by R A Fisher
Apparently, they hadn’t considered Ranat going straight to the man that had ratted him out. He’d gotten lucky on that one, and he knew it. He wasn’t about to blow it now. Not until he did what he had to do.
It looked like Gessa was waiting for someone, but the longer he watched her, the more he wondered. Was she waiting for him? He felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck at the thought. If they were watching her, and she was waiting for him … however he looked at it, it didn’t look good. He hoped she wasn’t in on it, too. Even if she hadn’t had a choice, the thought was more than he could take.
He decided he’d rather not know, and he slipped away again, while Gessa continued to wait through the deepening shadows, the glow lamps flaring on around her.
The Library of Heaven, known more often as just The Library, was a wide, squat tower of volcanic glass, cyclopean and out of place next to the delicate white-and-rose buttresses of Wise Hall and the adjacent palace.
The Library held the names of every person in Fom who had ever belonged to the Church of N’narad, and which level of Heaven they would attain, or which they were in now. A permanent tax record.
Ranat had mixed feelings about The Library. Despite his fascination with reading lists of names, he’d never been there before, although it was open to the public once a week. There were no Salvation Taxes for a grave robber, and even if there had been, he didn’t think he would have paid them.
Still, he’d been raised with the Church, and he’d always carried an inkling of a feeling that his casual disdain of the N’naradin tax system had doomed him to the Void. Or worse, now that he’d been stricken from the Books, condemned to endless suffering.
He’d swallowed his thirst and spent most of his last tin on a new linen shirt, this one dark grey, and rough wool pants. He also got a new coat. As much as he’d grown to love the other one, he needed to concede that it was a bad idea to wear a bloodstained coat that once belonged to a dead official he’d been convicted of murdering into the heart of Church power. The new clothes felt stiff and strange, and Ranat realized they were the first clothes he’d worn in fifty years that hadn’t come from the dead.
He’d shaved, too, back in his basement, after he’d watched the place for a day and decided no one was lurking around, waiting for him to come home. He’d watched people shave with flint razors before. It looked easy enough, but a dozen tiny, random gashes now sliced his face. He’d spent more than a day sleeping, but when he left for The Library the next morning, they still burned raw. His tarnished mirror revealed a ragged-haired old man with tired, sad eyes and scarred jowls. His flesh was grey, except for the dozen small bloody cuts and his ruddy, bulbous nose. Ranat felt even more conspicuous than before.
On the road up to Cathedral Hill and through the gates, he was ignored. Just another old peasant, dressed in the best he had, come to see his name in the Books before he died.
The Library was a vast corkscrew, each chamber within vaulted and walled with leather-bound books. Every room linked to a central spiral stairway. Nineteen vaults in all, from the base to the top. A vault for each Heaven, and one more for people like Ranat, bound for the purgatory of the Void for never paying their Salvation Taxes.
No, he reminded himself. One more for people like he’d used to be. Now his name wasn’t in any book at all.
Ranat paused at the base of the stairs. The towering entrance lay behind him, an arch of basalt carved into knots of thick rope, held aloft by square pillars and polished until the steady stream of visitors could see themselves reflected in the gleaming, black surfaces. Souls drowning in darkness.
Stairs in front of him, white marble, circled the wall all the way to the Sun-and-Moon mosaic glinting in the ceiling, made of countless chips of glass and bronze. Walls were likewise marble, set with hundreds of gloomy bas-reliefs of people Ranat didn’t recognize. The broad double doors that followed the stairs up, all propped open, were cut from gleaming blocks of volcanic glass.
Soldiers in white and red dress uniforms patrolled the stairs and the various landings, sometimes answering questions from the parishioners, but mostly looking bored. Ranat kept his head down as he clambered up the steps, but none of them paid him any more heed than they did any of the other peasants.
The vast majority of visitors from the city disappeared into one of the first two vaults, representing the lowest levels of Heaven, on opposite sides of the ground floor. He didn’t go into either of them, but he could see through the doorways, which rested ajar on enormous stone hinges. The lower vaults were huge—half the size of the rest of The Library, lined with tomes containing tiny names and birth dates. He wondered how one person could find a name penned in one of those tomes. Just one in a list of millions.
Ranat still didn’t know who he was looking for. He did, however, know that the man he hadn’t murdered was a high-ranking Church official, recently deceased, whose personal seal was a phoenix. He decided he’d start looking at the top.
The higher levels were almost vacant compared to the swarming mass going in and out of the lower two vaults. One guard, dressed in all white, with the Sun-and-Moon of the Church embroidered in red over his heart and larger on his back, leaned on the marble railing, looking down on the crowds below, distant thoughts etched on his face.
As Ranat ascended the stairs, the man stood straight and watched as the old man approached. “The lowest vaults contain the lowest books of Heaven,” the guard explained as if he couldn’t imagine why Ranat would progress any further into The Library.
Ranat’s mind turned to how bad he needed a drink. A flask of rum rode in his pocket, almost half full, but he knew now would be a bad time to take a swill from it. He cleared his throat and tried to adjust his posture so he’d look like he knew what he was doing.
“Found my name,” he mumbled. “And a few others I’d been meaning to see. Just thinking, since I was here, I’d see who got themselves into the Highest Books over the years. I mean, besides the Grace and the Bishop. Who else gets to be up there?” He nodded toward the stairs leading up past the guard. “That is,” he added, “if us common folk are allowed.”
The guard eyed him with tired disdain, a local giving directions to a tourist. “Yeah, fine. Go ahead.” He went back to leaning on the railing, watching the crowd, old man already forgotten.
Ranat nodded his thanks to the man’s back and proceeded up the stairs. None of the other guards bothered with more than a glance at the grandpa who stumbled up the steps past them, gasping for breath and limping on tired legs.
The top-most vault, housing the names of those bound for the Heaven of Light, was still massive, although perhaps a twentieth the size of one of the lower ones. Yellow stained glass banded around the top of the room, turning the dull grey light of Fom into a facsimile of sunshine. The books in here were thinner, but broader and square, about three hand-lengths to a side. A few visitors lurked around, paging through old tomes or walking between the shelves, running fingers across the leather spines, their reverence shouted through their silence. To one side sat two ornate oak tables ridged with vines and flowers. On each lay an immense book, eight hands to a side, almost as thick. Above one, a sign read: “Book of Bishops.” Above the other: “Book of Graces.”
Ranat wondered if that meant the Graces and Bishops got into an even higher level of Heaven. The thought made him snort a humorless laugh.
An ancient scribe in red-and-black robes with thick white hair glanced up from the desk by the door as Ranat entered, but turned back to his work without a word. The man had a scrawled list in front of him and was penning the names from it into a new tome. Ranat saw, with a fresh glimmer of hope, that after he penned each name, he selected a signet from an array set in glass cases around the desk. These he dipped in ink before stamping them next to the entries. Every seal in the Church linked to every name.
Ranat looked around the room, hesitated, and turned back to the scribe. He fiddled, and when the old man didn’t look up again, h
e cleared his throat. The rough sound echoed off the vaulted ceiling, and he winced at the sound.
“Yes?” The whisper was harsh and almost as loud as Ranat’s cough. A few people glared in their direction.
“I’m, uh, looking for, um, someone. They, uh …” He trailed off under the scribe’s withering glower.
“Yes?” The man hissed again, even louder than before. “Out with it!”
“Someone within the Church died not long ago, and I want to pay my respects,” Ranat blurted the words as fast as he could in a graveled hiss. In his coat pockets, he clenched his fists to keep his hands from shaking.
The scribe nodded toward the wall opposite the Books of Graces and Bishops. There was another table with another book on it, this one’s size more in keeping with the others. Above it, a sign read: “Book of Life.”
Ranat looked at it, then at the man, who had already turned his attention back to his work. “Um. If he’s recently passed on …?” He trailed off again.
The scribe looked up, rolled his eyes, and nodded a second time towards the book.
“Uh,” Ranat whispered. “Thank you.”
Ranat went over to the Book of Life and opened it, half-expecting a shout of alarm as he touched the tomb, but the room remained quiet below the susurration of turning pages.
The Book of Life was different than the others in the room, despite its identical size; beyond a simple list of names and seals, brief obituaries were printed beneath each name.
Ranat swallowed, waiting to be grabbed by a guard lurking invisible behind him. The room remained calm.
He panned down the names, working backward. With the short obituaries, there were only ten names to a page. Ranat wondered how long someone had to be dead before they were transferred to a normal book, and what they would do with this Book of Life when a new one was full.
He found the phoenix on the third page back. Angular and stylized, there was no mistake. He hugged himself as he read, shaking hands balled into fists and tucked into his armpits.
Hierophant Trier N’navum, Born Nir 7699 - Died Ageus’tan 7747.
Third Hierophant under Arch Bishop Daliius III. His position was often seen as the most difficult of the Five; it fell on him to restructure troubled posts in the most distant reaches of the N’naradin Fold. He is survived by his brother Lem; his soul rests in the Heaven of Flowers.
Ranat stepped away from the book, his quivering hands itching to reach for the flask of rum tucked in his pocket. He forced himself to drop his arms to his side and walk from the vault, then down the long stairs and out of The Library, pace unhurried, expression calm.
He forbade himself the flask until he was out of the compound at the top of Cathedral Hill and tucked away into one of the narrow, steam-filled streets of Grace’s Parish. There, he took a long pull and frowned. He thought there was more in it than that.
He’d been worried about being accused of killing some random official, but the man had been a damn Hierophant. Calling him “high-up” didn’t cover it.
When he’d taught himself to read as a child, sneaking books out of the Vintner’s office, he’d often done so with books about the Church. They weren’t stories of the Heavens—the Vintner was nothing if not a secular man—but charts and lists of the hierarchy. Ranat probably knew more about the Church’s structure than any other peasant, and most of the merchants, too. The problem was, now that he knew who he was accused of killing, he had more questions and no answers.
The Hierophants operated under the Arch Bishop’s direct command to bring local governments in line. Trier N’navum couldn’t have been here for that. Fom was no distant provincial outpost. It was, well, Fom—three times larger than the capital city of Tyrsh, and the Grace of Fom was the second in command of the Church.
Trier N’navum could have been in Fom for any number of reasons. Meeting with the Grace or just passing through the port on the way to some far-flung prefecture along the coast. None of that, though, explained what one of the most powerful members of the Church was doing in an alley by the Lip, all by himself, in the middle of the night.
Ranat drained the flask, then shook it next to his ear, hoping there might be one swallow left that didn’t flow into his mouth with the rest of it.
Then he sighed, stuffed the empty bottle into his pocket, and began trudging home, questions swimming through his mind.
Chapter Six
Ranat crouched in the alley where he’d found the body of Hierophant Trier N’navum, staring at the muddy cobbles, trying to force answers from them through strength of will.
There was, of course, no sign that a body had ever lain here. It was a little after noon. The clouds were high and bright, granting a rare reprieve from the drizzle. Deep within the shadows of the narrow street, a vent to the Tidal Works gasped. Behind him trundled wagons and pedestrians, and the chorus of beggars who’d emerged from the nearby tunnels of the Lip.
He sighed, and the sound bubbled in his chest. That couldn’t be good, he thought. He’d slept a little in an abandoned squat a few blocks from his room after he’d left the Library, afraid to go home in case the Church was watching. But his mind had been too aswarm with questions that had no answers to get much rest. He felt like he’d aged twenty years in the week since he’d first found the body. For an old man, that was saying a lot.
Ranat didn’t know what he was looking for. He just knew there needed to be some clue to what the Hierophant had been doing, who he’d been meeting. Who had killed him. There had to be, or else it wasn’t fair.
No footprints, no dropped confessions, no hidden murder weapons. Nothing that would tell the world Ranat Totz was an innocent man. As he conceded it, he fought back the welling tears. Not fair. None of it.
Out in the street, life continued. “Tin? Spare any tin? Just a ball or a disk? Excuse me, sir. Excuse me, miss.” The song of the beggars droned on. Ranat wondered if they ever stopped. Wondered if they ever left this dismal strip of the Grace’s Walk, where, inexplicably, they’d decided to converge in some distant past, and had come here every day ever since.
He wiped his face with a filthy hand, leaving a smear of mud unnoticed on his stubbled cheek, and took a pull from a fresh rum bottle. A full one, not just a flask. It had left him with one last Three-Side and a few balls, but at least it would last him more than a day. Hopefully.
Most of the beggars were children. He knew their keepers waited for them back in the tunnels, that of the tin they to made every day, they kept none of it. The merchants knew it too, which is why the nicer ones gave them a pull off the glogg keg along with a couple copper balls. A little something for themselves.
Still, the system worked well enough for their handlers to send them here, to the same stretch of Grace’s Walk. Every day. And every night.
Ranat took a few steps into the street and waved the rum bottle at the nearest beggar—a boy of about ten, wearing tattered, muddy pants so filthy it was impossible to tell what sort of material they were. He had no shirt or shoes at all.
“Were you here before dawn, a week or so ago?” Ranat asked, shaking the rum bottle again for good measure.
The kid said nothing but nodded toward the bottle. Ranat handed it to him.
The boy took a long pull from it, wincing as it burned down his throat, and handed it back to Ranat, wiping a dirty forearm across his mouth. “No,” he said and gave a mean-spirited laugh before darting back into the street around a rumbling keg wagon, dodging a camel that tried to bite him.
Son of a bitch, Ranat thought. He didn’t bother going after him. Even if he’d had the energy, he would have let it go. It was too much like something he would have done. Kids living on the street got their dues where they could.
He felt the weight of the bottle, sighed. The boy must have had a big mouth for a little kid. Well, he thought, lesson learned.
He raised the bottle again, and a girl who’d watched the first transaction came over. She was older than the boy. Somewhere in the awkwa
rd, gangly years between adolescent and adult. Her body under the rough burlap tunic was skinny, the first hints of womanhood touching her hips and breasts, but her face was unlined and young. Her eyes, though, were hard, ancient.
He asked her the same question. She, like the boy before her, said nothing and nodded toward the bottle. The mannerism was so similar, Ranat wondered if they were siblings. “No, no. Nice try. Tell me first, then we’ll see.”
She looked like she might protest, but just stuck out her lower lip in a pout. “Fine. No, I wasn’t here. Give me a drink or a few tin, and I’ll tell you who was, though.”
“Tell me, first. Then I’ll give you something.”
“And how do I know you won’t just screw me after you get what you want?”
Ranat scowled. “I guess you don’t.”
The girl glared at him, jutting her lip out even further, but she didn’t leave.
“Look at me,” he said. “Do I look like a merchant out to fuck you over? I’m no better off than you, and I never have been. Either tell me or don’t, so I can get on with it and ask someone else.”
She looked at the bottle again, and Ranat felt an unexpected tug of guilt. She looked at a bottle of rum the same way he had when he was her age. The girl had nothing but a hard life ahead of her, and he was helping her into the ditch.
“Fine,” she said before he could think about it anymore. “I got a friend. He’s not here now, but he’s been doing the nights for the past month. Older than me. Maybe eighteen, twenty. Mass of hair and a beard like polished copper, even when it’s wet, which it is all the time out here. Give me a swig off that bottle, and I’ll tell you where to find him.”
Ranat looked down at the girl, who glared up at him, looking like she was ready to punch him in the neck as soon as he refused her request.