Page 4 of The Book that Broke the World

Hellet’s voice broke all of Myles Carstar’s unspoken rules at a stroke. Celcha wasn’t sure if the slaver would properly understand what he was sentencing her brother for but she was certain that the penalty would be the third of the cruelties at the very least, perhaps even the fifth given the audience before which Hellet had disgraced himself.

The librarian stopped in that moment of stillness and rotated towards Hellet. Something golden sparkled briefly between them but for once Hellet’s eyes didn’t track it, remaining fixed upon the elder before him instead. Celcha had seen Kerns take a slave’s eye before, at Myles Carstar’s behest. The fourth official cruelty was a slow process, carried out with mechanical precision on the punishment platform behind the tool sheds. Sudden nausea swamped her as she imagined the same procedure with Hellet as the victim.

“What did you say?” The librarian pinned Hellet with a gaze that had a measure of curiosity in it where Myles Carstar’s held only contempt and a cold anger.

What did you say? She had heard what Hellet said. Everyone had. She was challenging him to say it again. To dig his hole deeper when it was already deep enough to be his grave.

“You won’t find what you’re looking for.” Hellet repeated himself without elaboration.

Kerns’s cane exploded across Hellet’s shoulders, the blow hard enough to fracture the wire-wood. Hellet gave no reaction at all, not a flinch, not a grunt, as if all the faked submissions over the years had combined to nullify what must be excruciating pain.

The librarian waved Kerns back, an annoyance, her blue eyes fixed on Hellet. “If you were insane, you wouldn’t have survived this long. So, there’s an implicit promise here. You have what I want.”

“I can re-create the ordering on the shelves.” Hellet rolled his shoulders, finally acknowledging the blow.

“Show me.” The librarian extended her arm, indicating that Hellet should precede her.

The air around Hellet glimmered and he turned his face towards Celcha. “I’ll need my sister. She memorised part of the layout,” he lied.

Two emotions split Celcha in that moment. The first was a cold, selfish terror at being roped into Hellet’s fatal hubris. Whatever head-patting the librarian might reward him with would provide no protection from Myles Carstar’s revenge. Celcha had had a lifetime to observe the slavemaster, and she was certain that whilst physically attacking him would earn a gruesome death, it would be less horrific than the one that humiliating him would bring.

The second, competing emotion was pride, something no slave could afford to have flowing through their veins. Pride in her brother’s action, and the other kind of pride, that of self-worth, pride at being named by him as co-conspirator. Even if it wasn’t true. Even if it could get her killed. Because so often since the lashing that broke him, Hellet had seemed to consider her part of the scenery, little different from those others who laboured beside him in the flame’s flicker. The fact that she loved him and sought at every turn to protect him went unnoticed, or so she’d thought in the long years since the collapse of the tunnel that had buried their father.

—

They entered the wide loading hall, all of them following Hellet. Outside, even the forgotten slaves edged closer, hoping to see what would happen. The place smelled of dry rot and roofing tar. The day’s brightness fingered in through narrow slits high in the walls, turning dust motes to gold.

In the space freshly cleared of rockcrete mounds, several thousand books sat in hip-high stacks, all of them thick with dust that had recorded every recent contact, the mark of a hand there, a finger graze here. The books had brought their own scent to the hall, one that Celcha was not familiar with, complex, old, and dead. There was, it had to be said, something of the mustiness of a dried-out corpse about them. Unsurprising really, given that Hellet had told her both the coverings and in many cases the pages themselves were made from the skins of animals.

Hellet moved around the stacks, occasionally placing a small stone from the handful he’d scooped up in the yard. The air around him glimmered with Maybe’s sparkle. Starve prowled the perimeter, occasionally circling Celcha.

The slavemaster and the three overseers who had joined him watched Hellet like the hawk watches the hare. Hellet ignored them. He set single stones here and there on top of various stacks, some close together, some far apart. From time to time, he looked towards Celcha as if for confirmation, and under the pressure of his stare she would nod.

At last, Hellet turned to face the librarian. “The marked stacks come from the first shelf of the set closest to the breach.”

“You’re going to trust the word of a slave?” Myles Carstar managed to look astonished and disgusted at the same time.

“No,” the librarian said. “I’m going to put that word to the test.”

She lifted the top two books from the first stack Hellet had marked and studied their spines before returning them to their place. She moved to the second stack and leafed through the topmost book. Going to the last stack she motioned one of her guards to her and had him lift all but the bottom book then pass that one to her. The woman opened the tome to the middle pages, resting it in her arms, and scanned the text. “The subject matter is related in all of these books. They came from the same shelf.” She turned to Hellet. “Show these men how to arrange the stacks to reflect the shelving.”

In one fell swoop the librarian reversed the order of the world. A slave became the overseer. It proved a step too far for Myles Carstar. His pink, hairless skin flushed deep red, and a tremble found its way into both his hands and his voice. “I’ll bring some slaves in.”

“No.” The librarian shook her head. “I need the chamber emptied quickly and efficiently. You will ensure that the rest of the books are arranged shelf by shelf as they’re brought up. I want a map of the shelving in the chamber and to be able to identify where each book came from. That’s something you can supervise? Or do I need to bring a junior from the library to go... below?” She said this last word with a shudder. The tunnels and their darkness and dirt were physically beneath her, but socially they lay much deeper than that.

And so, Hellet was left to oversee the overseers, which he did as if he’d been born to it. Celcha returned to the depths with the fuming slavemaster, coming back to the hall periodically, pushing carts of books, all now meticulously noted in Myles Carstar’s ledger. On each return, Hellet would consult her about details of the ordering, maintaining the fiction that she was a necessary part of the exercise.

Whilst the sight of Kerns and the others labouring under Hellet’s direction afforded Celcha great satisfaction, she knew that the daggers in their stares would be actual blades planted in her brother’s flesh as soon as the librarian went on her way. As such, Celcha loaded books and pushed carts all in the certainty that if she was lucky this would be her last day, but that it was more likely her final hours lay several days hence after a period of sanctioned torture that would feel like an eternity.

Whatever consequences were coming, it turned out that they would have to wait another day at least. By the time a moonless night swallowed the plains, the chamber still held about a quarter of its original contents. The slavemaster was keen that the labour continue till dawn if that was what it took; and if the slaves assigned to the job died of exhaustion, it was a price worth paying. The librarian disagreed. Organising the books in the loading hall would require a good many lanterns if they worked on into the night, and the risk of fire was too great. Besides, she wanted to sleep. Myles Carstar offered her his quarters, but she preferred the bone-jolting carriage journey back to the city, a slight that left the slavemaster fuming as the librarian and her guards clattered out through the compound’s gates.

In the blindness of the slave shack, Celcha huddled beside her brother’s broad frame, more terrified of the slavers’ revenge now that her mind had nothing to divert it from such thoughts.

“Hellet?” She poked his back and whispered his name again. “Hellet?”

A low grunt.

“Why are you doing this? They’re going to kill us.” Part of her already knew. His mind had broken years ago, and it was amazing that his madness had taken this long to kill him. The only surprise was that it had killed her too. Hellet’s silence seemed to confirm it. She seized on the one thing offering hope that there might be more to this. The angel. Angels now. “This new angel—Starve—what does it want?”

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