Chapter 10
Lies are a currency. The truth buys nothing save sorrow.
Real Economics , by Mark Carnival
CHAPTER 10
Evar
Evar followed the assistant’s directions, or rather its single direction, as best as he could. Where doors failed to open to his touch, he had to lead his siblings on long detours, whilst remembering their route with sufficient accuracy to understand when they finally reached a chamber where the original direction had meaning.
For the whole course of the journey a constant anxiety kept him company—the worry that they might find they had simply enlarged their prison, swapping one chamber for a network of several dozen that still didn’t connect with the outer world. Kerrol suggested that their escape had been promised from the moment they had reached a door that opened for them. Doors coded to canith must, he suggested, be part of a sequence that led to the canith door to the outside. Minutes later he undid any confidence he’d managed to instil by adding, “Unless, of course, the library’s design is intended to encourage cooperation between species, and we were in a part of the library that could only be reached by an accord between humans and canith. Or perhaps between humans, skeer, and canith.” A short while after that he even managed to sour the idea of escape by asking how one would know when the swapping of smaller prisons for larger ones had truly stopped and freedom had been found, or is freedom simply a sufficiently large prison? Clovis told him to shut up after that.
Their trek through the wonders of the library had the most impact on Clovis and Kerrol since Evar had ghosted his way through many chambers on journeys through the Exchange. Still, it was hard to impress anyone who had lived their entire life amid a near infinity of books by using a larger near infinity held in chambers identical to the one they’d lived in. Both were, however, fans of shelving, being impressed by its height and the ease of obtaining a book without toppling an entire tower to get to it. They were less impressed by the constraints it imposed on getting places. Particularly when trying to follow a bearing. Fortunately, the only decision that ever needed to be made—bearing or not—was which of the other three doors to attempt to leave a chamber by.
Evar wasn’t sure how long it took to reach the outermost chambers, but he was sure it was more than a day, and they slept twice. Despite the threat of the skeer, they saw no other living creature on their expedition. Clovis surmised that the skeer set guards only on the doors they couldn’t open, in the hope that they would then capture the door when it did finally open. Once through a canith door there was no worry about skeer since the areas the siblings trekked through were presumably inaccessible to the insectoids.
—
“Well, we’ve reached the edge.” Kerrol stood looking back and forth across the expanse of wall.
“We have.” Evar frowned. The lack of a door meant that beyond the wall lay the outside world. Unless of course the architect—Irad as some legends called him—enjoyed cruel tricks. The lack of a door also meant that they had followed the assistant’s bearing with insufficient accuracy.
“Left or right?” Clovis asked. It was the correct question. The more difficult one was how far left or right to go before turning back and going right or left.
Kerrol chose left and was outvoted, so they ended up going right, which was undoubtedly what Kerrol had intended. Evar considered reversing the decision and going left. But that would then turn out to be what Kerrol had intended. In the end he decided that it didn’t matter.
They found the exit door two chambers later.
Evar stood back and looked at it. Just for once he was the expert. He had experienced things that his siblings would soon face for the first time. “There’s a whole world out there.” He basked in the novelty of being the leader. “Brace yourselves. It’s not like anyth—”
Clovis cut his speech short by drawing her sword, walking up to the door, and slapping at it. She was through before it had fully dissipated. Kerrol walked after her, giving Evar a pat on the shoulder as he passed. “Sorry, brother, she’s seen all kinds of worlds in the Mechanism. It’s going to take quite a bit to impress her. Nice speech, though.”
Evar clenched his teeth against the grumbling he wanted to succumb to. The assistant had said there weren’t any ghosts around, but there was a remote chance Livira had found them in the interim and was watching over him. If so, he was sure she’d be laughing at his pomposity, and he determined to create a better impression going forward.
“Evar!” Kerrol ducked back through the door. “Come on!”
—
Beyond the door lay a sequence of natural caves adjoining artificial chambers. From the rubble heaped on all sides, and from the broken walls and cavitated ceilings, it was apparent that the place had been heavily damaged, collapsed even, then partially repaired at least once. Some passages were blocked, and the chambers had a deserted look, carrying the same cold, dampish aroma as caverns sculpted by nature.
“I’m going to say that the exit is very well hidden from the outside, and probably blocked too,” Kerrol said.
“Because there wasn’t a skeer waiting behind the door,” Clovis said.
Evar understood why his sister had gone through the door ahead of them, blade in hand. She’d been expecting a skeer. More than one maybe.
They found no sign of the insectoids. In fact, they found very little. No bones, almost nothing organic, just rusted hinges and pieces of shattered planking in the occasional doorway. A chair leg here, a blackened pot there.
“I want something to eat.” Clovis sniffed at a cauldron whose base had corroded through long ago. “We can starve out here.”
“We can starve in the library,” Evar said. “Just not die from it.”
“Unless you can’t reach a centre circle for some reason.” Kerrol rubbed his chin.
“I can’t see that happening...”
—
As they approached what had to be the main entrance, the library light began to fade and the collapses became more of a problem, forcing them to squeeze through narrow gaps on several occasions.
“This is deliberate.” Clovis eyed up the wall of rubble in their way.
“The question is whether it’s to stop canith coming in, or to stop something else,” Kerrol said.
“Either way”—Evar clambered up to the top and took hold of a large rock—“we have some digging to do. Watch out!” With a heave he sent the chunk tumbling down the slope. He looked at his hands, wondering. He’d never touched broken rock before. He’d never touched anything that wasn’t flesh, or books, or library, save for his food and the trees in the Exchange.
Clovis came up to join him, jumping between the larger rocks. Kerrol scrambled up after her. He stood, brushing rock dust from the book-leather skirt that covered his knees, then frowned at his dusty hands. “This could take a while. Reckon we can do it before we die of thirst?”
—
In the end it took three retreats to the nearest centre circle and another period of sleep before they smelled any hint of an outside world. The rubble wall was backed against truly titanic slabs of rock that sealed the entrance tunnel. Rubble filled the narrow gaps between the slabs too. The siblings mined a path between giant rocks, wondering all the time if their efforts were simply going to reveal a path that narrowed to a crack and forced them to try another way until at last all their labour proved futile. As they dug further the library’s light weakened rapidly, leaving them fumbling in the dark.
Evar coughed on dust, panted, coughed again, carried on panting as he hefted aside rocks from fist-sized to head-sized. His arms trembled with fatigue and his hands both ached and stung. Behind him, Kerrol and Clovis cleared rubble, waiting their turn at the digging front. A new scent was what first alerted Evar to a change ahead. The breeze came later, along with a whisper of sunlight. But at first there was only the smell of freedom, faint strains of life, and the arid tang of desert.
The final squeeze proved rib-scraping and had Evar had a richer, more plentiful diet he wouldn’t have made it through. He emerged in a small avalanche of pebbles and crawled from beneath a shelf of rock into dazzling sunlight. Rather than standing, he continued to crawl then sprawled exhausted on the nearest piece of mountainside flat enough to receive him.
Soon all three of them lay side by side, their manes dust-white as if they were true siblings from the same litter.
“It’s not the same,” Kerrol said at last.
“No,” Clovis said, her face still covered with one arm.
“What isn’t?” Evar asked.
“The Mechanism,” Kerrol said. “It’s close, but this is more real. I can feel every corner of this rock digging into me, and the wind is doing different things to the hairs on one arm than the other, and the sun... it’s just... hotter, brighter. More real.”
“Oh.” Evar said no more but he was glad in a way, glad that he could have shown them both something new, and that reality had something to offer that the dreams of the Mechanism couldn’t capture.
Some time passed as they lay, adjusting to the light, the temperature, and the wind. Evar had only ever left the library as a ghost and these things were all new to him too. Clovis was the first to sit up.
“We need water, then food, then shelter.” She shaded her eyes and gazed around. “Is that this city of yours?”
Evar sat up. “No.” The ruins she was looking at were too small for the city he’d seen, and surely too weathered. “Maybe some sort of fort to keep the canith from using this entrance to the library.” He frowned. “But why would the canith build their city outside the human entrance?”
Kerrol sat up, squinting and yawning. “Because the humans built one there and it was easier to take it, then hike to this entrance from there? Or to use humans to open the closer door? I suppose it depends on what fraction of the citizens are going to want to come into the library on a regular basis. From what you’ve said about the humans it was almost none of them.”
“So, where’s the city you were in?” Clovis asked.
Evar stood slowly and scanned the surrounding peaks. To his left the ground sloped away, trailing to a grey-brown plain whose distances lay beneath impenetrable haze. “It’s hard to say.” He had studied the mountains when he had first left the library, but out of fascination rather than a desire to locate himself at some future time. And he wasn’t used to seeing huge objects from different angles. “Maybe... over there?” He flapped a hand vaguely down the gorge to the right.
“We should find water down there at least?” Kerrol shaded his eyes and stared as if willing it into being. “I mean, the stuff runs downhill. That’s how rivers work.”
“Come on.” Clovis started to lead the way down towards the gorge, her usual poise deserting her on sloping ground after a life lived on the level. “We can’t just wait here.”
—
The sun swung through the sky, swirling their shadows around them as they laboured across the fractured landscape. Kerrol was the first to flag. Evar’s siblings had been trained by the Mechanism and weren’t literally jumping at their own shadows as he’d been in the Exchange, but Kerrol’s interests had always been cerebral rather than physical and the unaccustomed exercise was taking its toll.
“Wait here.” Clovis pointed to the shadow of a large rock. “Evar and I will go up to that ridge and see if he’s right about where we are.”
Kerrol didn’t bother to argue. He wasn’t given to pride—perhaps a side effect of deconstructing personality to such a degree. Also, it didn’t take his particular skill set to understand that Clovis wasn’t in the mood for negotiating.
Evar knew he was needed as the one most able to ensure they weren’t seen by hostile eyes. If Starval were there, then... but Starval wasn’t there. As they climbed, Evar tried to keep his thoughts on his surroundings and what Starval had taught him about concealment in such places, rather than thinking about Starval himself. His brother had vanished with Mayland, seemingly recruited to his plans for destroying the library. Mayland, who Evar had thought was dead, appeared to have simply found out how to escape before Evar did, and to have left all his siblings to carry on in their prison while he went exploring. Evar hadn’t yet decided how he felt about any of that.
The sinking sun had stretched every shadow until one started to meet the next. Again, Evar couldn’t help thinking of Starval. He’d have loved every bit of this. Evar, on the other hand, rather than loving it, was terrified that his education in such matters would prove inadequate and he’d let some enemy see them.
The last time Evar had seen his brother was with his knife at Mayland’s neck. Mayland in turn had held the neck of an assistant who had abandoned immortality in favour of involving herself in humanity’s affairs, and by extension those of the canith. Whether she counted as an innocent, Evar couldn’t tell. But she had certainly been helpless, and it had hurt Evar to see Mayland kill her, especially with so little emotion. Starval, rapidly changing his approach, had killed a human to protect their brother, and then all hell had broken loose in the Exchange and Evar had fled, meaning to save Livira. He hoped Mayland and Starval had kept each other safe, and that Starval hadn’t let their eldest brother lead him down a dark path.
“Down!” Evar grabbed at Clovis, but she found cover before he made contact.
“Where?”
“On the heights. Two skeer.” Evar slithered towards the ridge, keeping the folds of the rock between him and the skeer.
Clovis didn’t ask if they’d been spotted. It was nice to be trusted. Evar crested the ridge first. He let the scene before him sink into his eyes, lit by the red embers of the setting sun, then slid back, book leather scraping rock.
“Well?” Clovis asked.
“Best take a look for yourself.” Evar wasn’t sure he had the words for it.
Clovis advanced, following his path exactly. Moments later she came back without turning. “Shit.”
What the skeer had built over the city was larger than the city had been and far taller than any of its towers. The structure climbed the slopes, encompassing the library entrance, clinging to the rock like a wasps’ nest or a strange organic growth. Its vast, segmented walls even looked like skeer armour, as if the whole thing might be one gigantic insect capable of biting the peak off a mountain. The entire structure, surely large enough to house a million skeer, was the curious, semi-translucent white of skeer plates, veined with deep blue that bled into lighter shades before rapidly succumbing to the white. Thick veins here, thin there, spreading into ever thinner traceries that escaped the eye.
“We need to leave,” Clovis hissed.
Evar was still marvelling at the size of the nest. “What do they all eat?”
“Us, if we’re not careful.” Her stomach rumbled as if to remind them that they needed to eat too.
It seemed impossible that her stomach had given them away, but coincidence was hard to credit as a skeer chose that moment to send its alarm throbbing through the gorge whilst the shriek of its spiracle exhalation ricocheted off the cliff faces high above them.
“Run!” Evar shouted, and they ran.