Chapter 24
A hermetic seal will defeat nearly every invasion, be it virus, gas, or merely an unwanted draught. It will not stop an unwanted idea. To prevent the spread of any idea, true, false, or untestable, one simply needs a more compelling narrative to occupy the minds of those you wish to keep ignorant.
Tyranny Without the Stick , by Vlad Putative
CHAPTER 24
Celcha
Celcha got no more than a hundred yards down the steep slope, not even halfway to the most intrepid of the houses that scaled the mountain, before some sixth sense brought her stumbling to a halt. The tingling hairs on the back of her neck turned her around.
The mouth of the howling wolf’s head was belching a yellowish fog, all of it stripped away by the wind before it could reach Hellet on the platform in front of the library’s entrance. The altered gas that had backed up in the chambers behind the gas room’s intake had reached the librarians’ complex and poured through its corridors. The librarians, trainees, and staff would all be slumbering now. Celcha wondered how long it would take for the pressures to equalise and the flow to stop.
As she watched, two assistants walked out of the entrance, emerging from the fog that spilled around stone canines taller than a ganar. They approached the platform and Hellet backed away before them. The pair stopped close to the lip of the platform, looking down past Celcha at the city.
Another assistant emerged from the fog. Then two more. Then five together. And in the space of sixty breaths several hundred walked out, more assistants than the whole staff of the library complex. Celcha wondered if the gas had driven them out but that made no sense. It probably hadn’t even reached the library, and you would have to search many of the vast chambers to find a single assistant. How they had all reached the entrance so swiftly, and more importantly, why, Celcha had no idea.
The crowd of assistants formed a rough semicircle behind the first pair, who stood alone, front and centre. Celcha watched, hypnotised. Lutna and the rest would be furious to have slept through such a spectacle.
The pair of assistants were a male and a female. The male had started to talk, striding up and down the platform’s edge, gesticulating at the city in a most un-assistant-like manner. The wind took most of his words but not the edge of anger or despair they carried. Celcha’s uneasiness grew, crawling around the roots of her fur, fingering its way up her spine. Assistants were characterised by their detachment, their endless calm. This looked more like mania.
The assistant pointed at Celcha’s brother, and although none of the audience looked his way, Hellet stumbled back as if struck. He sank to the ground and set his hands to his face.
Without warning, the assistant dug his fingers into his own chest and tore loose a ragged slab of white flesh, dripping with opalescent blood. He let it fall and the horror continued as he tore at himself with both hands, wrenching off his flesh and tossing it aside. The blood ran from him, not spurting like an artery but flowing as if he were melting in the morning sun. The female assistant beside him started to do the same thing, though more methodically and with less passion. Tearing herself apart.
As Celcha watched, it seemed—impossibly—that a new creature was being revealed within the ruin of each of the two assistants. Smaller, slighter beings. The process wasn’t entirely physical, but almost as if the new beings had stepped through the portal of the assistants’ falling blood. Two white children. Not fleshed in shiny enamel like the assistants but in skin over muscle, only every bit of it the same matt white as a new page.
At the end of it all, the two white children stood in what must be two pools of their own blood and dissolving flesh. The male one jumped lightly down onto the path and began to descend. The other followed. Celcha stood, rooted to the spot, expecting them to confront her, but they passed by without comment, without their pink eyes once flickering her way.
She looked to where her brother was sitting. Already the audience of assistants was beginning to disperse, the first of them starting to walk back towards the library while most still watched the departing children. Celcha followed their gaze, studying the pair of retreating backs. The children were heading for the city.
Part of Celcha wanted to go to her brother. To learn what the assistant had said when he had pointed at him. Part of her almost knew and was too afraid to have that fear confirmed. Trapped by indecision, she looked down at the departing children and the city, then up at her brother and the assistants.
In the end, with a small cry of hurt, she turned and hastened after the children.
—
Celcha had to divide her attention between not falling on the steep path down from the library entrance and not losing sight of her quarry. The children might be new to their bodies, but they covered the ground swiftly and Celcha was built for endurance rather than speed.
She passed between the first houses with barely a glance. Soon she was following the pair of white figures past the succession of houses that lined the road down towards the rear of the grand plaza. Narrow homes towered, jammed up against the cliffs to one side or teetering on the drop to the other. The street lay quiet: there was nobody to remark on the passage of two strange not-quite-human children or the unescorted ganar struggling to catch up with them.
Celcha had barely dented the children’s lead by the time they disappeared into the maze of streets behind the plaza. There were no narrow homes nestling elbow to elbow here, just high walls surrounding the gardens and properties to the rear of the great buildings that fronted onto the plaza itself. Celcha ran on, her breath short and panting. Behind one of these tall, spike-topped walls lay the gardens of the palace. She had glimpsed them from the windows when Lutna had given her the tour. Sparkling pools glimmering beneath verdant treetops. Strange birds with vivid plumage pecking in the shadows around the feet of marble statues.
The roads were deserted, but unless you had business with the city’s great and good you had no business here. Still, Celcha would have expected to see a gardener coming or going, a night soil cart, a delivery for the kitchens... something.
She lost sight of the children and reached a turn where both choices seemed equally likely. Puffing, she took the direction that would lead her to the plaza. At least there she would have a clear view and might find them again.
Celcha stumbled breathlessly into the grand plaza, its sunlit stone-paved acres stretching before her. Astonishingly, even here there was nobody. Hellet’s plan had worked. The gas from the tainted cylinder had run through the city’s pipes, and then, for whatever reason, H’seen had not changed cylinders. Her decision had let the wind clear the gas from the city and caused the stuff to back up through the newly opened passage to the library complex. Celcha worried that, without the next cylinder and the one after that, the humans and the canith would wake up before the ganar had organised and decided on a course of action.
She felt suddenly guilty at the size of the unasked-for responsibility she was about to thrust upon the ganar who had expected to wake to another ordinary day. Perhaps Hellet had found himself overburdened by the same sense of guilt back at the library entrance when the assistant who became the child had accused him with a pointing finger. She wondered if that had been Yute—somehow so enraged by this disruption to whatever plans he’d had for the city that he’d literally torn himself apart in protest.
A glimmer of motion caught Celcha’s eye. There, between the pillars of the great temple to the Mother God. At the top of the steps. At first it seemed just a trick of the light, but it was enough to set her moving once more, angling across the plaza towards it, thinking that she might have found the children again.
The ghosts. She saw them with more clarity than ever before, as if they were limned by golden light. Hellet’s ghosts. Maybe and Starve. One tall, one small. The difference between them was accentuated by this newly sharpened view. As she drew closer, she saw with amazement that while the tall one was indeed the canith she had always taken him for, the smaller one was a human female. The pair of them stood at the top of the steps, holding each other’s hands, with eyes locked, both oblivious to her presence as she sought the cover of the temple’s side wall.
As she watched in amazement the pair began to dance. They left the steps and spun in the air, laughing. The dance devolved into a carefree game of chase. A dance of joy at the success of their plan? Celcha allowed herself to breathe. Perhaps it had worked after all.
She slid into the shadowed alley between the temple and the Hall of Records. She knew that the temple owned many ganar, housed in the basement and set to the preparation of the dead, a series of grisly procedures that for reasons beyond her understanding the followers of the Mother God liked to subject their corpses to.
In the alley she saw her first actual people. Two of them, almost lost in the shadow of the high wall that they’d rolled up against. Whatever sleep the gas had wrought in them did not look to have been a particularly gentle one. They lay at awkward angles, their faces hidden, and a stench hung about them. Celcha gave the pair a wide berth, half-afraid they would wake. The reality of it struck home. She hoped none of them had been tending a fire or climbing a ladder when the gas struck. Still, she reminded herself, these were people who would see her crucified for disobeying their commands.
At the back of the temple, she found the ganar entrance that she’d seen slaves slipping in and out of on one of her previous visits to the city. Lutna had said the temple ganar were better treated than the palace ganar, though they had dirtier jobs to do. A canith guard slumped in an observation box nearby. It smelled as if she’d vomited before passing out.
Celcha tugged on the door, then knocked timidly. All the while she thought of the two ghosts dancing in the air. Why were a human and a canith so pleased by the usurping of their kinds’ power? Why had they coached Hellet along this path? Seeing them clearly for once had resolved her doubts into solid questions that burned for answers.
Unable to open the door, Celcha went over to the guard box and lifted the key from the curiously still canith. She’d never seen a canith sleep before, so she accepted that they slept like the dead and moved on.
The passages under the temple held an acrid scent that needled Celcha’s eyes and throat. She wondered if this was the gas they’d released or just the chemicals used to preserve and prepare the dead in the catacombs. Even without gas lighting down in the ganar areas, the gas, being heavier than air, would have wound its way down the stairs and collected in their workspaces.
The basement corridors were low-ceilinged and lit only dimly by intermittent lanterns. Many of these had gone out and the few that still burned were guttering as if at the end of their oil. The place held a silence different to that of the library. A haunted silence, trembling with threat. Celcha gritted her teeth and reminded herself that neither darkness nor death was inherently scary, and that the ganar who worked here would need a confident, fearless herald to bring them the news, not some timid girl jumping at every shadow.
As she progressed, a charnel stink began to compete with the chemical taint still haunting the corridors. “Hello?” Her voice sounded thin, lost among the shadows. “Hello?”
She turned through an archway and descended a short flight of stairs. An age-stained oak door stood ajar at the bottom. When Celcha pushed on it the door resisted her in much the same manner as if someone were pushing back against her. “Hello? Is there someone there?” The darkness on the other side lay unbroken.
Celcha gave another tentative push, and then, realising that this was foolish and that she had to find someone quickly, she put her shoulder into it. The realisation that she was battling against a body didn’t come at once but in the same way that rain will wet fur, soaking steadily in until it reaches the skin. She guessed it must be a canith to be so hard to shove aside.
With an effort she forced a gap large enough for her to squeeze through. Barely a whisper of light followed her, but it seemed that some of her massive dose of methalayne still haunted her veins, enabling her to see better than she should, better than she wanted to. Three ganar lay in the corridor beyond the door, two having collapsed against it.
“No!” Celcha’s heart began to pound, and her stomach became an icy hole through the middle of her. If the ganar had been put to sleep, what was this all for? She needed to get back and warn Hellet so they could escape before the city woke. “No, this is all wrong!”
Celcha knelt beside the nearest ganar. Perhaps the gas had a lesser effect on them, and their sleep would be lighter. If she could wake some of them... The arm around which her fingers curled was not warm. The muscles weren’t relaxed in sleep but stiff and unyielding. In a rising panic she grabbed the second ganar and shook him. This one proved just as stiff, and when Celcha hauled him over she found herself staring at open, bloodshot eyes bulging in a contorted face above a bloody mouth. The fur on the ganar’s chin and chest bore traces of dried foam, a papery residue now.
Celcha released the corpse with a shudder of disgust and jumped to her feet. A wordless cry broke from her and she ran on into the darkness, weaving unsteadily. She passed the third ganar and tripped over a fourth that sprawled just beyond. On her hands and knees, she stared in horror at the bodies filling the corridor beyond. Some were locked together as if they’d died tearing at each other. They’d all been trying to get out, but none had made it further than the door.
“Hellet...” Celcha retched, spitting stomach acid onto the floor. “What have we done?”
She ran then, as if the gas was still here, and it was her choking and dying. She tore at the part-open door in the same blind panic that must have gripped the ganar who had expired against it, her nails scoring additional grooves before she finally tore herself through the gap. She ran without thought, upwards, always upwards, seeking the light, seeking air, lost within the structure.
Rather than escape the building she ended up stumbling into the vast, vaulted hall of the main temple. She fell to her knees beside one of the great pillars that bore the ceiling aloft. The peace of the Mother God’s house was a lie. The bright colours that streamed through stained glass to paint the stone-flagged floor were a cruel parody of the vitality snatched from so many just hours before. The god had done nothing to protect her children... or their slaves. Ganar, human, and canith had found a final equality. They had died the same horrible death. And Celcha had delivered it to them. It hadn’t been Hellet who crawled through that last pipe and poured the quicksilver into the underground heart of the gas room.
Celcha looked up uncomprehendingly from empty hands that were so full of guilt. A golden sparkle had drawn her eye. There, just inside the closed iron doors of the temple, were the two ghosts, the canith and the human. The ones who had delivered the black book of poisons into Hellet’s hands. The ones who had steered Celcha and her brother to just this place and time. The ones who had danced and cavorted above the dead city.
She watched in total disbelief as the pair bent their heads together and kissed. Kissed! The shock and terror that had crippled Celcha burned away, replaced by an anger so great it left her breathless, unable to speak. “You!” She wanted to boom her accusation. To fill the great hall with it from flagstone to cornice. But nothing emerged from the lips that framed the word.
She started to run, to charge at her enemy. But they had already turned away. As her pounding feet closed the gap, the last glimmer of the pair slipped through the fabric of the closed doors. She arrived too late, hurled herself after them, and was thrown back by the unyielding iron.
She found her voice then, trapped within the temple while the ghosts ran free, and howled after them, venting her rage, her hurt, her betrayal. “I will find you!” She beat the doors until her fists bled. “I will find you...”