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The innocent believe that there are boundaries over which our kind will not step. The complacent understand that there are walls of decency and conscience safeguarding our daily lives. Thick stone walls mortared with faith.

One Step to Hell , by Albus Saint

Anne

“Grandfather!”

Anne’s scream was lost in the general outcry that filled the void as the gunshot faded. Some members of the crowd went to their knees beside the fallen man, tending him in the road. Many others took to their heels, while newcomers came from both ends of the road at a run. Lights went on in nearby flats above the offices that lined the street. Even as she drew breath Anne couldn’t help wondering at how violence close up made people back away, but at a distance they rushed towards it.

Those ignorant of the danger were saved from a rapid re-evaluation of their courage by one of the women in the thinning crowd shrieking, “He’s reloading!”

At which point the most emboldened of the mob began to climb in through the broken window, whilst another man kicked out the board from the neighbouring window, creating a less hazardous entrance.

The ten or so people rapidly swelled to a couple of dozen, and still Kerrol’s implacable strength kept Anne from rushing to her grandfather’s aid.

Anne turned to demand that Kerrol release her, resolving to bite his hand if he refused. Even in her distress, with no room for thoughts other than those surrounding her grandfather’s well-being, she was shocked to notice that the hand that so easily engulfed her upper arm had only three fingers—seemingly by design rather than through some amputation.

“That’s one of Oanold’s men.” Yute blinked in surprise.

Anne looked back towards the shop. The people had dragged someone out. A soldier, but not in a uniform she recognised. One of the men following him out was carrying an odd-looking rifle. The word “spy” rang out. A Jewish spy! It made no sense whatsoever. Who would come spying in army uniform, carrying a rifle? But the crowd devoured the suggestion and multiplied it.

“We should leave.” Yute turned towards the side street they’d arrived by.

“Let me go!” Anne tried once more to free herself. “My grandfather’s in there!”

Yute paused to stare at her. “What makes you say so?”

“I…” Shouts from the crowd distracted her. Angry cries, jeering, shouts of “hang him!”

“If he had arrived and found you missing, and you had not yet returned, would he sit and wait for you, or believe you might be in trouble and go to search for you?”

“He…” The thought of her grandfather out in the febrile town, looking for her, asking questions of the very sort of group that had gathered outside the shop, filled her with horror.

“Where would he think you might go?” Yute asked.

“To Nana Hoffman’s.” If Anne were in trouble she would go to her great-grandmother’s house. Her great-uncle, two uncles, an aunt, and four cousins all shared the matriarch’s roof.

More shouting echoed down the road. Kerrol drew her into the shadows of the side street. “Take us there then, and perhaps we will catch him.”

Anne nodded, though why these strangers should risk themselves further on her behalf she wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to abandon the shop either, but a glance that way showed the foreign soldier being beaten to the ground and kicked.

“Let’s go,” she said.

To reach her nana’s house Anne didn’t have to cross the town centre but even so the night echoed with cries, and ran to the tempo of racing feet, and above all of this the sound of breaking glass shattered every lull.

Anne reasoned that if she could hear the mobs even here among the residential streets, far away from the high street, it must be mayhem where the Jewish-owned businesses clustered. And there was no doubt in her mind that this attack—this madness that had turned neighbours into enemies—was directed at the Jews.

Somehow over the course of this one night a tipping point had been passed. The single stones had become many. The hostility on the street that had started as slights, and had progressed into name-calling and threats, was now violence: a wilful open violence that would chase you into your home and beat you to death.

Twice, Anne saw crowds outside the homes of people she knew from the synagogue. The windows of the Lucas family’s house had been broken and the curtains had become caught on lingering shards of glass. As a child, Anne had been there to play with their daughter, Miriam.

She pulled back in the alley by the furniture factory, and with a nearly synchronized tramp, tramp, tramp of boots a dozen brownshirts hurried past. Anne had no expectation that they were in town to keep the peace. They were here to incite the chaos.

Anne led the way across Neustift Strasse in the militia’s wake, pulling a growling Kerrol into the shadows as a truck rattled by, headlights blazing.

“He’s intrigued by the manner of its locomotion,” Yute explained. “I myself am—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Anne snapped, fear displacing her manners. “We can’t be seen.”

She advanced at greater speed now, wanting to minimize the time they were exposed. So many people were hurrying towards the riot or whatever it was that three more breaking into a run wouldn’t draw too much interest.

They crossed Maltsergarten by starlight, slowing so that Anne could catch her breath. Yute too was puffing and blowing—worse than she was, if anything. Kerrol seemed utterly unaffected, though he did keep pressing a hand to his left shoulder as if it troubled him.

“That’s the library.” Anne waved an arm at the large, two-storey building.

Yute and Kerrol showed no signs of abandoning her to the night, though whatever strange book-related interests had brought them to Amberg, it seemed they were now on hold until Anne was delivered into her family’s keeping.

They threaded through the backstreets until at last Anne turned onto the road on which Nana Hoffman’s house stood, a well-heeled neighbourhood, not the finest the town had to offer but close.

Anne’s growing confidence became in an instant an empty hole inside her, devouring her strength and making her feet falter. The quiet residential street on which one might expect to see at most a handful of people after dark, and more likely none, tonight held a crowd.

Many of Nana Hoffman’s neighbours had left their homes to stand at their gates and jeer like jackals as Cousin Daniel was brought out through the front door by a pair of brownshirts. Other stormtroopers stood in the street with the lit torches of a military parade, the flames delineating a path to a waiting lorry.

Uncle Walter followed, similarly manhandled. When he turned as if he’d forgotten something, one of the men shoved him roughly and he fell to the ground. They hauled him up like a sack of grain and, even at this distance, Anne could see he’d lost his glasses.

Somehow the torchlight felt appropriate. As if the world she knew, a world of electricity and radio waves and modern medicines, had given way to something from a previous century, enlightenment abandoned in favour of the basest desire to persecute, to wound, and to burn.

It wasn’t until Kerrol’s hand closed around her arm that she realised she was walking towards the scene. “I have to—”

Kerrol’s rumble cut across her.

As the stormtroopers pushed Anne’s uncle into the back of the lorry, the torchlight afforded her a glimpse of men crowded inside, and briefly—so briefly that she might persuade part of her mind she had imagined it—she saw her grandfather’s grey head.

Kerrol’s hand, which had sealed away her scream almost as it emerged, remained in place until well after he had carried her, at remarkable pace, several streets away.

Yute came puffing up behind them, favouring one leg noticeably.

He held up a white hand in the darkness as Anne struggled to free herself from Kerrol’s grip.

“I must apologize.” Yute hauled in a breath. “It was never our intention to deprive you of your liberty.” Another deep breath, calming now. “But, for the kindness you’ve shown us, it was necessary to give you a moment to think.” He nodded to Kerrol, who released Anne. “I’ve lived many more years than you might imagine from my appearance. And although I am a stranger here, I know about mankind. Like many other species, in the grip of the moment, absolved of responsibility by society, they will commit horrors.”

“I’m going back,” Anne said.

Yute inclined his head regretfully. “They appear to have taken males from your family. I assume the females remain within the house. I advise you to seek shelter with your matriarch.”

Kerrol turned his dark eyes on her, just gleams in the moonlight, and rumbled out something, a full sentence.

“Kerrol says that your intervention will not stop your grandfather and the others being taken.” More growls. A narrowing of those non-human eyes. “But in such times, on such nights, the unfortunate truth is often that those most at risk are young females. If you put yourself in danger, you will achieve nothing, hurt yourself, and hurt your family. This is the harsh reality, no matter how honourable your intentions.”

“And what,” asked Anne, making no effort to keep the anger from her voice, “would Kerrol do in my position?” She was enraged that he’d laid hands on her, furious with the mob outside her nana’s house, and perhaps angriest of all that he was right, and that the world held nothing even close to justice in it.

Yute translated for Kerrol and translated his reply. “Kerrol says he is in your position. His family are in danger and beyond his reach, and he is surrounded on all sides by those that mean him harm with no means to defend himself against such numbers. He says that what he plans to do is follow the little librarian and hope that something more than just survival will result. Because he agrees with you, that without the prospect of anything more than simply enduring in such a world, it would be better to die fighting, however hopeless the odds.”

Kerrol showed his teeth, which proved to be considerably sharper and more numerous than Anne had imagined when they first met.

“Oh.” Anne hadn’t thought beyond running to the lorry and trying to pull her grandfather out. But Kerrol had the truth of it. She could fight, and lose, or try to endure into whatever grey existence was allowed her. And whilst she wasn’t about to abandon her family, neither of those unappealing options was denied her by exploring this utterly strange and unexpected third option. “This is magic.” It sounded stupid when she said it out loud, but also true. The world had gone mad, broken like a pane of glass. Why should the madness end with ordinary people becoming monsters? She gestured at the length of Kerrol’s body. He wasn’t a human twisted by failures within the womb like Madame Orlova. He wasn’t a human. His strangeness was by design. And it had been hidden from her. His appearance, his body, his clothes, even his language, had all been disguised when they first met, not by artifice of paint, not by smoke and mirrors, but by something that could only be named enchantment. “This… is …magic.” Anne shook her head. “I don’t understand.” And to her dismay, she began to cry uncontrollably.

Yute led them back the way they’d come, showing no hesitation despite the unfamiliar streets and the darkness. Once three men shouted and ran towards them, only to come to a faltering halt as they fully understood Kerrol’s size. Without hesitation, Kerrol grabbed the first two and heaved them over a high wall. The third man stood frozen until Kerrol unleashed a snarl more blood-curdling than anything Anne had ever heard, part wolf, part what she imagined must be tiger. The man ran, not looking back, and all down the street the lights that had flickered on behind lace curtains snapped off.

Yute hurried them on. Around the next corner the library loomed into sight, blotting out stars.

Anne came to a halt. “What are you going to do in there?”

“I’m not sure yet.” Yute frowned up at the walls.

“But you can do something?” Anne persisted. “You can use your…magic. You can repair what’s happening here!”

Yute walked back to her. “I’m so sorry, Anne, but no. The library has never been about taking charge. It’s a memory. It’s ideas. It might have hoped to stop what’s happening here, but it’s too late. There will be blood, and horror, and probably all the worst things that humanity is capable of. The library can make sure that nobody has a good excuse for forgetting what happens and striving to prevent repetition. But it cannot stop even that. People have to want to know. I wish I could tell you that free and easy access to information solves these problems—it doesn’t. People find their own wells of poison to drink from.”

Anne wasn’t really sure what Yute was saying. The library was just the library, and apart from scholars and children, only a minority ever visited it. Yet Yute spoke about the building as if it were a sleeping god. Even so, the conversation felt important. It felt like so much more than logic said it was.

“You could give them only truth,” she said.

“Who judges? Who decides what truth is and which truths to hand out?” Yute shook his head, slow with sorrow. “We take to ourselves the power of the almighty when we control it. So, not intending to rule, the library just gives access. The truth is there on the shelf. You just have to reach out and take it. Information is like water—without it you won’t live long, too much and you’ll drown. And there’s a difference between truth and information. Even correct information is not the same as truth—truth does not mislead—correct information bereft of context can be more dangerous than a lie.”

Anne turned to go, yet again. Yute’s talking had nothing to do with her life. She had to get back to her family, to her grandfather, secure the shop, repair the windows…She faltered.

“The library can’t prevent tonight’s terrors.” Yute spoke the words to her back. “But it is important to note that those preparing to carry out such horror, those who want to lead humanity down the darkest paths it can walk—their first instinct is to burn books, ban books, close the gates of information, allow no voices of dissent.”

Kerrol growled in affirmation, the sound rumbling through him.

“Provision of information might not cure these ills, but it is an impediment to their formation. The wind can’t stop the advance of armies, but eventually it wins. In the end mountains become dust, and the wind still blows. It is my faith that the library will save us in the end. Not you, not me, maybe not even humanity, but it will save life itself, and because of it, someone will climb the heights and know the divine.”

“I don’t care about that,” Anne said, wiping at her nose as she turned to face him once more. “But tell me what happens here, what happens to my family, tell me that won’t be forgotten.”

“If the library survives, then this shame, this stain, this lesson will be preserved. And though people may still forget it, they will at least have no excuse for doing so.”

Anne glanced at the building behind him. She still couldn’t understand what Yute thought he’d find in there, but somehow, she believed it to matter, even on this night. After all, the people who had taken her grandfather had also burned books.

“Let’s go.”