“Ms. Hala, they’re almost here.”
Her watch was the color of sunset pink on desert cliffs. “I see it.” The book lay open in its display case beside the angel’s outstretched finger. The world had changed, but the glass remained unbroken. She drew her picks and tools. The work was complicated and fine; she had bound the motions she needed to memories, which she summoned by recollection. A kiss in the hollow at the base of the neck. A line of poetry Ley once whispered in her sleep: howl, bound world. A fever so deep you begged, not knowing what for. The lock slipped, the case opened. She hefted the book. Classic Late Occupation binding. She read the title on the spine, in Old Telomeri letters: On Comedy.
She weighed the book in her hand, reviewed its silver spiderweb fixtures, the tanned drakeskin, the jewels. Just as the records claimed. Except for the silver family library marker on the spine.
“Ms. Hala,” Gal whispered from worlds away, “they are banging on the door. I’m making noise, as you said, but they won’t leave. Are you certain I shouldn’t just kill them?”
“I have it,” she said, too loud. The angel shifted, breaking floor tiles in agony. Shit. She ran back around the corpse, book clutched to her chest, watch ticking rose pink—jumped a wrist, ducked a spasming razor-edged wing.
“I really think it’ll be easier. Don’t worry about the bodies. I can—”
Zeddig leaped a chasm that opened in the library floor. The angel screamed music that bowed her, knelt her weeping with its beauty, but she fell through the door, pulled her legs clear, and fumbled in her suit’s breast pocket until she found her passport, thumbed it open, stared, desperately, at the stamp on the first page, the squid-mark of the Rectification Authority of Agdel Lex, cradling her in its arms. Hala’Zeddig, that’s my name, and I belong to Agdel Lex.
Take me home.
There was light, and heat, too much of either and not enough. Her jacket steamed. She dropped the passport on tile and clawed with gloved hands at the collar of her suit. Dew beaded inside the goggles. Her fingers moved too slowly. She demanded their obedience. Okay, there’s the latch, and pull, and gasp, fill your lungs with the searing air of this city where you’re supposed to live, where light hammers down from a merciless sun, where curling winds bear dust and sand, this city that’s not, more’s the pity, dead.
“Open up!” the guards shouted outside. Iskari accents. Get up. Yes, your body wants to kneel on this disgusting gray industrial tile, in this closet with its unfinished plaster walls and broken slat blinds and gray metal filing cabinets—but you didn’t get this far by listening to your body. Rise, and remember: there, against your chest, you cradle a book lost for more than a hundred years. That’s real. And if you don’t move now, they’ll take it from you, and put it somewhere it will never be seen again.
Don’t worry about the library mark just yet.
Get up.
“Ms. Hala?”
Zeddig blinked ice crystals from her eyes, looked up, and saw Gal wreathed in rainbows. The woman still wore the janitor’s jumpsuit they’d used to sneak into the library, but even Zeddig, who planned the delve, had to admit the limits of her disguise. The jumpsuit hid Gal like a gemstone filter hid a flame: even covered, she shined through, sharp and glittering as ever, the whole blond, slick, otter-muscled length of her, a deadly curve bent against the room’s sole desk, waiting for an excuse to spring.
The guards outside tried to open the door, which stuck against the chair Gal had wedged beneath the knob.
Gal indicated the door with her chin and a raised eyebrow. Her hand drifted to her heart, and tattoos there glowed with golden light. Zeddig heard a distant sound like a horsehead fiddle, but deeper: the music of Gal’s sword.
Because of course murder was the ideal solution to any inconvenience.
Gal was an excellent ally, but the people who had raised and trained her left her with odd priorities.
Zeddig tore off her suit, burst snaps and buttons, tugged hoses free of their mounts, and dumped the whole pile of equipment on the floor with a groan and a grunt. Boots—off! Wriggling out of the trousers, she gained her feet, clad only in thermal underwear, which, before Gal could respond, she removed, and before she could escape, caught her friend in her arms, tore open her shirt, and kissed her.
Gal’s eyes went wide and she twisted away, not recognizing the plan. Subterfuge wasn’t exactly the point of Gal. Zeddig hooked her neck with her arm, kissed her, and thought about someone else. The guards rammed the door again, and the chair slipped. Someone, peering through, saw her, saw Gal, and swore in Iskari; Zeddig turned, snatched up her discarded jumpsuit, covered her body, and cursed, in Talbeg first, then Iskari, so they knew what to make of her.
The men were university staff, thank Gods, not real Iskers—two guards and a young fellow with a mustache thin as the lines on his gray suit, a Lordly tentacle visible near his neck. “What are you doing here? This section is off-limits.” Pencil mustache spoke first, and wanted to sound stern, but his deep rosy blush and averted gaze rubbed the edge off his authority.
“So sorry,” she said, “my girlfriend,” faking the thick accent and verb-free grammar Iskari mystery play actors used when they impersonated Talbeg people. This kid looked straight from the Education Ministry, usual do-gooder type, didn’t think of himself as evil. “Nobody comes here. I thought. Very very sorry.” The apology and accent tasted like wadded socks, but Gal was the other option, and she was a limited instrument. Beautiful, but limited.
“Ah,” mustache said, still not looking up. “Well. I most certainly would not expect.” He didn’t finish the sentence. He seemed the type to most certainly not expect first, and decide what he most certainly did not expect later. “That is, your supervisor should be—”
“Sir,” said the older guard, a sunburned man with considerable paunch about the midsection, “perhaps we could show you the primary tier filing structure, and come back in, say, fifteen minutes?” Switching into bad Talbeg, tenses and formalities mangled: “And whence come we back, both you fucking ass gone, yes?” In Iskari, his tone of voice would read as charming.
She nodded, and tried to look grateful.
“Come on, sir,” paunch said, and as he led mustache and the other guard away, continued: “As we were saying, sir, in Agdel Lex it’s helpful to maintain a leniency of policy considering day-to-day affairs. Laxity in such cases may seem, admittedly, self-defeating, but the pair of docks of it is, constant maintenance of rigid standards leaves you without a goad to apply when discipline really matters, if you take my meaning. And on a daily basis we must learn to accept different cultural standards of, well, as you see . . .”
Zeddig closed the door, turned around, and legged into her jumpsuit. “Assholes. Let’s get out of here.”
Gal hadn’t moved. She touched her lips with the tips of her fingers, and looked at them, as if she expected to see a mark.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But: a lie, a kiss, and we’re free to go without a drop of blood shed. Isn’t that better than the alternative?”
Gal buttoned her shirt, and zipped her jumpsuit up to her collar. “It’s wrong to lie.”
“It’s wrong to kill people, too.”
“Not always.”
“Three bodies for one book is a high price,” Zeddig said. “Even for this book.”
Rather than responding, Gal touched the knuckle of her left thumb to her heart, and breathed out a prayer. Zeddig watched her: Frozen angels in the dead city looked so still and full of motion.
By the time Gal was done praying, Zeddig had donned her disguise, packed the suit in Gal’s duffle bag, and the book in her own.
“Ready?”
“As ever, Ms. Hala.”
“Good.” Zeddig ran her thumb over the library marker on the Comedy’s spine. Genuine. Damn.
Ideal getaways, and Zeddig flattered herself that theirs was nearly ideal, felt boring. No running required. No hiding, even: Why hide if no one was hunting you? Delving had this a
dvantage over normal theft: the victims, using the term loosely, never knew they had been robbed. In a certain sense, they hadn’t been. Zeddig and Gal bore their prizes through the Postal Tax Authority’s ill-lit gray halls, maintenance personnel burdened with the tools of their profession, invisible.
The only excitement came when they emerged into the oven-hot sandy noontime city, descended the front steps of a building that was once a palace, and passed a Wrecker climbing the stairs.
The woman was robed head to foot to shade her many Lords from the sun. Zeddig only saw the thin curling tentacles that gloved her hands, and a trace of wetness on the cheek beneath the hood. Space around her thickened and callused, and the air dried—the Iskari city, Agdel Lex, strongest in its agents’ presence.
Zeddig did not look at Gal. She trusted her friend not to draw.
She hoped that trust was well placed.
The Wrecker hesitated behind them on the steps, and Zeddig’s skin prickled, as when the air tensed before lightning. The Wrecker smelled the dead city. But of course: that’s why she came. The taint of Zeddig’s delve filled the Postal Authority, and the building had to be cleansed. Wreckers’ priorities were simple: protect the environment, heal any trace of breach, so as to remove the risk of noncompliance.
Do your job, she willed the woman inside the monster. Follow procedure.
The Wrecker continued up the stairs, and Zeddig did not exhale in relief.
Now she just had to tell Gal the bad news.
* * *
All things considered, Zeddig felt good—at least until sunset, when Raymet caught up with her on narrow, steep, cobbled Coronation Street, crisscrossed with clotheslines, neighbors shouting to neighbors out narrow windows, old women reclining on fire escapes to fan themselves and smoke. Zeddig carried On Comedy in her satchel, and breathed heavy as she climbed. Her sweat didn’t dry instantly on her skin. Coronation Street wound halfway out of Agdel Lex, and the air felt better here—more real.
“Zeddig,” Raymet said, “give me the book.”
She kept climbing.
Raymet sprinted in front of her, stopped, and spread her arms to block Zeddig’s path. As a barricade, Raymet left much to be desired: her close-shorn head barely reached Zeddig’s nose, and she had the build of a woman whose notion of heavy lifting involved stacks of books. Her shoulders were heaving after the brief run, and Zeddig could gauge her pulse from perturbations in her throat. They had been graduate students together, but Raymet still dressed like one. Her nails were painted sparkly black, and she was as angry as Zeddig had ever seen her.
Zeddig let herself be stopped anyway. “I asked Gal not to tell you.”
“You know she can’t lie.”
Zeddig tried to step around her. Raymet lunged for the satchel’s shoulder strap, but Zeddig pulled out of reach, and Raymet stumbled into a trash pile. She made a sick face and kicked her thick boots free of muck. “Don’t grab my things,” Zeddig said. “We’ve talked about that.”
“I’m—you’re—Z, we have to get paid for this job. It took us months to track down the Comedy, and most of that work was mine, climbing through archives—”
“You love archives.”
“I also love to eat. Some of us don’t have rich families to sponge off.”
That stung. Zeddig paid her own way, and “rich” wasn’t the right word for the Hala these days—they were still on the Roll of Fifty, but under Iskari rule the roll was just a list of potential troublemakers. Raymet’s family had been outsiders even before the Iskari came. On the one hand, they weren’t anyone; on the other, nobody cared what they once were. “We’ll get paid.”
“My collector’s waiting on this, Z. Public research, deep pockets, soulstuff to burn, near the end of a budget cycle, and she was holding a chunk of that budget for us.”
“You’re sleeping with her.”
“That’s not the point! She had budget, and now she’ll have to scramble to spend what’s left before the close of the quarter or she’ll lose it, and trust me, she’ll remember this mess next time I go to her when we have to unload something in a hurry. Relationships don’t just appear, Z, you have to nurture them—or, at least, I have to nurture them. We’ve found the only surviving volume of the Comedy in the world, and you just want to give it away?”
“I’m not giving it away,” she said. “I’m returning it.”
“To a private collection.”
“It’s a family library.” She glanced up and down the narrow street, drew close to Raymet, and tried to keep her voice level. “The wars broke up libraries families spent centuries building. What wasn’t looted fell into the dead city—my family’s books, the Ko’s, all the old collections.”
“I know that.”
“But you don’t live it. I know every book in the Hala collection. I feel the ones we’ve lost—like missing teeth. This matters. This is heritage.” The anger burst from nowhere, all her solid moral conviction suddenly expanding and aflame. She only recognized it for anger once it passed and left her raw, in the alley, returning Raymet’s wide-eyed stare like a kid caught sneaking out after dark, with that same futile hope the parent will say nothing and let the infraction, without comment, be undone.
“This is about Ley, isn’t it.”
Zeddig checked her satchel to be sure the book was still there. “It’s not about Ley.”
“It is! Gods. Zeddig.” Raymet paced between Zeddig and the front steps; her hand clawed at air as if she could scrape it away and find the right words. “Look. Breakups hurt. They do! Fine, you felt betrayed. A woman learns from you, sleeps with you, loves you, and turns and uses that in a way you don’t like, that sucks. But it’s been two years, and we’re not talking about exploiting the dead city.” She realized, too late, that this line of argument was going nowhere fast, and dismissed it with a frown. “We need to eat. You like eating, right? Food? Hells, even if you don’t, we need to pay to set up our next delve.”
“I like to eat,” Zeddig said. “But we need to do the right thing.”
She slipped around Raymet, climbed three steps, and knocked on the door. Raymet grabbed for Zeddig’s bag again, but Zeddig glared at her and she slowed, stepped back, hands up. “Fine.”
A girl in a dusty smock opened the door, and looked at Zeddig as if waiting for the answer to a question no one had asked.
“Is this the Ko household?” Zeddig pronounced the words slowly and clearly, with respect. She did not use the old formulas often. All the more reason to use them well.
The girl nodded.
“I am Hala’Zeddig, Hala Acquisitor. Is your archivist receiving guests?”
The girl weighed them with her eyes. “Yes.”
She led them both—Raymet, behind Zeddig, swearing in Iskari about stairs and humidity and the outside world in general, which for Raymet meant anything beyond the walls of her subbasement apartment—up a winding stair. Zeddig climbed with one hand on the railing, feeling the good wood under bad paint. The lower three floors of this building held four families these days, to judge from the names on post boxes and the toys cluttering up the landings, with eight children, on a range of Iskari assimilations—pink and blue toys on the third floor landing, green and yellow and black on the rest. The stairwell smelled of cinnamon and roast peppers, goat and beef and lemon peel. Chipped plaster revealed a vine mosaic. Zeddig grazed the tiles with her knuckle and judged their age, the soulstuff generations of onlookers had planted so deep not even need could tear it out.
Raymet stuffed her hands into her pockets and hunched her shoulders to her ears and didn’t look anywhere save the worn toes of her boots.
The building’s top floor was a single dark room, empty save for an old woman in a wicker chair, wrapped in a quilt of black on black, pondering a blank wall.
The girl ran to the old woman, bent to her ear, and whispered.
The woman raised her head, but did not turn.
“You’re really doing this?” Raymet whispered in Iskari,
but Zeddig silenced her with a look.
“How may I call you?” Zeddig asked.
The old woman nodded, still without looking, and the girl answered, “Grandmother.”
Fair enough. “Grandmother Librarian. I am Hala Acquisitor, and I have come to return a volume.”
She drew On Comedy from the satchel, with reverence. The first time Zeddig saw Gal draw her blade, she’d been shocked to recognize that attitude of prayer. Yes, Gal’s sword was pretty, true heart’s pledge to her undead queen and so forth, but it was still a sword. What could it do for the world save cut?
The room tightened and grew small. With measured, slow steps, she approached the old woman, knelt, and placed the book in her lap.
Grandmother Librarian stroked the book’s face, the silver trimmings and tanned drakeskin and the small jewels embedded in the cover. Her mouth cracked open. Thin white hairs on her upper lip drifted with her breath. She caressed the binding, curled her fingers around the edge, and guided its covers open.
She read the ancient Talbeg script with her fingertips, mouthing words. Zeddig lacked Raymet’s languages; she could pronounce old script but the grammar didn’t always jive in her head, so she didn’t know what made the old woman’s face split into a smile.
Grandmother Librarian closed the book, felt—without urgency, knowing what she would find—along the spine, traced the silver library mark.
“Thank you.”
Her voice was old as the edges of the world. Zeddig, still kneeling, thought of her own grandmother, and the dead city and the ice. She could not breathe without weeping.
Grandmother Librarian folded her quilt aside, and drew herself from her chair, On Comedy clutched in one hand, the other extended, clawed. The girl slid her shoulder beneath the old woman’s searching palm. Grandmother Librarian walked as if ice covered the floor. Her left knee buckled, and the girl took the extra weight.
When she was near enough to touch the wall, she spoke, quiet words, ground by wars and gods and passing ages of the world. “The Ko of Alikand take care,” Zeddig might render it in Kathic or Iskari, poorly—“take care,” for example, was a single verb. Preserve? Protect? Defend? Await? “Remember” might be the word, if Kathic or Iskari let memory be a physical act.
The Ruin of Angels--A Novel of the Craft Sequence Page 4