Chapter 4
An execution brings with it moments of great focus and decisions of consequence. It’s a time for reflection. So grab that mirror! How much neck do you dare to bare? This reign of terror the word is “lace.” We’re seeing big ruffs for the ladies, frothy jabots for the lords.
Dressing for the Guillotine , by Madame Gateaux
CHAPTER 4
Celcha
Celcha woke before the bell on what was certain to be the last day of her life. The remaining books would be emptied from the chamber. The librarian would depart to the city for the last time. Hellet would be left with Myles Carstar and the consequences of his behaviour. The slavemaster’s fury at his humiliation would not be satisfied with only Hellet’s torture and death. Celcha would suffer the same fate.
Celcha left the shack in Hellet’s wake, her mind filled with means of escape. Not out into the stark desert beyond the palisade—that would only afford the slavers the thrill of a chase—but a cleaner escape into death. Given some rope and a few minutes of privacy she could—
“It will be all right, sister.” Hellet turned and covered her hands in his, his rough palms covering the claw scars along the back of each where her blades would grow if the slavers hadn’t torn them out in her third year and cauterised the wounds with hot iron.
“How will it be all right?”
Raised voices from outside stopped Hellet from replying. The sabbers always rose early. It wasn’t out of kindness they let the slaves sleep longer. The simple mechanics of it were that sabbers needed less time in their beds, and that if they forced the slaves to match them, in a matter of weeks the slaves went mad and died.
“—any other pair!” That was Myles Carstar, his voice shaking with restrained outrage.
“I don’t require any other pair.” The librarian, imperious, unimpressed by the slavemaster’s protests. “I require those two.”
As Celcha and Hellet shuffled blinking from the shack’s shadows into the sunlight the librarian singled them out from the line. “Those two, just so there’s no doubt.”
“They’ll be nothing but trouble for you, ma’am.” Myles Carstar retreated into politeness, though to look at his face Celcha thought that without the librarian’s two guards gleaming in their armour he might have beaten the old woman to death. “They’ve both been disciplined for curiosity. Without strict supervision, who knows what they’ll do next. You need chains, gates, proper discipline...”
Hellet kept his head down and Celcha followed his example, reluctantly tearing her gaze away from the slavemaster’s distress. She felt as if she were in a dream and she wasn’t going to accept any of it as real until she was actually walking away from the dig in her brother’s company.
“Curiosity is a necessary qualification, Mr.Carstar. We will be turning a liability into an asset. The library will compensate you at above-market rates.” She turned towards the loading hall and the small convoy of unusually smart wagons lined up beside it. “Now, if you’ll be so good as to direct your workforce to the task, we should be able to finish this business before noon.”
—
And so it was that on a hot autumn day, after over twenty years spent digging out the ruins of a dead city, Celcha and her brother walked away from the place in which they had been destined to die. They followed the last of seven book-laden wagons out of the compound, leaving everything they’d ever known, leaving the dead city behind them.
Myles Carstar did not emerge from his office to see them leave, and the overseers drove all the slaves below ground so that none would witness Celcha and Hellet’s departure. Even so, there wasn’t anyone in the Arthran dig, slave or slaver, who didn’t know that the pair of them, brother and sister, had escaped from beneath Myles Carstar’s rage and left him humiliated in their wake.
Hellet and Celcha took nothing of their own with them. They had owned nothing. But in her hands Celcha carried several dozen tiny wooden figures—nootki in the old tongue—whittled against the slavers’ will and beneath their notice. Many of the slaves, the ones who followed tradition, made these figures, just one each, allegedly in their own image, though it was hard to tell on such a small scale. When a slave died, they were buried by the fence, unless they’d died during a cruelty, in which case their corpses were given to the dogs. The dead were always buried on the inside of the palisade, as Myles Carstar wanted to make it clear they hadn’t gone free, even in death. The figure they had carved was then returned to the shack and hidden in the rafters or some other suitable nook, so that their spirit would remain with the group, watching over the young, comforting the bereaved.
These were the figures that Celcha had been entrusted with, their owners knowing that they themselves would never leave the Arthran dig, and choosing to set their nootki in Celcha’s care so that some small part of themselves might go with her and witness the wider world.
It took shockingly little time before Celcha had gone further from the shack in which she’d been born than she had ever gone before. The dusty, rock-strewn world didn’t care, Hellet didn’t seem to notice, but Celcha did, turning briefly to look back on the compound, its low roofs, its weathered fences, and thinking in that moment how very small it all was and how awful that so many lives were eaten up there, ground into nothing for the greed of others. She turned from it and followed her brother’s broad, scarred back, wiping away hot tears. Not of sorrow, nor of joy at her salvation, but of anger.
—
Celcha’s first surprise was how big the world was. She had, of course, gazed on the lake to the east and the mountains to the west, but a life lived entirely within a few hundred yards of your birthplace fails to educate the eye in the matter of distances. She had understood that the lake and the mountains were both bigger and further away than they seemed, but she had not understood how much bigger and how much further away.
Celcha knew herself to possess both strength and endurance. These were the qualities that the slavers most valued. Her legs, however, had never been used to walk a great distance. She hurried along behind Hellet, finding that the horses pulled the wagons faster than she would have chosen to march. The mountains at which they were aimed seemed to come no closer though, no matter how far the road took Celcha, as if they were shuffling away at much the same pace as she advanced.
To distract from the growing fatigue in her legs, Celcha focused on thoughts of the city itself. The slaves weren’t wholly ignorant about it. In the past, though not in Celcha’s time, city slaves guilty of minor infractions such as being surplus to requirement, old, or injured, had been sent to work out their remaining days in the Arthran tunnels. The stories they brought with them were astounding, though Celcha suspected that they had been embellished over the years. The tales said that there were not one but two kinds of sabber living in the city, two species with a long history of warfare behind them, finally joined in a truce that had become an enduring peace. That in itself sounded like a miracle. Moreover, the stories had it that the second sabber race was even larger and even more warlike than the ones who ran the dig site.
The wagons rattled down from the Arthran Plateau and across an arid plain. Celcha and Hellet, walking at the rear, turned grey with the dust raised by seven sets of wheels and the hooves of a score of horses. A sabber rode towards the rear of the column, occasionally glancing their way, though far from vigilant. Escape wasn’t on Celcha’s mind, however—this was escape. Whatever the librarian had planned for them, it was hard to imagine that it would be worse than wandering aimlessly in the surrounding wasteland until death found them.
The librarian rode in her carriage ahead of the creaking wagons. Celcha had to imagine that the sleek horses pulling it must have fairly flown across the intervening distance to have the old woman there before the slaves woke that morning. The ganar slept late, but not that late.
Gradually Celcha started to catch up with her shadow. The prenoon sun had thrown it before her to point the way. By noon it puddled around her feet, and as more miles passed, it trailed behind her as if reluctant to journey further. Celcha continually readjusted her sense of scale as the hours passed and the mountains reluctantly began to grow larger. Even so, when Hellet raised his arm to point at the foot of the nearest mountain and said, “Krath,” Celcha took a long time to understand what she was looking at. She had heard that the city of Krath had walls so tall that someone falling from them had time to scream, draw breath, and scream again before they hit the ground. So wide that many defenders could walk abreast along their thickness. The small dark line at the foot of the closest mountain couldn’t be that wall. It would mean that the mountain was so vast as to defy all sense.
And yet, mile by mile, the line grew into a wall. And by the time they reached the gates, Celcha had to crane her neck to see the serrated line of the battlements against the bright steel of the sky.
Hellet had made no complaints, not about the unaccustomed miles or eating dust the whole way. “Krath” had been his first word of the journey and his only word until they passed through the gates. Once inside the city there were innumerable amazements to capture Celcha’s attention, but the fact that her brother started to talk and said more in the next half hour than he had in the previous six months was perhaps what amazed her most.
“The canith are faster and stronger than the humans.” In the crowd just beyond the gates the canith towered above the humans, head and shoulders taller in many cases, just as most humans towered above Celcha and overtopped even Hellet’s unusual height. All three species had more in common physically than differences. Size was the most obvious dissimilarity. Celcha was used to the humans’ nakedness and their need to cover it with cloth. Even the hair on their heads often looked thin compared to the golden pelt she shared with all other ganar. The canith’s manes were impressive but faded to a short bristling fur that could go unnoticed, particularly on their arms and hands. At first glance their faces had something canine about them, though closer observation showed this to be a passing similarity rather than some shared fundamental.
“The canith owned this city too. For a century here and there.” The air to either side of Hellet glimmered, Maybe and Starve flanking his advance along the broad streets. “Swapping it back and forth with the humans. Nobody’s sure who first built it.” He paused to shake out some of the dust from his pelt. “There’s a lesson there. Size and speed aren’t what really matter. The big child might push the smaller one over, but when we’re grown...” He tapped his forehead. “It’s this and what we do with it that matters.” A stone hit Hellet’s shoulder, but he didn’t look for whoever had thrown it. Instead, he turned the other way as a child shouted, “They caught another hairy!” and other children laughed. Hellet gazed up at the tenements rising four and five storeys above them. “Brains, not brawn. They know this too—the canith and the humans—under the mockery and cruelty and abuse, they know it. It’s why they clamp down so hard on us.”
“This is what Maybe’s been whispering to you all this time?” Celcha asked.
“Some of it. Some I understood by myself even before he told me. Maybe can see the past like he’s turning the pages of a book. He knows the history of our people. We’ve built cities too—greater ones than this. We’ve fought to defend them. They say that the ganar are slow to anger but they hold on to it. Our enemies say we don’t fight fair, as if any sane creature would fight fair against an opponent twice their size. Fairness is something others try to impose at the surface level once they’ve fixed all the foundations in their favour.”
Celcha shook her head, torn between the strangeness all around her and the strangeness of her brother, who appeared to have been tutored by ghosts or angels in matters of a past lost to the memory of even the oldest slave. They followed the wagons, no longer in a dust cloud. The ghosts were slightly clearer here in the light of day than down in the tunnels of Arthran. She’d expected them to fade in the sun, but they’d done the opposite. Maybe was the taller by quite some margin, and the easier to see. In the sunlight he could almost be a canith...
The city lay in a valley between two great arms of the mountain and climbed the slope towards the impossible sky-scraping heights that loomed above them, making even the towers and temples seem small. As the main street led them higher, the buildings became still more grand. Celcha had never seen or imagined anything like it. The dig site held only the most utilitarian of structures: boxes in which to keep things. The buried city had always hinted at more, but it was hard to appreciate grandeur when you were hewing it from the ground one lump at a time. Here, there were soaring works of art in solid stone on every side.
The wagons clattered ever upwards, over stone-paved streets. As the gradient steepened, the path wound back and forth, softening the slope for the horses, each zig and zag gaining elevation and expanding the view back over the city. The carpet of canith and humanity spread further than Celcha had been able to understand from outside the wall or from within the shadowed valleys of its streets. From up on the slopes, where the houses began to thin and the raw bedrock started to reassert itself, Celcha could see that there must be not the thousands she had imagined but tens of thousands of citizens, a hundred thousand even.
The sun burned red, peering from the shoulder of the mountain. As Celcha passed a tall pole standing by the roadside, the top of it burst into brilliance. Hellet caught her arm when she startled away. The horses carried on with barely a snort. Back along the winding street they’d travelled, more of the poles lit, the bright yellow flames held inside glass boxes. Celcha hadn’t even noticed them—there’d been so much else to see.
“Street lighting,” Hellet said. “So they can see where they’re going at night.”
The ganar slept at night. The idea of having the way lit for anyone to wander seemed extraordinary to Celcha. Just thinking about it made her yawn mightily.
“They have these lights in their homes too. The lights burn the same kind of gas that they use to cook with and for heat,” Hellet said.
Celcha walked on in silence, watching the illumination spread. It almost seemed that Hellet had been here before. If Celcha had pointed to a random house and asked who lived there she wouldn’t have been surprised if Hellet told her.
—
The wagons left the houses behind and stopped shortly afterwards on a steep road that led up towards the head of a howling wolf carved into the mountainside. A wolf whose mouth stood wide enough to devour them whole.
The guard who had ridden at the back dismounted and pointed towards the entrance. “Go help with the unloading.” Hellet chose that moment to yawn hugely, showing all his big square teeth. “None of that.” The guardsman shook his head. “Sleep comes afterwards. One late night won’t kill you.”
It took remarkably little sleep deprivation to cause a ganar to fall unconscious, but even so neither of them protested. For the first time since passing through the gates, yawns notwithstanding, Hellet seemed as excited as Celcha to see what lay ahead.
Librarians in crimson robes, both human and canith, came out onto the stone platform before the entrance to watch the books being unloaded by underlings uniformed in black. Although the physical labour seemed to be beneath them, many of the librarians were unable to maintain their air of aloofness and stand back watching. Instead, they broke ranks and came forward to pick at the loads being carried into the wolf’s jaws.
Celcha and Hellet joined in with the effort, working alongside humans and canith for the first time. They unloaded the wagons and set the books inside the wolf’s mouth, where other library staff took them off in wheeled shelving units at a much slower rate. Celcha wondered why there were no other slaves doing the work. The staff paid her and her brother little attention but there was none of the overt hostility that she’d sensed in the streets, and certainly none of the murderous rage that even the suggestion of human labouring beside ganar would have evoked back at the dig site.
Books were easier to load and unload than the material Celcha normally worked with. They were lighter, blunter, and had regular, stackable shapes. She found the labour easy, the only difficulty being that she very much wanted to be asleep. Also, it was hard to handle the books with sufficient care that one of the onlooking librarians didn’t wince or scold. Hellet seemed to be making a better job of it.
Celcha had both arms out and had received most of a double armful of books when the black-tunicked woman loading the volumes onto her stopped in mid-action. Everyone stopped. The murmur of conversation around the task vanished. Awkwardly, Celcha shuffled herself around to peer past her burden in the direction everyone else was looking.
On the stone platform before the wolf’s head, somebody new had come to join the librarians. Although built on similar lines to all three, this newcomer was neither canith, human, nor ganar. Tall as a human, unclothed like the ganar, with the confidence of a canith. If the creature hadn’t been moving Celcha would have assumed it was a statue, carved from a stone she’d never seen before, white and gleaming like a tooth. The most unnatural thing about it, apart from the texture and uniformity of its flesh, was the lack of detail, everything smooth, without wrinkle, hair, claw, or colour. She couldn’t even see if it had eyes or nostrils or tell if its mouth could open. In many ways he—she felt it was a he—reminded her of the nootki she’d tied into her pelt for safekeeping. More of a suggestion or reminder of the original than an accurate representation.
The new arrival took a place among the librarians in their crimson robes and, looking down at the wagons, lapsed into the immobility that Celcha had expected from it all along. It stood stiller than sculpture. Watching. Or dead. The librarians around the creature seemed unable to look away, though it was surprise and deference that reflected on their faces rather than fear.
“What’s an assistant doing out here?” someone muttered behind Celcha.
“Never seen one before. Not even in the library.” Another astonished mutter.
Hellet provided the signal to return to work. He walked past Celcha with a load of books, unconcerned, as if nothing had happened. Celcha started to follow him. Nobody had told them to stop, after all. For a slave, unilaterally deciding to take a rest could have horrific consequences. The rest of the workforce took the cue and a moment later everyone was back to what they’d been doing.
Hellet’s arrival at the platform and careful negotiation of the steps caused the second astonishment, shutting down conversation and activity just as effectively as the first. The assistant walked towards Celcha’s brother, blocking his path. Several librarians had done the same thing as evening had darkened towards dusk, but the assistant didn’t take a book for inspection.
“Your name?” he asked in a voice free of inflection.
“Hellet.”
The assistant looked to Hellet’s left and right, resting his gaze briefly on Starve and Maybe. “Welcome to the library, Hellet.” He stood aside and Hellet carried on his way.
The stillness and silence persisted this time, but Celcha felt more compulsion to follow her brother than to stand staring with the rest. She climbed the steps to the platform with great care, not wishing to find out what punishment would be earned by dropping books.
The assistant moved to intercept her. “Your name?”
“Celcha.” Her mouth struggled to say “master” but she wouldn’t let it. Hellet hadn’t said it, and following him had got her this far. An insane desire to ask the assistant’s name in turn took possession of her, so much so that simply fighting it off made her tremble with the effort.
“Welcome to the library, Celcha.” The assistant turned away and walked back towards the wolf’s head entrance.
As he left, Celcha saw the golden sparkle of one of the angels approaching from the direction Hellet had gone in. Maybe, the one she could see better—in fact she saw him better than ever before. He looked for all the world like a canith.
Maybe came to her side, bent low, and whispered in her ear. “Himma-calling Yute.”