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“They don’t kill you.” The assistant shook his head. “My apologies, though. It is hard for me to see the world as something sliding by from known to unknown.” He touched his neck again. “I talk to you because I can’t see past you. You are turbulence in the flow. Cracks in the crystal. You, Hellet, in particular. There is no point in conversing with the others. I already know that I do not speak with them.”

He’d called them cracks. Celcha knew what had cracked her brother. The cruelty of humans, inflicted on a child. She ground her teeth and kept her silence. It was dangerous for a slave to show anger.

The assistant, seeing that she would not reply, carried on. “Anomalies of your kind are very rare. The library draws them in but still they are rare. To find two together—is unheard of. You are dangerous. If left unchecked, you might start seeing ghosts. Or even worse, talking to them.”

Celcha resisted exchanging a glance with Hellet. “Unchecked? You’re planning to... check us?”

“You can serve the library as I do. Even for assistants there was a before.”

“As you do? You mean... all white and serious?”

The assistant inclined his head.

“Or?” asked Hellet. Celcha couldn’t tell if her brother was asking about the consequences of defiance, or what the second choice was.

“Or...” The assistant shook his head. “It’s best to accept eternity. You’ll never be bored, I promise.” He saw they were waiting for him to continue. “Or, you can be repaired. You will no longer be cracks in time, no longer flaws in the crystal.”

“That sounds better,” Celcha muttered, then, louder, “It always works?”

“It always works.” A nod of the head. “You will no longer be a crack in time. You might, however, not be quite the same person you were before. You might not even be alive. You’ll be whatever was necessary for you to no longer crack the world.”

It was the gentlest threat Celcha had ever received. Even the slavemaster would have been proud of it.

“Why wait to tell us all this now?” Hellet asked. “Why not say it when we arrived?”

“I wasn’t sure when you arrived. You weren’t making that much turbulence in the flow. I thought maybe you were borderline cases. I wondered if there might be a compromise. But you’re churning things up now. You’re rocks in the stream.” He tilted his head, studying Hellet with blank white eyes. “And you’ve found two books, I see. Interesting ones.”

Celcha didn’t want to talk about books. “You’re telling us we’re going to get turned into creepy statues like you, or have something done to us that might leave us dead or broken?” She started to say that it wasn’t fair, but bit off the words. Less than a week among these sabbers, being treated as almost equals, and she’d started responding to adversity with talk of fairness or justice. When had anything ever been fair for her and Hellet?

“If you’d come here with a terminal disease would that have been so different? This is just what time has placed upon your shoulders. You can bear the cure or step out of time, as I did.”

“How are you going to make us do it, Yute?” Hellet asked. “Lock us in a chamber until we agree?”

The assistant stiffened at the use of his name. His enamel forehead remained smooth but somehow Celcha could feel the frown. “You mistake me. The library informs. It does not compel. We share information. It is for the recipients of that information to decide how to respond to it.”

“You already locked us in. That’s not compelling us?” Celcha said.

Yute almost flinched. “My apologies. I merely sought to delay you while I attended to another matter. I wanted to speak with you here, within sight of your ancestors’ great works. A monument to possibilities that irresponsible actions on your part might ensure never come again.”

“Irresponsible?” Hellet fixed the assistant with his black stare. “That sounds like judgement. Like opinion. Guidance is neighbour to instruction. Aren’t you breaking your own rules, Yute?”

Yute shuddered. “How do you know that name?” He sounded almost angry.

“Even for assistants there was a before,” Hellet quoted.

Yute bowed his head. “I have overstepped myself.” All emotion gone from his voice. “I’ve spent too long in the flow. Do what you will with the knowledge imparted. You will, in the end, come to understand it as I do, but the choice will be yours.”

Lies are a currency. The truth buys nothing save sorrow.

Real Economics, by Mark Carnival

CHAPTER 10

Evar

Evar followed the assistant’s directions, or rather its single direction, as best as he could. Where doors failed to open to his touch, he had to lead his siblings on long detours, whilst remembering their route with sufficient accuracy to understand when they finally reached a chamber where the original direction had meaning.

For the whole course of the journey a constant anxiety kept him company—the worry that they might find they had simply enlarged their prison, swapping one chamber for a network of several dozen that still didn’t connect with the outer world. Kerrol suggested that their escape had been promised from the moment they had reached a door that opened for them. Doors coded to canith must, he suggested, be part of a sequence that led to the canith door to the outside. Minutes later he undid any confidence he’d managed to instil by adding, “Unless, of course, the library’s design is intended to encourage cooperation between species, and we were in a part of the library that could only be reached by an accord between humans and canith. Or perhaps between humans, skeer, and canith.” A short while after that he even managed to sour the idea of escape by asking how one would know when the swapping of smaller prisons for larger ones had truly stopped and freedom had been found, or is freedom simply a sufficiently large prison? Clovis told him to shut up after that.