Page 58 of The Book that Broke the World

As she watched in amazement the pair began to dance. They left the steps and spun in the air, laughing. The dance devolved into a carefree game of chase. A dance of joy at the success of their plan? Celcha allowed herself to breathe. Perhaps it had worked after all.

She slid into the shadowed alley between the temple and the Hall of Records. She knew that the temple owned many ganar, housed in the basement and set to the preparation of the dead, a series of grisly procedures that for reasons beyond her understanding the followers of the Mother God liked to subject their corpses to.

In the alley she saw her first actual people. Two of them, almost lost in the shadow of the high wall that they’d rolled up against. Whatever sleep the gas had wrought in them did not look to have been a particularly gentle one. They lay at awkward angles, their faces hidden, and a stench hung about them. Celcha gave the pair a wide berth, half-afraid they would wake. The reality of it struck home. She hoped none of them had been tending a fire or climbing a ladder when the gas struck. Still, she reminded herself, these were people who would see her crucified for disobeying their commands.

At the back of the temple, she found the ganar entrance that she’d seen slaves slipping in and out of on one of her previous visits to the city. Lutna had said the temple ganar were better treated than the palace ganar, though they had dirtier jobs to do. A canith guard slumped in an observation box nearby. It smelled as if she’d vomited before passing out.

Celcha tugged on the door, then knocked timidly. All the while she thought of the two ghosts dancing in the air. Why were a human and a canith so pleased by the usurping of their kinds’ power? Why had they coached Hellet along this path? Seeing them clearly for once had resolved her doubts into solid questions that burned for answers.

Unable to open the door, Celcha went over to the guard box and lifted the key from the curiously still canith. She’d never seen a canith sleep before, so she accepted that they slept like the dead and moved on.

The passages under the temple held an acrid scent that needled Celcha’s eyes and throat. She wondered if this was the gas they’d released or just the chemicals used to preserve and prepare the dead in the catacombs. Even without gas lighting down in the ganar areas, the gas, being heavier than air, would have wound its way down the stairs and collected in their workspaces.

The basement corridors were low-ceilinged and lit only dimly by intermittent lanterns. Many of these had gone out and the few that still burned were guttering as if at the end of their oil. The place held a silence different to that of the library. A haunted silence, trembling with threat. Celcha gritted her teeth and reminded herself that neither darkness nor death was inherently scary, and that the ganar who worked here would need a confident, fearless herald to bring them the news, not some timid girl jumping at every shadow.

As she progressed, a charnel stink began to compete with the chemical taint still haunting the corridors. “Hello?” Her voice sounded thin, lost among the shadows. “Hello?”

She turned through an archway and descended a short flight of stairs. An age-stained oak door stood ajar at the bottom. When Celcha pushed on it the door resisted her in much the same manner as if someone were pushing back against her. “Hello? Is there someone there?” The darkness on the other side lay unbroken.

Celcha gave another tentative push, and then, realising that this was foolish and that she had to find someone quickly, she put her shoulder into it. The realisation that she was battling against a body didn’t come at once but in the same way that rain will wet fur, soaking steadily in until it reaches the skin. She guessed it must be a canith to be so hard to shove aside.

With an effort she forced a gap large enough for her to squeeze through. Barely a whisper of light followed her, but it seemed that some of her massive dose of methalayne still haunted her veins, enabling her to see better than she should, better than she wanted to. Three ganar lay in the corridor beyond the door, two having collapsed against it.

“No!” Celcha’s heart began to pound, and her stomach became an icy hole through the middle of her. If the ganar had been put to sleep, what was this all for? She needed to get back and warn Hellet so they could escape before the city woke. “No, this is all wrong!”

Celcha knelt beside the nearest ganar. Perhaps the gas had a lesser effect on them, and their sleep would be lighter. If she could wake some of them... The arm around which her fingers curled was not warm. The muscles weren’t relaxed in sleep but stiff and unyielding. In a rising panic she grabbed the second ganar and shook him. This one proved just as stiff, and when Celcha hauled him over she found herself staring at open, bloodshot eyes bulging in a contorted face above a bloody mouth. The fur on the ganar’s chin and chest bore traces of dried foam, a papery residue now.

Celcha released the corpse with a shudder of disgust and jumped to her feet. A wordless cry broke from her and she ran on into the darkness, weaving unsteadily. She passed the third ganar and tripped over a fourth that sprawled just beyond. On her hands and knees, she stared in horror at the bodies filling the corridor beyond. Some were locked together as if they’d died tearing at each other. They’d all been trying to get out, but none had made it further than the door.

“Hellet...” Celcha retched, spitting stomach acid onto the floor. “What have we done?”

She ran then, as if the gas was still here, and it was her choking and dying. She tore at the part-open door in the same blind panic that must have gripped the ganar who had expired against it, her nails scoring additional grooves before she finally tore herself through the gap. She ran without thought, upwards, always upwards, seeking the light, seeking air, lost within the structure.

Rather than escape the building she ended up stumbling into the vast, vaulted hall of the main temple. She fell to her knees beside one of the great pillars that bore the ceiling aloft. The peace of the Mother God’s house was a lie. The bright colours that streamed through stained glass to paint the stone-flagged floor were a cruel parody of the vitality snatched from so many just hours before. The god had done nothing to protect her children... or their slaves. Ganar, human, and canith had found a final equality. They had died the same horrible death. And Celcha had delivered it to them. It hadn’t been Hellet who crawled through that last pipe and poured the quicksilver into the underground heart of the gas room.

Celcha looked up uncomprehendingly from empty hands that were so full of guilt. A golden sparkle had drawn her eye. There, just inside the closed iron doors of the temple, were the two ghosts, the canith and the human. The ones who had delivered the black book of poisons into Hellet’s hands. The ones who had steered Celcha and her brother to just this place and time. The ones who had danced and cavorted above the dead city.

She watched in total disbelief as the pair bent their heads together and kissed. Kissed! The shock and terror that had crippled Celcha burned away, replaced by an anger so great it left her breathless, unable to speak. “You!” She wanted to boom her accusation. To fill the great hall with it from flagstone to cornice. But nothing emerged from the lips that framed the word.

She started to run, to charge at her enemy. But they had already turned away. As her pounding feet closed the gap, the last glimmer of the pair slipped through the fabric of the closed doors. She arrived too late, hurled herself after them, and was thrown back by the unyielding iron.

She found her voice then, trapped within the temple while the ghosts ran free, and howled after them, venting her rage, her hurt, her betrayal. “I will find you!” She beat the doors until her fists bled. “I will find you...”

When the flesh has rotted from them there is little difference between a city and a skull. Both watch you with empty eyes and the kind of grin that will follow you home.

The Last Empress of Charn, by Heinrich Slylieman

CHAPTER 25

Celcha

Celcha toured the dead city, still unable to believe that the calamity had fallen with such completeness across every house and hall. She thought that she would find someone, anyone, a lost child, a rare individual whose lungs were somehow immune, a princess in a draughty tower... She remembered her own princess, little Lutna, who had been only good. She would be lying twisted in her bedding in her room on the trainee corridor, choked by the yellow fog. There would be no family to mourn her, nobody to perform her funeral rites. She would rot there. Alone. Celcha found herself on all fours, crying as if she were the source of a river. She reached for her only defence: her anger, and let it lift her to her feet.

Humans would come. Canith would come. Krath was not the only city that paid fealty to the queen. People would come and in time they would understand that no god of death had swung their scythe through the population. They would understand the cause and even without firm proof their suspicions would fall upon the ganar. Even with ganar dead piled in the bowels of the palace, the temples, and the gas room itself they would not believe any other capable of such a crime.

The lives of those ganar Celcha hadn’t already killed would become still more miserable if they were not immediately executed. The people who had worked alongside her in the Arthran dark would suffer. The same people who had entrusted their nootki to her keeping would feel new cruelties from Myles Carstar’s hands, and he would enjoy bestowing them.

Celcha turned back towards the mountain. It thrust above the city, too huge to notice the small encrustation of life and death around its feet, yet somehow still too small to encompass the enormity of the library. The library had been the co-author of this destruction. It had put too much knowledge into her brother’s hands, too fast for even his genius to keep pace. It had given him power without the wisdom to know how little he understood it. It had made murderers of them both, twisted good intentions into genocide.

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