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“This quicksilver—this catalyst—will change the methalayne into something that will put the humans and the canith to sleep. It doesn’t join with the gas. It doesn’t get used up. So, a vast supply is not required. It simply encourages the gas to change by itself through some miracle of alchemy. All I needed was enough to convert a sufficient portion of the gas at the rate at which it enters the storage chamber.”

“But they burn the gas!” Celcha’s mind was reeling with the scale and insanity of Hellet’s plan. She grasped at the idea that the burning would put an end to the madness. She didn’t know a lot of alchemy, but things tended to stop working once you set fire to them.

“That’s the beauty of it. The changed gas won’t burn. When they connect the new cylinder, lights, hearths, and stoves all over the city will flicker into darkness and this new gas will hiss into their homes.”

“Whose—”

“Everyone’s homes. Even the tenements have gas lighting. The streets have it. From pauper to palace.”

“How will this help the ganar?” To Celcha it sounded like a recipe for getting extravagantly tortured to death while at the same time casting a shadow of suspicion over all their kind.

“That’s the genius of it. All from my little black book. The ganar”—Hellet paused and smiled one of the rare smiles that he’d kept from the days before the cruelty—“are immune to its effects!”

The tunnel narrowed, forcing them to their knees. Celcha continued to follow, crawling on one hand and two knees while cradling her sack of liquid metal against her chest. It hardly seemed real that she was here, doing this. “And what’s the choice?” Hellet had said he was giving the ganar something they’d never had before: a choice.

“What to do, of course!” Hellet squeezed through a choke point with exquisite care. “They will wake with their masters at their mercy.”

Celcha carried on. It was madness. It couldn’t work. And if it did... what would they choose? What would she choose faced with a sleeping library? She and Hellet would get to decide how and if their colleagues... their enslavers... woke.

In the meantime, more practical problems faced them. Celcha’s knuckles quickly became very sore. By the time they reached the first chamber large enough to stand in her hand was bleeding.

Physically she felt good: the methalayne revitalised her, making her feel she could run forever. It made her somewhat light-headed too. At the back of her mind a small voice was saying disturbing things, finding all manner of problems, both practical and ethical, with Hellet’s plan. It was telling her she should be utterly terrified. It was telling her that but for the gas she was breathing she would be running from all this. Probably screaming while she did it.

Celcha realised that despite the fact it should be pitch-black, she could see. Whatever sight had served her ancestors on Attamast as it circled the heavens now revealed the underground world to her in shades of green and grey.

“Now the difficult part,” Hellet said.

“I thought that was the difficult part.” Celcha waved an uncertain hand at the round mouth of the tunnel she’d left stained with her blood. “How did you even know the way? How did you even know it was possible? That we would fit?”

“Maybe and Starve told me,” Hellet said, frowning. “But they didn’t describe the route in great detail. The plan was they would guide us when the time came. But now we need to find where the gas house draws its breath from by ourselves. And give it something new to suck on!”

Mary understood the concept of momentum as it appeared in mechanics, both classical and quantum. She had, however, not known that it applied to her own life until she realised how fast she was going and stepped on the brakes as hard as she could.

Quite Contrary, by Vincenza Standridge

CHAPTER 20

Celcha

Celcha’s life had changed quickly when Hellet discovered the book chamber back at the Arthran dig. It had changed dramatically when Librarian Sellna declared she was taking both of them back to serve at the library. Although her luxurious tenure at the library had only lasted a few months thus far, she had already grown comfortable in it. She was still a slave. Her chains might be golden, but they were still chains. Even so, without Hellet, who remained as unchanged as the story written in his scars, she might have fallen into routine and accepted her lot with the same gratitude that H’seen and her colleagues at the gas house seemed to show. She might even have reached the point when she would have fought to protect her gains rather than risk them in a larger cause.

With three words her brother had changed her life again. “Walk with me,” he had said, and a short walk had shown her that his plans had been far more than idle dreams. With little more than a bucket of silver magic Hellet was going to introduce an agent of change. He would transmute the gas that warmed and lit the homes of Krath into a blanket of sleep to which the ganar were immune.

When they found themselves unguarded, with all of the city at their mercy, even faint hearts like those of H’seen and Redmak would beat with new resolve. The rest of the ganar would take still less encouragement to put down the tools of their labour, strike off their chains, and for the first time claim their own lives. Hellet’s plans after that grew hazy. Clearly just marching out into the wider kingdom would be ill-advised. The recovering canith and human soldiers would give chase to recapture them. Perhaps the ganar would claim the palace and hold the queen hostage while negotiating a peace. That was for others to decide. Hellet’s self-imposed job was simply to place the choice in their hands.

Already though, Celcha’s faith in the plan was faltering. Their venture through the cave systems beneath the city seemed hopeless. There were no maps of these hidden spaces. The ganar knew that links must exist between their current location and the place from which the gas house drank its fill. There were, however, no guarantees that the gaps through which the methalayne flowed were ones through which a ganar could squeeze. The ghosts had promised a path, but Hellet wasn’t finding it.

The methalayne of Celcha’s home world had invigorated her and woken her sight, but the concentration was higher than found on Attamast. She found herself both starved of other vital components of the air whilst being simultaneously intoxicated.

“We could lose ourselves down here and wander until we starve,” Celcha panted.

“It seems a distinct possibility,” Hellet agreed, also in difficulty. “Though we’d suffocate long before that.”

“Then... what are we doing?” Celcha stopped in her tracks halfway across a small chamber the shape of a rotting squash. “I thought you had a plan!”

“I did. I do. This is it.”

“A better one than this!” Celcha found herself wanting to shout but was too breathless for it. All her emotions bubbled closer to the surface. “A better plan.”