Chapter 41
A library may grow big enough to hold every fact concerning the mechanics of the universe, but truth itself is larger than any page.
The First Book of Irad
CHAPTER 41
Arpix
Arpix followed Yute through the mist of the grey door. He had heard Livira’s many tales of the one Mechanism she knew about, but he had never visited. He put that reticence down to the fact that while nobody had told him not to enter it, the Mechanism was clearly a secret held close by the deputies and head librarian. When they wanted him to know about it, Arpix reasoned, they would tell him.
Another part of him whispered that this law-abiding excuse was just something he’d reached for gratefully, and that the truth was that it was fear which had held him back. Livira had told him how Evar and his siblings had been trapped within the device for whole lifetimes and more. Arpix had been wary of exposing himself to such risk and had ungenerously characterised the transportation Livira described as “cheating.” He would, he said, rather absorb books through his eyeballs, and leave the rest of his anatomy out of the experience.
Even now as the grey mist swallowed Yute from sight, Arpix hesitated. Behind him, Jella paused too. “You don’t have to.”
Arpix nodded to himself. He didn’t have to. But Clovis would. Jella would. All the people he loved would. All the people he had left in the world. He made fists of his hands, telling himself that he was tired of his dried-up, tight-wrapped existence, tired of himself, and ready for change. And with that, he stepped into the mist.
—
From the stories Livira had told him, Arpix was expecting to step into another world of light and colour and fascination. Instead, a darkness enfolded him, a darkness so profound that it devoured ideas as small as up and down, and took with them any notion of a floor beneath his feet. It consumed even time itself. This was the void that had held Evar Eventari until the bones of his parents had become dust along with those of generations to follow.
Two points of light hung in the Mechanism’s night, and Arpix wondered if they had always been there, and he had somehow failed to see them until now. They became closer, brighter, larger, resolved by his attention into two thrones, each in its own pool of light, a great space between them as if at opposite extremes of some vast dais.
In the same way that the lights had entered Arpix’s mind, each throne now held an occupant who might have been there all along. A man on each throne, somehow conveying an impression of great size despite the fact that there was nothing here to offer scale.
The man on the left sat upright, a regal gravitas to the planes and angles of his face that was never present in King Oanold’s, not even in the flattery stamped upon the realm’s coins. Dark hair curled from beneath a silver circlet to frame his features. The blade of his nose reminded Arpix strangely of Carlotte. A librarian’s robe wrapped him, the same grey as the Mechanism, and across his lap lay a large black book.
The man occupying the other throne lounged in his seat. He shared sufficient similarities with the librarian that he might be a younger brother. The same dark curls, though longer and unkempt. The same prominent nose and dark, watchful eyes, though with a glint of humour. The stubble on chin and cheeks might, with another week, constitute a beard. In place of the other’s robes he wore a motley of browns with flashes of crimson. The garb of a traveller, perhaps. The staff leaning against his throne looked more suited to walking than to ceremony.
Arpix looked for the others, Livira, Clovis, Yute, Evar... but if the void held them, it did not reveal them. The men on the thrones seemed to be focused on the far distance and neither deigned to acknowledge his presence.
“Hello?” Arpix’s voice came out more timidly than he would have liked. It seemed almost a crime to break the silence.
“Ah,” the older man rumbled. “It has come to this now?”
The younger man looked at Arpix with mild interest. “Arpix Reed. A true son of the library if ever there was one.”
“Might I enquire...” Arpix started again. “You have me at a disadvantage. Your names?”
The older man cleared his throat. “I have read enough books to know that saying I have many names would be an awful cliché. Call me Irad. My brother is Jaspeth.”
Arpix made an awkward bow. “And I am here... because?”
“We asked for you and you came,” Jaspeth said.
“You’re here to decide the library’s fate.” Irad bowed his head.
“You’re here to settle a bet.” Jaspeth grinned, white teeth in the darkness of his face.
“Just me?” Arpix stammered a little.
“All of you.” Irad waved a hand as if Arpix were part of a sizeable audience. “All of you who have become part of this tangle.”
Arpix gathered his courage. “Forgive me, but the library spans worlds and time. Surely its fate can’t depend on my friends and me?”
Jaspeth sat forward in his throne, reaching for his staff. He eyed Arpix as if he might agree with his assessment of his lack of consequence, then shrugged. “Every crack has to begin as the smallest of things, even if it grows to split away some vast tonnage of ice, or to divide a planet. Even the shattering of reality must begin with a hairline fracture.” He looked over at Irad. “My family has a poor history with fratricide. We invented it. This gathering—this delegation—is our answer to the irreconcilable views we’ve been gifted. We will abide by the outcome of your efforts and thereby avoid violence between us. Whether you can do the same is a question for you.”
Irad folded the fingers of one hand through those of the other. “There will be a time of choosing. Sooner than you think. Sides must be picked and taken. The decisions made here matter. They will echo through time. I invite you to choose the vision I have laid out. The library as it would have been had my brother not opposed me. Every work that has ever been committed to record by any species made available to all, without the barriers of language or distance. A library with so many doors that it will never be out of reach. A place where all opinion, discovery, and imagination can be summoned in a comprehensible form without delay. Immortal memory to counter the fragility of flesh. A ladder by which intelligence may ascend. With such a gift any species could hardly fail to reach nirvana.”
Jaspeth, who had been shaking his head slowly, now focused on Arpix and the intensity of his stare felt as if the noonday sun were blazing upon him.
“Many poisons taste sweet. Much that is deadly proves pleasing to the eye. My brother’s gift is such a thing. Wisdom is difficult to write down, harder to find amid the ocean of the unwise, and, when found, next to impossible to learn from a page. The wisdom to use knowledge must be earned rather than given. That takes time. Lifetimes. Millennia. Knowledge without wisdom is fire in the hands of children. You know this.
“There is a ladder to the heavens, but there are no shortcuts when it comes to scaling it. When you fall you must start afresh, without the fear of falling that memory will bring, without the fatal distance that memory will place beneath you as it lifts you back to the highest point that any have reached so far. My brother’s library presents itself as wings with which you might fly, but in truth it shackles you in ways that are difficult to see. A clean slate is the real freedom. Fresh innocence. Tabula rasa .”
“And the third way?” Arpix dared to speak into the pause after Jaspeth fell silent. They had, after all, summoned him and spoken of choices.
The mouths of both brothers quirked in disapproval but in that same moment a third figure appeared, standing between the thrones, dwarfed by them, confirming Arpix’s previously unfounded belief that Irad and Jaspeth were as tall as houses.
Yute stood there, tiny and pale. “There are many other paths.”
Irad looked down at him, frowning. “I fashioned you from nothing. Just as the creator made his angels from light and void.”
“And some of them still fell.” Yute studied his hands. “Some fell as far as I have. Perhaps lower still.” He looked up, staring in Arpix’s direction, though Arpix now understood that he was more than a hundred yards away and if Yute could also see a hidden audience then maybe his gaze had found another to settle on. “I offer compromise. The library has, for many cycles of men, canith, and countless others, existed under this compromise—”
“And it has failed to prevent disaster a thousand times,” Jaspeth interrupted without heat.
“It has.” Yute bowed his head. “But unlike your solution, Lord Jaspeth, or Lord Irad’s, compromise has many forms. It can change, adjust, seek new solutions. That is my only defence of it. That is my plea to any who will join me and avoid absolutes.
“Believe me when I say that whatever choices you make in this matter, you will not be my enemy. Irad and Jaspeth are—forgive me, my lords—archetypes. Neither is inherently wrong, neither is evil, and those who follow them deserve neither credit nor censure for that choice.
“Evil, such as it is, is found far closer to home. It is found among humans, among canith, and in every other form of intelligence. What follows us in the library is as close to evil as I’ve seen.
“King Oanold has in his possession, though he doesn’t yet know it, a weapon to put all others to shame. A weapon forged by the unwitting trespass of a human and a canith. Some of you will have heard me speak of the fire-limit. The level of technology a people are able to reach before they burn their world down with it. Sometimes the fire is the hot flicker that consumes cities and eats through library shelves. Sometimes the fire is of a more advanced kind that can scour bedrock and poison the skies. Sometimes it will even shatter worlds. But with the book that Livira and Evar have created, King Oanold has reached a fire-limit where the flames are of the sort that can reduce the laws of nature to ash and burn the very substance of the library rather than merely the books within it.”
Jaspeth stood from his throne. “Compromise is a cancer, a rot that destroys what it touches. At least my brother’s vision is clear. It has purity to it. It’s wrong, but there is nothing soft or corrupt to it, nothing hidden to be revealed later.” His dark gaze swept the void and Arpix felt the tingle of it on his skin. “Let us see the place where compromise took my brother’s fallen angel.” He stamped the heel of his staff on whatever invisible ground he stood upon.
Where Yute had been, Arpix saw another Yute. Blood and panic covered the face of this new man. The vision showed only him and his immediate surroundings, a place that burned with the library’s light. Stacks of books taller than Yute moved in and out of the vision, fading away at the edges as he hurried through a forest of the things.
Sounds reached out from the scene, distant shouts, muffled cries of pain, screaming.
The scene widened. Behind Yute and to the left dozens of the stacks had been toppled and books carpeted the floor. In one place a hand reached out, the fingers unmoving and stained with crimson. Yute hurried on, stepping around the bloody corpse of a child. A canith child. He avoided the body of an old female, grey-maned, no mark of violence visible upon her.
The scene widened again to show the trail of Yute’s red footprints leading back through the book stacks to a circle of crops where Livira’s old friends, Gevin, Katrin, Neera, and a score of others from the city milled about in confusion, shock on their faces, the greenery trampled around them. At their backs stood a pool of dark water, its surface rippled and unquiet.
Another two canith bodies lay among the plants. The humans steered clear of them.
The focus returned to Yute. He reached a soldier, one of Oanold’s veterans who had skirmished with canith out on the Dust for years before they rolled over Crath City’s walls in a grey wave. Her uniform was marked with soot in places and with blood spatters.
“No! Stop!” Yute caught her sword arm as she made to skewer a canith on the ground who might or might not be dead.
The woman shook Yute off with minimal effort. An elbow to the stomach sent him staggering back, gasping for breath. She ran the length of her steel through the body at her feet, then looked back at Yute, frowning, shook her head, and moved on, hunting for survivors.
Yute’s voice returned as a whisper, then a croak. “Come back. You have to stop this...”
Arpix knew that Yute had come through the portal last, to ensure that nobody who left the library with him used any of the other portals. It seemed clear, though, that he hadn’t known what would be waiting for them on the other side of the doorway. He arrived last, and the soldiers were already exacting what they considered vengeance upon what looked to be a largely unarmed community of canith living in the library.
Arpix, who was already sickened by the cruel aftermath of the slaughter, suddenly had a bad feeling about who these canith might be. It was the way of the Exchange, when left without instruction, to link things, to bring together causes and effects, wants and desires, to fit one piece to another.
The void in which he hung allowed no sounds other than those from the vision Jaspeth was sharing, but somehow, rippling under the quiet between the fading sounds of murder among the stacks, Arpix could feel the silence shaking with Clovis’s howling.
Yute moved on, one arm across his stomach, half a run, half a stagger. His path took him past the bodies of a score of canith, most cut down from behind. Two soldiers lay dead, one with a missing throat, the other’s head smashed against the floor. Their weapons had already been salvaged. He passed the entrance to one of the reading rooms. A tall figure stood beside a shorter, fatter man who was in the process of placing a grey wig upon his bald head. A dozen soldiers flanked the pair, most staring where the tall man’s singular gaze was directed: down the corridor.
“Algar! Stop this madness! These aren’t—”
“When you find cockroaches in the kitchen of your new home you stamp on them.” The fat man turned around as a soldier helped him into a robe of purple velvet lined with ermine. “You don’t say, ‘These are different cockroaches, let us give them a chance to prove themselves.’?” King Oanold faced Yute, the remnants of his disguise—the dress and shawl of some older noblewoman—on the floor beside him.
Yute saw soldiers at the far end of the corridor running as if in pursuit of someone. “We have to leave. Now! We need to go back and try another door.”
Algar exchanged a look with the king. “Our soldiers seem to like it here. They’re doing an excellent job of driving back the sabbers.”
“Driving them back?” Yute’s outrage loaned rare colour to his words. “They’re slaughter—”
“Did we not just leave my city in flames? My library?” Oanold roared. “This is justice! It’s mercy compared to the retribution that the law demands.”
Yute stared from the lord to the king. He straightened and drew his untidy robes around him. “In the chambers beyond this one these people maintain armies that dwarf the one which invaded our city. Consider this a peaceful village surrounded by fortresses. I have unwittingly helped you to bypass their defences, but if we don’t leave now, by the same route that brought us here, their kin will come in numbers so great...”
Distant cries of pain and fear rattled down the corridor from the reading room. Human voices. The sounds of a tide turning, of an advance becoming a retreat.
“...perhaps it has already started,” Yute said.