagreement on what ought to be done with such people, and how best to limit the chaos they naturally cause. There are islands where certain faiths preach that writers are the conduits of their god’s will and ought to be treated as blessed saints. There is a series of townships in the south that have proclaimed that their writers must live separately from unlettered folk, lest they infect them with their unruly imaginations. Such extremes are rare, however; most Cities find some functional-yet-respectable role for their writers, and simply carry on.
This was the way of things on the islands surrounding the Amarico Sea. Talented writers were most often employed by universities and expected to devote themselves to the civic good, and granted the surname Wordworker.
There are, as my old acquaintance would say, ten thousand other differences between that world and yours. Many of them are too insignificant to merit documentation. I could describe the way the smells of brine and sun have permeated every stone of every street, or the way the tide callers stand at their watchtowers and cry out the hour for their Cities. I could tell you of the many-shaped ships that crisscross the seas with careful writing stitched on their sails praying for good fortune and fair winds. I could tell you of the squid-ink tattoos that adorn the hands of every husband and wife, and of the lesser word-workers who prick words into flesh.
But such an anthropological documenting of facts and practices will tell you little, in the end, about the nature of a world. I will tell you instead about one particular island and one particular City, and one particular boy who would not have been remarkable at all were it not for the day he stumbled through a door and into the burnt-orange fields of another world.
If you were to approach the City of Nin in the early evening, as Adelaide eventually did, you might see it first as some hump-spined creature coiled around a stone outcropping. As you sailed closer the creature would divide itself into a series of buildings standing in rows like whitewashed vertebrae. Spiraling streets would fall like veins between the buildings, and eventually you might begin to pick out figures strolling along them: children chasing skittering cats down alleys; white-robed men and women walking down avenues with sober expressions; shopkeepers hauling their baskets back from the crowded coastline. Some of them might pause to stare out at the honey-tinted sea, just for a moment.
You might suppose that the City was a small, sea-soaked version of paradise. On the whole this impression was not inaccurate, although I admit I find it difficult to be objective.
The City of Nin was certainly a peaceful place, and neither the grandest nor poorest island City that circled the edges of the Amarico Sea. It had a reputation for fine word-working and fair traders and had gained a small degree of fame as a center of prestigious scholarship. The scholarship was rooted in Nin’s vast tunneling archives, which were some of the oldest and most extensive collections on the Amarico. Should you ever find yourself on the island I urge you to visit them and wander through the endless vaults packed full of scrolls and books and pages written in every language that has ever been documented in that world.
Of course, the City of Nin suffered all the usual maladies of human cities. Poverty and strife, crimes and their punishments, disease and drought—I have not yet seen any world free entirely of such things. But none of these sins touched the childhood of Yule Ian, a dreamy-eyed boy who grew up on the eastern edge of the City in a crumbling stone apartment above his mother’s tattoo shop.
He had devoted parents who were prevented from spoiling him only by the sheer number of their offspring. He had six brothers and sisters, who were, like siblings in every world, alternately his dearest friends and direst enemies. He had a narrow bunk decorated with tin stars dangling from the ceiling, which filled his dreams with gleaming planets and fanciful places. He also possessed a bound set of Var Storyteller’s Tales of the Amarico Sea given to him by his favorite aunt, and a temperamental cat that liked to sleep on the sunbaked windowsill while he read.9 It was a life well suited to daydreaming and reverie, which were the things Yule loved best.
Yule and his siblings spent their afternoons working with their father on his small fishing boat or helping their mother in her tattoo shop: copying out blessings and prayers in different scripts, mixing inks, and scrubbing her tools. Yule preferred the shop to the ship, and especially loved the long afternoons when his mother permitted him to watch her pricking tiny, blood-dotted words into a customer’s skin. His mother’s word-working wasn’t especially strong, but it was enough that her customers were willing to pay more to have their blessings written by Tilsa Ink, because her blessings sometimes came true.
His mother originally intended to apprentice him to her art, but it soon became clear that he lacked even the faintest spark of word-working talent. She might have trained him anyway, but he had no patience for the actual labor of tattooing. It was simply the words he loved, the sound and shape and marvelous fluidity of them, and so he drifted instead toward the scholars in their long white robes.
Every child in the City of Nin was subjected to several years of schooling, which amounted to weekly gatherings in the university courtyards to listen to a young scholar lecture them on their letters and numbers and the locations of all one hundred eighteen inhabited islands on the Amarico. Most children fled these lessons as soon as their parents permitted it. Yule did not. He often lingered to ask questions, and even wheedled a few extra books out of his teachers. One of them, a patient young man named Rilling Scholar, provided books in different languages, and these became Yule’s most prized possessions. He loved the rolling way new syllables felt in his mind and the strangeness of the stories they brought with them, like treasures from sunken ships the waves left behind.
By age nine Yule had achieved proficiency in three languages, one of which existed only in the university archives, and by the time he turned eleven—the traditional age for such decisions—not even his mother could object to his clear destiny as a scholar. She purchased the long lengths of undyed cloth at the harbor market and only sighed a little as she wrapped her son’s dark limbs in a scholar’s fashion. He was out the door with an armful of books in a white-blurred instant.
His first years at the university were passed in a state of dreamy near-genius, which provoked both frustration and admiration from his instructors. He continued to learn new languages with the ease of a boy scooping water from a well but seemed unwilling to dedicate himself sufficiently to master any single one of them. He spent untold hours in the archives, turning manuscript pages with a thin wooden paddle, but frequently missed assigned lectures because he’d found an interesting passage on merfolk in a sailor’s logbook, or a crumbling map marked in an unknown language. He consumed books as if they were as necessary to his health as bread and water, but they were rarely the books he had been assigned.
His most generous instructors insisted that it was purely an issue of time and maturity—eventually young Yule Ian would find a steady subject of study and dedicate himself to it. Then he might select a mentor and begin contributing to the grand body of research that made the University of Nin so prestigious. Other scholars, watching Yule prop a book of fables against the water pitcher at breakfast and turn the pages with a faraway expression, were less sanguine.
Indeed, as Yule’s fifteenth birthday approached, even the most optimistic scholars were growing concerned. He showed no signs of narrowing his field of study or proposing a course of research, and did not seem in the least concerned by his approaching examinations. Should he pass them, he could be formally announced as Yule Ian Scholar and begin his ascent through the ranks of the university; should he fail, he would be politely asked to consider some other, less demanding apprenticeship.
In retrospect, it is easy to suspect that Yule’s aimlessness was actually a quest, a search for some shapeless, unnamed thing that lurked just out of sight, and perhaps it was true. Perhaps he and Adelaide spent their childhoods in much the same manner, searching the limits of their worlds in search of another.
But restless quests are not the business of serious scholars. Yule was therefore summoned one day to the master’s study to have “a serious discussion of his future.” He arrived an hour late with his finger marking his place in A Study of Myths and Legends in the North Sea Isles and a bemused, distant expression. “You summoned me, sir?”
