Chapter 8
A language may tell you more about the people who own it than do the things they use that language to say to you. We have in our collection no language without a word for anger. There are some few—some very few—with no word for revenge.
One Hundred Chambers , by X’thon Qylar
CHAPTER 8
Celcha
Ahan’ah... mu-mutupk.”
Celcha, sitting with her back to the shelves, turned in surprise and looked up at the skinny child addressing her.
Lutna frowned. “Did I get it right?”
“I don’t know,” Celcha said. “What are you trying to do?”
“AHan’ah mutuupk.” Lutna smiled nervously.
Celcha looked around at the rest of the trainees, most of them sitting down, making best use of the rest break that Librarian Markeet had called. The humans and canith had clustered together, away from the two ganar. None of them were paying her any attention. “Are you unwell?”
Lutna looked put out. “It’s your language. Ahan’ah mutuupk . How are you?”
Celcha blinked. She never heard a ganar speak anything but the language they were speaking now, a tongue she’d recently learned was called modern Eursian. She knew a few words in the old tongue but they didn’t sound like anything the girl had said. “Ahanah mutupuk?”
“ Ahan’ahh mutuupk ,” Hellet said beside her. “It means ‘are you well.’ It’s a common ganar language, though not the one our ancestors spoke.”
Celcha didn’t ask how Hellet knew or why he’d never thought she might like to know. Maybe must have whispered it to him and, broken as he was, Hellet rarely looked up through the cracks of his inner world to see her and her needs. “Where did you learn it?” She directed the question at Lutna.
Lutna looked down, rubbing the toe of her shoe on the floor.
“She probably learned it at the palace,” called over the pushy boy who had made fun of Celcha’s nootki carvings.
“The palace?” Celcha asked.
“I don’t live there.” Lutna held her hands up as if warding off a blow. “I mean I didn’t before here. Only visited. With my father. He’s the fourth son of the queen’s third daughter.”
“Princess!” the boy hissed. Librarian Sternus cuffed him wearily over the head.
Lutna aimed her back at the boy. “I’m not really a princess. Not a proper one. But there were ganar at the palace. You know. Downstairs. They taught me a bit of their language. I’ve always been good at languages... I thought...”
“ Mutuupk ,” Hellet said, not looking up from his study of his claw scars. “Your mouth is the wrong shape for the uu-sound. You’re close enough to understand.”
“Everybody up!” Librarian Sternus clapped his hands. “Four more chambers to go.”
—
The destination chosen for Celcha’s first expedition into the library was the nearest ganar chamber. Most rooms could be accessed by four doors, those on the library’s edge by three. Most doors could be opened only by one species. Most chambers could be accessed only by one species. A ganar chamber could be entered only with the help of a ganar.
If Myles Carstar had been told that the library held chambers where four square miles were given over to the ganar, he would have denied it. If it were proved to him, he would have burned the lot and committed murder if necessary to bury the knowledge that such a place had ever existed. He had constructed himself around the idea that ganar were his inferior in every way. Celcha would have enjoyed informing him that in some of those chambers it was next to impossible to find any book not written by a ganar.
They came at last to their destination. Or at least to the short corridor leading to it and to the final white door blocking their way. The many doors before this one had melted away before the trainees’ touch. Markeet invited Lutna to try this one. She rapped her knuckles against the surface, unable to make a sound, and equally unable to pass through.
“And now.” Sternus extended his hand towards Celcha and her brother. “If one of our honoured guests would like to see a chamber through which many of their kind have passed before?”
Hellet nodded for Celcha to do it. So often these days she felt as though she were not only the smaller, but younger sibling too.
She advanced slowly towards the immensity of the door, which was large enough for scores to enter abreast, and so high that she’d hardly be able to throw a stone to the top. The whole thing dissipated before her reaching fingers, not allowing her any sensation of contact.
Celcha advanced without seeking permission.
Hellet caught up with her. “Once they’re in they can’t get out again without our permission. And nobody in the library can get in. They’d have to search the city for a slave who wanted to open the chamber for them.”
Celcha looked back to see the door re-form behind the last of the trainees, the irksome human boy whose name she’d learned was Kenton. For a moment she wanted to make them feel an echo of the terror she’d lived with all her life. None of these sabbers had set the manacle around her wrist, but it was still there. None of them had sent her down the tunnels, but parts of their houses were likely built of what her kind had recovered. None of them had administered the cruelties. Most of them were children. But they were clever children. They all knew that slaves worked beneath their feet in chains. They were part of the system. Part of the machine.
Hellet drew her attention forward with a snort. “They’re not enough. Think bigger, sister. Much bigger.”
—
The sight that greeted Celcha as she emerged from the tunnel put all thoughts of revenge to one side. The many rooms they had crossed to reach the ganar chamber had been filled with shelving. Shelves of various designs, heights, spacing, and materials, in all manner of repair, some shrugging off the years, others collapsing beneath their weight. The ganar chamber presented something very different. A stone-block wall reached to the dizzying heights of the ceiling and curved to meet the chamber wall to either side of the corridor. Celcha stood in a vertical semicircular shaft some thirty yards in radius, formed between the curving wall and chamber wall. A dozen doorways offered passage through the wall, with stone steps leading back and forth to visit the higher entrances. Far above the doors hundreds of windows stared down at her.
It seemed that instead of covering the floor of the chamber with shelving the ganar had filled the entire volume with some vast multi-roomed structure. That felt impossible. There would be sufficient accommodation for a nation; even the population of the largest city would be lost with such a volume.
“How far...” Celcha turned to the two librarians approaching behind her. “It can’t fill the whole space?”
“There are voids,” Sternus said. “But it seems to be more full than not. We estimate that we’ve explored fewer than three in a hundred of the rooms.”
“But... how did they live here? There’s no food. Can the chamber even be reached without humans and canith to open doors on the way?”
“All good questions.” Markeet came up on her other side, the larger and older of the two librarians, bulging belly tenting his crimson robes around his feet. “We believe they traded books here, volumes of particular value gleaned from faraway chambers. It’s possible that some of the population came and went by swift routes through the neighbouring rooms, using wheeled vehicles on tracks perhaps. But our scholars agree that food must have been grown here and consumed with very little delay between harvesting and the mouth in order that the assistants did not destroy it. It appears that assistants don’t consider something to be food until it is dead, or at least picked.”
“I have read,” said Hellet, “that the library shuffles the chambers and everything in them. Less often than once in a lifetime. But that it is sufficient to move what might at one time have been the library’s entrance chamber to some remove as distant as this.”
Markeet frowned. “That’s a rather fanciful story, best kept for children’s books. But I have heard it before.” His frown deepened. “The truth is that we have various theories and no certainties.”
“Why don’t you know for sure? Isn’t it written?” Celcha found herself eager to learn the languages of her own people—to study the books they left behind.
“Fire.” Sternus, blond-haired, short for a human, shuddered. “A very long time ago. Almost none of the rooms in this chamber survived untouched. We find books hidden in small caches, but not often.”
“Why”—Hellet asked his first question of the whole journey—“search in the labyrinth of a burned-out city for books when almost every step we’ve taken to get here has dozens of books within arm’s reach?”
Sternus looked up at the high windows speculatively. “The books uncovered here are often of considerable value to us.”
“And how many ganar tongues do you speak, librarian?” Hellet asked.
“Three.” The man frowned as if it was a number that troubled him rather than one he took pride in. He stared at Hellet, waiting for the next question, but Hellet looked away, craning his neck to study the heights.
When it became apparent that Hellet had no more to say, Markeet led them in through the nearest doorway. The next few hours were spent winding through corridors, climbing stairs, and finding paths through rooms that ranged from vaulted halls to small cubicles. Celcha tried to imagine the countless people who must have lived there, sleeping and eating in the many dwelling places. The windows in these homes often opened onto echoingly large voids, reaching down to the library floor in some places, false floors in others. With constant light everywhere it would have been easy to grow crops here: fruit trees; vines climbing the buildings. She tried to imagine it. The scale and complexity of it. The water that would have needed to be pumped in from outside the library.
The emptiness of the city grated on Celcha’s nerves. The whole library was, of course, characterised by solitude, but these rooms were made for families: the halls and open squares ached for the crowds that had once thronged here. The fire and subsequent centuries had left little but scorched stone to record the passing of so many. The air around Hellet might sparkle with the presence of angels, but everywhere else it was ghosts that held sway. The phantoms of innumerable ganar taken from the world before their time.
Initially, they followed stair after stair, gaining height, passing through regions already picked clean. The taint of the great fire had long since left the air but memories of it haunted the empty halls: black drifts of char, banished to the corners where shadows would linger but for the pervasive library light, blocks of stone split by heat, scorch marks that the passage of many feet had not erased. Ancient soot blackened every ceiling.
The further they went, the darker the walls and floor became.
“In the unexplored chambers everything’s black,” Sternus said. “The mark of a librarian who has done their job here is that they’ll come out looking like a trainee.”
A muted ripple of laughter went through the trainee ranks as they looked from the librarian’s crimson to their own black tunics.
As the walls grew darker Markeet called a halt from place to place and sent the trainees out exploring, equipping each band of two or three with coloured chalk to mark their return paths, though their footprints should also serve. On the fourth such stop Lutna surprised everyone by asking to be in a three with Celcha and Hellet. The librarians, mildly amused, allowed it.
Celcha followed the other two, deep in her thoughts. Not looking for books or anything else. It was in this state of mind that she found the raven, or rather she glimpsed it from a window across the floor of a void that might once have been an orchard. It launched itself from a distant window on the far side, a brief explosion of glossy black wings, gaining height before being lost from view. Back at the dig the eldest slaves, some who had been there more than a century, held great store by the sight of ravens. They even had a peculiar arithmetic whereby the number of the birds seen together constituted a prediction. One was always sorrow.
“Come on!” Lutna called back.
It didn’t take many choices of left or right, up or down before the other groups were out of earshot and a silence enfolded the ganar, broken only by the commentary of their human companion.
“I’m going to tell H’run and F’nort at the palace,” Lutna said. “They’re the ones that taught me to speak ganar. I mean, their language. I bet they’ve never heard about this place. They didn’t say anything and they knew I was coming to the lib—”
“This city is a tomb,” Hellet cut across her. “Many millions died here in the fire.” The air around him seethed and sparkled as Maybe and Starve circled him like prowling wolves. “The remains that were not wholly consumed were heaped together when the survivors returned. They made a pyramid two hundred and fifty yards on each side and a hundred and sixty yards high, just of bones.”
“I didn’t know.” Lutna looked down.
Hellet rolled his shoulders as he often did to ease the ache of his old scars. “It is good that you show more interest in the ganar than your fellows do. But understand that your actions are neither a kindness nor reparation. They are a bandage applied to a cancer.” He waved a hand at the view from the nearest window, looking out across a void to countless windows on the opposite wall. “This was the third and most recent ganar ascendance since the latest descent from Attamast. There have been earlier descents but information concerning those is scarce and patchy.”
“You came from the moon?” Lutna’s eyes went round.
“Our ancestors did,” Celcha said, glad to know something about her people that the child did not.
“They will come again.” Hellet’s voice was grim. “Or one of our enemies will go there. It never ends well. One world always burns. Or both do.” He walked across the room and knelt beside the wall where a pile of rubble lay. He moved a few blocks, disturbing a small cloud of soot. There seemed to be a space in the wall at floor level, partly obscured. Hellet drew out first one book, then another, the fur of his arms black now. The first was large with gold foil decorating its embossed cover, the other much smaller with an ink-dark cover and the edges of its pages dyed black. This smaller book he placed in his satchel, offering Lutna a slow wink. Next, he stood, crossed back to them, and placed the larger book in Lutna’s arms. “Well done, you’ve found a treasure.”
—
Of the two librarians it was Sternus, the younger one, who managed to disguise his excitement best, perhaps because he didn’t fully appreciate the importance of the book Lutna presented them with. Markeet, in contrast, couldn’t stop his cheeks spasming periodically with an alarmingly wide smile. Moreover, the older librarian began to sweat, and at such a rate that Celcha wondered if he’d reach the outer library half his current size, shrivelled beyond recognition.
The expedition ended abruptly and Markeet warned them all to be ready for a swifter return journey than the outward one. Celcha, whilst she could imagine that the book was important, was unclear why the librarians were in such a hurry to get back. It wasn’t as if someone was going to steal their prize from them.
On the retreat through the deserted warrens of the city Celcha lingered at the rear of the party with Hellet. “It was Maybe that put those books there, wasn’t it?” she hissed.
“I don’t know.” Hellet shrugged. “He knew they were there. That was enough.”
“Why though? What good does it do us?” What good does it do him? She wanted to ask that too, but Hellet grew uncommunicative if she ever questioned the angels’ motivation. Even pointing out that from what she could see Maybe was definitely canith had set her adrift on his silence for a day. Starve she saw less well—he, or she, could be canith, or human, or something similar to them both.
“Goodwill is a currency that can be spent in many ways. We’ve opened an account with both librarians and with the princess.”
“She’s not a princess.”
“Their queen has bounced her on her knee. It’s close enough.”
—
They reached the bottom of the last flight of steps on weary legs and walked down a long corridor before emerging from the city. Behind its curving wall it had reminded Celcha of the towering ant nests and hanging beehives she’d seen illustrated in a book Tutor Ablesan had been teaching her to read from. As if it were an amalgamation of both, fashioned from stone.
Celcha’s stomach rumbled as she crossed the ground between the city’s wall and the corridor. Her last meal seemed a very long time ago, her stomach already accustomed to the librarians’ plenty. The sustenance offered by the centre circle of each chamber felt like a poor exchange for actual food. She was glad the searching had been cut short, but they still had a long walk home and would sleep a night on empty bellies before reaching the outer library.
The librarians led the way down the corridor, halting before the white door then turning to look expectantly at Hellet. Celcha noticed that both angels, who had been hanging around her brother ever since their arrival at the chamber, had vanished. Without acknowledging Sternus or Markeet, Hellet came forward and set his palm, still black with soot, to the door. Nothing happened.
Markeet’s brow furrowed and, with his arms folded across the expanse of his belly, he swung his gaze to Celcha. “You try it.” All command, no request.
Celcha joined her brother and set her hand to the door. Nothing.
“This is...” Sternus looked astonished.
“Bad,” Markeet supplied. “It could be days before they come looking. And even if they bring more ganar... the door’s not opening for them.”
“Try again,” Sternus urged.
Celcha looked pointedly at her hand still on the door. “How long will we have to survive using the centre circle?”
Markeet and Sternus exchanged a look.
“This place is a maze,” Sternus said. “It’s hard enough finding the circle when it’s just shelves hiding it.”
“You don’t know where it is?” Celcha asked, horrified.
“It’s not like we haven’t looked...” The older librarian turned his gaze at the trainees as if considering how they might taste. “But no. We haven’t.”
“We’ll starve,” the trainee Kenton wailed, all his sneering gone in an instant.
“No,” Hellet said, and for a moment Celcha thought he was offering comfort. “Thirst will kill you long before that.”