Chapter 19
Each alphabet is a marvel of evolution. No person, no committee, no nation can lay claim to the final product, and indeed there is no final product, just a twisting, tumbling beauty, barely able to hold its form from front cover to back. And yet these marks, without forming so much as a single sentence, spell out something greater than any book might contain.
Calligraphy and Other Martial Arts , by Lee Chan
CHAPTER 19
Celcha
The beggar is more generous with his money than the lord.” Hellet eyed Celcha over the top of his current read. Already he spoke more like a librarian than a ganar just months out of the tunnels of Arthran. He practically inhaled books, and each left its mark upon him. “Some rich men consider themselves philanthropists, but although they may give away a thousand times what any beggar will see in their lifetimes, it constitutes only a modest fraction of what they own. The beggar, on the other hand, will sometimes give his last penny to someone else on the street whose misfortune is still greater than theirs. Losing all their wealth at a single stroke and without hesitation.” Hellet put his book down. The scars curling around his shoulders and sides glistened in the library light. “Those on the journey from beggar to lord, from famine to feast, are often the least generous. The lord who gives will still be rich. The beggar can mine his poverty no deeper and perhaps restore his penny at a stroke. For the rest... every act of generosity is a slip back down the ladder they’ve been climbing all their lives.”
“You’re saying H’seen and the rest have too much to lose.” Celcha had returned from the gas house buoyed on her lungfuls of methalayne though carrying little by way of encouragement. H’seen had at least appeared thoughtful when Celcha spoke of her brother’s aspirations for the ganar. Celcha had avoided specifics, but she’d repeated Hellet’s recent oratory on the foul institution of slavery. She’d expounded on the criminal state of affairs wherein a proud people, who once descended from the moons themselves, now suffered beneath the heel of oppressors.
The sentiments were certainly ones that both she and Hellet had long harboured, holding them deeper than their bones, knowing that to speak them would be to ask for an ugly death. Since their arrival at the library, Hellet had found works that gave voice to these ideas. Books that were centuries old, so ancient that the language now spoken had twisted away from that on the page, and only by dint of shining the blaze of his intellect upon the lines before him could Hellet see to pursue the words.
The books recorded speeches in which humans and canith of great eloquence railed against similar treatment of their own kind. It was those words, in Celcha’s mouth, that had fallen so flat in the dark halls of H’seen’s de facto empire. H’seen had nodded wisely, said little, and sent her on her way with vague platitudes. Not a rejection, but certainly the hoped-for fire had not been lit. The silence from those who had stopped to listen had been stony. It had been the black-furred Redmak who led Celcha back through the gas house, far less talkative than he had been on the way in. He’d taken her to the square exit at the plant’s rear and had said farewell with a firm “don’t come back” followed by a firmer slamming of the hatch.
H’seen and her workmates might still be slaves and endure what to their masters would be seen as intolerable, but from their own perspective, they had a long way to fall. Celcha understood. A similar cliff lay at her own heels where the plummet back to the Arthran dig awaited her.
“What now?” Celcha had asked her brother on her return.
Hellet had bowed his head and remained silent for so long that she’d worried he might have returned to his wordless ways. Eventually he had looked up from his thoughts. “It would have been easier if they’d helped us. Safer. There were experiments I wanted to run. Tests that should be carried out. Now I’ll have to trust the books, and my understanding of them. But we can still do this. By ourselves. We have to.”
—
Weeks passed and Hellet’s resolve didn’t appear to have many consequences. He had become more silent, more reserved, and busied himself with his reading. Celcha continued to spend time with Lutna and the other trainees and was allowed to visit the city several more times in Lutna’s company. Hellet stayed behind, his only sight of the city the one he’d had on the journey to the library.
Month by month the library life seduced Celcha. She liked reading, loved books, even enjoyed the company of some of the trainees, especially Lutna, who managed to be kind and caring despite the dizzy heights of her upbringing. Winter came and icy winds howled around the mountain’s flanks. With the passing seasons the idea of gambling all they’d gained at long odds in the cause of some ideal seemed more foolish. Most of Celcha was glad that Hellet seemed to have put his ambitions on hold. Some small part of her mourned the loss of that purity of purpose though, knowing that before long she would be finding excuses to further delay, or even undermine, her brother’s plans.
—
A hand shook Celcha gently from dreams of flying above mountain peaks.
“W-what?” She opened bleary eyes. Library light lit the room as usual, but she knew it was late.
“It’s time,” Hellet said.
“Time?”
“To show you what I’ve been doing.” Hellet handed her book satchel to her. “Time to change the world.”
“But... I...” Celcha was suddenly afraid. The comfort of her bed, the safe haven of the library, these weren’t things she wanted to give up in the name of a cause.
“But what?” Hellet studied her with wide, dark eyes. Would he give this up for her? He was her little brother and he loved her—they were each all the other had—and yet... would he? Should he?
Celcha ran her fingers through her fur, finding and touching the nootki tied there, each a silent witness to her deeds, a reminder of those who laboured in the dark even now, digging up a lost city to build another that they would never see. “So, what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to give the ganar something they haven’t had in many lifetimes,” Hellet said. “A choice.”
Celcha bowed her head. “How?”
“Walk with me.”
—
Celcha and Hellet were allowed one “day of ease” on the last day of each week, and even given a small stipend, though they had to convince a trainee to spend it for them since, in the city, a ganar with money would instantly be accused of theft. At best, they’d end up penniless and beaten.
This particular day of ease was all but over. The ganar, however, kept different hours. They not only needed more sleep than natives of this world but when their sleeping was combined with their waking, it totalled something rather longer than a day, leading to their sleeping periods shifting through the months so that sometimes, as on this particular day, they slept the whole time that the sun spent crossing the sky and woke in the evening.
Hellet had woken Celcha early rather than late. They wound their way unchallenged through the outer complex which lay empty but for a handful of guards and the occasional overly enthusiastic librarian. By the time they emerged into the large cavern that abutted the library wall Celcha had stopped yawning. For the brief period between first seeing this cave and seeing the chambers of the library, the cavern had been not only the largest by far she had ever seen after a lifetime underground, but substantially bigger than any she might have imagined.
“This way.” Hellet veered away from the well-travelled route between the complex and the library’s white door. He led Celcha away from the bridges and rails of the official path and out into the uncharted chaos of the wider chamber. Somehow, the idea of leaving the path had never occurred to Celcha. She supposed it was because the library’s door seemed a beacon, drawing her on towards its hidden mysteries. Even so, she couldn’t help feeling mildly disappointed with herself.
Hellet navigated the way along a deep valley cutting across the cavern, all water-smoothed rock and sudden drops. He offered a belated, “Be careful.”
They were soon out of sight of anyone crossing by the normal route, ten yards deep in an increasingly steep chasm. Celcha began to smell an acrid scent, as if something that shouldn’t be burned had been cremated here. It grew stronger as they went.
“Here’s our first stop.” Hellet worked his way around a narrow ledge. In the void to his left the library’s light at last began to fail.
The ledge itself was blackened, and charred lumps crunched beneath Celcha’s feet as she advanced, clinging to whatever handholds offered themselves. “What’s this?” Something shiny and silver caught the light and drew her eye with it.
Hellet bent and snagged a long-necked glass flask resting in the blackened hollow. In its rounded belly the flask held liquid silver—the thing that had snared Celcha’s attention—brighter and more gleaming than even the most polished steel.
“It’s called quicksilver,” Hellet said. “But what it is exactly is less important than what it is in general.”
“Which is?” Celcha wasn’t sure why her brother couldn’t have explained this earlier, somewhere level.
“It’s a catalyst. Something that allows a chemical reaction to take place but does not itself take part in the reaction.”
“Did Tutor Ablesan teach you a new language while I wasn’t looking?”
“An agent of change,” Hellet said. “We’re going to need a lot of it.”
“Did... did you make it here?” Celcha looked at the burn marks. Here and there were rocks that hadn’t come from the stone walls. Rocks that, whilst blackened on one side, were a strangely familiar reddish-orange on the other. They reminded Celcha of... “These are from h—” She had been about to say “home” but to call the dig site home felt like a kind of obscenity. “From Arthran.”
Hellet nodded and showed his teeth. “Cinnabar. It’s the ore from which quicksilver comes. Smelting it is dirty work. The fumes are toxic and plentiful. I knew you’d try to stop me so I—”
“How did you get the rocks, the fuel, the glassware?” Celcha was too intrigued to be angry.
“They pay me too.” Hellet shrugged. “I asked different trainees to get me different things. They don’t say no to me. They’re a little scared, I think.” He shrugged again, a deeper one this time. “I told Benjon that the rocks reminded us of home, and we scatter them in our room.” Hellet turned away. “Come on, let’s get the rest.”
“There’s more?”
“I’ve kept busy whilst you’re out exploring with the princess.”
“Don’t call her that.”
Hellet vanished from view around a shoulder of rock. When Celcha struggled past the obstruction she found him gathering more flasks into a sack.
“Be careful with this.” He handed a second sack to her. It proved surprisingly heavy. “This took a lot of work and all the money they paid me plus some I stole from you and some I borrowed from Lutna to buy you a birthday present. Actually, that was most of it.”
“Hellet!”
“She seemed eager to give.” Hellet licked his teeth. “Guilt, I expect. You can’t buy your way out of what they’ve done to us, but she clearly wanted to try.
“Anyway, the quicksilver in those flasks is your present. So don’t drop it.” He twitched, almost losing grip of his own sack. “I spent all the money,” he repeated. “Also, I may have poisoned myself a little. So, I don’t want to have to do it again.”
Hellet led on, both of them burdened by their fragile loads of quicksilver. Celcha followed, feeling guilty that her brother had abused Lutna’s trust, even while acknowledging that everything he’d said was true. Guilt was like that, sticking in places where it didn’t belong, and rolling off others where it did just as easily as if it were quicksilver.
Counter to Celcha’s expectations the way became easier rather than more difficult. Soon they were heading steeply down on stairs that had been carved into the rock.
“What is this? Where are we going?”
“These steps were made by the citizens of an earlier city that stood exactly where Krath stands now. The histories imply that the canith and the humans have been building and burning down each other’s cities here for an unfathomable amount of time. This current one appears to be the first to host a lasting peace between them.”
“How do you know all this?” Celcha knew that her brother had become a voracious reader and had mastered the art even before reaching the library, but still, she too had been reading as fast as she could, and his books seemed to have divulged far more secrets.
“Yute told me. I think he wants to change my mind but can’t quite bring himself to command me. So, instead he’s settled on education and hope.”
“He could command you?” Celcha asked.
“Assistants can destroy matter with a wave of their hand. I’m sure that whatever constrains them it’s not the laws of nature as we know them, but rather some code of ethics imposed by their creator.”
The fissure had become so narrow that if Celcha were to lean out too far to save herself from the drop, she could bridge it with her hands pressed to the far side. The illumination had faded to a gloom through which the occasional mote of library light still meandered like a lost firefly.
The door came as a surprise. A round door of corroded steel with a handwheel at its centre by which it might be unsealed. Someone had been digging through the rock around the door’s perimeter and made considerable progress, though at no point had they reached past the metal rim.
“This would be a heap of rust, of course, if it were normal steel.” Hellet picked up a crowbar from a nearby ledge. “It seized up long ago, so I’m having to dig it out. All that practice finally paid off.”
“You didn’t need me at all,” Celcha said. “Except to fetch and carry.”
“You played your part, sister. Lutna wouldn’t have stamped her foot to get me into the gas house. I needed to know the basics of the system there.”
“But they won’t even let us back in,” Celcha complained. “Let alone fiddle with their machinery.”
“Don’t need to.” Hellet jammed the end of his crowbar into the area he’d excavated around the edge of the hatch. “It turns out we just needed to know their timings.”
Hellet exerted his strength, groaning. Celcha went to help him, lending her muscles to the effort just as she had so often back at the Arthran dig. For several long moments she was sure the door wasn’t going to give. She’d reached the point of giving up when she realised that the hissing she could hear wasn’t her own breath escaping clenched teeth or even the result of Hellet’s explosive effort. Surprisingly, she gained a second wind, fresh energy filling her straining muscles.
The whole frame surrendered, and rather than inching out or toppling gently into the fall, it shot forward as if punched from inside, striking the opposite wall with force. Celcha’s questions were drowned in the roar of methalayne blasting from the passage behind the door.
For some time, they clung to the rockface in the reflected swirl of the hurricane. The gas buffeted Celcha and filled her lungs. It made her feel light-headed and left her unsure how much time passed before the hurricane died to a gale and then to a strong breeze.
“I don’t understand,” Celcha called over quieting gusts. It wasn’t just the confusion that too much methalayne had brought. Hellet had told her almost nothing of his plans. She wanted to believe his reticence to be because he feared being overheard or spied upon by the head librarian’s agents even in their chamber. She feared his secrecy had other causes. She feared he thought her too weak for the task in hand. Yet here she was. Literally in the thick of the storm. “How is all this here?”
“Krath isn’t the first city to cook its meals on the grave gas of its predecessors.” Hellet spoke in a normal voice, audible over the rush of methalayne. “Before Krath the humans built a city called Tanylarn at the library gates. This hatch and tunnel are their work. Ironically, their corpses, sewage, and waste are now rotting far below Krath, making gas for those who came after them.” He held his hand in the flow and his fur streamed out. “Maybe Maybe is a ghost, but this stuff is definitely full of them.”
“They’ll find this place soon enough now.” Celcha looked up, half expecting to see a library guard peering over the edge of the chasm.
“So, we’d better get a move on.” Hellet handed her his sack and started to climb into the tunnel. “This side of the mountain is lousy with caves. The methalayne has been gathering in them for aeons. By sealing known exits the city founders increase the pressure and the reserve escapes in the gas house, where it’s pressurised further and stored in cylinders ready for release into the city’s pipes.” He turned around in the tight confines of the tunnel and reached back. “Here, give me the sacks— carefully —and then come in.”
Celcha joined her brother, and together, like dust-rats in a burrow, they followed the tunnel’s slope.
“Let me tell you what we’re doing,” Hellet said.
“That would be... helpful.” Celcha ground her teeth together and tried to remember that her brother did not think like other people did.
“This quicksilver—this catalyst—will change the methalayne into something that will put the humans and the canith to sleep. It doesn’t join with the gas. It doesn’t get used up. So, a vast supply is not required. It simply encourages the gas to change by itself through some miracle of alchemy. All I needed was enough to convert a sufficient portion of the gas at the rate at which it enters the storage chamber.”
“But they burn the gas!” Celcha’s mind was reeling with the scale and insanity of Hellet’s plan. She grasped at the idea that the burning would put an end to the madness. She didn’t know a lot of alchemy, but things tended to stop working once you set fire to them.
“That’s the beauty of it. The changed gas won’t burn. When they connect the new cylinder, lights, hearths, and stoves all over the city will flicker into darkness and this new gas will hiss into their homes.”
“Whose—”
“Everyone’s homes. Even the tenements have gas lighting. The streets have it. From pauper to palace.”
“How will this help the ganar?” To Celcha it sounded like a recipe for getting extravagantly tortured to death while at the same time casting a shadow of suspicion over all their kind.
“That’s the genius of it. All from my little black book. The ganar”—Hellet paused and smiled one of the rare smiles that he’d kept from the days before the cruelty—“are immune to its effects!”
The tunnel narrowed, forcing them to their knees. Celcha continued to follow, crawling on one hand and two knees while cradling her sack of liquid metal against her chest. It hardly seemed real that she was here, doing this. “And what’s the choice?” Hellet had said he was giving the ganar something they’d never had before: a choice.
“What to do, of course!” Hellet squeezed through a choke point with exquisite care. “They will wake with their masters at their mercy.”
Celcha carried on. It was madness. It couldn’t work. And if it did... what would they choose? What would she choose faced with a sleeping library? She and Hellet would get to decide how and if their colleagues... their enslavers... woke.
In the meantime, more practical problems faced them. Celcha’s knuckles quickly became very sore. By the time they reached the first chamber large enough to stand in her hand was bleeding.
Physically she felt good: the methalayne revitalised her, making her feel she could run forever. It made her somewhat light-headed too. At the back of her mind a small voice was saying disturbing things, finding all manner of problems, both practical and ethical, with Hellet’s plan. It was telling her she should be utterly terrified. It was telling her that but for the gas she was breathing she would be running from all this. Probably screaming while she did it.
Celcha realised that despite the fact it should be pitch-black, she could see. Whatever sight had served her ancestors on Attamast as it circled the heavens now revealed the underground world to her in shades of green and grey.
“Now the difficult part,” Hellet said.
“I thought that was the difficult part.” Celcha waved an uncertain hand at the round mouth of the tunnel she’d left stained with her blood. “How did you even know the way? How did you even know it was possible? That we would fit?”
“Maybe and Starve told me,” Hellet said, frowning. “But they didn’t describe the route in great detail. The plan was they would guide us when the time came. But now we need to find where the gas house draws its breath from by ourselves. And give it something new to suck on!”