The Steel Seraglio

by Mike Carey

  His voice dropped to a whisper. Heads craned towards him as he went on, “For there is another light, my friends. A greater, brighter, purer light, a hundred times lovelier than those lesser lights which entrap us. This is the light of the One Truth. This, and only this, is the light which will guide us to safety through the desert, the light which illuminates our proper way. So why, you may ask me, have you not seen this light? Why have you had no glimpse of its beauty? Why have you not basked in its transcending beam?”

  Now his eyes flashed sparks, and the flame caught. The fire sleeping in his voice woke to a roar.

  “Because you are lost in the desert! Because you are deceived by the Nihareem! Abandon your drinking, leave your gambling halls, conquer your licentiousness and your lust! You are only turning aside from death. You are only spurning the temptations of demons! And when you have forsaken these things, think, only think, what you will gain in return . . .”

  Hakkim’s voice sank to an ecstatic murmur as he described the joys of his One Truth, and Rem glanced at the faces around her. Not everyone in the crowd, transfixed as they were, was reacting well to his words. She could see several people muttering uncertainly to one another, and not a few smirks and grimaces at the notion of conquering licentiousness and lust. It was nearing midday, the time when life in the hot city slowed to a crawl, and the square was shimmering in the summer heat. The sun stewed in the sky. It was one of those days when the heat boils and thickens in the air, begging to be lanced by a storm. It sapped people’s spirits, making them weak and tired and angry. To Rem’s right, a plain looking man with sweat patches under his arms shouted, “Why not leave off eating and drinking as well, and have an end to it? Won’t be any future for humanity anyway, since we’re forbidden to procreate.”

  The audience had swelled by this time to such a size that when it happened, the people standing at the front had no idea. Insulated by a growing cushion of onlookers, they were aware of nothing more than a slight stir in the crowd, an intensification in the background noise which always filled the Jidur.

  Hakkim’s voice ran on, sinuous and smooth, now a sensuous whisper, now a bright clarion call, as his disciples oozed like tar through the crowd, congealed around the man at Rem’s side—not quick enough to startle him—and then closed in. The whole thing seemed melted by the heat into a warped dream: their movement, a viscous fluidity, the man’s face waking into slow surprise, the grunts of his pain.

  Rem watched them beating him, too horrified to cry out. A sickening sense of helplessness overwhelmed her. She stood shackled to the spot until the dark figures turned and stalked off, leaving the bloodied man curled in a broken ball on the ground. People around her began to shout and point; some men started to give chase, but checked themselves and hung back, or went instead to fetch a doctor for the man, who had begun to groan and stir. The Ascetics left the Jidur unchallenged, in the same silence in which they had conducted their attack. And through it all, like music, Hakkim’s voice flowed. His tone now was one of profound and terrible pity, as if he would wrap his listeners in his arms.

  “Oh, my brothers! Oh, my friends! How I wish that you could see the light of the Truth as I have seen it! It would transform you!” Rem ran from the square in disgust.

  She wanted to forget it, to dismiss the entire incident from her mind as an aberration, never to be repeated. But something had broken, that day in the Jidur. Not the hoped-for storm, come to lance the boil of summer, but some foul, rotten thing, grown fat on darkness and secrecy. Its belly had been slit, and now the contagion was pouring out. At first she saw the black-robed figures only with the inner eye of foresight, but soon they were seeping through the streets of Bessa like ink spilled across parchment.

  They were mostly young men, the sons of butchers and weavers who had always felt destined for greater things than a career in their father’s shop. They drank Hakkim’s words, sneaked to the Jidur against their parents’ wishes, and began refusing wine at dinner, rising long before the rest of their household to sit in silent meditation.

  A little oddness in a growing boy was to be expected. Youth came with confusion and frustration—such things were natural, and would find an outlet, sometimes in a drunken brawl, sometimes in a little religious eccentricity. But Hakkim was a prophet. He looked at a thousand separate wellsprings of uncertainty and rage and saw a river in potentia. All it lacked was a direction in which to flow. Asceticism had no God, yet in its name he performed miracles, bringing a new nation out of the midst of another nation: a young nation, dressed in black, united by a single purpose.

  The purpose was blood. The Ascetics shunned the pleasures of the world, but hounded those who lived by them. Gambling halls were torched and inns attacked, their customers pelted with stones. Dancing girls were followed on their way home from work. Soon, no woman dared to walk alone after nightfall with her arms and head uncovered. It was said that Bokhari Al-Bokhari had intensified the security around his own harem. A publican was found hanged from the sign outside his establishment. Men and women who lay with others of their own sex were also targeted. The Ascetics practised strict abstinence, and considered all sexual practices apart from those conducted between husband and wife to be sinful and abhorrent.

  When the attacks began, groups of women would congregate on their way to the market, gossiping in hushed, fearful tones about the latest atrocity. Then the Ascetics began to patrol the city by day, walking in groups of three or four and pausing to listen in to conversations. Suddenly, no one talked in the streets any more.

  They were not loutish; the violence of the Ascetics was silent and whisper-swift, begun with the noise of soft footsteps at the top of some narrow street, and ended with the discreet swish of a blade wiped clean on a fold of dark cloth. It was this silence, this imperturbable silence, that Rem found most chilling about them. She had lived with silence for most of her life, but this was different. Her silence, the silence she loved, hummed with mute voices; it was the silence at the end of a song, the silence of lovers in the moments just before and just after coupling. The Ascetics were silent in the way of dead things, and Rem felt this and recoiled from it in dread.

  The fear that filled Bessa had even permeated the thick stone walls of her Library, usually so reassuringly cut off from the city and its problems. The First Librarian came out more and more often from his office and tottered around anxiously at odd moments, looking for his son. Several times now Rem had been forced to drag the Second Librarian into the Rare Texts room to hide him from his father, meeting the First Librarian with an excuse about a purchase at the market, or an unexpected meeting with one of the sultan’s legates. The First Librarian was well-wadded with delusions, but even he was not quite so oblivious that he had no inkling of the real reasons behind Warid’s long absences from the Library, and the fact that Rem did most of his work.

  Deep down, in some dark, shameful little chamber of his mind such as is reserved by cuckolds for the knowledge of their wives’ exploits, he knew that Warid had a certain reputation. He had managed to ignore it up until now, but suddenly, a certain reputation was a dangerous thing to have in Bessa, and the consciousness of encroaching threat had woken him to panicked activity. Every week now brought some story of an inveterate gambler beaten and left to bleed in the street, or a collapsed drunk gutted in his sleep, gashed throat gaping as if in terror at some dream from which he would never awake. So the First Librarian would search for his son, accept Rem’s lies with nervous acquiescence and, on those few occasions when he found Warid sober enough to talk, clasp him in trembling arms, tears leaking from the folds of skin around his eyes, and quaver vaguely, “You will be careful, won’t you, my boy? These are dangerous times, you know . . . dangerous times. . . .”

  The Second Librarian would brush him off in an embarrassed fashion, breaking out of his embrace with a cough and a muttered, “Yes, yes, of course, father. Don’t fuss so.” His behaviou
r did not alter in the least. He continued, reckless and unrepentant as ever, in spite of the First Librarian’s fears. Rem watched these repeated scenes between father and son with disapproval and apprehension. As the Ascetics’ violence escalated, the number of people frequenting Bessa’s drinking houses and gambling halls was falling rapidly, and men like Warid were starting to stand out. Her more pointed warnings were met with a similar rebuttal.

  “Oh calm down,” he would say. “Can’t put everything on hold for a few hooligans. Stop nagging. I’m not afraid of them.”

  The Second Librarian was not afraid for himself, but he had cause to be. Nor was he the only one at risk. Rem began to insist that he come into the Library through the side entrance rather than the main doors, and took to hiding him more carefully when he was passed out drunk, far from the eyes of any scholars who might happen to be passing. The Library had become the eye of some inconceivable storm, and she clung to it even harder than before, stalking its corridors and guarding the fragile equilibrium of its peace with a ferocious intensity.

  And then one evening the storm shifted its ground, as she had always known it would.

  Rem was sitting outside on the Library’s imposing marble steps like a sentry on duty, soaking up the last vestiges of heat from the stone. Inside, the First and Second Librarians were asleep. It was long past closing time, and she should have woken them hours ago so that they could go home. But instead, she had left the Second Librarian where he lay on the floor, and let his father doze off in front of his desk, his evening cup of hibiscus tea untouched at his side.

  She sat gazing at the stars with an expression of intense concentration such as is often worn by people lost in thought, so that afterwards, an observer, had anyone been around to see, would have said that she seemed to be watching for the faint plume of smoke that curled in an elegant cursive towards the darkening bowl of the sky. As it was, the only sign she gave of having noticed the fire at all was a slight stiffening in her posture, perhaps merely a reaction to the growing cold.

  After a few minutes, she rose from where she had been sitting and walked deliberately over to the well in the square in front of her, where a few women had gathered to draw water for the evening.

  “Look at that smoke,” she said as she approached them, pointing in the direction of the plume. The women glanced up with worried faces. “Must be another attack,” one said quietly. “That’s the fifth this week!”

  “It could easily catch, especially in this dry weather,” Rem said. “I’m going to see what I can do to help.” A couple of the women went with Rem, while others ran to fetch husbands and neighbours. As they hurried through the city, they were joined by more and more people, flocking towards the source of the smoke. Some carried jugs of water, running with care to avoid spilling any.

  Rem began to see confusion on the faces around her: the smoke was coming from the outskirts of Bessa, not the pleasure district. The western edge of the city was a respectable residential area, a neighbourhood of lower-order dignitaries and the better class of merchant. The frightened murmuring of the crowd increased.

  “They’re targeting people’s homes now?”

  “But this is a good area. What could they want with anyone here?”

  “Oh, we all know that,” a large woman dressed in orange interrupted loudly. “We all know what they’re doing here.” She glanced around to make sure that she had people’s interest, but did not continue, only raising her eyebrows significantly.

  The street was becoming thick with smoke, forcing many to turn back, coughing and choking. With the fire this far advanced, there would not be much left to save.

  Rem pressed onwards, following the white tendrils which threaded with lazy menace around her feet, as if to trip her. Speculation was growing in the crowd. Whose house could it be? Were they at home when the fire started? Were they still alive?

  For her own part, Rem already knew the answers to these questions. She had seen this fire in her mind’s eye long before she noticed the smoke in the sky. The houses around her were already starting to look familiar, resolving into forms which she passed frequently enough that their new shroud of smoke rendered them uncanny, like the faces of friends seen under water.

  She rounded the last corner to see the First Librarian’s house ablaze, flames leering from its windows. A circle of people had gathered at a safe distance, shielding their eyes and monitoring the progress of the fire. No one wanted their own house to catch a stray spark. Rem could hear Warid’s name being muttered, in tones ranging from pity to malicious satisfaction. The orange woman nudged her arm.

  “I only pity his poor father,” she said. “That reprobate son of his knew what he was letting himself in for, but what did his father do to deserve it? The poor old man had no idea. Where is he going to go now? It’s a mercy they weren’t at home—no question where the son is, that drunken lecher. Now I’m not saying he deserved it, but . . .”

  The woman carried on speaking, but Rem no longer heard her. She was staring at the burning house, the mesmerising flicker of the flames, but her gaze passed through it, penetrating the crumbling walls to scrutinise their own past, and the hearts and minds of those who had burned them. She winced as the full horror of what she was seeing came clear to her.

  “They didn’t come for Warid,” she whispered. Then, louder, cutting the woman beside her off in mid-squawk. “You’re wrong. You’re all wrong. They didn’t come for Warid. They came for his father. They came for the First Librarian.”

  The people around Rem stared at her as if she was mad, but she didn’t notice. She was running over all she knew about the Ascetics in her head, hoping desperately that she was wrong. They scorned the pleasures of the world. They worshipped a single truth, against which all other truths were counted deceit, and what they counted deceit, they burned. No, she wasn’t wrong. In fact, she had been a fool not to see it before.

  By this point she had turned away from the burning house, was already shoving through the crowd, running back the way she had come. She had thought the Ascetics would target Warid, had even expected them to, but she had been mistaken. They had come for his father. His father, the head of the Library, the archivist of ten thousand different truths, all clamouring at once. The Library in Bessa was a paradise; it had more voices within its walls than the Jidur. But as she ran home, Rem could see it for the first time as it must appear to Hakkim: a desert of dry parchment, filled with Nihareem.

  Her first priority, obviously, was to save the scrolls. How exactly this was to be done was a difficult question. Back in the Library, Rem fought tears as she gazed at the crowded shelves, knowing beyond certainty that she must empty them, and as quickly as possible.

  There was no point in going to the sultan for protection. Al-Bokhari was as worried as anyone by the Ascetics’ violence, but the strength of his armed guard was focused on keeping peace in the streets and maintaining the security of his palace. Besides, he was too concerned about his own position to spare much thought for the health of civic institutions. In the Jidur, Hakkim’s speeches had taken a turn deeply disquieting to Bessa’s ruler. His general condemnation of excess and pleasure was becoming more pointed and personal in import, containing dark references to a certain great man’s fondness for drink, or his wild feasting, his revelries which lasted for days on end. He had recently delivered an attack on the evils of Bessa’s brothels in which he singled out for special mention Al-Bokhari’s own seraglio, with its decadent cohort of three hundred and sixty five concubines.

  All this was bordering on the treasonous, but Hakkim’s invectives were unsurprisingly popular with an audience of poor shopkeepers and artisans. Al-Bokhari had many faults, not least the free sway he gave to his appetites, but he was no fool, and he knew full well that the last thing the Ascetic cause needed was martyrs. So Hakkim and his followers were left, for the time being, to continue their activities largel
y unhindered.

  And so was Rem.

  She had decided from the start that it would be better not to confide her decision to the First and Second Librarians. Though they were unlikely to oppose her, the prospect that they might provide useful support for her efforts was still more remote.

  The chances of them discovering her actions unaided, moreover, verged on impossibility. The First Librarian had taken the loss of his house badly. Most of his dead wife’s possessions had been inside when it burned down, reduced to ash along with his clothes and a large portion of his savings. Rem had made up a bed for him in his office, and now he rarely ventured outside. The Second Librarian mooched around as he had always done, but drank less frequently and with greater secrecy. He guiltily avoided his father’s presence, and, Rem noted, made a conscious effort to stay sober when making enquiries about renting a new house. She had taken to spreading a blanket over him when she found him sleeping in between the shelves, feeling both resentful and strangely tender towards these new inhabitants of the city once reserved for her alone. The First and Second Librarians weren’t much of a family, but Rem began to feel protective towards them all the same.

  The Library had turned into a sort of crisis centre, filled with the dispossessed and afraid, and it was under her care. During the still nights, hearing the other Librarians’ distant snores and feeling the comforting presence of the scrolls around her, nestling like ancient birds in the darkness, it was easy for Rem to slip back into the sense of peace she had felt in earlier days, to forget the terrible warning that the sight of the burning house had awakened in her mind. But her visions were filled with burning scrolls and crumbling masonry: she knew beyond a doubt that the Library was no longer the sanctuary it appeared, and none of those who sheltered within it could do so for long.