Chapter 20
Mary understood the concept of momentum as it appeared in mechanics, both classical and quantum. She had, however, not known that it applied to her own life until she realised how fast she was going and stepped on the brakes as hard as she could.
Quite Contrary , by Vincenza Standridge
CHAPTER 20
Celcha
Celcha’s life had changed quickly when Hellet discovered the book chamber back at the Arthran dig. It had changed dramatically when Librarian Sellna declared she was taking both of them back to serve at the library. Although her luxurious tenure at the library had only lasted a few months thus far, she had already grown comfortable in it. She was still a slave. Her chains might be golden, but they were still chains. Even so, without Hellet, who remained as unchanged as the story written in his scars, she might have fallen into routine and accepted her lot with the same gratitude that H’seen and her colleagues at the gas house seemed to show. She might even have reached the point when she would have fought to protect her gains rather than risk them in a larger cause.
With three words her brother had changed her life again. “Walk with me,” he had said, and a short walk had shown her that his plans had been far more than idle dreams. With little more than a bucket of silver magic Hellet was going to introduce an agent of change. He would transmute the gas that warmed and lit the homes of Krath into a blanket of sleep to which the ganar were immune.
When they found themselves unguarded, with all of the city at their mercy, even faint hearts like those of H’seen and Redmak would beat with new resolve. The rest of the ganar would take still less encouragement to put down the tools of their labour, strike off their chains, and for the first time claim their own lives. Hellet’s plans after that grew hazy. Clearly just marching out into the wider kingdom would be ill-advised. The recovering canith and human soldiers would give chase to recapture them. Perhaps the ganar would claim the palace and hold the queen hostage while negotiating a peace. That was for others to decide. Hellet’s self-imposed job was simply to place the choice in their hands.
Already though, Celcha’s faith in the plan was faltering. Their venture through the cave systems beneath the city seemed hopeless. There were no maps of these hidden spaces. The ganar knew that links must exist between their current location and the place from which the gas house drank its fill. There were, however, no guarantees that the gaps through which the methalayne flowed were ones through which a ganar could squeeze. The ghosts had promised a path, but Hellet wasn’t finding it.
The methalayne of Celcha’s home world had invigorated her and woken her sight, but the concentration was higher than found on Attamast. She found herself both starved of other vital components of the air whilst being simultaneously intoxicated.
“We could lose ourselves down here and wander until we starve,” Celcha panted.
“It seems a distinct possibility,” Hellet agreed, also in difficulty. “Though we’d suffocate long before that.”
“Then... what are we doing?” Celcha stopped in her tracks halfway across a small chamber the shape of a rotting squash. “I thought you had a plan!”
“I did. I do. This is it.”
“A better one than this!” Celcha found herself wanting to shout but was too breathless for it. All her emotions bubbled closer to the surface. “A better plan.”
“I had one of those too,” Hellet said. “But you took it away from me.”
“Me?” Celcha put her sack down, retaining enough self-control to do it gently. “How is any of this my fault?”
“You made me send Maybe and Starve away.”
Celcha couldn’t deny that. Who better to guide them than ghosts who could fly through stone finding new ways, discovering connections? “Well...” She tried to think of some defence and found none, other than her flimsy lack of trust. “What’s done is done. It’s not like you can call them back.” She lifted her gaze from studying her feet to meet Hellet’s eyes. “Is it?”
Hellet leaned against the nearest wall, his chest heaving as his lungs hunted for what they needed. “In the past, I’ve found that angels have a habit of turning up... at significant times. I don’t know how they know or how they find us, but it seems they do. Perhaps it’s what Yute said: that we’re cracks in the world, in time itself, and that leads them. But if you want me to call them back, I’ll try.”
Celcha slumped beside her brother and slid to the floor, struggling for breath. She had never wholly trusted Maybe and Starve, but the darkness of the dig had been hell and their golden light could paint them as nothing but angels. In the library light, and the comfort offered by the librarians, the angels had become ghosts. Since the only direction was no longer up, the ghosts also offered the danger of down, and Celcha’s suspicions had hardened.
But here, in the dark once more, lost in endless caverns, her resolve faltered. Hellet wanted to find the gas house’s intake. If the ghosts led them to it, where was the harm?
“Call them.” Her voice wheezed out of her.
Hellet nodded and opened his mouth to speak—and as he did so, the air between them began to sparkle.
—
The two ghosts led them through the tangle of caves where hidden waters must once have run in astonishing abandon among the roots of the dusty mountains above. Sometimes one ghost would vanish, scouting ahead for a route that the ganar could follow.
In time they came to a chamber which, although sculpted by a long-vanished river, showed the marks of chisel and hammer. The mouth of the gas house’s intake was a wide horn of the same metal that the access hatch had been made from. It yawned from a low roof and sucked with a deep, constant moan. The gas flowed towards it at a speed that ruffled the fur across Celcha’s back and sides as she stared up it.
Hellet lifted a flask from his sack and swirled its heavy contents. The absence of light stole the quicksilver’s gleam, leaving it a curious deep purple colour in Celcha’s augmented sight. A coughing fit seized him, and he almost dropped the glassware. He doubled over until it passed, then stood, wheezing.
“We could empty the flasks out here and hope that there’s enough time for the reaction as the gas passes over.” Hellet looked up at the mouth.
“But?” Celcha heard the unvoiced qualifier.
“But the changed gas is heavier. It will sink rather than rise.”
“That tube leads to the concentration chamber.” Celcha followed Hellet’s stare.
“There are other stages, purification stages, but yes.” Hellet nodded.
Celcha put her sack down. “Get me up there.” She felt too weak for any climbing, but they’d come this far...
—
It took a few tries but at full stretch Hellet managed to provide a platform from which a similarly stretched Celcha could snag a seam inside the pipe. From there, with a degree of swearing and swinging, she managed to use what remained of her digging muscles to haul herself further up. She hung there breathlessly for a while, trying to recover from the effort.
The next part proved tricky. Celcha had to catch a heavy sack of precious, fragile objects whilst bracing herself against the walls of the pipe, all beneath the heavy burden of the knowledge that should she miss then the flasks would almost certainly shatter as Hellet caught them, rewarding him with a faceful of glass shards and toxic metal.
She caught the first one, just barely, and found herself slipping, her descent accompanied by the sound of tearing fabric. With a scream she jammed her elbows into the pipe walls and prayed to any god who might be listening, all of them in fact, in one wordless plea. Whether by divine intervention or basic physics, Celcha didn’t fall. She repositioned herself, sure that only the upwards rush of gas inhaled by the gas room far above had kept her from a disastrous plunge.
The torn sackcloth exposed a flask but had released none of them so far. She took the neck of the bag in her teeth, put her trust in her footholds, and reached for new handholds. In this manner, with her back to the pipe’s wall and the sack almost scraping the opposite side, she inched upwards.
The nightmare struggle that followed felt as if it took hours. At several points she thought she’d passed out for a few moments but had managed to jam herself in the pipe too tightly to fall.
In the end, long after she felt she’d exceeded the limit of her endurance, she reached a level section and was able to painstakingly manoeuvre the sack past her into the relative safety ahead. With all her muscles trembling, and her lungs aching with the effort to find what she needed, Celcha began to descend for the second sack.
It felt unreasonable that their success should hinge on feats of athleticism and dexterity that Celcha would have bet on herself to fail ten times in a row. She found herself angry that Hellet and his damned ghosts had put her in such a ridiculous position: saviour of a plan that had no right to succeed. But somehow, against all odds, Celcha caught the second sack and managed to position it beside the first.
The climb felt as if it was at the very least a hundred yards. Celcha knew that without the regular rims where one section was fixed to the next, she would never have made it. Without the upwards rush of gas trying to lift the snug ganar-sized blockage she constituted, she would never have made it. And without the iron in her arms from a lifetime of digging, she would never have made it.
Celcha lay in the horizontal section gasping for breath and trembling with fatigue. She could hear the machinery of the gas room up ahead. She was within striking distance. She had in the sacks before her the alchemical magic needed to put an entire city to sleep.
At last, she crawled on, pushing the sacks ahead of her as gently as she could, glass squeaking against glass. A crunching sound told her that at least one flask had already broken, but whatever effect its contents might be having on the methalayne were swept ahead of her.
After ten yards the tunnel began to dip slightly and to narrow, speeding the flow of gas. Celcha’s journey was over; a dog might manage the remaining distance but not a library-fed ganar. With a shaky hand she took the first of the flasks from the sack. Everything they’d done so far could be undone or walked away from. This act, this unstoppering of the flask, this pouring of the liquid silver... this was what would either get them killed, or change history, or both.
Celcha tried to imagine it. A whole city drugged to sleep. Several thousand ganar suddenly handed the power of life or death over the humans and canith who had subjugated them. For a moment visions of the ganar slaughtering their former masters ran through her head. Surely it wouldn’t come to that? Surely having been shown the ganar’s power and having been shown mercy the city of Krath would change its ways? Their queen would sign a new accord. A three-way peace. An equality.
“...eeeelcha...” Hellet’s distant voice carried on the gas flow, a note of query in it, she thought, rather than panic.
Doubts still assailed her. She wasn’t intended for decisions this big. She had never wanted anything but a chance at comfort, the right to earn respect, a life not overshadowed by constant fear. And in that moment of reflection the decision was made for her. The ganar had none of those things.
She opened the flask, poured it out, watched the quicksilver trickle away down the pipe, driven by gravity and the force of the gas that smoked as it passed over the scurrying droplets. She opened another and another and another, tipped one after the next until they were all gone, then shook the sacks to free the trickling contents of the broken flasks. And finally, wearily, she shuffled back to the drop, then began to inch down it for the last time to join her brother.
—
“Where?” Celcha struggled to see. “Where am I?”
“You fell. I caught you,” Hellet wheezed. He lifted her to her feet. Above her the mouth of the pipe gaped, still inhaling its endless breath.
Celcha patted herself down. She had cuts on her elbows and her ankle felt as if hot skewers had been driven into the bones.
“If they catch us, you’ll have to kill me.” The pain from her ankle, although a pale shadow of the cruelty done to her in Arthran, reminded her of the punishments for even small infractions. She didn’t want to find out what the city kept in store for her latest crime.
“Of course.” Hellet showed her the knife he had in his book satchel. “Their power over us is finished. One way or the other.” He took her hand and pulled her towards the crack they’d entered the chamber by.
“What now?” Celcha hobbled after him, wheezing.
Hellet answered in short bursts of words punctuated by ragged breaths. “They’ll switch cylinders in about two hours. Hopefully the quicksilver will follow the gas into the cylinder. At the least it will sit somewhere in the compressor. When the new cylinder goes online the altered gas will flow everywhere in the city. It will be dark outside, cold; the city will still be awake. The gas won’t burn, so the lights and fires will go out and it will spread. The ganar will inherit the city come morning. We’ll need to go out there and tell them what’s happened. After that they need to decide their own fate.”
Celcha frowned. “We’re a bit like the library then.”
“How so, sister?”
“The library puts knowledge in your hands and it’s up to you to understand it, judge it, use it. It gives you opportunity and leaves you to take it or ignore it. We’ve done the same. Only a bit more forcefully.”
“I suppose we have.” Hellet nodded then broke off to cough for a score of paces before finally controlling himself. “We should hurry. Methalayne’s the proof that you can have too much of a good thing.”
—
Hellet remembered the way out, which was fortunate, since both ghosts had vanished soon after leading them to the intake. Celcha followed her brother in a daze, her mind wandering. Her thoughts fractured and diffused into the gas. She managed to worry that Hellet might become as disoriented as her and lose the way. It was her last coherent worry for a while.
—
Celcha woke with a yawn. She luxuriated in the moment of comfort, as complete as any experienced in her library bed. The rocks digging into her side, the small stones embedded in her cheek, the ache of her ankle, the rawness of her lungs, and the knife twisting in her brain, all introduced themselves one by one, forming an orderly queue. Memory arrived last, prompting her into an ill-advised scramble that, instead of putting her on her feet, simply rearranged her across the rocks and very nearly pitched her into the chasm on whose side she had collapsed.
Hellet lay on the narrow path ahead of her, snoring loudly. Just below them, the gorge into which she had almost thrown herself appeared to be filled with a yellowish fog that lapped at the path just a few yards from Celcha’s feet.
“Hellet!” She hobbled over to him and started to shake him. “Wake up!”
Her brother woke with a comfortable yawn that mimicked her own so closely that she immediately took a firmer hold and warned him to stay still, in case he also completed his return to consciousness with a startled lunge.
“How long did we sleep?” Celcha knew it was a foolish question as she asked it. “And what’s that stuff!” She aimed Hellet’s attention at the fog.
“Oh...” Hellet struggled to his feet. “We were unconscious long enough for someone at the gas house to shut off the supply and for the changed gas to back up to... here.”
Celcha looked at the undulating surface of the fog, a strange yellow sea. It seemed closer to them than it had been. “It’s still rising.” A faint acrid scent reached her nostrils and clawed at her eyes. “We should go. Now!”
“Yellow?” Hellet retreated ahead of her, muttering to himself. “It shouldn’t look like that.”
By the time they reached the top, the rising gas had swallowed the place where they’d been lying.
Hellet stared down at it. “It’s heavier than air but it will mix as soon as it finds a breeze. It’s going to spread over the cavern floor and then follow us down the stairwell. So, it will put all the librarians to sleep too.”
Celcha had been wondering about them. They didn’t need gas for light and in consequence the supply ended further down the mountain, leaving the library kitchens to cook the meals on charcoal-burning stoves.
“We should hurry.” Hellet set off towards the stairs at quite a stride.
“Wait.” Celcha, limping on her sore ankle, felt unsteady on the treacherous cavern floor.
“Hurry!” Hellet snapped the word, sounding more worried than at any time during their wildly dangerous adventure so far, and apparently with less reason.
Celcha gritted her teeth and hurried. The fog had stung her eyes even when she wasn’t in it, so she shared some of her brother’s urgency. She’d rather not be wandering blind inside it, waiting for it to clear before her streaming eyes could show her the world again.
Together they wound their way down the stairs and through the complex. They saw nobody in the complex’s corridors save a lone guard who sniffed as they passed, as if their fur still carried the reek of methalayne, and a few kitchen staff who lived on site. The librarians and apprentices had yet to rise for the day.
Hellet stumbled through the passageways, head down, looking the opposite of someone celebrating a triumph. His muttering accompanied them through the complex, a repetition of alchemical formulas, a litany of science that meant nothing to Celcha but sounded curiously like a mourning song.
At the wolf’s head entrance two armoured guards watched them leave as the sun started to rise over the sleeping city.
“You two shouldn’t be going out alone,” one man called after them.
Celcha turned back to address them. You didn’t ignore a master, especially not a guard. “Librarian Sellna sent us to get—”
“Not together she didn’t.” The other guard stepped towards them. “One of you stays here. You know the rules.”
Celcha hadn’t heard this rule before, but then again, until last night’s activities, Hellet hadn’t left the library since his arrival. It made sense though: two of them leaving together was much more likely to be an escape attempt.
“I’ll stay.” Hellet stumbled past her. “I’ll stay. It’s my fault.”
“What’s your fault?”
“The mercury. I think it poisoned me. Did something to my mind.”
“Mercury?” Celcha wasn’t following him.
“The quicksilver. It should have worked. I was so sure. I did the calculations. I did them so many—”
“I’m not leaving without you.” Celcha started back towards the guards with him.
“Celcha!” Hellet grabbed hold of both her wrists and steered her towards him, staring into her eyes. “I need you to go down and tell the ganar what we’ve done.” He glanced away at the approaching guard. “I’ll be fine here. They’ll all be asleep in a short while. I’ll join you at the gas house. Now go!” He released her roughly, pushing her away, down the slope.
Celcha couldn’t argue with the logic, but something felt badly wrong. Yet Hellet was right: the ganar had to know. There wasn’t much time and they needed to understand that. To seize the opportunity. She was scared of what they might do, scared of the consequences, scared of everything, but Hellet had been right, things couldn’t be left the way they were.
“I won’t be long!” And with that she was off, jogging down the slope on tired legs, wincing each time she put weight on the ankle she’d hurt.
An unrooted sense of disaster chased her, nipping at her heels. And down below, the silent city waited beneath a rising sun.