Page 16 of The Book that Broke the World

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The destination chosen for Celcha’s first expedition into the library was the nearest ganar chamber. Most rooms could be accessed by four doors, those on the library’s edge by three. Most doors could be opened only by one species. Most chambers could be accessed only by one species. A ganar chamber could be entered only with the help of a ganar.

If Myles Carstar had been told that the library held chambers where four square miles were given over to the ganar, he would have denied it. If it were proved to him, he would have burned the lot and committed murder if necessary to bury the knowledge that such a place had ever existed. He had constructed himself around the idea that ganar were his inferior in every way. Celcha would have enjoyed informing him that in some of those chambers it was next to impossible to find any book not written by a ganar.

They came at last to their destination. Or at least to the short corridor leading to it and to the final white door blocking their way. The many doors before this one had melted away before the trainees’ touch. Markeet invited Lutna to try this one. She rapped her knuckles against the surface, unable to make a sound, and equally unable to pass through.

“And now.” Sternus extended his hand towards Celcha and her brother. “If one of our honoured guests would like to see a chamber through which many of their kind have passed before?”

Hellet nodded for Celcha to do it. So often these days she felt as though she were not only the smaller, but younger sibling too.

She advanced slowly towards the immensity of the door, which was large enough for scores to enter abreast, and so high that she’d hardly be able to throw a stone to the top. The whole thing dissipated before her reaching fingers, not allowing her any sensation of contact.

Celcha advanced without seeking permission.

Hellet caught up with her. “Once they’re in they can’t get out again without our permission. And nobody in the library can get in. They’d have to search the city for a slave who wanted to open the chamber for them.”

Celcha looked back to see the door re-form behind the last of the trainees, the irksome human boy whose name she’d learned was Kenton. For a moment she wanted to make them feel an echo of the terror she’d lived with all her life. None of these sabbers had set the manacle around her wrist, but it was still there. None of them had sent her down the tunnels, but parts of their houses were likely built of what her kind had recovered. None of them had administered the cruelties. Most of them were children. But they were clever children. They all knew that slaves worked beneath their feet in chains. They were part of the system. Part of the machine.

Hellet drew her attention forward with a snort. “They’re not enough. Think bigger, sister. Much bigger.”

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The sight that greeted Celcha as she emerged from the tunnel put all thoughts of revenge to one side. The many rooms they had crossed to reach the ganar chamber had been filled with shelving. Shelves of various designs, heights, spacing, and materials, in all manner of repair, some shrugging off the years, others collapsing beneath their weight. The ganar chamber presented something very different. A stone-block wall reached to the dizzying heights of the ceiling and curved to meet the chamber wall to either side of the corridor. Celcha stood in a vertical semicircular shaft some thirty yards in radius, formed between the curving wall and chamber wall. A dozen doorways offered passage through the wall, with stone steps leading back and forth to visit the higher entrances. Far above the doors hundreds of windows stared down at her.

It seemed that instead of covering the floor of the chamber with shelving the ganar had filled the entire volume with some vast multi-roomed structure. That felt impossible. There would be sufficient accommodation for a nation; even the population of the largest city would be lost with such a volume.

“How far...” Celcha turned to the two librarians approaching behind her. “It can’t fill the whole space?”

“There are voids,” Sternus said. “But it seems to be more full than not. We estimate that we’ve explored fewer than three in a hundred of the rooms.”

“But... how did they live here? There’s no food. Can the chamber even be reached without humans and canith to open doors on the way?”

“All good questions.” Markeet came up on her other side, the larger and older of the two librarians, bulging belly tenting his crimson robes around his feet. “We believe they traded books here, volumes of particular value gleaned from faraway chambers. It’s possible that some of the population came and went by swift routes through the neighbouring rooms, using wheeled vehicles on tracks perhaps. But our scholars agree that food must have been grown here and consumed with very little delay between harvesting and the mouth in order that the assistants did not destroy it. It appears that assistants don’t consider something to be food until it is dead, or at least picked.”

“I have read,” said Hellet, “that the library shuffles the chambers and everything in them. Less often than once in a lifetime. But that it is sufficient to move what might at one time have been the library’s entrance chamber to some remove as distant as this.”

Markeet frowned. “That’s a rather fanciful story, best kept for children’s books. But I have heard it before.” His frown deepened. “The truth is that we have various theories and no certainties.”

“Why don’t you know for sure? Isn’t it written?” Celcha found herself eager to learn the languages of her own people—to study the books they left behind.

“Fire.” Sternus, blond-haired, short for a human, shuddered. “A very long time ago. Almost none of the rooms in this chamber survived untouched. We find books hidden in small caches, but not often.”

“Why”—Hellet asked his first question of the whole journey—“search in the labyrinth of a burned-out city for books when almost every step we’ve taken to get here has dozens of books within arm’s reach?”

Sternus looked up at the high windows speculatively. “The books uncovered here are often of considerable value to us.”

“And how many ganar tongues do you speak, librarian?” Hellet asked.

“Three.” The man frowned as if it was a number that troubled him rather than one he took pride in. He stared at Hellet, waiting for the next question, but Hellet looked away, craning his neck to study the heights.

When it became apparent that Hellet had no more to say, Markeet led them in through the nearest doorway. The next few hours were spent winding through corridors, climbing stairs, and finding paths through rooms that ranged from vaulted halls to small cubicles. Celcha tried to imagine the countless people who must have lived there, sleeping and eating in the many dwelling places. The windows in these homes often opened onto echoingly large voids, reaching down to the library floor in some places, false floors in others. With constant light everywhere it would have been easy to grow crops here: fruit trees; vines climbing the buildings. She tried to imagine it. The scale and complexity of it. The water that would have needed to be pumped in from outside the library.

The emptiness of the city grated on Celcha’s nerves. The whole library was, of course, characterised by solitude, but these rooms were made for families: the halls and open squares ached for the crowds that had once thronged here. The fire and subsequent centuries had left little but scorched stone to record the passing of so many. The air around Hellet might sparkle with the presence of angels, but everywhere else it was ghosts that held sway. The phantoms of innumerable ganar taken from the world before their time.

Initially, they followed stair after stair, gaining height, passing through regions already picked clean. The taint of the great fire had long since left the air but memories of it haunted the empty halls: black drifts of char, banished to the corners where shadows would linger but for the pervasive library light, blocks of stone split by heat, scorch marks that the passage of many feet had not erased. Ancient soot blackened every ceiling.

The further they went, the darker the walls and floor became.

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