The Fire Opal Mechanism

by Fran Wilde

  Curious students, still undecided, turned their heads to see how the faculty reacted.

  How would children do otherwise? They’d been taught to follow others’ examples here.

  The speed with which professors threw in with the Pressmen worsened the sour taste in Ania’s mouth.

  “We should have done this earlier,” said the head of shipping and trade law. His voice was rough, but he pulled more books from his satchel, as if he’d known what was coming. Ania had often looked things up for him in the library. He’d always been polite.

  Now he passed one of the books he’d borrowed from her to a Pressman in exchange for a book-shaped loyalty pin.

  With speedy nods, several metals professors also took pins, former students too. Others who protested, even by shaking their heads, were pushed into a corner and held there by Pressmen. Their academic robes were thrown to the crowd, some of whom spit on the cloth.

  Ania clutched her own satchel to her side. But no one demanded anything of her, except an occasional “move!”

  In confusion, she looked down at her robes and remembered what she’d done.

  Her professorial regalia hidden, her face still scuffed with dust, she was being treated like a student. She opened her mouth to protest, then shut it. Tugged on a sleeve to rumple her dark robes further.

  Ania hated herself a little for that. If she’d been loyal to her persecuted colleagues, if she was any better than the metals professors, she should have reversed her robes. Pulled the twice-corded sleeves out and waved them in the faces of the tall, glass-faced guards.

  But she didn’t.

  Ania, too, was reduced by the reality of the Pressmen’s campaign. Her heart beat irregularly and too fast, itself trying to survive.

  To survive, to keep going, to remember—she tried to quiet her fears. But a chill passed through her. Would there be a record of what happened here if the Pressmen controlled all the books? Would it really mean peace?

  Ania’s heart pounded faster. She would continue to try to keep some books out of the Pressmen’s hands, to smuggle at least some far from the archipelago. A small revenge. Something her grandparents, and their parents, who’d fled Quadril and the Jeweled Valley long ago, would have appreciated.

  Trapped within the press of student bodies, Ania started to panic. She needed to move quickly, before the Pressmen found her trove and destroyed it too.

  Finally, a Pressman leader, wearing the color blue that Ania knew once heralded the Western Mountains’ army, addressed the students. “You can join up with us, try for jobs in Quadril, or help distribute Universal Compendiums here. Either way, you’ll soon be freed of the need for this place, peace or no. Soon enough, you’ll have Knowledge wherever you go. Nothing will be out of reach for anyone.” The speaker waved a hand. The students were dismissed.

  They shifted uneasily and began to move to the door. “Universities kept knowledge from those who couldn’t afford it,” a young man said behind Ania. “It hasn’t been fair.”

  Head bowed, Ania began to move out of the hall with the crowd.

  “We know there are professors still hiding more books.” Dean Andol’s voice carried over the students’ whispers. “Find them, bring them here. If you do, you’ll be cared for until you find work. We’ll feed you, house you if you need it. Or we’ll trade for your fare home. Exams are hereby canceled.”

  Ania didn’t dare turn around as the students applauded. So Dean Andol had done more than agree to turn over the books. He’d capitulated the university.

  The dean hadn’t spotted her yet. Or, probably more likely, he’d never really seen her when they spoke. But she cheered with the rest of the students, a sour sound buoyed by fear. She was a student now, for all that this meant. A student of falsehood and lies, of survival and mean bargains.

  Xachar Oubliant, one of Ania’s first-year students, also didn’t recognize her in the crowd. Turning her robes around had saved her. Meantime, Ania remembered Xachar. He’d borrowed several engineering books early in the semester and hadn’t returned them yet. Now he’d pinned the badge of Pressman’s senior helper to his robes.

  He strained at the handles of an overflowing book cart, working to be the first to pull it forward to the part of the square where large crates waited.

  Ania looked away fast, her heart pounding in her ears.

  She kept walking. She moved forward in the crush of robes, her eyes on her shoes, on her fellow escapees’ shoes. Brown leather, embroidered cloth, patched canvas. Her eyes blurred the seams with tears that didn’t fall.

  “Where are the rest of your books!” The shouts began. “No more hoarding knowledge!”

  An engineering professor on his knees in the corner opened his mouth when he saw Ania. He’d greeted her often as they passed on the square with a cheerful “Librarian!” The engineer had always taken good care of the books he borrowed.

  Would he betray her now? The professor clamped his lips shut. More loyal to her than she to him.

  Ania took one step and then the next. An even pace, like a clock’s tick.

  Betrayal and lies.

  The deans’ lies. Her own betrayals.

  Guilt bore Ania out of that hall and into the sunlight.

  A few of the Master Archivist’s first-year students sat on the library steps, the same place where they’d often waited for their lessons on ancient records and continuity problems. Now they looked like baby birds, gray and cowlicked in the morning light, peering from side to side, trying to figure out what was happening. Unwilling to leave, but unwilling to brave Gladulous Hall.

  If Ania were to go to them, to take them into the library, the Pressmen might think her a professor. They might capture her then, and the books she’d saved. But already the Pressmen were fanning out over the campus square, rifling through the carts, grabbing professors and students alike who did not wear their pins, commandeering assistants. She had to help these students escape.

  As Ania moved across the square with a student’s measured pace, she glanced behind her. Two Pressmen pulled three professors to stools in the center of the square, before the crates. The professors looked outraged. The engineering professor seemed to be arguing. The Pressmen blew handfuls of dust in their faces.

  Ania kept moving away from them, toward the library. Forward. Keep going.

  But she couldn’t help it. She looked back. The three professors slumped on their stools, faces pale, their eyes blank.

  Forward, she commanded her feet. Only forward.

  Up ahead, the students waited. If she turned away, they would be easily taken and given the same tasks as Xachar Oubliant.

  Ania chose once more. She stepped quickly across the remains of the square, parting the Pressmen and students in her way.

  She opened the library’s small door, which was not her usual way. Ania, like Master Vos before her, been known for swinging the big archive doors wide, an invitation.

  Her students rose and reached for their knapsacks, wanting to ask questions. She stilled them with a finger to her lips.

  “Librarian, stop!” The distant shout broke the morning. Dean Andol.

  Ania kept moving. “Forward,” she said to the door, the air, the library.

  “Librarians who talk to empty shelves rather than listening to their colleagues will be left to their fate,” Dean Andol shouted.

  Ania pressed ahead. She did talk to the library. She listened too.

  She heard the sound of running feet behind her.

  Listening wasn’t the same as obeying. Refusing to follow wasn’t the same as being abandoned.

  Ania waved the last student through the shadow of the library’s archways instead. She shut and bolted the small door with a loud bang that echoed through the stacks.

  No Pressmen would find her trove of books or conscript these students.

  “Come down below.” She beckoned her class. They looked at her, surprised and hesitant—they’d never been in the library’s basement. “It’s safer.�
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  She took a deep breath. Would they listen to her? “You must go home. Tell people what you saw here, but very carefully. You must not become part of this. You must remember.”

  When she’d begun traveling to rescue books, the Master Archivist had stored food in the basement and in the clockroom. Ania shared out some of the remaining biscuits and dried fruit with her students.

  “I’ll show you out the back way,” she whispered. “Then run as far as you can. Don’t stop to get your things from your rooms. Go home, hide your robes. Go.”

  The five students listened wide-eyed; they could sense that she’d told them a truth.

  “Will you take some of these?” Ania held up a book, feeling guilty. These books might not make it, but then again, they might. Ania couldn’t run them to safety on her own. But her students could.

  When four students nodded, she tucked a book in each of their bags. Perhaps one or two books would survive.

  Until there was nowhere left to hide the books that the Pressmen hadn’t already found.

  “If you’re discovered, you may be able to trade the book for your freedom,” she said. That eased her heart—she was giving them a way out of being caught, becoming Pressmen.

  When the last student’s shadow disappeared into the steam tunnels, Ania locked that passage too. The remaining books were too many and too heavy to carry.

  She would stay. She would defend the library, at least until the students were well away from the Far Reaches.

  She would become the decoy.

  2

  Jorit

  Jorit Lee knew a dozen things. She knew when to get out and when to stay put. She knew six ways to pick a lock. And four ways to conceal her identity.

  A lot of thieves knew these things.

  The cart she rode in creaked and groaned loudly in the dawn quiet as they moved over the archipelago’s last bridge. She shifted, trying to spare her bones the jostle. The Pressmen had sailed to the Far Reaches from the Eastern Seas, while Jorit took the more bruising path.

  “Metalsmith, eh?” the cart driver said.

  Jorit shrugged. She’d hung a jeweler’s loupe around her neck. She fiddled with it as the cart driver attempted conversation. It belonged to her grandfather, long ago.

  Thieves knew a lot of things, but expertise—finesse—that was more important than knowing, most times. And Jorit’s expertise was being inconsequential.

  She and her brother Marton had followed the Pressmen’s path across the Six Kingdoms once their studies abruptly ended. Safer to be in the Pressmen’s wake than between them and what they wanted, Marton had reasoned more than once.

  They’d found ways to make a small profit here and there. They’d changed their clothes, their looks, their methods, and they’d only rarely been caught. The thief’s mark carved on her hand in Quadril had begun to fade to a pale scar.

  As the kingdoms unified, Jorit knew it was vitally important to fade, to fit in. Once everyone knew what set an individual apart, the more they seemed to desire its elimination.

  Jorit ruffled her fingers through her close-cropped, shoe-blacked hair. She missed the fingerless gloves she’d had in Quadril, but they’d worn through. With few ways to hide the mark, and none to clear her name, she was a thief on the run, and would always be so. Her scalp itched from the dye job, but with it and a change of clothes, she’d been able to pass herself off as a local student. At least from a distance, in the shadows. If she kept her hands tucked in her sleeves.

  Quadril and then the Eastern Shores had changed how they traveled: Marton not at all, and Jorit in faster, more desperate ways. She was running out of kingdoms, and without Marton, she had no plan. Instead, she had a singular need to keep moving, and a sense that it was safer to do so alone. And if Jorit couldn’t get back what she’d lost, she knew she’d settle for safety.

  “They may not have use for you for long at the university,” the cart man said. His horse snorted steam into the sea-salted air. “Seeing as everyone will be able to learn anything they want from one book soon. No more students. No more teachers.”

  Jorit bit her tongue. She’d heard this argument before. When the Pressmen came, this philosophy always came with them. More and more, people welcomed it.

  Marton had always been the one to try to explain the difference between being told a thing was true and experiencing the truth of it firsthand. And at first, he’d been all for the Pressmen’s goals. Access to books and information should be easier than it is in the Six Kingdoms, he’d said while they studied late at night. We shouldn’t have to fight so hard to learn. She’d asked him then, But do people value it more when they have to fight for it? Jorit could hear their younger voices bantering in her memory. She shook her head to clear it.

  She’d stick with the safer way from now on. She raised her voice so the cart man could hear her over the sound of its wheels. “I expect so.”

  The cart creaked to a stop before the university gates. A group of Pressmen approached, asking the driver about the contents of his cart. Did he have any books? They offered a very pretty sum.

  The driver shook his head, then turned to point to Jorit. But she was already gone.

  * * *

  Jorit watched the Pressmen set off the last of the strange charges they’d brought.

  As the buildings of the Far Reaches’ only remaining university began to collapse under their own weight and sink into their foundations, Jorit made mental lists of things she could recover and sell from the structures still standing.

  In the arts building, all she’d found were metal bindings, palette knives. A few notebooks. Everything else had been picked over already.

  The good jewelry was long gone. And everyone in the Far Reaches suddenly seemed to have plenty of knives.

  She’d waited far too long. She hadn’t waited long enough.

  But the library still stood. And it might still have books, if the doors had remained locked for days, as everyone was saying. Last night, she’d heard Pressmen returning to their barracks—former dormitories—muttering about going inside. Wondering at missing colleagues who’d tried to enter and not returned. This morning, she heard more returning in a group: a flock of young assistants, led by a guide.

  “Historically, universities never even enriched the towns they occupied. They kept all their best knowledge locked inside their walls. The Pressmen have always fought to share that knowledge equally,” the guide was saying. “Now that we have the technology, we’re able to do that far faster. What was once a small protest against academic fortresses? Is now changing the Six Kingdoms for the better.”

  The new assistants nodded in the dawn.

  “So go out today and find as many hidden books as possible. Buy what you can to keep people happy. Take the rest. If you find a professor, call for help. We’ll free these words from what binds them. We’ll share everything. And then we’ll level the rest.”

  With excited shouts, the assistants scattered across the square. Jorit’s eyes followed the guide to where he took up a seat next to the crates. She heard his purse jingle, filled with money.

  Even pieces of books could attract a buyer. Blank books brought less, but still paid. Jorit had sold some sketchbooks from the arts building already. Sell a few books from the library, she thought in the dark shadow of the university’s wall, and escape the Far Reaches for good.

  And go where?

  Some of the outer islands beyond the Far Reaches. The ones without any universities. Jorit knew they were too small for the Pressmen, for now. But passage was expensive. Giving up was more affordable.

  Over the wall, a sooner bird spit a warning: Te-la! Te-LA!

  Jorit jumped. Stop thinking like that.

  But she knew the pattern by now. Scholars dedicated to maintaining individual universities felt strong before the Pressmen arrived. They took in fleeing students. Shepherded more books inside their walls. Idealists held on until the Last Meeting. A few hard-core academics in each kingdom stayed
through the inevitable Declaration Against Information Hoarding to make sure their students got home all right. A few more would flee. Some might be trapped, eventually, among the leveled buildings. She didn’t like to think of that.

  Jorit had learned the pattern at other universities the Pressmen visited. Once they began weakening buildings and setting charges, Jorit readied her bags. First the administration and lecture halls. The arts building. The library.

  Jorit touched a finger to the Pressmen pin she’d stolen. She’d abandoned her pretense that she was a researcher, a metalsmith, a student, a refugee from another university.

  These identities were no longer necessary. They were dangerous.

  It had been true, once. Metalsmith first class with a focus on gems, until the Pressmen demanded her research, especially on the mythical Jeweled Valley. Accused her and Marton, both, of stealing jewelers’ tailings when they refused to comply. Marked them as thieves.

  So marked, they’d become just that.

  Now Jorit was determined to escape. She knew the cost of staying too long, far too well. She knew the price of a ship’s berth. Or had known it yesterday. It had probably doubled now.

  A week ago, the territories firmly under the Pressmen’s control seemed a lot safer than the places they were still trying to take over. But now, for the first time in Jorit’s life without Marton, the Pressmen held every kingdom. She could no longer stay one step ahead of them, or follow behind them either. They were no longer on the move. They just were.

  But the ocean was still free. Jorit sniffed at the sea air hungrily. Maybe she’d stay out there for good this time. No one to mind her out there.

  And no one to mind, either. She ground her teeth. Mustn’t think about that.

  Her stomach ached as she shouldered her nearly empty canvas knapsack, the metal buckles on the straps clinking gently together. Her feet crunched on the seashell-flecked paving stones.

  Jorit moved from the shadows into the dusty dawn light. She hadn’t eaten in a while, but she had gotten used to an empty belly.

  A person could get used to almost anything in order to survive.