Page 3 of The Book that Broke the World

“You did well today, boy.”

Hellet gave the grateful twist of his mouth that was expected of him.

“Who would have thought that you of all my herd would be the one to find more books?” The slavemaster’s teeth showed at his own joke, fingers idly tracing the scars that crisscrossed Hellet’s shoulder. “I’ll wager you were scared to even touch them.”

Hellet let his head fall. “Hellet was. Yes, sir.”

Myles Carstar nodded, his sharp eyes flicking towards Celcha, who lowered her head, unable to match Hellet’s acting. The slaves rarely spoke around the sabbers, particularly around the slavemaster. He preferred to hear grunts and growls, and what kept his mood good was good for them too. “Do you want a she-slave or more food?”

“Hellet want food.”

When answering the slavemaster, you said your name first. He pretended it was because they all looked the same to him, but the real reason was to make children of them. You spoke like a small child too, no matter your age. None of them were supposed to be equal to the language of the masters. To speak it too well would be arrogance and that would earn an official cruelty faster than stealing or getting into a fight—those things were at least expected of a slave.

Myles Carstar did some sabber thing with his mouth that meant amusement. “Not a she-slave? You’ve grown big. We need more big slaves.”

“Hellet want food, please.” Hellet looked down, humble, trembling with the correct amount of fear at daring a choice even when choice was offered.

The slavemaster laughed and ruffled Hellet’s head with a thin-fingered hand. “Food it is.”

Celcha and Hellet had both determined long ago never to breed. Few children born into the Arthran dig would choose to produce their own replacements. Slaves had no say in the matter, of course. As livestock, they did what they were told. But Hellet knew ways to ensure such enforced unions bore no fruit. He said Maybe had told him how to find the plants required to make the paste. Bitter stuff that made you ill for days. Celcha considered it the only good thing the angel had done for them.

When they locked the shack door, Hellet sank into his sleep without a murmur. He lay so quiet that Celcha, wide awake and a thousand miles from dreaming, worried he might have died. Hellet never rested well. But that night he slept like the righteous. And far below him the ancient chamber waited for them, thick with secrets that they would never be allowed to know.

Dawn brought them a day much the same as any other save that instead of hauling rubble they were hauling books, and they got three overseers in place of one, two of them doing their overseeing in the newly broached chamber. The work carried on without breaks, the task of emptying the shelves apparently an urgent one, as if the slavemaster feared the buried city might recognise its oversight in not collapsing the ceiling above the books and have it come tumbling down post-haste.

Change arrived on the second day.

Around noon, beneath a blazing sun, a carriage jolted its way through the palisade gates. Not a drab covered wagon of the sort used to bring in food and tools but a work of art on wheels, lacquered sides dark as night skies, impossibly skinny wheels, and drawn by horses with glossy hides and flowing manes rather than the stumbling beasts that dragged the products of the dig to the city and rarely looked more than three trips from the cooking pot. Two sabbers in gleaming armour rode behind the carriage, their ornate helms styled to resemble howling wolves.

Celcha saw all this over the top of the cart she’d pushed with Stana and Cherl up the long incline from the chamber and out into the dizzying brightness of the day.

“No! No! No! No! No!” The elderly female sabber emerged from the carriage before its wheels had stopped rolling. She came towards them in a swirl of crimson robes, astonishingly vivid in the dull grey camp. “No!”

Kerns, who was bringing up the rear, cracked his cane across Celcha’s shoulders as if it were a given that she was the source of their visitor’s displeasure.

The female came right at them, laying her skinny, withered hands—too delicate for any serious work—on the cart’s front as if she might actually be able to stop it by herself. “Who has done this?” She looked around the yard, eyes sliding over Celcha, Stana, and Cherl as if they could no more be responsible for whatever offence had been committed than the cart itself. She fixed Kerns with the heat of her stare.

The overseer stepped uneasily around the cart as the two guards dismounted. “We’re following orders, librarian.” Kerns kept his head down, all his customary malice gone from him like water spilled from a cup.

The librarian’s sharp gaze cut to Myles Carstar’s office, a large stone-built structure not far from the gates. “Whose orders?”

“Mine, my lady.” Myles Carstar came from the direction of the slave shacks, unseen until he was almost among them. Even he seemed flustered by the librarian’s arrival, humble, when for all Celcha’s life he had been defined by his arrogance. An arrogance that ran so deep he hardly needed to express it, any more than an upright man needed to show you his bones. “The books we’ve brought up are in the sorting hall, out of the sun, safe from any rain.” He glanced towards the building in question, making a strained chuckle at the idea the books might get wet even without a roof. Rain might be more common than the discovery of books, but not a lot more.

“And the indexing has been preserved?” the librarian snapped.

“The what now?” Myles Carstar peered at the old woman as if she had spoken in a language other than his own.

“Did it not occur to you”—the librarian advanced on the slavemaster, and to Celcha’s astonishment the man retreated with a nervous swallowing—“that the arrangement of these books on the shelves encoded information of great value? Information that is almost certainly wholly lost in the ugly heap you’ve doubtless created in this storage shed of yours?”

Myles Carstar had always styled himself as the intellectual superior of his staff, cutting down larger men, and some larger women too, with deft twists of the verbal knife, belittling them with references beyond the scope of their education. Just as he cast the slaves into the role of animals, he portrayed the overseers in his employ as unruly and rather dim children. The official cruelties exacted upon Hellet and Celcha had been to ensure that they conformed to the slavemaster’s view of what they were.

To see that same man now robbed of his power was a revelation to Celcha. She understood in one moment the sudden change that can be wrought in the appearance of an object simply by changing the angle from which you illuminate it. The librarian had cast the slaver in a new light. And Celcha realised that although his discomfort was only a small revenge for all that he had done to her, her family, and her people... she liked the taste of it and wanted more.

“Well?” The old sabber woman lifted her hands from the cart and tilted her palms upwards. “Show me the shambles.” She turned towards another cart rumbling in through the gates, pushed by Hellet and Farga, loaded with books. “And for the love of all the gods of canith and men stop bringing up more!” Without waiting, she began to walk towards the hall, her two guards falling in behind her. The slaver moved reluctantly to follow. They wouldn’t find any order in what had been brought up. Care had been taken to preserve the well-being of the leather-bound tomes as they were loaded and unloaded, but their arrangement on the shelves had been lost in the process.

“You won’t find what you’re looking for.”

For a long moment even Celcha wasn’t sure who had spoken. She hoped to the heavens that it hadn’t been her, but it had been the voice of a slave. The slaves spoke the slavers’ language but they spoke it with different mouths, different chests, the words never sounded quite the same as they did from a sabber’s tongue. More importantly though, they spoke it in a different tone. All of the overseers, and Myles Carstar in particular, placed a great deal of importance on tone. A slave must never contradict a master, that was obvious, but more than that: a slave’s voice must never show confidence, let alone arrogance. Even certainty was dangerous. Hesitant and timid was the way. Intelligence was dangerous too, perhaps more so than disobedience. A slave must sound as stupid as their master imagined them to be, or more accurately, as their master wanted them to be. They must show their belly by willingly entering into the pantomime that both sides knew to be a lie, and speak as if every one of them were the village idiot.

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