Chapter 2
It’s remarkable how seldom visions are unremarkable. Or might it be that the great majority of our days are populated with visions that are simply too pedestrian to be called into question? How many of us have an acquaintance that is entirely fictional and who we will go to our graves believing to have been real?
The Unremarked , by Markus McMarkle
CHAPTER 2
Celcha
The second angel called itself Starve. He came after Kerns had fetched Raddock, and after Raddock had fetched Myles Carstar, but before the first cartload of books was hauled to the surface.
Celcha saw Starve even less clearly than she saw Maybe. Both were indistinct, more easily seen from the corner of her eye than when staring straight at them. He moved more than Maybe did. He prowled. Always watching. It was Starve who noticed she could see him. Maybe had seldom glanced her way and never shown any interest. Starve circled her, moved his extended finger before her eyes, and watched her watch his progress. He spoke to her too, though she heard nothing, or rather she heard a new kind of silence when his lips moved, as if what he said didn’t reach her but instead stopped any other small noise from doing so.
They all got an extra ration that night. Not just Hellet’s group but the whole shack. And Myles Carstar patted Hellet on the shoulder, almost stroking him as if he were one of the dogs that haunted the outskirts of the camp.
“You did well today, boy.”
Hellet gave the grateful twist of his mouth that was expected of him.
“Who would have thought that you of all my herd would be the one to find more books?” The slavemaster’s teeth showed at his own joke, fingers idly tracing the scars that crisscrossed Hellet’s shoulder. “I’ll wager you were scared to even touch them.”
Hellet let his head fall. “Hellet was. Yes, sir.”
Myles Carstar nodded, his sharp eyes flicking towards Celcha, who lowered her head, unable to match Hellet’s acting. The slaves rarely spoke around the sabbers, particularly around the slavemaster. He preferred to hear grunts and growls, and what kept his mood good was good for them too. “Do you want a she-slave or more food?”
“Hellet want food.”
When answering the slavemaster, you said your name first. He pretended it was because they all looked the same to him, but the real reason was to make children of them. You spoke like a small child too, no matter your age. None of them were supposed to be equal to the language of the masters. To speak it too well would be arrogance and that would earn an official cruelty faster than stealing or getting into a fight—those things were at least expected of a slave.
Myles Carstar did some sabber thing with his mouth that meant amusement. “Not a she-slave? You’ve grown big. We need more big slaves.”
“Hellet want food, please.” Hellet looked down, humble, trembling with the correct amount of fear at daring a choice even when choice was offered.
The slavemaster laughed and ruffled Hellet’s head with a thin-fingered hand. “Food it is.”
Celcha and Hellet had both determined long ago never to breed. Few children born into the Arthran dig would choose to produce their own replacements. Slaves had no say in the matter, of course. As livestock, they did what they were told. But Hellet knew ways to ensure such enforced unions bore no fruit. He said Maybe had told him how to find the plants required to make the paste. Bitter stuff that made you ill for days. Celcha considered it the only good thing the angel had done for them.
When they locked the shack door, Hellet sank into his sleep without a murmur. He lay so quiet that Celcha, wide awake and a thousand miles from dreaming, worried he might have died. Hellet never rested well. But that night he slept like the righteous. And far below him the ancient chamber waited for them, thick with secrets that they would never be allowed to know.
Dawn brought them a day much the same as any other save that instead of hauling rubble they were hauling books, and they got three overseers in place of one, two of them doing their overseeing in the newly broached chamber. The work carried on without breaks, the task of emptying the shelves apparently an urgent one, as if the slavemaster feared the buried city might recognise its oversight in not collapsing the ceiling above the books and have it come tumbling down post-haste.
Change arrived on the second day.
Around noon, beneath a blazing sun, a carriage jolted its way through the palisade gates. Not a drab covered wagon of the sort used to bring in food and tools but a work of art on wheels, lacquered sides dark as night skies, impossibly skinny wheels, and drawn by horses with glossy hides and flowing manes rather than the stumbling beasts that dragged the products of the dig to the city and rarely looked more than three trips from the cooking pot. Two sabbers in gleaming armour rode behind the carriage, their ornate helms styled to resemble howling wolves.
Celcha saw all this over the top of the cart she’d pushed with Stana and Cherl up the long incline from the chamber and out into the dizzying brightness of the day.
“No! No! No! No! No!” The elderly female sabber emerged from the carriage before its wheels had stopped rolling. She came towards them in a swirl of crimson robes, astonishingly vivid in the dull grey camp. “No!”
Kerns, who was bringing up the rear, cracked his cane across Celcha’s shoulders as if it were a given that she was the source of their visitor’s displeasure.
The female came right at them, laying her skinny, withered hands—too delicate for any serious work—on the cart’s front as if she might actually be able to stop it by herself. “Who has done this?” She looked around the yard, eyes sliding over Celcha, Stana, and Cherl as if they could no more be responsible for whatever offence had been committed than the cart itself. She fixed Kerns with the heat of her stare.
The overseer stepped uneasily around the cart as the two guards dismounted. “We’re following orders, librarian.” Kerns kept his head down, all his customary malice gone from him like water spilled from a cup.
The librarian’s sharp gaze cut to Myles Carstar’s office, a large stone-built structure not far from the gates. “Whose orders?”
“Mine, my lady.” Myles Carstar came from the direction of the slave shacks, unseen until he was almost among them. Even he seemed flustered by the librarian’s arrival, humble, when for all Celcha’s life he had been defined by his arrogance. An arrogance that ran so deep he hardly needed to express it, any more than an upright man needed to show you his bones. “The books we’ve brought up are in the sorting hall, out of the sun, safe from any rain.” He glanced towards the building in question, making a strained chuckle at the idea the books might get wet even without a roof. Rain might be more common than the discovery of books, but not a lot more.
“And the indexing has been preserved?” the librarian snapped.
“The what now?” Myles Carstar peered at the old woman as if she had spoken in a language other than his own.
“Did it not occur to you”—the librarian advanced on the slavemaster, and to Celcha’s astonishment the man retreated with a nervous swallowing—“that the arrangement of these books on the shelves encoded information of great value? Information that is almost certainly wholly lost in the ugly heap you’ve doubtless created in this storage shed of yours?”
Myles Carstar had always styled himself as the intellectual superior of his staff, cutting down larger men, and some larger women too, with deft twists of the verbal knife, belittling them with references beyond the scope of their education. Just as he cast the slaves into the role of animals, he portrayed the overseers in his employ as unruly and rather dim children. The official cruelties exacted upon Hellet and Celcha had been to ensure that they conformed to the slavemaster’s view of what they were.
To see that same man now robbed of his power was a revelation to Celcha. She understood in one moment the sudden change that can be wrought in the appearance of an object simply by changing the angle from which you illuminate it. The librarian had cast the slaver in a new light. And Celcha realised that although his discomfort was only a small revenge for all that he had done to her, her family, and her people... she liked the taste of it and wanted more.
“Well?” The old sabber woman lifted her hands from the cart and tilted her palms upwards. “Show me the shambles.” She turned towards another cart rumbling in through the gates, pushed by Hellet and Farga, loaded with books. “And for the love of all the gods of canith and men stop bringing up more!” Without waiting, she began to walk towards the hall, her two guards falling in behind her. The slaver moved reluctantly to follow. They wouldn’t find any order in what had been brought up. Care had been taken to preserve the well-being of the leather-bound tomes as they were loaded and unloaded, but their arrangement on the shelves had been lost in the process.
“You won’t find what you’re looking for.”
For a long moment even Celcha wasn’t sure who had spoken. She hoped to the heavens that it hadn’t been her, but it had been the voice of a slave. The slaves spoke the slavers’ language but they spoke it with different mouths, different chests, the words never sounded quite the same as they did from a sabber’s tongue. More importantly though, they spoke it in a different tone. All of the overseers, and Myles Carstar in particular, placed a great deal of importance on tone. A slave must never contradict a master, that was obvious, but more than that: a slave’s voice must never show confidence, let alone arrogance. Even certainty was dangerous. Hesitant and timid was the way. Intelligence was dangerous too, perhaps more so than disobedience. A slave must sound as stupid as their master imagined them to be, or more accurately, as their master wanted them to be. They must show their belly by willingly entering into the pantomime that both sides knew to be a lie, and speak as if every one of them were the village idiot.
Hellet’s voice broke all of Myles Carstar’s unspoken rules at a stroke. Celcha wasn’t sure if the slaver would properly understand what he was sentencing her brother for but she was certain that the penalty would be the third of the cruelties at the very least, perhaps even the fifth given the audience before which Hellet had disgraced himself.
The librarian stopped in that moment of stillness and rotated towards Hellet. Something golden sparkled briefly between them but for once Hellet’s eyes didn’t track it, remaining fixed upon the elder before him instead. Celcha had seen Kerns take a slave’s eye before, at Myles Carstar’s behest. The fourth official cruelty was a slow process, carried out with mechanical precision on the punishment platform behind the tool sheds. Sudden nausea swamped her as she imagined the same procedure with Hellet as the victim.
“What did you say?” The librarian pinned Hellet with a gaze that had a measure of curiosity in it where Myles Carstar’s held only contempt and a cold anger.
What did you say? She had heard what Hellet said. Everyone had. She was challenging him to say it again. To dig his hole deeper when it was already deep enough to be his grave.
“You won’t find what you’re looking for.” Hellet repeated himself without elaboration.
Kerns’s cane exploded across Hellet’s shoulders, the blow hard enough to fracture the wire-wood. Hellet gave no reaction at all, not a flinch, not a grunt, as if all the faked submissions over the years had combined to nullify what must be excruciating pain.
The librarian waved Kerns back, an annoyance, her blue eyes fixed on Hellet. “If you were insane, you wouldn’t have survived this long. So, there’s an implicit promise here. You have what I want.”
“I can re-create the ordering on the shelves.” Hellet rolled his shoulders, finally acknowledging the blow.
“Show me.” The librarian extended her arm, indicating that Hellet should precede her.
The air around Hellet glimmered and he turned his face towards Celcha. “I’ll need my sister. She memorised part of the layout,” he lied.
Two emotions split Celcha in that moment. The first was a cold, selfish terror at being roped into Hellet’s fatal hubris. Whatever head-patting the librarian might reward him with would provide no protection from Myles Carstar’s revenge. Celcha had had a lifetime to observe the slavemaster, and she was certain that whilst physically attacking him would earn a gruesome death, it would be less horrific than the one that humiliating him would bring.
The second, competing emotion was pride, something no slave could afford to have flowing through their veins. Pride in her brother’s action, and the other kind of pride, that of self-worth, pride at being named by him as co-conspirator. Even if it wasn’t true. Even if it could get her killed. Because so often since the lashing that broke him, Hellet had seemed to consider her part of the scenery, little different from those others who laboured beside him in the flame’s flicker. The fact that she loved him and sought at every turn to protect him went unnoticed, or so she’d thought in the long years since the collapse of the tunnel that had buried their father.
—
They entered the wide loading hall, all of them following Hellet. Outside, even the forgotten slaves edged closer, hoping to see what would happen. The place smelled of dry rot and roofing tar. The day’s brightness fingered in through narrow slits high in the walls, turning dust motes to gold.
In the space freshly cleared of rockcrete mounds, several thousand books sat in hip-high stacks, all of them thick with dust that had recorded every recent contact, the mark of a hand there, a finger graze here. The books had brought their own scent to the hall, one that Celcha was not familiar with, complex, old, and dead. There was, it had to be said, something of the mustiness of a dried-out corpse about them. Unsurprising really, given that Hellet had told her both the coverings and in many cases the pages themselves were made from the skins of animals.
Hellet moved around the stacks, occasionally placing a small stone from the handful he’d scooped up in the yard. The air around him glimmered with Maybe’s sparkle. Starve prowled the perimeter, occasionally circling Celcha.
The slavemaster and the three overseers who had joined him watched Hellet like the hawk watches the hare. Hellet ignored them. He set single stones here and there on top of various stacks, some close together, some far apart. From time to time, he looked towards Celcha as if for confirmation, and under the pressure of his stare she would nod.
At last, Hellet turned to face the librarian. “The marked stacks come from the first shelf of the set closest to the breach.”
“You’re going to trust the word of a slave?” Myles Carstar managed to look astonished and disgusted at the same time.
“No,” the librarian said. “I’m going to put that word to the test.”
She lifted the top two books from the first stack Hellet had marked and studied their spines before returning them to their place. She moved to the second stack and leafed through the topmost book. Going to the last stack she motioned one of her guards to her and had him lift all but the bottom book then pass that one to her. The woman opened the tome to the middle pages, resting it in her arms, and scanned the text. “The subject matter is related in all of these books. They came from the same shelf.” She turned to Hellet. “Show these men how to arrange the stacks to reflect the shelving.”
In one fell swoop the librarian reversed the order of the world. A slave became the overseer. It proved a step too far for Myles Carstar. His pink, hairless skin flushed deep red, and a tremble found its way into both his hands and his voice. “I’ll bring some slaves in.”
“No.” The librarian shook her head. “I need the chamber emptied quickly and efficiently. You will ensure that the rest of the books are arranged shelf by shelf as they’re brought up. I want a map of the shelving in the chamber and to be able to identify where each book came from. That’s something you can supervise? Or do I need to bring a junior from the library to go... below?” She said this last word with a shudder. The tunnels and their darkness and dirt were physically beneath her, but socially they lay much deeper than that.
And so, Hellet was left to oversee the overseers, which he did as if he’d been born to it. Celcha returned to the depths with the fuming slavemaster, coming back to the hall periodically, pushing carts of books, all now meticulously noted in Myles Carstar’s ledger. On each return, Hellet would consult her about details of the ordering, maintaining the fiction that she was a necessary part of the exercise.
Whilst the sight of Kerns and the others labouring under Hellet’s direction afforded Celcha great satisfaction, she knew that the daggers in their stares would be actual blades planted in her brother’s flesh as soon as the librarian went on her way. As such, Celcha loaded books and pushed carts all in the certainty that if she was lucky this would be her last day, but that it was more likely her final hours lay several days hence after a period of sanctioned torture that would feel like an eternity.
Whatever consequences were coming, it turned out that they would have to wait another day at least. By the time a moonless night swallowed the plains, the chamber still held about a quarter of its original contents. The slavemaster was keen that the labour continue till dawn if that was what it took; and if the slaves assigned to the job died of exhaustion, it was a price worth paying. The librarian disagreed. Organising the books in the loading hall would require a good many lanterns if they worked on into the night, and the risk of fire was too great. Besides, she wanted to sleep. Myles Carstar offered her his quarters, but she preferred the bone-jolting carriage journey back to the city, a slight that left the slavemaster fuming as the librarian and her guards clattered out through the compound’s gates.
In the blindness of the slave shack, Celcha huddled beside her brother’s broad frame, more terrified of the slavers’ revenge now that her mind had nothing to divert it from such thoughts.
“Hellet?” She poked his back and whispered his name again. “Hellet?”
A low grunt.
“Why are you doing this? They’re going to kill us.” Part of her already knew. His mind had broken years ago, and it was amazing that his madness had taken this long to kill him. The only surprise was that it had killed her too. Hellet’s silence seemed to confirm it. She seized on the one thing offering hope that there might be more to this. The angel. Angels now. “This new angel—Starve—what does it want?”
Hellet rolled slowly to face her, drawing sleepy grumbles from their neighbours. “It’s the angel of death.”
Celcha’s last fragile hope shattered. He’d come to watch them die. And Hellet had given him just what he wanted. She turned away, stifling a despairing sob.
“No. You don’t understand.” Hellet’s big hand covered her shoulder. “Starve’s here to show me how to kill them.”
“Kill Myles Carstar?” Celcha hissed, horrified.
“All of them.”
“The overseers as well?”
“All. Of. Them.”