Page 29 of The Book that Broke the World

“You could send them away.”

“Wouldn’t that be talking to them?”

“Yes,” Celcha growled, “but for a good reason.”

“My other reasons aren’t good?” Before she could answer he carried on. “I can send them away, but you can’t?”

“I can’t hear them, so maybe they can’t hear me...” Celcha was unsure now.

“Oh, they can hear you.” Hellet showed his tombstone teeth. “Starve likes you. Says you’re well meaning.”

Celcha wasn’t sure whether that was an insult in disguise and whether the fact Hellet proclaimed Starve’s approval of her meant that Maybe had made no such statements, or even actively spoke against her. Suddenly the ghosts’ presence, their secret conversations with her brother, felt so intolerable that she started the sentence that had so often waited on her tongue—the one that she had never spoken for fear of being unable to finish it.

“Send them away, Hellet. Either they go or...” And the words dried up in her mouth. It was both a hollow threat—she could never abandon him—and a foolish one, inviting him to choose against her. Such capital could not be spent without wounding all those party to the transaction. And still, she couldn’t explain why it was so important to her, why she would set so much store by the words of an assistant who had done nothing for them but call them broken. Starve and Maybe had changed their lives for the better, shown them a new world and new opportunities. Yute offered only a dangerous cure for a condition that, for all they knew, he might be inventing. A cure or eternity serving the library in a white suit. All she knew was that it felt wrong. In the same way that she had known about the three collapses that might have buried her in the Arthran dig, she knew that something was wrong here too. Some instinct too deep to name or scrutinise had warned her of those cave-ins just in time, and that same feeling niggled at her now in a place where the ceiling was hand-cut bedrock that would never fall. “Hellet...”

“All right, sister. All right.” He said it without heat and, rising from his chair, he pointed towards the doorway. “Thank you, my friends. I will guide myself from here on.”

Hellet and Celcha had named them angels, Yute had called them ghosts, but whatever they were they seemed to know better than to outstay their welcome. A trail of glimmers flowed towards the doorway and vanished through the stout timbers.

—

Hellet proved as good as his word, and the ghosts upheld their side of things with the integrity of angels. All that day the air around Celcha and her brother remained free of any artefact of the light. The angels went unseen for a week. And another.

“Lutna’s asked me to go with her into the city,” Celcha said as she settled into her bed.

“Good.”

Celcha closed her eyes. She wasn’t sure if Hellet had been first to talk about wanting to see around the city or if it had been her. Probably it was Hellet. Both of them were plagued by curiosity but, although she had been the one to open the book that had got him caned, Hellet was less able to resist its call than she was. Even with an ocean of information and endless seas of stories at their doorstep, still the city, crammed with real life rather than the record of it trapped in ink, called to them.

Celcha would have asked for Hellet to come too, but Lutna had always seemed scared of her brother. All of the trainees seemed a little apprehensive of him, even those who were larger and stronger, as if the hairless tapestry of his scars told a story that unsettled them.

On the following morning, one of the trainees’ rest days, Lutna and Celcha set off along the steep road leading from the wolf’s head gate down to the city. The previous ganar had spent their whole tenure within the library and the librarians’ complex, but Librarian Markeet was still basking in the glow of returning a book long alluded to in other important texts yet never found. In such a buoyant state of mind he signed off the permission for Celcha to visit the city in Lutna’s care without protest. He did, however, assign a canith named Jhar to guard Lutna because of her royal connections. The unspoken message was that Jhar would also ensure Celcha’s prompt return.

Lutna led the way, chatting animatedly. Celcha had little experience on which to base a judgement, but it seemed to her that despite the girl’s proximity to the queen, and the possibility that she might officially be allowed to demand that people refer to her as Princess Lutna, she was in most ways wholly unremarkable. She had gained the impression that Lutna was not thought of as pretty, clever, or entertaining among her fellow trainees. She was, however, kind, in an awkward, sometimes clumsy, sort of way. And Celcha, having lived among slaves beneath the threat of cruelties of many flavours, felt this to be an important attribute.

As they came down between the first houses that clung perilously to the cliffs, Celcha began to notice the looks that were thrown her way. The closer she came to walking abreast with Lutna, the more glances she got, the more raised eyebrows, the more sneers and muttering. The citizenry appeared much more relaxed when she followed a few paces behind the girl, though in her library blacks nobody would think Lutna a princess deserving of such obeisance.

For her part, Lutna kept urging Celcha to walk beside her, and chattered happily about various parts of the city as they came into view. Telling her what that spire was, which was the temple with the copper-green dome, whose grand house was being constructed so embarrassingly close to the outer wall. Lutna always had lots to say, though, unlike many of the trainees, little of it was about herself. She seemed to acknowledge herself as both surplus to requirement in the aristocracy and at the same time unlikely to measure up to the exacting intellectual demands of the library.

One topic that she had steered clear of, ever since her attempt to address Celcha in a ganar language that was not her own, was that of the ganar. Now, as they came down towards the grand square they’d seen from above, Lutna turned in the street and took hold of Celcha’s left wrist—she had stopped taking Celcha’s hands once she realised that the gnarled ridge along the back of each was the scar of an earlier mutilation where her claw-blades had been cut out as a child, and she had stopped taking the right wrist when her hand had closed around the iron of the manacle set there.

“Celcha. Will you come and see H’run and F’nort with me? I wouldn’t ask but they were both so good to me when I was a child...”

Celcha resisted pointing out that Lutna was still a child, and that any ganar at the palace would be a slave who would suffer terrible punishments if they were anything other than nice to a princess.

Lutna, seeing her hesitation, pressed on. “Honestly, they were more of a mother and father to me than my own parents were.” Her grip on Celcha’s wrist grew tight and the pale green of her eyes glistened as if tears might be welling there. “I just want them to see you. To see how well you’ve done and how clever you are. So they know there’s more out there than what they’ve been born to. They’re so... I don’t know... accepting. I think it would make them glad to know that we’re—that we work together at the library.”

Celcha tightened her jaw against a hot reply. She reminded herself that Lutna was still a child. That she didn’t know what failing to accept their lot would mean for this H’run and this F’nort. In the end, she shrugged off her anger. It wasn’t directed at this child who was merely trying to aim her kindness at a target too big for her to comprehend, something she was part of and that had grown about her so intimately she could hardly know where it ended and she began.

“I’ll come.”

And so, with Jhar looming at their heels, the warrior so tall that neither of their heads reached above his hip, they came to the doors of the palace. Although, compared to the complex within the ganar chamber, the whole city was a small thing and the palace itself a drop in the ocean, it was an impressive structure. Being able to see it all at once from across the grand plaza, and then coming into its shadow, climbing its many steps and being swallowed between pillars so wide that it would take three Jhars to link hands around any one of them, made the building seem truly vast in a way that the ganar warrens had not.

Palace guards intercepted them at the doors, their initial respect almost certainly for the library guard rather than for the infant and the slave at his feet. In due course a functionary was summoned and came hurrying across the marbled doorstep to welcome the princess and her attendant.

With Jhar left in the shadows outside and a new escort in his place, Lutna led Celcha on a hurried tour through the areas of the palace not restricted to just the most senior royals. The interiors rapidly overwhelmed Celcha with their luxury in rather the same way that the library had overwhelmed her with its books. On its own any one of the marvels might have captured her attention for hours. Nothing so beautiful and delicate as that small sculpture she just passed had ever entered her world in the Arthran dig, or in the library, but the next plinth held another, different and just as wondrous—an elegant and vibrantly painted vase—and so on to the next until they became mere increments marked on the yardstick of this seemingly endless corridor.

Lutna led her through rooms carpeted with rugs of such softness and thickness yet intricately woven design that it seemed a crime to step upon them. They should hang on the walls, except that the walls were hung with paintings in which Lutna’s ancestors were presented five yards high with such skill that they each seemed as if they might step through the doorway before them. They almost looked more real than real people.

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