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The assistant looked to Hellet’s left and right, resting his gaze briefly on Starve and Maybe. “Welcome to the library, Hellet.” He stood aside and Hellet carried on his way.

The stillness and silence persisted this time, but Celcha felt more compulsion to follow her brother than to stand staring with the rest. She climbed the steps to the platform with great care, not wishing to find out what punishment would be earned by dropping books.

The assistant moved to intercept her. “Your name?”

“Celcha.” Her mouth struggled to say “master” but she wouldn’t let it. Hellet hadn’t said it, and following him had got her this far. An insane desire to ask the assistant’s name in turn took possession of her, so much so that simply fighting it off made her tremble with the effort.

“Welcome to the library, Celcha.” The assistant turned away and walked back towards the wolf’s head entrance.

As he left, Celcha saw the golden sparkle of one of the angels approaching from the direction Hellet had gone in. Maybe, the one she could see better—in fact she saw him better than ever before. He looked for all the world like a canith.

Maybe came to her side, bent low, and whispered in her ear. “Himma-calling Yute.”

It is one thing to live a life contingent on necessary evils. And another to be one of those evils. To be suffered is, in and of itself, another form of suffering.

Accountancy for Beginners, by Murray Humphreys

CHAPTER 5

Celcha

Yute was the first name Celcha learned at the library and the only one she never heard used. The librarian who had acquired Celcha and Hellet from the Arthran dig was named Sellna Smith, though Celcha doubted there had been any metalworkers in the woman’s family for generations. Celcha was to call her Librarian or, when the need to be more specific arose, Librarian Sellna.

The woman was old for a human, who, compared to the ganar, lived relatively brief lives, and quite senior, though three other librarians stood between her and the head librarian who was, it turned out, cousin to the queen who ruled not only the city but everything that might be seen from the mountaintop and more beyond.

Librarian Sellna took it upon herself to explain Celcha and Hellet’s duties to them. She spoke more slowly when addressing the siblings and offered them a similar level of respect to that which she’d shown Myles Carstar. She wore a brittle smile at such times and struggled to hide flashes of displeasure when Hellet accepted this limited courtesy as his due rather than simpering beneath small but unaccustomed kindnesses.

The library, Sellna told them, was very old and the trick to opening its doors had been partially forgotten. There were many doors that would yield to the touch of a human, or to that of a canith. Others, however, particularly further out from the entrance, would not. And some of these had in the past been shown to open for ganar. The library had employed two ganar whose main job was to accompany librarians in and out of these chambers, or occasionally on expeditions into new areas. Sadly—at this point Sellna paused and made her face sad in the way of humans—both these ganar had been killed in an unusual accident just prior to Sellna’s visit to the dig site.

Celcha and her brother were given a room within the mountain, all to themselves. A rectangular room that still smelled of the ganar who had lived there until recently.

Celcha peered in. “It’s big.”

“Hmmm.” Hellet shrugged.

“It’s just us?” Celcha still felt wary addressing the librarian.

“Just you.” Librarian Sellna paused before she left them at the door, seeming to struggle with something. At last she spoke, drawing the words slowly over her teeth. “The assistant that spoke to you at the entrance... That was not... usual. It’s very rare to see an assistant. I’ve never seen one outside the main library. And they might sometimes answer questions, but they don’t talk—” She shook her head and started again. “Why did he speak to you? What do you know about this?”

Celcha answered honestly, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen an assistant before.”

The librarian frowned. “This is a very old place, very important. We don’t like surprises here.”

“You weren’t surprised when our predecessors died?” Hellet asked.

The librarian’s face twitched towards annoyance, perhaps anger, quickly erased. “I was. I didn’t like it.”

It was when the pair of them were in this room and finally alone that Hellet expanded on what Sellna had said. The library’s doors could only be opened by willing individuals. A grim history of attempted coercion had, according to Maybe, been unsuccessful, leading to the librarians selecting naturally curious candidates and taking pains to treat them well.

—

So it was that library life replaced the arduous monotony of the Arthran dig. Celcha and Hellet were free to wander, though they were told not to go down into the city. They were fed the same as the librarians and their staff, in the same hall, though at a table by themselves. They were warned against eating fruit. Apples, although they looked and smelled delicious, had, in the past, made ganar violently ill.

Opening books wasn’t punished with cruelties, official or unofficial. In fact, they were encouraged to take some of the precious objects back to their room. Librarian Sellna clearly wanted them to be interested in what lay on the far side of the doors only they could open.

A trainee librarian was even appointed to see if either of them could be taught to read. Apparently, their predecessors had become almost competent in modern Eursian, though neither had mastered writing. Their tutor, a young canith male called Ablesan, even explained to them why they needed so much sleep. It was an education that Celcha had already acquired at a simpler level through the ganar slaves’ oral tradition of myths and tales, and at a more complex level from Hellet’s account, which he in turn had received from Maybe. Ablesan’s version was predicated on the notion that any creature barely reaching his hip would be incapable of advanced thinking.

“Your distant ancestors were brought here from another world. Somewhere you could never walk to no matter how far you went. Like the moons.”