Page 57 of The Book that Broke the World

“Time to jump.” Malar stepped to the edge.

Livira looked back the way they’d come, wondering. Yute and his family had wrapped her into a war she’d never asked to be part of. Something too big for her. Even the sides were unclear, the choices too large to be grappled with. “I don’t know what I should do, Malar. I don’t know which side I’m on.”

Malar turned and frowned at her. “People don’t choose sides up here.” He tapped his head. “That’s where they think up the reasons for the choice after they’ve made it. The reasons they’re going to tell everyone. But the truth is that they made the choice here.” He slapped his chest. “We fight for the people we love. We fight for the ideas we want to be true, whether they are or not. It’s a bit like this fucking pond. You just jump in with both feet.” And so saying, he slapped her between the shoulder blades, hard enough to topple her into the pool.

A hermetic seal will defeat nearly every invasion, be it virus, gas, or merely an unwanted draught. It will not stop an unwanted idea. To prevent the spread of any idea, true, false, or untestable, one simply needs a more compelling narrative to occupy the minds of those you wish to keep ignorant.

Tyranny Without the Stick, by Vlad Putative

CHAPTER 24

Celcha

Celcha got no more than a hundred yards down the steep slope, not even halfway to the most intrepid of the houses that scaled the mountain, before some sixth sense brought her stumbling to a halt. The tingling hairs on the back of her neck turned her around.

The mouth of the howling wolf’s head was belching a yellowish fog, all of it stripped away by the wind before it could reach Hellet on the platform in front of the library’s entrance. The altered gas that had backed up in the chambers behind the gas room’s intake had reached the librarians’ complex and poured through its corridors. The librarians, trainees, and staff would all be slumbering now. Celcha wondered how long it would take for the pressures to equalise and the flow to stop.

As she watched, two assistants walked out of the entrance, emerging from the fog that spilled around stone canines taller than a ganar. They approached the platform and Hellet backed away before them. The pair stopped close to the lip of the platform, looking down past Celcha at the city.

Another assistant emerged from the fog. Then two more. Then five together. And in the space of sixty breaths several hundred walked out, more assistants than the whole staff of the library complex. Celcha wondered if the gas had driven them out but that made no sense. It probably hadn’t even reached the library, and you would have to search many of the vast chambers to find a single assistant. How they had all reached the entrance so swiftly, and more importantly, why, Celcha had no idea.

The crowd of assistants formed a rough semicircle behind the first pair, who stood alone, front and centre. Celcha watched, hypnotised. Lutna and the rest would be furious to have slept through such a spectacle.

The pair of assistants were a male and a female. The male had started to talk, striding up and down the platform’s edge, gesticulating at the city in a most un-assistant-like manner. The wind took most of his words but not the edge of anger or despair they carried. Celcha’s uneasiness grew, crawling around the roots of her fur, fingering its way up her spine. Assistants were characterised by their detachment, their endless calm. This looked more like mania.

The assistant pointed at Celcha’s brother, and although none of the audience looked his way, Hellet stumbled back as if struck. He sank to the ground and set his hands to his face.

Without warning, the assistant dug his fingers into his own chest and tore loose a ragged slab of white flesh, dripping with opalescent blood. He let it fall and the horror continued as he tore at himself with both hands, wrenching off his flesh and tossing it aside. The blood ran from him, not spurting like an artery but flowing as if he were melting in the morning sun. The female assistant beside him started to do the same thing, though more methodically and with less passion. Tearing herself apart.

As Celcha watched, it seemed—impossibly—that a new creature was being revealed within the ruin of each of the two assistants. Smaller, slighter beings. The process wasn’t entirely physical, but almost as if the new beings had stepped through the portal of the assistants’ falling blood. Two white children. Not fleshed in shiny enamel like the assistants but in skin over muscle, only every bit of it the same matt white as a new page.

At the end of it all, the two white children stood in what must be two pools of their own blood and dissolving flesh. The male one jumped lightly down onto the path and began to descend. The other followed. Celcha stood, rooted to the spot, expecting them to confront her, but they passed by without comment, without their pink eyes once flickering her way.

She looked to where her brother was sitting. Already the audience of assistants was beginning to disperse, the first of them starting to walk back towards the library while most still watched the departing children. Celcha followed their gaze, studying the pair of retreating backs. The children were heading for the city.

Part of Celcha wanted to go to her brother. To learn what the assistant had said when he had pointed at him. Part of her almost knew and was too afraid to have that fear confirmed. Trapped by indecision, she looked down at the departing children and the city, then up at her brother and the assistants.

In the end, with a small cry of hurt, she turned and hastened after the children.

—

Celcha had to divide her attention between not falling on the steep path down from the library entrance and not losing sight of her quarry. The children might be new to their bodies, but they covered the ground swiftly and Celcha was built for endurance rather than speed.

She passed between the first houses with barely a glance. Soon she was following the pair of white figures past the succession of houses that lined the road down towards the rear of the grand plaza. Narrow homes towered, jammed up against the cliffs to one side or teetering on the drop to the other. The street lay quiet: there was nobody to remark on the passage of two strange not-quite-human children or the unescorted ganar struggling to catch up with them.

Celcha had barely dented the children’s lead by the time they disappeared into the maze of streets behind the plaza. There were no narrow homes nestling elbow to elbow here, just high walls surrounding the gardens and properties to the rear of the great buildings that fronted onto the plaza itself. Celcha ran on, her breath short and panting. Behind one of these tall, spike-topped walls lay the gardens of the palace. She had glimpsed them from the windows when Lutna had given her the tour. Sparkling pools glimmering beneath verdant treetops. Strange birds with vivid plumage pecking in the shadows around the feet of marble statues.

The roads were deserted, but unless you had business with the city’s great and good you had no business here. Still, Celcha would have expected to see a gardener coming or going, a night soil cart, a delivery for the kitchens... something.

She lost sight of the children and reached a turn where both choices seemed equally likely. Puffing, she took the direction that would lead her to the plaza. At least there she would have a clear view and might find them again.

Celcha stumbled breathlessly into the grand plaza, its sunlit stone-paved acres stretching before her. Astonishingly, even here there was nobody. Hellet’s plan had worked. The gas from the tainted cylinder had run through the city’s pipes, and then, for whatever reason, H’seen had not changed cylinders. Her decision had let the wind clear the gas from the city and caused the stuff to back up through the newly opened passage to the library complex. Celcha worried that, without the next cylinder and the one after that, the humans and the canith would wake up before the ganar had organised and decided on a course of action.

She felt suddenly guilty at the size of the unasked-for responsibility she was about to thrust upon the ganar who had expected to wake to another ordinary day. Perhaps Hellet had found himself overburdened by the same sense of guilt back at the library entrance when the assistant who became the child had accused him with a pointing finger. She wondered if that had been Yute—somehow so enraged by this disruption to whatever plans he’d had for the city that he’d literally torn himself apart in protest.

A glimmer of motion caught Celcha’s eye. There, between the pillars of the great temple to the Mother God. At the top of the steps. At first it seemed just a trick of the light, but it was enough to set her moving once more, angling across the plaza towards it, thinking that she might have found the children again.

The ghosts. She saw them with more clarity than ever before, as if they were limned by golden light. Hellet’s ghosts. Maybe and Starve. One tall, one small. The difference between them was accentuated by this newly sharpened view. As she drew closer, she saw with amazement that while the tall one was indeed the canith she had always taken him for, the smaller one was a human female. The pair of them stood at the top of the steps, holding each other’s hands, with eyes locked, both oblivious to her presence as she sought the cover of the temple’s side wall.

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