Page 7 of The Book that Broke the World

Kerrol looked at the pair of them expectantly.

“We need to run,” Evar said. “Now!”

An execution brings with it moments of great focus and decisions of consequence. It’s a time for reflection. So grab that mirror! How much neck do you dare to bare? This reign of terror the word is “lace.” We’re seeing big ruffs for the ladies, frothy jabots for the lords.

Dressing for the Guillotine, by Madame Gâteaux

CHAPTER 4

Celcha

Celcha woke before the bell on what was certain to be the last day of her life. The remaining books would be emptied from the chamber. The librarian would depart to the city for the last time. Hellet would be left with Myles Carstar and the consequences of his behaviour. The slavemaster’s fury at his humiliation would not be satisfied with only Hellet’s torture and death. Celcha would suffer the same fate.

Celcha left the shack in Hellet’s wake, her mind filled with means of escape. Not out into the stark desert beyond the palisade—that would only afford the slavers the thrill of a chase—but a cleaner escape into death. Given some rope and a few minutes of privacy she could—

“It will be all right, sister.” Hellet turned and covered her hands in his, his rough palms covering the claw scars along the back of each where her blades would grow if the slavers hadn’t torn them out in her third year and cauterised the wounds with hot iron.

“How will it be all right?”

Raised voices from outside stopped Hellet from replying. The sabbers always rose early. It wasn’t out of kindness they let the slaves sleep longer. The simple mechanics of it were that sabbers needed less time in their beds, and that if they forced the slaves to match them, in a matter of weeks the slaves went mad and died.

“—any other pair!” That was Myles Carstar, his voice shaking with restrained outrage.

“I don’t require any other pair.” The librarian, imperious, unimpressed by the slavemaster’s protests. “I require those two.”

As Celcha and Hellet shuffled blinking from the shack’s shadows into the sunlight the librarian singled them out from the line. “Those two, just so there’s no doubt.”

“They’ll be nothing but trouble for you, ma’am.” Myles Carstar retreated into politeness, though to look at his face Celcha thought that without the librarian’s two guards gleaming in their armour he might have beaten the old woman to death. “They’ve both been disciplined for curiosity. Without strict supervision, who knows what they’ll do next. You need chains, gates, proper discipline...”

Hellet kept his head down and Celcha followed his example, reluctantly tearing her gaze away from the slavemaster’s distress. She felt as if she were in a dream and she wasn’t going to accept any of it as real until she was actually walking away from the dig in her brother’s company.

“Curiosity is a necessary qualification, Mr.Carstar. We will be turning a liability into an asset. The library will compensate you at above-market rates.” She turned towards the loading hall and the small convoy of unusually smart wagons lined up beside it. “Now, if you’ll be so good as to direct your workforce to the task, we should be able to finish this business before noon.”

—

And so it was that on a hot autumn day, after over twenty years spent digging out the ruins of a dead city, Celcha and her brother walked away from the place in which they had been destined to die. They followed the last of seven book-laden wagons out of the compound, leaving everything they’d ever known, leaving the dead city behind them.

Myles Carstar did not emerge from his office to see them leave, and the overseers drove all the slaves below ground so that none would witness Celcha and Hellet’s departure. Even so, there wasn’t anyone in the Arthran dig, slave or slaver, who didn’t know that the pair of them, brother and sister, had escaped from beneath Myles Carstar’s rage and left him humiliated in their wake.

Hellet and Celcha took nothing of their own with them. They had owned nothing. But in her hands Celcha carried several dozen tiny wooden figures—nootki in the old tongue—whittled against the slavers’ will and beneath their notice. Many of the slaves, the ones who followed tradition, made these figures, just one each, allegedly in their own image, though it was hard to tell on such a small scale. When a slave died, they were buried by the fence, unless they’d died during a cruelty, in which case their corpses were given to the dogs. The dead were always buried on the inside of the palisade, as Myles Carstar wanted to make it clear they hadn’t gone free, even in death. The figure they had carved was then returned to the shack and hidden in the rafters or some other suitable nook, so that their spirit would remain with the group, watching over the young, comforting the bereaved.

These were the figures that Celcha had been entrusted with, their owners knowing that they themselves would never leave the Arthran dig, and choosing to set their nootki in Celcha’s care so that some small part of themselves might go with her and witness the wider world.

It took shockingly little time before Celcha had gone further from the shack in which she’d been born than she had ever gone before. The dusty, rock-strewn world didn’t care, Hellet didn’t seem to notice, but Celcha did, turning briefly to look back on the compound, its low roofs, its weathered fences, and thinking in that moment how very small it all was and how awful that so many lives were eaten up there, ground into nothing for the greed of others. She turned from it and followed her brother’s broad, scarred back, wiping away hot tears. Not of sorrow, nor of joy at her salvation, but of anger.

—

Celcha’s first surprise was how big the world was. She had, of course, gazed on the lake to the east and the mountains to the west, but a life lived entirely within a few hundred yards of your birthplace fails to educate the eye in the matter of distances. She had understood that the lake and the mountains were both bigger and further away than they seemed, but she had not understood how much bigger and how much further away.

Celcha knew herself to possess both strength and endurance. These were the qualities that the slavers most valued. Her legs, however, had never been used to walk a great distance. She hurried along behind Hellet, finding that the horses pulled the wagons faster than she would have chosen to march. The mountains at which they were aimed seemed to come no closer though, no matter how far the road took Celcha, as if they were shuffling away at much the same pace as she advanced.

To distract from the growing fatigue in her legs, Celcha focused on thoughts of the city itself. The slaves weren’t wholly ignorant about it. In the past, though not in Celcha’s time, city slaves guilty of minor infractions such as being surplus to requirement, old, or injured, had been sent to work out their remaining days in the Arthran tunnels. The stories they brought with them were astounding, though Celcha suspected that they had been embellished over the years. The tales said that there were not one but two kinds of sabber living in the city, two species with a long history of warfare behind them, finally joined in a truce that had become an enduring peace. That in itself sounded like a miracle. Moreover, the stories had it that the second sabber race was even larger and even more warlike than the ones who ran the dig site.

The wagons rattled down from the Arthran Plateau and across an arid plain. Celcha and Hellet, walking at the rear, turned grey with the dust raised by seven sets of wheels and the hooves of a score of horses. A sabber rode towards the rear of the column, occasionally glancing their way, though far from vigilant. Escape wasn’t on Celcha’s mind, however—this was escape. Whatever the librarian had planned for them, it was hard to imagine that it would be worse than wandering aimlessly in the surrounding wasteland until death found them.

The librarian rode in her carriage ahead of the creaking wagons. Celcha had to imagine that the sleek horses pulling it must have fairly flown across the intervening distance to have the old woman there before the slaves woke that morning. The ganar slept late, but not that late.

Gradually Celcha started to catch up with her shadow. The prenoon sun had thrown it before her to point the way. By noon it puddled around her feet, and as more miles passed, it trailed behind her as if reluctant to journey further. Celcha continually readjusted her sense of scale as the hours passed and the mountains reluctantly began to grow larger. Even so, when Hellet raised his arm to point at the foot of the nearest mountain and said, “Krath,” Celcha took a long time to understand what she was looking at. She had heard that the city of Krath had walls so tall that someone falling from them had time to scream, draw breath, and scream again before they hit the ground. So wide that many defenders could walk abreast along their thickness. The small dark line at the foot of the closest mountain couldn’t be that wall. It would mean that the mountain was so vast as to defy all sense.

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