Chapter 4
Apart from Svangerd jumping up and grabbing my arm every time there was the tiniest sound, or even when there wasn’t, it was a pleasantly uneventful night. I didn’t get any sleep, but you can’t have everything in this life. “It’s daylight,” she announced.
“No, it isn’t. It’s as dark as a bag.”
“It’s daylight,” she insisted. “Come on.”
The day that followed was very long. It involved a great deal of sneaking about, ducking into shadows, keeping absolutely still while people walked past, climbing up stairs, climbing down stairs, a significant proportion of my least favourite things distilled into a condensed package.
We managed to get through it without killing anybody.
The one thing we didn’t do was find the library.
“This is stupid,” she hissed at me, as we cowered in a narrow, dark garderobe shaft, having barely avoided a ten-man patrol in a dead-end corridor.
“We’ve been everywhere, and it’s just not there.
You know what I think? I don’t think there is a fucking library.
I think he keeps a few old books in a chest somewhere. ”
The same thought had occurred to me. “Of course there’s a library,” I told her. “It was in the mission briefing.”
“How would anyone know? Have they been here? No, of course not. All they know is, this arsehole’s got the stupid book. Therefore they assume he’s got a library to keep it in. But they don’t know that. They’re guessing.”
“There’s no reason to believe the mission briefing wasn’t accurate,” I said. “There’s got to be a library.”
“Why?”
I realised I couldn’t answer that. “Because you wouldn’t go to the trouble and expense of building a fake imperial citadel and not have a library,” I said.
“Look, this place was designed to persuade the world that the Angkolans have a bit of class. Therefore, it’s got to have a library.
Building it without one would be as good as admitting you’re still a bunch of pirates. ”
That didn’t convince her. Or me. But it was the best I could do, especially with the bad headache that had been plaguing me most of the day. “Here’s what we do,” she said. “We hide up somewhere, we grab a clerk or a servant, we bash him till he tells us where the library is.”
I didn’t point out that the clerk or servant would go and raise the alarm the moment we let him go, because I knew what she’d say to that, and I didn’t want to hear it. “That’s a useful fall-back plan,” I told her. “We’ll definitely do that if my idea doesn’t work.”
“What idea?”
Good question. “Stay there,” I said. “I won’t be long.”
She couldn’t protest, for fear of being heard by unfriendly ears, so she made a grab at my sleeve, which I just managed to evade.
I walked away quickly until I was where she couldn’t see me any more, then found the nearest dark corner and huddled into it.
Now what? I asked myself. No reply, which didn’t surprise me in the least.
A man cleared his throat.
How he crept up on me without being heard or seen I have no idea. He was just there. “Piss off,” I said to him.
“That’s nice,” replied the man with the nose. “So, how’s it coming along? Made any progress?”
It occurred to me that nobody had explained to my satisfaction why the man with the nose seemed to have the run of the place, given that it was regularly patrolled by guards and sentries with a strong work ethic.
Or, come to that, how he’d contrived to get us released from custody.
“Leave me alone,” I said, and it came out as a sort of nauseating whine.
“Sure, if that’s what you want. My instructions are to afford you all possible assistance. If I can help best by staying out of your way, that’s absolutely fine. Found the library yet?”
“No.”
“Ah. Right then. Follow this corridor, second staircase on your left, up three flights, turn right, follow your nose, you’ll find yourself in a long gallery sort of thing, it’s at the far end of that, big double door with fancy brass hinges, you can’t miss it. Ciao for now.”
He turned on his heel and walked away, round a corner, out of sight.
Oftentimes, according to the poet Saloninus, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths.
The hell with it, I thought, it can’t hurt to look.
The alternative would be another day or a week of sneaking around, or Svangerd throttling a chambermaid, and no guarantee it’d get us anything more than a cell in the dungeons and an early date with the deputy chief torturer.
That, I had to concede, would be silly. Besides, I’d been told; I hadn’t asked.
“Found it,” I told her, some time later.
Her eyes widened. “Well done,” she said. “Where—?”
“Where I thought it’d be,” I told her. “Where we went wrong was assuming that the temple portico obscures the view of the side of the building for an arc of forty-five degrees. What we didn’t take into account was the hang of the eaves. Once I’d grasped that, it was obvious. Come on.”
To win us to our harm… Of course, one of the mistakes people commonly make is getting Saloninus muddled up with Holy Writ.
Actually, all they really have in common is a knack for the sonorous phrase and the fairly obvious, neatly stated.
“It’s in there,” I hissed in her ear. “Behind those double doors.”
“Great,” she said. “What about the guards?”
There were two of them; palace steelnecks in full dress uniform, meaning red worsted cloaks over gilded fish-scale armour, and boots that shone like the sun.
I don’t know how anyone does their job, standing rock-still all day long, staring straight ahead.
I couldn’t do it for two minutes. “What about them?” I said.
She grinned at me, then went to work. “Excuse me,” she sang out in a loud, clear voice, “I’m afraid I’m a bit lost, can you possibly tell me the way to the buttery?
” Three seconds later it was all over, and – credit where it’s due – not a drop of blood spilt, or a sound you could’ve heard ten yards away.
I opened the doors a crack, peered round, saw that we had the library to ourselves and helped her tow the bodies inside. “Are they dead?” I asked her.
“Don’t be stupid.”
We trussed them up with their own belts and bootlaces, with strips of their cloaks stuffed in their mouths to ensure discretion. “Slice of luck there’s nobody else in here,” she observed, dragging the second guard under a desk by his heels and tucking his feet neatly behind the end of a bench.
“I don’t think anyone comes here much,” I replied. “Not even to dust.”
Even so, it was a magnificent library. I’d been right about the tall windows; the whole space glowed with beautiful, crystal-clear light.
The desks were oak, new enough still to be golden-brown, finished with linseed oil and that incredibly expensive polish they make in Echmen out of a special gum secreted by beetles.
The shelves were cedar, of course, planed, sanded and burnished but untainted by a single drop of oil or wax.
There were benches for sitting and reading, and high stools for copying.
If I was a believer, it was the sort of place I’d hope to end up in after I died.
As things stood, I reminded myself, it could well be the place I ended up in immediately before I died.
Time to stop gawping and get to work. “Let’s find the book,” I said.
“Sure. What’s it called?”
“Um.”
She rolled her eyes. “You didn’t think to ask.”
“I asked. Nobody knows.”
We took a moment to gaze at the shelves, which were floor-to-ceiling on both walls and ran the full width of the building. “Fuck,” she said. “All right. You take the left side.”
Talking of the afterlife. If there were such a thing (there isn’t), and if I went there after living a life of unparalleled vice and depravity, a fitting punishment for me would be eternity in a library like that, pulling down book after book and scanning the title page, and then having to put it back without reading it.
There were treasures there to make a strong man cry.
Theodosius’ Analects. Rudprand’s Histories.
The missing fifth and seventh books of the Song of Sechimer.
The Dialogues of Guthbrand of Eurichen. A complete set of Notker’s comedies.
Seven – I’ll say that again, seven – works by Saloninus that were supposed to have been lost a thousand years ago, when the Rosinholet burned Iden.
Lutiker of Schanz, complete, with all the diagrams, in the original Permian.
For a moment, you could stand there, basking in the mellow evening light, and pretend the empire had never fallen, and mankind was still the paragon of animals, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in apprehension how like a god, instead of a bunch of primitives gnawing bones among the ashes.
Even Svangerd was impressed, I think. “Where did they get all this stuff?” I heard her murmur at one point.
“Half of these people I’ve never even heard of. ”
Yes, but I had. “Pirates,” I heard myself mumble.
“Sherden longships attacking an isolated monastery at daybreak. They used to do that a lot. Everyone always believed they burned the books, but maybe not.” I closed an annotated Sulpician – there are at least five other copies of Sulpician, but the annotations quoted great gobbets of Alimer of Neidhol, lost for eight hundred years – “Maybe they figured they’d be worth something one day, or they liked looking at the pictures. ”