Chapter 44
Grace had always felt like a bystander in her own life. She memorised names, and faces, and numberplates in case she should ever be called on to give evidence. She died peacefully, never regretting her decision not to take part.
Tanylorn Daily Press , Obituaries
CHAPTER 44
Celcha
To those who come and go by the doorways of the Exchange time becomes a fractured thing, best remembered as a collection of events that happened rather than something enumerated. Even so, Celcha had done her best to count the days she’d spent, some frittered away, some laid down to purchase things she had thought she needed. A hundred years was her best guess. A hundred years since the poisoning of Krath. A century of her own time, and, in the way of ganar, she was in her prime, the extremes of old age still the best part of two centuries ahead.
In the world’s timeline, however, the years had raced by far more swiftly. Celcha’s present lay a thousand years from the day of her birth. She had needed to let that millennium slide by, a century here, a century there, to allow her plans space to develop, allow the seeds she’d planted time to blossom.
As many had already discovered, knowledge is the most valuable and easily transported of all commodities. Pound for pound neither gold nor diamonds come anywhere close. Celcha became a trader, taking information from place to place, investing her profits.
She travelled widely, leaping decades in a single bound when required to outrun trouble or to wait for machinations to mature into materiel. In her time Celcha had been to both moons, seen her people rise and fall, rise again and fall again. She had wandered the habitable band of Attamast, commissioned wonders from the ganar at their heights, and commiserated with survivors at their lows.
On Attamast she finally found a place to set the nootki that had been pressed upon her as she left the Arthran dig. The tiny figurines sat within crystal in the palace of a great king and watched five centuries pass before war came and made new dust of all that had been built there.
Celcha never, in all those years, settled. She had been unsettled by the tragedy of her youth, and roots felt too similar to chains for her to want to sink any. She could have abandoned the Exchange, spent her years on Attamast, raised a family perhaps, and become a link in a different sort of chain. She did not.
Instead, she roamed. No matter how far she wandered, her old hurts drew her back, anchoring her to the darkest day she’d yet seen. Her understanding of the Exchange and its ways grew, but still she could never find Hellet and knew that he must be avoiding her for reasons of his own. Over the years she toyed with the idea of going back to the dig at the time when they had both laboured for Myles Carstar. She should, by rights, be able to speak to Hellet there. She could warn him about the other ghosts, and guide them both to a better future. But even before the rarest and best-hidden of the library’s own books cautioned her against such madness, her own instinct saved her from that path. The library had been built to last, but obdurate as it was, even the stuff of the athenaeum could be undone by paradox.
Guilt pursued Celcha, a vast, unrelenting guilt. And although the facts bound little or none of it to her actions, the crime still owned her. She could have checked deeper, worried more, trusted less. Even the smallest sliver of responsibility for one hundred thousand lives places corpses at your feet, and lost lives could not be shrugged away, at least not by Celcha. The child, Lutna, the princess who had shown her kindness, walked with Celcha every day of her life through a hundred years and more, undaunted by distance, even to the moons themselves.
Celcha diverted what portion of that guilt she could into anger and revenge. Had she not she would have drowned in it. She spent her resources hunting the two ghosts who had picked out her brother from the obscurity of the tunnels, wound him up like a clockwork toy, and loosed him on the world. She knew, in her secret heart, that Hellet hid from her because she would ask him to show these two ghosts to her, and that he for his part had forgiven their crimes in the greater cause of bringing down the structure that had allowed such crimes and allowed their repetition in many ways and many places.
Celcha reasoned that in time her quarry would return to the library. To find someone in a place so large it pays to have many pairs of eyes watching for them. She commissioned hunters, great and small, fashioned in her image so that her enemies might know the source of their demise. She had her memory of that last day imprinted upon each of her avatars. The image of the canith male and human female dancing out their victory, kissing above the corpses of a multitude of ganar who had choked out their last breaths alongside those who had enslaved them.
The application of decades will blunt most sharp edges. The wounds that Celcha’s guilt inflicted upon her grew less grievous; the flames of her rage guttered and died, though the coals remained hot as is the way of the ganar. Celcha’s kind were slow to anger but slow to forgive. Hellet had been an anomaly in many ways where Celcha remained truer to the archetype.
The alarm, when it finally came, long after she had abandoned hope, reached her in the Exchange. It was carried in the person of a small messenger construct in her own likeness and borne on the currents of coincidence. She picked the head-sized metal creature out of the grass. It had been so very many years since she set the things loose in their thousands that for several moments she had no idea what it might be.
“Oh.” Memory returned. She pressed the construct to her forehead. “They’ve been found!”
Celcha carried the construct into the nearest portal and let it guide her.
—
“The past...” It had always been a risk. Celcha had had to advance through the years. Letting time flow by you is a means of accumulating power. Plant a seed; return a lifetime later to reap what you have sown. And now her constructs had found their prey, but the deed was already done and all that remained was for Celcha to watch it.
She ghosted through untold walls, following the direction and the purpose that had sustained her for so long in place of the life that Hellet might have wanted for her. When she finally came upon them it seemed that the pair had hardly aged from the day of their dance. That was a good thing. Her vengeance might have consumed her youth but for the authors of the great crime it would be a swift thing, hard on the heels of their victory, striking before they could enjoy the spoils.
She found them in a reading room distinguished only by the fact that it held a Mechanism. It took her a few moments to find them amid the crowd of humans and canith. When she finally found her canith and her human she was shocked to discover the canith lying amid his own blood, apparently mortally wounded, and his paramour kneeling beside him in distress.
This was not the vengeance Celcha had wanted. This was not the victory. She had always known time would claim them both as it claimed everyone. To see the deceivers die at the hand of chance made her feel cheated.
Celcha watched despite this, and as she watched she saw that the wounded canith’s gaze aimed past his grieving partner to a pair of canith beside the Mechanism’s door, one tall and looming over the other who might be the shortest canith she’d seen. Something about the pair disturbed her. Some sense of the familiar.
While Celcha stared and tugged at the threads of memory, the taller canith did something to the Mechanism’s door and a moment later Hellet emerged. Not Hellet as she had known him, clad in the scars of past cruelty, but Hellet in the assistants’ white. Even so, she knew him without hesitation, as if her still-cracked sight offered up the ghost of him surrounding the whiteness like the memory of smoke.
Even the clanging advance of some huge new threat behind her couldn’t take Celcha’s gaze from her brother. For his part, Hellet walked past her without a flicker of recognition. Celcha turned, calling his name, and saw emerging from the constriction of the corridor a vast likeness of herself, somewhat battered just as she now was, trailing twisted steel behind it in mockery of the chains that she still dragged through the years. A lone canith ran ahead of it, dwarfed by the avatar, underscoring the towering height of the thing.
Celcha stood amazed. She had forgotten how large some of the constructs had been. At the time it had felt justified, somehow scaled towards the size of her anger. Now it seemed excessive, but at least the former ghosts would know the author of their doom.
“No.” Hellet held out a white hand, palm forward.
The mechanical Celcha lunged forward with an awful silent fury. It hit an invisible wall and came to a dead halt, though she saw that Hellet was jolted back some fraction of an inch. The canith that had run from the avatar tried to brace him, as if her strength might somehow make a difference.
“Why?” Celcha shouted. “Why, brother?” Why had he put himself between her vengeance and the ones who had tricked them into murdering a city?
The construct recovered itself and pointed with one finger, aiming its accusation squarely at the wounded canith and the human tending him.
“Why?” gasped the canith, no understanding on his face.