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“Ma’am! Ma’am, where are you going? It’s dark out, and raining!”

The story thickened around them, everything crystal clear, every colour stolen from a rainbow. Livira felt her hold on the story deeper than at any point before. She could almost sense the smooth leather of the covers beneath her fingertips.

“I’m going my own way. I’d forgotten that I had other choices.”

Livira had thought that the servant might argue with her, but Twila simply turned on a heel. “Wait there. I’ll get your coat.”

Livira watched her go. The world waited for her outside and she’d have to negotiate it while balancing between her privilege and her ignorance. Perhaps she would call in at the library and see if they had any vacancies. And once she’d found her place, she might even invite the handsome canith to pay her a call.

A sudden flush of cold made Livira shiver and she turned, thinking that the doors had been thrown open. They remained closed. But in front of them, where there had been nobody, there now stood a white child. For a heartbeat Livira imagined it was Yute as she’d glimpsed him in the city back in the time when everyone in it had died in a day, victims of some unknown poison.

“You’re not him...”

This child was a girl. Painfully thin, her white robes, thin as a nightdress, plastered to her by the freezing rain.

“Yamala?” But Yute’s wife was dead, killed by Evar’s brother, Mayland. And Yamala had never had the haunted look of this child: a stare that seemed to reach into Livira and start to freeze the marrow of her bones.

“No.” A small word from a small girl, but it sent a faint tremor through the foundations of the house. Every shadow stretched, reaching towards her.

“No what?” No, she wasn’t Yamala? Livira desperately wanted to run as the child walked towards her but that would have been silly, and it wasn’t in the story. The girl wasn’t in the story either. With each step that brought the white child closer, Livira felt her grip on the story loosen. “Wait, stop, don’t—”

Don’t touch me was what she’d been going to say, but the white child touched her and the world vanished.

Each alphabet is a marvel of evolution. No person, no committee, no nation can lay claim to the final product, and indeed there is no final product, just a twisting, tumbling beauty, barely able to hold its form from front cover to back. And yet these marks, without forming so much as a single sentence, spell out something greater than any book might contain.

Calligraphy and Other Martial Arts, by Lee Chan

CHAPTER 19

Celcha

The beggar is more generous with his money than the lord.” Hellet eyed Celcha over the top of his current read. Already he spoke more like a librarian than a ganar just months out of the tunnels of Arthran. He practically inhaled books, and each left its mark upon him. “Some rich men consider themselves philanthropists, but although they may give away a thousand times what any beggar will see in their lifetimes, it constitutes only a modest fraction of what they own. The beggar, on the other hand, will sometimes give his last penny to someone else on the street whose misfortune is still greater than theirs. Losing all their wealth at a single stroke and without hesitation.” Hellet put his book down. The scars curling around his shoulders and sides glistened in the library light. “Those on the journey from beggar to lord, from famine to feast, are often the least generous. The lord who gives will still be rich. The beggar can mine his poverty no deeper and perhaps restore his penny at a stroke. For the rest... every act of generosity is a slip back down the ladder they’ve been climbing all their lives.”

“You’re saying H’seen and the rest have too much to lose.” Celcha had returned from the gas house buoyed on her lungfuls of methalayne though carrying little by way of encouragement. H’seen had at least appeared thoughtful when Celcha spoke of her brother’s aspirations for the ganar. Celcha had avoided specifics, but she’d repeated Hellet’s recent oratory on the foul institution of slavery. She’d expounded on the criminal state of affairs wherein a proud people, who once descended from the moons themselves, now suffered beneath the heel of oppressors.

The sentiments were certainly ones that both she and Hellet had long harboured, holding them deeper than their bones, knowing that to speak them would be to ask for an ugly death. Since their arrival at the library, Hellet had found works that gave voice to these ideas. Books that were centuries old, so ancient that the language now spoken had twisted away from that on the page, and only by dint of shining the blaze of his intellect upon the lines before him could Hellet see to pursue the words.

The books recorded speeches in which humans and canith of great eloquence railed against similar treatment of their own kind. It was those words, in Celcha’s mouth, that had fallen so flat in the dark halls of H’seen’s de facto empire. H’seen had nodded wisely, said little, and sent her on her way with vague platitudes. Not a rejection, but certainly the hoped-for fire had not been lit. The silence from those who had stopped to listen had been stony. It had been the black-furred Redmak who led Celcha back through the gas house, far less talkative than he had been on the way in. He’d taken her to the square exit at the plant’s rear and had said farewell with a firm “don’t come back” followed by a firmer slamming of the hatch.

H’seen and her workmates might still be slaves and endure what to their masters would be seen as intolerable, but from their own perspective, they had a long way to fall. Celcha understood. A similar cliff lay at her own heels where the plummet back to the Arthran dig awaited her.

“What now?” Celcha had asked her brother on her return.

Hellet had bowed his head and remained silent for so long that she’d worried he might have returned to his wordless ways. Eventually he had looked up from his thoughts. “It would have been easier if they’d helped us. Safer. There were experiments I wanted to run. Tests that should be carried out. Now I’ll have to trust the books, and my understanding of them. But we can still do this. By ourselves. We have to.”

—

Weeks passed and Hellet’s resolve didn’t appear to have many consequences. He had become more silent, more reserved, and busied himself with his reading. Celcha continued to spend time with Lutna and the other trainees and was allowed to visit the city several more times in Lutna’s company. Hellet stayed behind, his only sight of the city the one he’d had on the journey to the library.

Month by month the library life seduced Celcha. She liked reading, loved books, even enjoyed the company of some of the trainees, especially Lutna, who managed to be kind and caring despite the dizzy heights of her upbringing. Winter came and icy winds howled around the mountain’s flanks. With the passing seasons the idea of gambling all they’d gained at long odds in the cause of some ideal seemed more foolish. Most of Celcha was glad that Hellet seemed to have put his ambitions on hold. Some small part of her mourned the loss of that purity of purpose though, knowing that before long she would be finding excuses to further delay, or even undermine, her brother’s plans.

—

A hand shook Celcha gently from dreams of flying above mountain peaks.

“W-what?” She opened bleary eyes. Library light lit the room as usual, but she knew it was late.

“It’s time,” Hellet said.