Page 2 of The Book that Broke the World

Celcha had spent most of her life below ground. The Arthran Plateau had somehow swallowed another city, deep enough that the majority of it had to be excavated through tunnelling, though in places the slaves had long ago dug vast craters exposing streets and houses. None of that remained. The stone had been carted away and time had worn that great work of digging into smooth depressions that would one day pass unnoticed, carrying with them all memory of the lives spent shovelling away the soil in search of a less-forgotten people.

Celcha took a shovel and a pick from the tool hoppers by the tunnel mouth. Two sabber guards watched over them, always disapproving, displeased by the sight of a potential weapon in the hands of any slave. Hellet took only a pick. The overseers said his strength was wasted on shovelling.

“And how’s Maybe today?” Celcha asked.

Hellet grunted. Since the angel had appeared it had been hard to get anything out of him. It had taken years for him even to admit to seeing the angel, longer before he named it to her. He wasn’t sure about the name. Angels, he said, were hard to hear, and the language that spilled from their tongues wasn’t the one the slaves spoke. Similar, but not the same.

Celcha would have dismissed Hellet’s claims as the products of a fractured mind but for three things. Firstly, he was her brother. Secondly, whilst others said that sense was apt to leak from a cracked brain, she wondered if the fissures might not also allow new things to leak in. Thirdly, and most importantly—though it shamed her to say it—when she looked where Hellet looked, she had begun to see glimmers. Golden glimmers, hints, slices of understanding, almost fractures themselves, as if her vision had on occasion offered her fragments of another truth.

She couldn’t hear the angel, not like her brother could; she couldn’t see it either, not properly, but over months the glimpses built into something, piece by piece, taller than the tallest sabber, built like a man, arms and legs in the right number and similar proportions. Hellet said that the angel called itself Maybe and that through the long nights it filled his dreams with unease and promises of a greater destiny, one that made him feel smaller even than standing beneath the vast star-scattered arc of the sky. That sky lay hidden today, veiled by the dust that blew in whenever the wind came from any direction but west.

“Ready to dig some dirt?” The overseer for Celcha’s group today was Kerns, the worst of the lot. “Of course you are, you filthy animals.” His cane flickered out, landing across Hellet’s broad shoulders. Hellet grunted. If he held out, Kerns would just beat him until he showed some sign of weakness. Celcha tried not to hate the sabbers. Her father had always told her, “We aren’t the ones that hate.” But it was hard. She couldn’t let it out and she couldn’t let it go. Sometimes she felt that holding on to all that anger had condensed it into a poison that ran through her veins, doing her more harm than the official cruelties that would follow if she gave it a target. Hellet on the other hand seemed to bear no malice. As if the thought had never even occurred to him. As if the sabbers were nothing more than weather, their offences no more personal than a tornado off the Dust or one of the lightning strikes which came with the rain that would fall once or twice each year.

In chamber seventy-nine the work party split into groups of five, each of which followed a different tunnel. Kerns remained in the junction chamber with his lantern to oversee what might be brought up. Hellet led Celcha and three others down the rightmost tunnel. Celcha held the group’s small oil lamp whose meagre light served to minimise injuries from swinging picks and stray shovels.

“We’re going to find something today,” Hellet said.

Hellet so rarely offered an opinion that doing so proved enough to make the others miss a pace. Of all of them only Celcha knew that this must be something Maybe had told her brother. It felt as if Maybe had been steering Hellet for years, and he in turn had steered the digging, moving the sabbers with imperceptible nudges, aiming the excavation ever more to the south.

Most of what they brought to the surface was shaped stone and carts loaded with rockcrete chunks. Less frequently they dragged out pieces of wood from the unwilling bone-dry clays, or hunks of rusting metal, or stranger materials for which they had no name other than the sabbers’ coverall term “plasteek.” All of it was seemingly worth the lives of slaves. All of it could be taken to the city and repurposed. Hellet said that the world had been squeezed dry long ago and that there was almost nothing that had been thrown away in past millennia, or covered by catastrophe, that was not now worth digging up. Especially if someone else was doing the digging.

At the end of the tunnel Hellet and Farga went ahead with their picks to continue digging out the current wall, leaving Celcha and the others to carry on loading rubble from the previous day into the cart.

Celcha hesitated as the others started work. She watched the shadows flicker across Hellet’s back, the interplay of light, muscle, and scar. Many of the slaves feared her brother for his size, his silence, and the way he looked past them, his black eyes following things that weren’t there. Celcha still saw the broken child, the boy whose sacrifice had opened his flesh to the bone. The boy who had nursed an injured tunnel rat to health and kept its company until age claimed it. Who had laughed and sung and danced. Her father had loved that child with his whole heart. Celcha had always sensed a thread of duty running through the care he’d turned her way, a degree of reservation. Perhaps she reminded him too sharply of their mother, the woman he said she so resembled. What had always surprised Celcha was not the uneven division of their father’s love but the fact that she could never hate Hellet for the size of his share. Instead of their father’s death unleashing that resentment, it had, if anything, prompted her to take on the mantle of loving Hellet. She was jealous of the angel though. Wary of him. Even now as the golden sparkle of him crackled across her vision, shedding a light that none but she and Hellet could see, she worried why it was that he haunted her brother and what he was aiming him towards.

They laboured in the heat and dust and din, Celcha bending her back to the task of loading the sharp-edged ’crete chunks. The tempo of Hellet’s blows seemed almost to outpace her heart. At times Farga would just stand back in amazement, giving Hellet more room to swing, and even without Farga hewing at the rockcrete wall the rubble mounded up faster than the three of them could heft load it.

Celcha turned from tumbling a chunk into the cart. “Brother...” She wanted him to stop, to rest a moment, take some water. Hellet didn’t hear her. She doubted he’d have paused even if he did. His attack on the wall proceeded at frenzied pace though it wasn’t a frenzy—each blow landed with precision to match its power. Years of hewing at ancient walls builds an understanding of their structure and weaknesses, an understanding for which Hellet’s genius was not required, just his appetite for destruction.

The void beyond had been announcing itself for some while in the resonance that answered Hellet’s blows. When he breached it, they all knew it in the moment that the pick struck. A change in the quality of the sound, followed by the scatter of fragments inwards rather than outwards. With seven or eight more powerful blows Hellet opened a gap wide enough for a child to crawl through. Celcha advanced, holding her trembling flame high. The rest of them crowded at her shoulders, all save Hellet. He fell back, panting, dust coating his fur. He slumped against the opposite wall and slid down to his haunches, seemingly uninterested in what his labours had exposed.

For several long moments all that the oil lamp’s light revealed was dust, hanging in lazy veils, settling only as the violence that set it loose receded into memory. Most chambers in the buried city had collapsed long ago, their roofs perhaps consumed in the inferno that had blackened so many of its structures, or simply crushed beneath the weight of years. Hellet said that the place had been covered swiftly in some sudden event. Maybe a great act of destruction nearby had raised a dust cloud much the same as the one obscuring Celcha’s view, only far greater, and it had settled to bury the city fathoms deep. In any case, intact rooms were a rarity.

The book that had drawn Hellet into the crime that had earned him his lacerations had been dug out from a layer of dust that infrequent rains had turned to clay and the years were fashioning into mudstone. It had been a sorry thing, barely recognisable to the elder who had been with them. Celcha had had to prise one stiff page from the next, and the text upon them had been so faded and so stained that even the most practised reader might have struggled to extract sense from it.

The thinning veils of dust now revealed a large chamber where row upon row of ancient shelves owned the floor space, each of them taller than a sabber and stretching beyond the reach of the lamp’s glow. Many had collapsed under their burdens, but a great number still stood, withstanding the weight of the books lined along them. Score upon score. Hundreds. Thousands maybe.

“What is it?” Farga gasped, clutching his pick as if it were a lifeline.

Hellet didn’t look up.

Celcha turned from the hole and crouched beside her brother. She repeated Farga’s question. “What is it?”

Hellet raised his gaze though not his head, his black eyes glittering through the curtain of his fur. “A means to an end.”

It’s remarkable how seldom visions are unremarkable. Or might it be that the great majority of our days are populated with visions that are simply too pedestrian to be called into question? How many of us have an acquaintance that is entirely fictional and who we will go to our graves believing to have been real?

The Unremarked, by Markus McMarkle

CHAPTER 2

Celcha

The second angel called itself Starve. He came after Kerns had fetched Raddock, and after Raddock had fetched Myles Carstar, but before the first cartload of books was hauled to the surface.

Celcha saw Starve even less clearly than she saw Maybe. Both were indistinct, more easily seen from the corner of her eye than when staring straight at them. He moved more than Maybe did. He prowled. Always watching. It was Starve who noticed she could see him. Maybe had seldom glanced her way and never shown any interest. Starve circled her, moved his extended finger before her eyes, and watched her watch his progress. He spoke to her too, though she heard nothing, or rather she heard a new kind of silence when his lips moved, as if what he said didn’t reach her but instead stopped any other small noise from doing so.

They all got an extra ration that night. Not just Hellet’s group but the whole shack. And Myles Carstar patted Hellet on the shoulder, almost stroking him as if he were one of the dogs that haunted the outskirts of the camp.

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