Chapter 14
One of the worst things about humans is everything. But I’ll tell you what’s ten times worse than a human... two humans. And what’s ten times worse than two humans? You’ve guessed it: one child.
A Complete History of Humanity , by Hubert Duck
CHAPTER 14
Celcha
Yute said you shouldn’t talk to the ghosts,” Celcha said. “I don’t think he knew you already were. He said it like it was the worst thing you could do.”
“He’s clearly not very imaginative then.” Hellet closed the door to their quarters behind them and began to tuck into the food on the tray he’d been carrying. He’d piled it with black bread and carrots. Celcha liked the bread, but carrots were a marvel and she’d eat nothing else if it didn’t leave the tables bare.
The trainees had all made directly for the food hall on their return from the expedition to the first ganar chamber. Librarians Markeet and Sternus, however, had managed to delay satisfying their hunger awhile longer, preferring instead to present themselves before the head librarian to devour her praise. Nobody expected a great work to be recovered on a training exercise, particularly from a location as close as the first ganar chamber, but the book—whose title Celcha had yet to learn—appeared to be the find of the week, if not the month or even the year.
“He thinks we’re a problem.” Celcha hadn’t liked being called a crack, or a rock in the stream. She’d been called far worse things, of course, but these things were said without malice by someone who had at his fingertips a repository of knowledge vaster than anyone who had not seen it could imagine. “He said we’re dangerous.”
“We are dangerous,” Hellet replied without concern.
“I don’t think...” Celcha hesitated. It felt as if Hellet had spent more time speaking with his ghosts over the last few years than with her. As if she were the stranger, the outsider. “I’m not sure you should talk to Maybe and the other one anymore.”
Hellet peered at her through his fur in a way that strengthened the feeling she might no longer be his closest confidante, though she knew with certainty that she was the one who loved him most—the only one—and that whatever these ghosts wanted it wasn’t all for Hellet. Perhaps none of it was.
Hellet chewed and swallowed. “Didn’t they bring us here?” he asked. “Out from beneath Myles Carstar’s heel? We’re well fed, better treated. I know I prefer reading books and wandering shelves to hacking tunnels out with a pick, in the dark.” The air around him gleamed and glittered, stirred by turbulent phantoms.
“They did.” Celcha couldn’t deny any of it. The good fortune that had befallen them was beyond her dreams and it hadn’t truly fallen. It had been pushed.
Hellet shrugged. “All right, I’ll stop talking to them.” He bit off half a carrot and set the rest down. He wiped his hand and reached into his book satchel, pulling out the black book he’d retrieved from the ganar city within the library.
Celcha sat back, chewing on a heel of bread. She’d got what she wanted, but it had come too easily. All of this had come too easily, and she mistrusted every part of it. Hellet, however, she trusted. She had to. He’d never lied to her that she knew of. And if she didn’t believe in him then what was there left for her to believe in? This was Hellet. All that remained of her mother and father. The same boy who had gone trembling to the whipping post and howled as the steel cane divided his flesh. Blows that had been meant for her.
So she said nothing and instead sat and watched as Hellet leafed through the black pages of his black book, frowning at the narrow silver script. The air continued to glimmer around him. Starve seemed particularly interested in the book, bending over or even through Hellet’s shoulder to peer at a page from time to time.
“I don’t think you should listen to them either,” Celcha said at last. “That’s probably as dangerous as talking.”
Hellet lifted his gaze from the pages before him. “It’s hard not to listen.”
“You could send them away.”
“Wouldn’t that be talking to them?”
“Yes,” Celcha growled, “but for a good reason.”
“My other reasons aren’t good?” Before she could answer he carried on. “I can send them away, but you can’t?”
“I can’t hear them, so maybe they can’t hear me...” Celcha was unsure now.
“Oh, they can hear you.” Hellet showed his tombstone teeth. “Starve likes you. Says you’re well meaning.”
Celcha wasn’t sure whether that was an insult in disguise and whether the fact Hellet proclaimed Starve’s approval of her meant that Maybe had made no such statements, or even actively spoke against her. Suddenly the ghosts’ presence, their secret conversations with her brother, felt so intolerable that she started the sentence that had so often waited on her tongue—the one that she had never spoken for fear of being unable to finish it.
“Send them away, Hellet. Either they go or...” And the words dried up in her mouth. It was both a hollow threat—she could never abandon him—and a foolish one, inviting him to choose against her. Such capital could not be spent without wounding all those party to the transaction. And still, she couldn’t explain why it was so important to her, why she would set so much store by the words of an assistant who had done nothing for them but call them broken. Starve and Maybe had changed their lives for the better, shown them a new world and new opportunities. Yute offered only a dangerous cure for a condition that, for all they knew, he might be inventing. A cure or eternity serving the library in a white suit. All she knew was that it felt wrong. In the same way that she had known about the three collapses that might have buried her in the Arthran dig, she knew that something was wrong here too. Some instinct too deep to name or scrutinise had warned her of those cave-ins just in time, and that same feeling niggled at her now in a place where the ceiling was hand-cut bedrock that would never fall. “Hellet...”
“All right, sister. All right.” He said it without heat and, rising from his chair, he pointed towards the doorway. “Thank you, my friends. I will guide myself from here on.”
Hellet and Celcha had named them angels, Yute had called them ghosts, but whatever they were they seemed to know better than to outstay their welcome. A trail of glimmers flowed towards the doorway and vanished through the stout timbers.
—
Hellet proved as good as his word, and the ghosts upheld their side of things with the integrity of angels. All that day the air around Celcha and her brother remained free of any artefact of the light. The angels went unseen for a week. And another.
“Lutna’s asked me to go with her into the city,” Celcha said as she settled into her bed.
“Good.”
Celcha closed her eyes. She wasn’t sure if Hellet had been first to talk about wanting to see around the city or if it had been her. Probably it was Hellet. Both of them were plagued by curiosity but, although she had been the one to open the book that had got him caned, Hellet was less able to resist its call than she was. Even with an ocean of information and endless seas of stories at their doorstep, still the city, crammed with real life rather than the record of it trapped in ink, called to them.
Celcha would have asked for Hellet to come too, but Lutna had always seemed scared of her brother. All of the trainees seemed a little apprehensive of him, even those who were larger and stronger, as if the hairless tapestry of his scars told a story that unsettled them.
On the following morning, one of the trainees’ rest days, Lutna and Celcha set off along the steep road leading from the wolf’s head gate down to the city. The previous ganar had spent their whole tenure within the library and the librarians’ complex, but Librarian Markeet was still basking in the glow of returning a book long alluded to in other important texts yet never found. In such a buoyant state of mind he signed off the permission for Celcha to visit the city in Lutna’s care without protest. He did, however, assign a canith named Jhar to guard Lutna because of her royal connections. The unspoken message was that Jhar would also ensure Celcha’s prompt return.
Lutna led the way, chatting animatedly. Celcha had little experience on which to base a judgement, but it seemed to her that despite the girl’s proximity to the queen, and the possibility that she might officially be allowed to demand that people refer to her as Princess Lutna, she was in most ways wholly unremarkable. She had gained the impression that Lutna was not thought of as pretty, clever, or entertaining among her fellow trainees. She was, however, kind, in an awkward, sometimes clumsy, sort of way. And Celcha, having lived among slaves beneath the threat of cruelties of many flavours, felt this to be an important attribute.
As they came down between the first houses that clung perilously to the cliffs, Celcha began to notice the looks that were thrown her way. The closer she came to walking abreast with Lutna, the more glances she got, the more raised eyebrows, the more sneers and muttering. The citizenry appeared much more relaxed when she followed a few paces behind the girl, though in her library blacks nobody would think Lutna a princess deserving of such obeisance.
For her part, Lutna kept urging Celcha to walk beside her, and chattered happily about various parts of the city as they came into view. Telling her what that spire was, which was the temple with the copper-green dome, whose grand house was being constructed so embarrassingly close to the outer wall. Lutna always had lots to say, though, unlike many of the trainees, little of it was about herself. She seemed to acknowledge herself as both surplus to requirement in the aristocracy and at the same time unlikely to measure up to the exacting intellectual demands of the library.
One topic that she had steered clear of, ever since her attempt to address Celcha in a ganar language that was not her own, was that of the ganar. Now, as they came down towards the grand square they’d seen from above, Lutna turned in the street and took hold of Celcha’s left wrist—she had stopped taking Celcha’s hands once she realised that the gnarled ridge along the back of each was the scar of an earlier mutilation where her claw-blades had been cut out as a child, and she had stopped taking the right wrist when her hand had closed around the iron of the manacle set there.
“Celcha. Will you come and see H’run and F’nort with me? I wouldn’t ask but they were both so good to me when I was a child...”
Celcha resisted pointing out that Lutna was still a child, and that any ganar at the palace would be a slave who would suffer terrible punishments if they were anything other than nice to a princess.
Lutna, seeing her hesitation, pressed on. “Honestly, they were more of a mother and father to me than my own parents were.” Her grip on Celcha’s wrist grew tight and the pale green of her eyes glistened as if tears might be welling there. “I just want them to see you. To see how well you’ve done and how clever you are. So they know there’s more out there than what they’ve been born to. They’re so... I don’t know... accepting. I think it would make them glad to know that we’re—that we work together at the library.”
Celcha tightened her jaw against a hot reply. She reminded herself that Lutna was still a child. That she didn’t know what failing to accept their lot would mean for this H’run and this F’nort. In the end, she shrugged off her anger. It wasn’t directed at this child who was merely trying to aim her kindness at a target too big for her to comprehend, something she was part of and that had grown about her so intimately she could hardly know where it ended and she began.
“I’ll come.”
And so, with Jhar looming at their heels, the warrior so tall that neither of their heads reached above his hip, they came to the doors of the palace. Although, compared to the complex within the ganar chamber, the whole city was a small thing and the palace itself a drop in the ocean, it was an impressive structure. Being able to see it all at once from across the grand plaza, and then coming into its shadow, climbing its many steps and being swallowed between pillars so wide that it would take three Jhars to link hands around any one of them, made the building seem truly vast in a way that the ganar warrens had not.
Palace guards intercepted them at the doors, their initial respect almost certainly for the library guard rather than for the infant and the slave at his feet. In due course a functionary was summoned and came hurrying across the marbled doorstep to welcome the princess and her attendant.
With Jhar left in the shadows outside and a new escort in his place, Lutna led Celcha on a hurried tour through the areas of the palace not restricted to just the most senior royals. The interiors rapidly overwhelmed Celcha with their luxury in rather the same way that the library had overwhelmed her with its books. On its own any one of the marvels might have captured her attention for hours. Nothing so beautiful and delicate as that small sculpture she just passed had ever entered her world in the Arthran dig, or in the library, but the next plinth held another, different and just as wondrous—an elegant and vibrantly painted vase—and so on to the next until they became mere increments marked on the yardstick of this seemingly endless corridor.
Lutna led her through rooms carpeted with rugs of such softness and thickness yet intricately woven design that it seemed a crime to step upon them. They should hang on the walls, except that the walls were hung with paintings in which Lutna’s ancestors were presented five yards high with such skill that they each seemed as if they might step through the doorway before them. They almost looked more real than real people.
Eventually Lutna had the guard—herself decorated like a work of art, every piece of armour and uniform worked to delight the eye—open a side door that gave on to bare stone steps leading down.
“What’s this?” A cold drawl of a voice, arched with its own superiority. “Lutna’s got herself a new pet?”
Celcha turned from the doorway to see two human boys standing side by side, both somewhat older than Lutna and both considerably bigger. In fact, it seemed that anything that could be said about one could be said about the other. Many humans appeared quite similar to Celcha but these two were identical. Doubles from the same litter. One held the lead of a short-haired dog, too small to be a hunter.
“What’s this one called, Lutna?” The boy without the dog strode up and grabbed a handful of Celcha’s neck fur. A palace guard stood behind him, and the richness of the boy’s garb, both in fabric and in colour and in ornament from buttons to buckles, left no doubt that he and his brother weren’t strangers to being beneath the queen’s roof.
“These are my cousins.” Lutna studied the floor. “Acran and Bastan.”
“Prince Acran!” Acran announced with some measure of outrage. He twisted his hand in Celcha’s fur and attempted to throw her to the ground. Celcha felt it sensible to let him and fell as far from the dog as she could. Even so, the beast flinched and barked.
“Your pet should say hello to our pet,” Bastan said, letting the lead slip.
Celcha narrowed her eyes at the dog and instead of advancing it retreated with a yelp and its tail tucked between its legs.
“Damn you, Mutters!” Bastan aimed a kick at it and the dog scampered back, barely avoiding the blow.
“She’s not my pet.” Lutna kept her eyes on the ground.
“Not yours?” Acran’s grin, which had been ugly to start with, turned uglier. “Then she’s mine. Can’t have a slave without an owner running around Grandma’s palace!” He stared down at Celcha out of deep-set little eyes that were as hard and bright as buttons. “Come here.”
Celcha knew she should be scared. Scared was good. It kept you alive. Instead, a hot anger bubbled up through her. She made to stand, trying to keep the snarl from her mouth.
A foot in a slipper sewn with silver descended on her shoulder, keeping her on hands and knees. “Come here like the animal you are, new pet.”
Celcha had suffered far worse humiliation before, but somehow it had been easier to take back at the dig. The fact that her guards shared some of the hardship of life on the plateau in no way excused them, but even so, the rage that trembled through her had to owe something to the luxury on every side and the fact that it was a child doing this. She pressed the anger into the cold ball of hate that sat deep in her chest, that had sat there year after year. The ganar were not warriors. They waited their moment.
On hands and knees, she crawled towards the young prince, wondering how long it would take this bored child to grow bored with torturing her.
Lutna, bound by very different chains to the ones that held Celcha captive, suddenly broke free of her paralysis with an anguished shriek. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” She flew at Acran, hands clawed. He shoved her back hard enough to slam her into the wall save for the quick reflexes of her guard.
“Acran, Bastan!” A tall dark figure down the corridor. “Do stop that.” The individual, an exceptionally tall and very thin male human, wore a deep purple tunic with just the occasional silver button. A functionary of some sort, Celcha judged.
“Why should we?” Acran turned with a pout on his reddening face. “It’s just a ganar.”
“It is,” said the man, staring disapprovingly from beneath thin eyebrows. “But it’s one of the library’s ganar, and the head librarian is very protective of her staff. So, unless you’d like a visit from your great-aunt, I would suggest finding another game to play, Prince Acran.”
Acran scowled, eyes glittering with the kind of hate that’s hard to understand in one with a life so filled by privilege and plenty. He stepped forward and delivered a vicious kick to Celcha’s ribs before striding down the hall, followed by his laughing brother.
Celcha got to her feet, hugging her side, and went quickly through the open door, into the bare stairwell that smelled faintly of stale bodies.
“Celcha,” Lutna called after her miserably.
“Come on.” Celcha went down the steps, leading though she didn’t know the way. All she knew was that she’d seen enough of the queen’s wealth and was more interested in what lay beneath it all.