Secrets Eat Me
In the Kingdom of Not there are seven virtues enshrined as the Seven Lances of Not: Quality, Remuneration, Sensation, Trade, Utility, Value, and Worth. In the tower Miserable, the Lance Worth is king, for it is in the tower Miserable that the Worthy are consumed by secrets.
I did not stop walking. I did not even slow down.
They take as a truism the notion that Worth is earned, not inherent; only through service can one fall into accord with the Seventh Lance. Therefore the tower Miserable was built to house those would seek to become Worthy, which in the Kingdom of Not are all the young men. Women do not venture to the tower Miserable, but instead acquire their Worth through private trials which are not named or described to the outsider.
Whenever I see my mother I remember what she did to my father and I want to retch.
The disparate young men of the Kingdom of Not travel as pilgrims to the tower Miserable. One group comes from each town or village every two to three years. In the largest cities a group of pilgrims comes from a ward or neighborhood; the precise division is practiced in a manner which varies from population center to population center. Even the walled-up children of Yomno leave their nests for the pilgrimage; it is for most the only time they spend out of earshot of the sounding-stone.
Someday I am going to wait until he is asleep, and I am going to pour oil into him, and light the oil on fire. Someday soon I will do this.
To facilitate the trip to the tower, the crown of Not ordered years ago the construction of a series of highways, broad enough for three men of Horseflesh to walk abreast, spread through the Kingdom like a spider’s web. The order was an unfunded mandate, which has drained the coffers of some provinces of the Kingdom and been ignored in others. The result is an uneven patchwork of roads, three to twelve feet wide in places, which does ease the travel of pilgrims when their path and it intersect.
I heard Ag, who wears fire, and Evelyn, the daughter of the river, plotting treason against the Exemplar. They will deface his obelisk on the eve of the next harvest festival.
The tower Miserable stands in the center of this rent web, and it is here that the pilgrims acquire their Worth. The time needed for this process varies, but is never less than thirty days or more than three hundred. Young men gain their Worth by willingly permitting secrets into them; they sacrifice their lack of knowledge of secrets to become full-fledged adults under the customs of the Kingdom. When an applicant has achieved the requisite level of contamination with secrets, he is told to return to his home, and congratulated on his Worth.
Every day I want to cry and I do not know why.
The process of becoming eaten by secrets is a simple one. The applicant sits at a stone-gray desk with a basket of envelopes and a notebook. He opens each envelope in turn and reads the note within. Each envelope contains a secret, mailed to the tower Miserable by a Worthy adult of Not who chose not to bear it. Anyone Worthy can mail a secret. Most mail several over their lifetimes. It is not spoken of, even among the chattering silk folk of the city called Nowhere.
I was the one who burned the bridge connecting the Avenue of Unpleasant Truths to Inclement Park. I was smoking a cigarillo and I dropped it. Three men were hung for conspiracy, and they were innocent.
The applicant reads the secret and recopies it into his notebook, then eats the note and envelope. When the notebook is full he gives it to one of the brothers of the tower, who checks it without reading the secrets and burns it in the central furnace at the heart of the tower. It is these brothers who tell the applicants when their service is done.
I would give anything to have him back – my wife, our children, anything. I don’t love my wife. I don’t love our children.
There are seven brothers of the tower, and when one passes away the other six choose a new brother from among the pool of applicants. Their most common cause of death is suicide.