Chapter 35
Advancing from finger paints to the quill pen enabled writers to whisper more prettily. The printing press allowed them to shout.
The Empty Page , by Tess Eliot
CHAPTER 35
Arpix
Arpix had always counted himself as a cautious man. He admitted to being studious, and acknowledged that he lacked Livira’s chaotic genius, Jella’s fortitude, Carlotte’s vivaciousness, or Meelan’s determination. War had come and set him running through a burning library. A strange escape had dumped him on an island of relative safety, and there he’d stayed, seeing no direction to take and lacking the courage or foolhardiness to strike out into the unknown.
Once again it had taken outside pressure to make him move, and now here he was, following a magical cat through the library, looking for a new direction. His horizons had been broadened to such a degree that his old life looked small and blinkered. Still, he wanted it back. He wanted his quiet, ordered days back, growing old among the towering shelves, exploring the space between two covers while sitting in a comfortable chair, with a hot cup of chai within arm’s reach.
Doors closed behind him one after the next. Doors that could be opened only by the touch of a willing canith. And still Wentworth led them on, stepping from shelf top to shelf top via some distant intermediate space, never needing to jump.
Clovis walked at Arpix’s side, further complicating his life. He’d sometimes felt that women were a different species—a stupid conceit, he acknowledged, but one that stood as effective shorthand for his awkwardness and inability to move any conversation or relationship away from the comfortable ground of academia into spaces that seemed dark and uncertain. Spaces where the floor itself might vanish beneath you and injury seemed a certainty. Even with a friend as bold and salacious as Carlotte he’d always felt happier, calmer, steering back towards safe ground, telling himself there would always be another day, better timing, more auspicious omens—any excuse would do. Women weren’t a different species, but Clovis definitely was. Textbook fact. And she was female on top of that. Carlotte had been forthright and as suggestive as it was possible to be without actually unbuttoning his clothes. But there had always been escape routes, and Arpix had taken them, while all the time part of his mind was screaming at him that he was an idiot, and another part that he was a coward.
Meelan had even asked him one day if he liked boys. To which Arpix had sighed and said that he wished it were anything so simple and reasonable as that. “I think I just hate myself, Mee,” he’d said. “I can’t see any other logical explanation for constantly getting in my own way, for pushing aside things that would be good for me. But”—and he had held up a hand to forestall his friend’s inevitable repetition of old offers to help—“it is in my nature, mine to bear, and I think if I were to change... it might break me. So, please, let’s not speak of it again.” And, with his eyes prickling and his hands trembling, he had walked away from Meelan, and still to this day his imagination could not tell him what might have been on the boy’s face as he watched him go.
All of which had made Clovis both a revelation and an existential crisis. She was a force of nature, like a flood, or a forest fire. Social niceties were nothing to her. The body language with which he’d so often deflected that sort of attention was as meaningless to her as his own tongue. It was one thing when Carlotte had suddenly started to find his slightest attempt at humour to be hilarious, or his library tales fascinating. He’d been able to ignore her playful touches. But when a seven-foot canith puts her face an inch from your neck and breathes you in, it’s hard to pretend there’s nothing going on.
Even so, if Clovis’s attentions had sparked nothing in him he would have been able to answer her in kind, even if it meant simply turning his back. But they hadn’t. Something about her lit a fire under his skin, and it turned out that there was no lying to a canith about such things. Whatever his mouth told her, her nose told her something else.
And even then, if it had just been his traitor body walking away from the script he’d played his life by, he could have, with difficulty, reined it in using the power of his will. Probably. But it wasn’t just his body, or her body. Something in her directness, her lack of concern for almost everything that concerned him, her total honesty, something in that mix called to him. The strangest thing of all was that although she was clearly capable of taking on an army of Arpixes and had thrown herself at an enraged cratalac armed only with a sword... the strange thing was that he worried for her and wanted to protect her.
“What are you thinking about, human boy?” Clovis growled at his side.
“What we’ll find when we reach Yute.”
“Liar.” She gave a lazy smile. “You were thinking of me.”
—
The next door Wentworth led them to was closed, but Evar went ahead to scout it and came back to report that three skeer warriors were waiting before it, facing the door. Possibly in the same sort of hibernation that the previous one had been.
“Use the orb to squash them against the door,” Clovis said.
It was the sensible suggestion, and not dissimilar to Evar going forward and stabbing his blade through the last one’s head. Even so, the idea of casually murdering three skeer didn’t sit well with Arpix and he said so.
“What would you suggest instead?” Clovis asked.
Arpix had already remarked that while she was ready for any fight, she wasn’t ready to make a fight out of anything. A good general listens first, when there is time to listen, and Clovis would make a good general.
“We could come from the side and just move them out of the way. It wouldn’t put us in any danger.”
“They would bring more of their kind here,” Clovis countered. “And after the lesson with the rock, perhaps the next one they’ll learn will involve spears...”
Arpix frowned. “The door we came through is closed. They can’t get out to call for reinforcements.”
“Perhaps the other two doors are open or open for them,” Clovis said.
“We could check.” Arpix met her gaze.
“That seems a lot of effort to save the lives of three enemies who don’t seem to care whether they live or die anyway.”
“We could send a human and a canith to both doors,” Evar said. “If they open for either one then we know the skeer can’t get in or out that way.”
“We’d all need to go to both doors.” Arpix shaped the imagined iron ball between his hands. “It’s the only way to keep safe from any skeer that might be wandering out here.”
“A journey of over four miles.” Clovis grimaced. “To maybe keep three skeer alive. Skeer that might cause us problems later.”
“We should vote on—” Arpix broke off as Kerrol, who he hadn’t seen leave, reappeared around the end of the aisle.
“Squashed the bugs.” Kerrol tossed the orb to his sister.
Arpix found his mouth hanging open and closed it. Evar seemed similarly amazed. Clovis took it more in her stride though still looked a little puzzled as she turned the orb over in her hands.
Kerrol explained himself. “You were going to argue over it. It’s a fault line in the group dynamics. Couldn’t be allowed to widen. Better that I take the hit. You don’t trust me anyway.”
The group advanced to find the pulverised remains of three skeer decorating the foot of the door. Their gore rippled across the white surface, seeking to get away from the orb even in death.
Clovis advanced unperturbed. “Let’s see what they were guarding.” Her hand came to rest against the door. She frowned and turned back to the others. “Arpix?”
Arpix wondered if it was the first time she’d spoken his name. It seemed impossible but he couldn’t remember another. He liked how it sounded in her mouth, growled out but still not a threat—more of a promise. He went forward to stand beside her. “Let’s hope it’s not a ganar door, or a larnix door, or something even—”
“Just try it.” She laughed.
So, he did. And it melted before him, the ichor spraying out down the corridor under the orb’s pressure.
Clovis stood for a while, sniffing. “I can smell something.”
“Me too, and I wish I couldn’t.” The reek of skeer guts was overpowering to the point where Arpix’s eyes were starting to water.
“Humans.” Clovis nodded. “Not close, but lots of them.”
“Define ‘lots.’?”
Clovis licked her teeth. “My nose is clever. But it can’t count.”
—
Cautiously, the group moved into the chamber, with Evar and Arpix at the front. Evar in case of problems; Arpix in case those problems were caused by Evar being a canith.
The room, or at least the tiny fraction of it that Arpix could see, appeared similar to the typical library room. It always amazed him that people had had the energy and industry to erect such a vast amount of shelving so far from the known entrances, and fill them with the books that the assistants would otherwise leave piled on the floor. It certainly lent credence to the slow migration of the chambers—or perhaps it should more accurately be described as the quick but highly infrequent exchange of chambers.
Livira had spoken of written accounts from travellers who had ventured deep into the interior. They spoke of seemingly endless rooms lying beyond the range of any but the most intrepid explorer, where books lay in drifts, taller than a man, untended, unknown, unloved. It had always amazed and saddened him that such a wealth of knowledge and culture, speculation and imagination sat out there, beyond the capacity of mankind to make use of, just waiting for the next fire to sweep through.
The shelves in Arpix’s small patch of the current chamber were in good condition, fashioned from dark oak and topped by carved animal heads that looked down upon the travellers in the style of cathedral grotesques, as large as a human head and set every few yards. Each had been picked out in great detail by a master of the craft, some indistinguishable from the true animal, others given human expressions ranging from contemplation to amusement, some wise, some leering, some comically bored.
The group carried on, trailing Wentworth through the lefts and rights, broadly following the wall for a few hundred yards into the chamber. Evar sniffed the air from time to time. “Definitely humans.” He confirmed Clovis’s earlier judgement.
The attack, when it came, wasn’t well organised or executed with precision. A handful of figures clambered up onto the shelf top forming a T-junction with the aisle down which Wentworth was leading Arpix. The animal heads peering from the heights of this particular unit turned out to be no longer connected to the plank supporting them, and the people above snatched them up, throwing them down as missiles.
It was hard to miss when your target was confined within an aisle two yards wide, but at least half of the six heads thrown their way would not have hit anyone. A stag’s head, complete with antlers, came spinning towards Arpix, and Evar pulled him out of its way. A second, more compact head, shot towards Evar with more force than the rest. He caught it in one hand. The slap of wood against flesh was loud enough to make Arpix wince, but the canith seemed unconcerned.
The last missile went over Arpix’s head, and when he turned, he saw that Clovis had impaled it on her sword.
“Wait!” Arpix called up to the humans above them. “Wait! We’re not here to fight. We’re looking for Yute!”
The people, on the point of retreating down the ladders that must rest against the far side, hesitated.
“Those are canith!” One of them spat. He bent to reach for another wooden head.
“Yes!” Arpix called back. “But good ones. We’re librarians. Friends of Yute.”
The people on the shelf top exchanged glances. Arpix could see that some of them were Livira’s kin, thick black hair, fawn skin. But canith were always going to be a hard sell whether to city dwellers or those from the Dust. Death and destruction had been what the canith brought to the doors of both.
After a few muttered words the group started to descend their ladders. Canith had a history of taking prisoners and exploiting them. Arpix understood the mistrust.
“Wait! I’m not lying!” Arpix was embarrassed by how unconvincing he sounded.
Half of them had vanished from view already. One of the remaining women, possibly the one whose shot would have brained Evar but for his preternatural reactions, sparked a moment of recognition. She had a thick rope of black hair reaching past the small of her back, and even from this angle there was something familiar about her.
Arpix opened his mouth to shout again, but Jella beat him to it.
“Neera?”
The girl coughed in surprise. “Who... Do I know you?”
“It’s me, Jella.” Jella elbowed past the canith.
“Gods!” Neera gestured to one of her companions. “Pull a ladder up.” She sat on the shelf top, legs dangling, peering over short-sightedly. “We nearly killed you.” She sounded horrified, though Evar snorted his amusement. “I’m so sorry!” She leaned further over, looking to be a hair’s breadth from toppling into the fall. “Is that really you, Jella? You’re so thin!”
—
The ambush point had been chosen well, and a ladder was needed to avoid a long detour to reach the spot where Neera and her crew had waited below their single spotter. Arpix clambered up first, followed by Jella and the rest of the humans.
Jella and Neera staged a dangerous reunion twenty yards above the ground, hugging each other and weeping and remarking on how skinny the other was.
“How did you get like this?” Neera stepped back, astonished, and it was all Arpix could do to keep from grabbing her as she backed towards the edge. But she seemed at home on the shelf top, well aware of its dimensions and unbothered by the drops despite having been raised in the flattest place in the kingdom. “How are you so thin? So dark!”
“We can discuss it,” Arpix said. “On the ground.” The drop to either side had put a tremble in his legs and dizziness threatened.
“Are they really safe?” Neera frowned doubtfully at the canith below.
“They are.” Arpix knew that, like Livira, Neera had been taken captive by the canith who raided her settlement. “That one with the dark mane. That’s Livira’s... special friend.”
He had to reach out to catch Neera then as her amazement set her back another step. Dizziness took him and both of them might have fallen if not for Jella. “We really should get back on the floor,” she said, releasing them both from her grip. “The slow way.”
—
Wentworth, who had vanished at the first sign of trouble, reappeared once everyone was at the same level and on the same side. Neera and her companions greeted him like another old friend and made a fuss of him.
“He brings us food,” Neera explained, looking up from stroking the cat. Wentworth for his part made a show of disdain, as if he were suffering their attentions out of kindness, though when the man scratching his neck stopped doing it, Wentworth butted his hand with his head. “He brings rats mainly, but also chickens, and once... a horse. That’s how we’ve survived. Also Master Yute’s pockets. He can reach in and bring out bread, sausages, onions, sometimes a hot pie.” She looked wistful at the memory. “But he can’t do it too often and it takes a lot of rummaging.”
Salamonda, who had been the last one over before the canith, frowned at this particular revelation. “Pies?”
“Yes.” Neera nodded. “It’s true. It sounds crazy but it’s real magic.”
Salamonda pursed her lips. “It might be true, but it’s not magic. Someone made those pies that Yute’s been stealing!”
Arpix interjected himself into the conversation. “How long have you been here?”
“Weeks!” one of Neera’s companions said.
“It’s been terrible,” said another.
“Even with Yute and Wentworth there’s not nearly enough to eat. And then—”
“And before that?” Arpix pressed on with his line of questioning.
“Before that was the fire and the running,” Neera said. “The canith took the city...” She looked nervously up at Evar and his siblings.
Meelan laughed behind Arpix. “Weeks?”
Jella took Neera’s hand. “We’ve been outside, on the Dust. For years.”
“Years?” Neera’s confusion furrowed her brow. “How can that be?”
Arpix sighed. “We all stepped forward in time to be here. The portals we used can do that—move us through the years as well as to other places. Yes?”
Neera nodded. “Yute told us we were hundreds of years in the future of our old lives.” She said it with the tone of someone who had yet to truly believe it.
“Well, the door we came through didn’t bring us as far forward as the route you took,” Arpix said. “We’ve had to wait four years for you to appear. I guess we’re just lucky it wasn’t four hundred.”
Neera looked at him with wide, round eyes, wrestling with the concept.
“We need to find Yute,” Arpix said. “Is it far to go?”
—
Yute, and his small band of mainly Livira’s former neighbours from the settlement, had set up temporary camp in the north-west corner. He greeted their arrival with a disturbing degree of relief. Arpix would have preferred the unperturbed confidence of a man playing the long game and in charge of all the variables.
“Well done, Wentworth!” Yute went to one knee to fuss the cat. “Well done!”
The joyous reunions among library employees in Arpix’s party and Yute’s were put on hold by the towering presence of the three canith. All eyes, save Yute’s, were turned their way along with the ’stick held by one ageing library guard whose name escaped Arpix.
Yute stood up from greeting his furry companion to look at the newcomers. He opened his arms and Salamonda barrelled into him, nearly knocking him over. Arpix took the opportunity to introduce the canith to Yute’s group of perhaps a dozen.
“Some of you know me. I’m Arpix. Formerly a librarian. My friends and I have spent four years living on the edge of the Dust, eating beans we grew and whatever Wentworth dropped for us. These three canith are Evar, Kerrol, and Clovis.” He indicated each in turn. “Without them we would still be on the Arthran Plateau and might well be dead. They have spent all of their lives, save the last week or so, trapped in a single chamber of the library. They have not raided settlements in the Dust, or attacked cities, and are no more responsible for the activities of other canith than you are for those of other humans that you’ve never met or heard of. Please treat them with respect.”
Yute disentangled himself from Salamonda and added his own recommendation. “This is where war with the canith has led us and left us. Out there”—he waved his arm towards the centre of the chamber—“our own kind are refusing change, turning inwards on their hunger. Let us embrace a different path. One I have seen trodden before.”
Arpix frowned at the mention of others. “There are more survivors?”
“Can you tell us who?” Meelan asked, and the others chimed in with too many questions for any one of them to receive an answer.
“What are they eating?” Arpix spoke into the pause. “What are you eating, for that matter?”
Yute brightened. “Let me see if I can show you. You look as if you could use a meal. A drink at the least.” He held up a white hand to forestall their excitement. “It won’t be much, I’m afraid.” He reached into the pocket of his robe and kept on reaching as if his pocket had a hole in it and his arm were sliding down his leg, though Arpix couldn’t see the shape of it under the deputy’s robe.
“Just... a... moment.” Yute’s face took on a look of concentration, his eyes not seeing what lay before him. “Here!” And to Arpix’s astonishment he brought out eighteen inches of blood-dark smoke-cured sausage mottled beneath the skin with lumps of pork fat. He handed it to Salamonda. Arpix’s mouth immediately filled with saliva and his stomach growled as if it were independently attempting to speak canith.
Salamonda looked from the sausage to Yute and back at the sausage. “This is mine.”
“Yes, it is,” Yute said. Which seemed obvious. He’d just given it to her. What surprised Arpix almost as much as the mysterious appearance of the food was that Salamonda should lay claim to it so firmly. The word “selfish” was not one that Arpix would ever have associated with the woman.
“No,” Salamonda said. “I mean... it’s mine. I made this.”
Yute shrugged somewhat guiltily. “I’ve been thieving from your kitchen.”
“How?” Salamonda sniffed the sausage while two score eyes watched the item’s every move. “I mean... it burned down, didn’t it? Or the canith took it. It’s certainly not hiding in your pocket...”
Yute looked down. Arpix could almost imagine the man’s feet shuffling beneath his robe. “A little here. A little there. I mean, legally it’s actually my kitchen.”
“You’re making no sense.” Salamonda said what Arpix had been thinking.
“I reach back across the years.”
“Through your pocket?” Salamonda handed the sausage absently to Jella, who stood closest to her.
“Yes.”
“Back in time?”
“Yes.”
“Stealing from my kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“Damn you, Yute!” Salamonda raised both her voice and her hand. “I thought I was going mad. I told you about it. Things going missing all the time. I blamed the delivery boy, I blamed Wentworth, I blamed poor Martha, who came to clean. I...”
“I’m sorry, Salamonda.” Yute stepped in range of the hand that had been raised to strike him. He set his own hand to her upper arm. “Back then I didn’t know it was me either.” He glanced at Jella, who was staring at the bounty in her grasp, trembling with restraint. All three canith were sniffing too, despite their pride. “Eat, Jella, eat. Have a bite and pass it on. I’ll see if I can reach in again and find the water pump.” And, so saying, Yute began a second slightly comical dive into his unfeasibly deep pockets.
He had to reach deeper this second time and Arpix could see the effort vibrating through the man’s narrow frame. Without warning, Yute jolted, his face twisting in sudden panic. A yelp of surprise escaped him, and he pulled—or tried to pull—his arm clear. For a moment Arpix wondered if he were going to see a man vanish into his own pocket in some sort of surreal accident, but before anyone could get to him to offer help, Yute managed to yank his arm free.
“That was... so...” A cracking sound split the air. Neither loud nor quiet, but a definite sound that Arpix felt from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. “Someone caught hold of me.”
For a moment the sausage was forgotten. The sound had admitted no direction, but it felt significant in the same way that the noise might had they been standing on ice above a deep lake or in front of a dam wall. Yute saw it first, something astonishing to all of those who had spent years within the vastness of the library. A crack running through the ground beneath their feet. Almost too thin to notice but commanding the eye with its wrongness even so. A black crack. And from it, almost imperceptibly, a black mist began to seep.