Page 8 of The Book that Broke the World

And yet, mile by mile, the line grew into a wall. And by the time they reached the gates, Celcha had to crane her neck to see the serrated line of the battlements against the bright steel of the sky.

Hellet had made no complaints, not about the unaccustomed miles or eating dust the whole way. “Krath” had been his first word of the journey and his only word until they passed through the gates. Once inside the city there were innumerable amazements to capture Celcha’s attention, but the fact that her brother started to talk and said more in the next half hour than he had in the previous six months was perhaps what amazed her most.

“The canith are faster and stronger than the humans.” In the crowd just beyond the gates the canith towered above the humans, head and shoulders taller in many cases, just as most humans towered above Celcha and overtopped even Hellet’s unusual height. All three species had more in common physically than differences. Size was the most obvious dissimilarity. Celcha was used to the humans’ nakedness and their need to cover it with cloth. Even the hair on their heads often looked thin compared to the golden pelt she shared with all other ganar. The canith’s manes were impressive but faded to a short bristling fur that could go unnoticed, particularly on their arms and hands. At first glance their faces had something canine about them, though closer observation showed this to be a passing similarity rather than some shared fundamental.

“The canith owned this city too. For a century here and there.” The air to either side of Hellet glimmered, Maybe and Starve flanking his advance along the broad streets. “Swapping it back and forth with the humans. Nobody’s sure who first built it.” He paused to shake out some of the dust from his pelt. “There’s a lesson there. Size and speed aren’t what really matter. The big child might push the smaller one over, but when we’re grown...” He tapped his forehead. “It’s this and what we do with it that matters.” A stone hit Hellet’s shoulder, but he didn’t look for whoever had thrown it. Instead, he turned the other way as a child shouted, “They caught another hairy!” and other children laughed. Hellet gazed up at the tenements rising four and five storeys above them. “Brains, not brawn. They know this too—the canith and the humans—under the mockery and cruelty and abuse, they know it. It’s why they clamp down so hard on us.”

“This is what Maybe’s been whispering to you all this time?” Celcha asked.

“Some of it. Some I understood by myself even before he told me. Maybe can see the past like he’s turning the pages of a book. He knows the history of our people. We’ve built cities too—greater ones than this. We’ve fought to defend them. They say that the ganar are slow to anger but they hold on to it. Our enemies say we don’t fight fair, as if any sane creature would fight fair against an opponent twice their size. Fairness is something others try to impose at the surface level once they’ve fixed all the foundations in their favour.”

Celcha shook her head, torn between the strangeness all around her and the strangeness of her brother, who appeared to have been tutored by ghosts or angels in matters of a past lost to the memory of even the oldest slave. They followed the wagons, no longer in a dust cloud. The ghosts were slightly clearer here in the light of day than down in the tunnels of Arthran. She’d expected them to fade in the sun, but they’d done the opposite. Maybe was the taller by quite some margin, and the easier to see. In the sunlight he could almost be a canith...

The city lay in a valley between two great arms of the mountain and climbed the slope towards the impossible sky-scraping heights that loomed above them, making even the towers and temples seem small. As the main street led them higher, the buildings became still more grand. Celcha had never seen or imagined anything like it. The dig site held only the most utilitarian of structures: boxes in which to keep things. The buried city had always hinted at more, but it was hard to appreciate grandeur when you were hewing it from the ground one lump at a time. Here, there were soaring works of art in solid stone on every side.

The wagons clattered ever upwards, over stone-paved streets. As the gradient steepened, the path wound back and forth, softening the slope for the horses, each zig and zag gaining elevation and expanding the view back over the city. The carpet of canith and humanity spread further than Celcha had been able to understand from outside the wall or from within the shadowed valleys of its streets. From up on the slopes, where the houses began to thin and the raw bedrock started to reassert itself, Celcha could see that there must be not the thousands she had imagined but tens of thousands of citizens, a hundred thousand even.

The sun burned red, peering from the shoulder of the mountain. As Celcha passed a tall pole standing by the roadside, the top of it burst into brilliance. Hellet caught her arm when she startled away. The horses carried on with barely a snort. Back along the winding street they’d travelled, more of the poles lit, the bright yellow flames held inside glass boxes. Celcha hadn’t even noticed them—there’d been so much else to see.

“Street lighting,” Hellet said. “So they can see where they’re going at night.”

The ganar slept at night. The idea of having the way lit for anyone to wander seemed extraordinary to Celcha. Just thinking about it made her yawn mightily.

“They have these lights in their homes too. The lights burn the same kind of gas that they use to cook with and for heat,” Hellet said.

Celcha walked on in silence, watching the illumination spread. It almost seemed that Hellet had been here before. If Celcha had pointed to a random house and asked who lived there she wouldn’t have been surprised if Hellet told her.

—

The wagons left the houses behind and stopped shortly afterwards on a steep road that led up towards the head of a howling wolf carved into the mountainside. A wolf whose mouth stood wide enough to devour them whole.

The guard who had ridden at the back dismounted and pointed towards the entrance. “Go help with the unloading.” Hellet chose that moment to yawn hugely, showing all his big square teeth. “None of that.” The guardsman shook his head. “Sleep comes afterwards. One late night won’t kill you.”

It took remarkably little sleep deprivation to cause a ganar to fall unconscious, but even so neither of them protested. For the first time since passing through the gates, yawns notwithstanding, Hellet seemed as excited as Celcha to see what lay ahead.

Librarians in crimson robes, both human and canith, came out onto the stone platform before the entrance to watch the books being unloaded by underlings uniformed in black. Although the physical labour seemed to be beneath them, many of the librarians were unable to maintain their air of aloofness and stand back watching. Instead, they broke ranks and came forward to pick at the loads being carried into the wolf’s jaws.

Celcha and Hellet joined in with the effort, working alongside humans and canith for the first time. They unloaded the wagons and set the books inside the wolf’s mouth, where other library staff took them off in wheeled shelving units at a much slower rate. Celcha wondered why there were no other slaves doing the work. The staff paid her and her brother little attention but there was none of the overt hostility that she’d sensed in the streets, and certainly none of the murderous rage that even the suggestion of human labouring beside ganar would have evoked back at the dig site.

Books were easier to load and unload than the material Celcha normally worked with. They were lighter, blunter, and had regular, stackable shapes. She found the labour easy, the only difficulty being that she very much wanted to be asleep. Also, it was hard to handle the books with sufficient care that one of the onlooking librarians didn’t wince or scold. Hellet seemed to be making a better job of it.

Celcha had both arms out and had received most of a double armful of books when the black-tunicked woman loading the volumes onto her stopped in mid-action. Everyone stopped. The murmur of conversation around the task vanished. Awkwardly, Celcha shuffled herself around to peer past her burden in the direction everyone else was looking.

On the stone platform before the wolf’s head, somebody new had come to join the librarians. Although built on similar lines to all three, this newcomer was neither canith, human, nor ganar. Tall as a human, unclothed like the ganar, with the confidence of a canith. If the creature hadn’t been moving Celcha would have assumed it was a statue, carved from a stone she’d never seen before, white and gleaming like a tooth. The most unnatural thing about it, apart from the texture and uniformity of its flesh, was the lack of detail, everything smooth, without wrinkle, hair, claw, or colour. She couldn’t even see if it had eyes or nostrils or tell if its mouth could open. In many ways he—she felt it was a he—reminded her of the nootki she’d tied into her pelt for safekeeping. More of a suggestion or reminder of the original than an accurate representation.

The new arrival took a place among the librarians in their crimson robes and, looking down at the wagons, lapsed into the immobility that Celcha had expected from it all along. It stood stiller than sculpture. Watching. Or dead. The librarians around the creature seemed unable to look away, though it was surprise and deference that reflected on their faces rather than fear.

“What’s an assistant doing out here?” someone muttered behind Celcha.

“Never seen one before. Not even in the library.” Another astonished mutter.

Hellet provided the signal to return to work. He walked past Celcha with a load of books, unconcerned, as if nothing had happened. Celcha started to follow him. Nobody had told them to stop, after all. For a slave, unilaterally deciding to take a rest could have horrific consequences. The rest of the workforce took the cue and a moment later everyone was back to what they’d been doing.

Hellet’s arrival at the platform and careful negotiation of the steps caused the second astonishment, shutting down conversation and activity just as effectively as the first. The assistant walked towards Celcha’s brother, blocking his path. Several librarians had done the same thing as evening had darkened towards dusk, but the assistant didn’t take a book for inspection.

“Your name?” he asked in a voice free of inflection.

“Hellet.”

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