by Brent Weeks
Maybe one crumb.
Is a crumb the unit of measure for cowardice?
He tried stepping into the aisle again. Ah, it wasn’t endless, it was merely so wide that it seemed so. Somewhere in an oceanic distance he could see something that had to be a wall, and to the other side, the same. Looking so far and being made aware of the expanse inspired vertigo again. Kip turned instead to look at what was near at hand.
A flurry of activity burst forth, the moment of creation appearing to only begin because he was there to observe it, the shelves near at hand filling with an explosion of texts, a blunderbuss blast of thought flew through the aether of every language and collided with the medium of its time: vast double-roll scrolls were unrolling, being filled with text by invisible quills, being illuminated whimsically, then advancing; whole pages of text were unrolled from a press, lined up like soldiers, and sliced apart and stitched to a binding before flying to their place on a shelf; papyrus was pounded flat in layers even as intricate glyphs danced across its surface; clay tablets were smoothed to uniform thickness, tiny punch marks of cuneiform wedges barely filling it before the tablets hardened in sun or kiln; bamboo was pounded flat, cured and stitched, script dropping down each column like rain: a thousand kinds of writing, on skin and on stone and on wood and on paper and on material for which he had no name; left to right, and right to left, and top to bottom, and all at once, and in no discernible order at all. Some of them flew to shelves nearby, but some—like the cuneiform—flew to distant shelves, rows back.
Almost at Kip’s feet, he saw scrawling—on a tabletop that looked like those in the lecture halls at the Chromeria. In a child’s awkward penmanship, written by an invisible hand, letters leapt out:
Majister Gold Thorn is a bitch
She went to the chirurjins with a notty itch
Majister they sed you have the pox
The only cure is lots of
The doggerel was never finished before it was whisked off to a shelf somewhere. Ooo, poor bastard. Kip couldn’t imagine Magister Goldthorn had taken the mockery well.
The old styles of writing that no one used anymore flew far away, and doggerel that had to have been written in the last ten years was nearby. So… What if this place held every word ever written? Every word. And every word, as written, was added.
Which meant Kip was standing at the present, facing the past, watching history roll slowly by to the left and right.
He turned around, expecting to be standing at the edge of a precipice or a blank.
But he was wrong. The future rose before him, league after league of shelves, crammed book after book—the scrolls slowly disappearing as the pressed books crowded them out, and were in turn replaced by shining metal or crystal pieces Kip couldn’t begin to identify somewhere in the distance. And there, beyond even those, far, far in the distance, but still visible, was the library’s wall.
The future ended.
Kip looked off to the sides again, and there, dimly could make out walls. To the past—and nothing. The past might be finite, but it went farther back than he could see, and the past was deeper than the future.
I die and go to a library? Sure, it could be worse, but I’ve spent a lot of time in libraries this year. Quite enough time, really. Do I have to stay forever? Where do I go pee?
I suppose the dead don’t pee.
In the same way they don’t breathe?
He was just about to start walking to explore the shelves when a man fell out of the sky. He landed with a sound like a rockslide, right in front of Kip. Somehow, his landing gave the impression that he’d been falling forever, and that the landing wasn’t even a strain on his knees. Sort of like Cruxer landing a jump. Even if Kip had lived to train in the Blackguard for a hundred years, he was pretty certain making a landing look light and easy was a skill he never would have mastered.
The man stood gracefully, fixed the cuffs of a shirt under a three-buttoned black jacket of a cut and shiny fabric Kip had never seen. Over the jacket, he wore a leather greatcoat, black on the outside, white on the inside, slim cut and hanging down to his pointed-toe leather boots. He took off a brimmed hat similar to a petasos and shook back a cascade of platinum-white hair that didn’t quite touch his collar. His features were paler than anyone Kip had ever seen, exotic, unearthly, perfect. He smiled, a genuine smile that touched his mirrored iridescent eyes, and his teeth were not quite white, but instead pearlescent, and the bit of dogtooth that Kip saw in that smile seemed longer and sharper than usual.
This man was not, Kip decided, a man. A shiver of fear ran down his spine, despite the man’s apparent friendliness and beauty, but then Kip thought, I’m already dead. What’s he gonna do to me?
Good thing fear is rational. Good thing you can talk yourself right out of it.
“Hail, Godslayer,” the stranger said. With his pretty face and sharp beard and immaculate coiffure, Kip had expected a tenor, but instead the voice emanating from this being was a bass—crisp, perfectly enunciated, not gravelly or an indistinct rumble, but a bass that sounded too big to be coming from this man-sized creature.
“Hail, scary guy who fell out of the sky.”
The stranger’s eye twitched as if with irritation. He smiled to cover it instantly, but not before a ragged crack shot from the corner of his eye where he’d twitched to his ear. It filled in as fast as it appeared, and left the smile alone on his face. “Hail, Godslayer,” he said again, as if being very patient.
“Hail… sir.” Puzzled. It was as if Kip was playing a game, and no one had told him the stakes, let alone the rules. It had happened enough in the last year that Kip should have been getting used to it. But this wasn’t the kind of thing you get used to. The man filled Kip with a quiet, nameless dread.
Already dead, can’t do anything to me. Oh, look at that. There may not be peeing in the afterlife, but it turns out that the strong desire to pee is indeed possible.
Which, in itself, was kind of terrifying.
Not moving from the spot where he’d landed, the man extended an open hand, tilted up. It wasn’t quite the attitude for a handshake or a wrist clasp, and Kip looked at it warily. Falling from the silent sky, something slapped into the man’s open hand. A polished black wood cane.
“You’ll excuse me the use of a cane, I hope,” the man said with a sound like great gears grinding. He stepped forward, and Kip could see that the man’s ankles were broken, poorly mended. Perhaps that was the reason for the stiff leather boots. “Under what name have you come here?”
Kip looked to the left and right. “Uh, is this a trick question?”
The man settled into place perhaps ten feet away from Kip, an odd distance for interlocutors. He put his cane centered before him and leaned on it with both hands like a three-legged stool. He waited.
“I am whatever I am. I mean, I am what I ever am. Kip. Kip,” Kip said. “Is there a privy here?”
“Kip? Kip. Not your birth name, is it? Kip, so puny, so insignificant. Barely worth three little letters. ‘Don’t look at me,’ it screams. ‘I’m just a bastard.’ Kip Delauria. Kip Guile. Lard Guile. Breaker. Godslayer. Perhaps Diakoptês? If you’re going to start collecting names in other languages and religions, this is really going to get tedious. But what are you under the names? Under your cloak of names, who are you?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I was known as a bit of a wearer of masks myself, you know. They called me… well, why ruin it? It became one of the first Black Cards, forbidden, for those who viewed it lost their minds. That, little Guile, from the tiny fraction of my power that can fit inside a card. You’re dying, right now. Oh, no worries, time is different here. We have all the time out of the world to talk, but your body is dying. I can save you.”
“Well, that solves that,” Kip said. “Here I didn’t know if you were a hero or a villain. Villain.”
“Really? It’s so easy for you?” the immortal asked.
“N
ot complicated,” Kip said. A million million books, and not one place to pee. “There’s a time for ratiocination, and a time for gut feelings. Gut wins, this time.” Ratiocination? Where did I even hear that word? Too much time in the restricted library.
“And if head and heart are equal, with which facility do you decide whether to follow the one or the other?” The creature smiled. He leaned on the cane with his left hand and propped his right hand on his hip. The move pushed back his long leather coat and revealed a pistol hanging in a special holster made for it at his right hip. It was actually kind of brilliant. Most people carried a pistol either in a bag or in a pocket. This design would make it far easier to draw quickly. It even had a tie at the bottom to keep the holster tight against the leg, so it wouldn’t flop around. Its wearer could always be certain of the position of his pistol. Kip would have to remember that.
Kip said, “You come across a dying man, and it’s in your power to help him—and you don’t. That’s villain behavior.”
Amused. Only a too-small ring of black pupil interrupted the eerie mirrored perfection of his eyes and showed where he was looking. “Ah, but you’re not dead yet. So perhaps you’re too hasty to judge me.”
Kip scowled. He had the distinct impression that the longer he listened to this man—Man? God? Something in between?—the more convinced he’d be. In that way, Kip’s tutelage under Gavin Guile was invaluable. Gavin tended to do the same thing.
“So I haven’t saved you. Yet. But neither has my enemy, now, has he?”
Enemy? “Who are you?” Kip asked. There was something odd about the leather of that long coat. Dual-layered, supple, yet so thin.
“Of course, he can’t save you. He doesn’t see. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t save. He is dead, and this world is ours.”
“Who are you?” Kip whispered. That was what it was about that coat. It was the pale white of the Angari on the inside, and that black was Parian black. Orholam have mercy, it was made of human skin.
“I am the Bearer of Fire; I am the Opener of Eyes; I have been called a god and a beast; I have been called angel and demon, and Slave of the Holy, and Breaker of Chains. I have been called jinn and monster and man. Those who hate me have called me Defiler, Seducer, Corrupter—and Master, and King. Wanderer, Outcast, Kinless, Unclean. I am the Right Hand of Darkness, the Voice of the Grave. I have slain kings and gods. I have come to bring true worship to the Seven Satrapies, to destroy what has been erringly wrought by human hands. The luxiats have shrouded my coming in darkness, but some things cannot be hidden forever. You know who I am.”
Kip’s metaphysical heart came into perfect synchronicity with his physical heart, and stopped. No.
“Say it.”
“You… you’re the Lightbringer.”
“I am.” The Lightbringer rolled his neck, and then his shoulders, and giant, glorious white wings unfurled from his back with a crack, emerging from long slits cut in the coat. His shirt tore, revealing a torso so white and flawless it could have been carved of living marble. He was larger than life, and more beautiful than any woman. It was more than simple beauty. It was raw presence, as if you magnified the melancholic yearning and pain of a perfect sunset a thousand times and stirred it with an animal lust to take and be taken and added glory like the true light of a summer day passing through a lens and burning Kip, the ant.
This is why the owl hunts at night; her eyes would burn in the sun. This is why man sees only his slim slice of the spectrum. To see more would be to be blinded. To see that for which his mind is not made was to be struck dumb.
Kip dropped to his knees, fell prostrate. He couldn’t help it. Had no strength. No will.
His hands slapped in the dust, in a position of worship, barely keeping his face from smacking the golden floor. The dust—dust? here? in this immaculate library?—swirled up in clouds into his open eyes before he could blink. In seconds, he was streaming tears, his tears turning humble dust to mud. The mud burned his eyes, but it wasn’t the burning of getting a speck in your eye, it was the burning of a muscle fatigued, a muscle growing stronger. The burning faded to tingling.
He looked up—and through, his eyes made new, silently made strong. Beneath a façade of glory—a cloak of light—the wings were rotten; a stench of decaying flesh swept out in a putrid cloud; the skin was blackened and curling, split from flames, and something else, something utterly inhuman was beneath—all quickly covered. The immortal bared his fangs at the sky, and snarled in a language that Kip’s ears couldn’t parse into syllables, nor his tongue ever hope to form. Here was an angel of light indeed, for light can also be used to dazzle, to blind, to misdirect and deceive. Here was light bent to illusions and lies.
The masks slammed back in place, and the immortal said, “I am Abaddon, the King, one of the Two Hundred who marched out of the Tyrant’s palaces and went to make our own way in this wilderness, and a thousand worlds like it. I am a lover of queens and a father of gods. I am the Day Star, ushered from the heavens in glory.”
Stand.
Kip couldn’t tell if the voice came from within his head or outside of it, but his stubbornness agreed it was a good idea. He found strength, a little anyway, and stood slowly. “Marched out? Or were thrown out? So out of two hundred failures, I only rate you? What’s the fat son of a whore got to do to get some respect?”
The immortal laughed. “Save yourself, Kip. He won’t. Though if you do, He’ll take credit. Like always, sapping the achievements of the good and the great, making you doubt your own worth. If you’re strong enough to save yourself today, I’ll be back. When you’re ready. I have eternity. You have… minutes, or fifteen years, or seventy years at the most. It’s all the same to me. I will come again, in your hour of need, when your own strength fails. If you live so long.”
For some reason, that seemed a little more menacing than, ‘Fare thee well, see thee anon!’ Kip cleared his throat. “Not sure I’m understanding. If I live so long?”
“You man. Why do you think you’re here, in the Great Library where all the knowledge of your race’s five ages is stored?”
I’ve kind of been wondering that.
Abaddon seemed incredulous that Kip still didn’t get it, even with what he seemed to think was a generous hint. He shook his head. “Know this, O Kip. Your being here involves a compromise. Your mind is not structured to understand timelessness. So instead of being outside of time, you are instead carrying around with you a bubble of causality.”
“Hammerfist centaur granite,” Kip said gravely.
Ancient eyes wrinkled, irritated. “What?”
“I was, uh, trying to demonstrate how I could understand each of the three words in a three-word phrase and still have no clue what they mean together.” Kip grinned weakly.
Monster eyes flashed, and something seemed terribly wrong with that mouth as it spoke: “This library is outside of time, but your mind isn’t made to understand timelessness. So while you’re here, cause precedes effect. Which means you’re not fully removed from time. Your body is dying right now. You’re not breathing. Your heart has stopped. If you could go back now, you’d be yourself when you arrived. If you don’t get back soon, you’ll be alive, but a simpleton, perhaps with no control of your limbs, or your bowels, perhaps too gone to even care. You wait a few seconds more back in time, and you’ll simply be dead.”
Oh.
Oh, shit!
“You think I’m being awfully helpful for a villain, don’t you?”
Actually, Kip hadn’t gotten that far yet. He was still a little hung up on the bubble of causality part. But now that he mentioned it…
Abaddon folded his wings. They slipped easily back into slits in the sides of his human-leather coat. There was something about the greatcoat that drew the eye, more than simply its repulsive materials. It shimmered. Everything about this godling breathed extravagance, from the delicate ivory lace at his cuffs to the subtle blue silk pinstriping in his straight-l
egged trousers. He assumed his posture again, left hand on cane, right hand on hip. He noticed Kip’s glance fall to his pistol.
“There are rules here,” Abaddon said. “These very clothes come from hundreds of years in your future. It’s forbidden that I show a mortal things from after his time. Never was much for rules.”
“What are you?” Kip asked instead.
“In this form? A lone wanderer, an icon, a card from a deck not yet painted. Your descendants, like you, will believe that every excellence is praiseworthy. This figure is good at killing. Nothing more. Killing and moving on, with impunity, as if above their petty laws, as if a god. And how they will worship it. Indeed, they would worship you, O… Kip,” he said, the word like a popping bubble, as if he were delighted by insubstantiality of it. “By this time you’ve already killed a god and a king and fought a sea demon at the very walls of—oh, my, no, not that, not yet.”
He smiled, and Kip thought that was a trap, a little false prophecy that would probably get him killed. If he made it that far.
“You want to see it?” In a move faster than human thought, the pistol was in Abaddon’s hand. “I made it with my own hands, sacrificing precious days out of eternity to Make. It has been long and long since I have done such, and it will be millennia, I think, before I do so again. I named her Comfort. Do you think that your chromaturgy is magic? What is the most irritating thing about a pistol?”
This wasn’t right. There was more going on here than Kip could grasp. “I don’t know. The inaccuracy. The black powder blinding and burning you after you fire.”
“I fixed those, too, but think bigger.”
Kip was fascinated, but this… this was a smokescreen, just like the black powder. “I don’t care,” he lied. “Why are you doing this?”
“Reloading. Reloading is the most irritating part of a pistol. Some two hundred years hence, they discover a reliable rotating cylinder to give multiple shots before reloading is necessary. I copied the form so as to not stand out, but this pistol… no reloading. Ever. Reloads itself. That, that is magic. Do you want to know how I did it? I came perilously close to violating the basic laws of the universe to do so. A magic engine, within an inanimate object?”