by Ian Irvine
Maelys could not stop shaking; even on the ice-covered surface of the Frozen Sea she had never felt so cold.
‘He’s gone,’ she said when Yggur appeared, followed by Tulitine. ‘Yalkara has taken Emberr’s body and I’ll never see him again. Never get the chance to say farewell.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Tulitine, folding Maelys in her arms. ‘Let it out.’
‘I can’t. It’s not finished and now it never will be, and all because of her, the evil cow. She stole the fire and caused all this trouble. I hate her!’
There was a long pause, after which Tulitine said gently, ‘Yalkara is his mother, and Emberr was her only surviving child. She also had the right.’
Maelys wept.
Yggur searched the cottage, the garden and the black forest behind it, and came back. ‘There’s no white fire here, not a trace. We’ve come all this way for nothing.’
‘But the caduceus pointed here,’ said Tulitine. ‘Why would it do that unless the fire was here at the time?’
Yggur squatted down and inspected the indented carpet. ‘The fibres are slowly springing up. I’d say the body was taken not long before Maelys came in.’
‘You mean Yalkara is still here somewhere?’
Yggur shook his head. ‘That thud as we arrived must have been her leaving the Nightland. She realised Maelys was coming and took the body away.’
‘Where to?’ cried Maelys.
‘Two centuries ago she went back to the void with the surviving Charon and their dead. She would have taken her son’s body –’
‘You’ve got to take me there,’ said Maelys desperately, clutching at Yggur’s arm. ‘I have to –’
‘I’m sorry, Maelys,’ he said gently. ‘It’s quite impossible. I can’t take you to the void, and even if I could, how would you find him? It’s infinite. Besides, none of us could survive there for a single minute.’
Maelys subsided to the floor, blindly stroking the depression in the carpet, which was all she had left of him, and even that was disappearing by the second. Soon there would be nothing.
‘As you said, the days can pass swiftly in the Nightland, especially when you don’t want them to,’ said Tulitine. ‘Stilkeen gave us fifteen days to find the true fire, and our time is rapidly running out. Where to now?’
‘I don’t know where else to look,’ said Yggur.
‘Someone must know. We just have to ask the right people.’
‘I don’t even know where to begin.’
‘Then I’d start where all such searches would have begun in the olden days,’ said Tulitine. ‘The Great Library.’
‘I’m not sure anything is left of it,’ said Yggur. ‘Wasn’t it sacked by the lyrinx at the end of the war?’
‘So some people say,’ said Tulitine, ‘though I don’t know if it’s true.’
‘And if anything of value remained, Jal-Nish would have carried it off when he proclaimed himself God-Emperor.’
‘I don’t think so. If you recall, when he met Yalkara on the Range of Ruin he had never heard of Stilkeen, or chthonic fire.’
‘Then we’d better get going,’ said Yggur. ‘Each portal hurts me more than the last, and I’d hate to fail with the one taking us out of the Nightland.’
‘It would be ironic indeed,’ said Tulitine, ‘if you ended up a prisoner in the prison you helped to create.’
Maelys knew, because Yggur had told her, that the Great Library was situated in Zile, a once great city on the River Zur near the north-western tip of vast Meldorin Island, west of the Sea of Thurkad.
But Zile had fallen into decay long before the war – when the Sea of Perion became the Dry Sea the climate had changed and the fertile floodplains of the Zur had dried out and blown away, leaving a desert crisscrossed by the salt-crusted ancient irrigation canals. The people of Zile were long gone, save for a few hardy folk who, Yggur had said, lived in the abandoned city like lizards dwelling in the cast-off shoe of a giant.
‘Yet the Great Library, one of the wonders of the ancient world, still survives,’ he added as the portal deposited them on its roof many hours later. He breathed deeply of the dry evening air, as if tasting its differences to all the other places they had been. ‘I had not thought it would.’
‘The librarians once claimed that it held the entirety of Santhenar’s Histories,’ said Tulitine, walking painfully across to the edge. Yggur went after her and put his arm around her, and she clung to him gratefully.
Maelys wandered along the side of the enormous rectangular roof, pleased to have something unfamiliar to distract her from her cycling miseries. The Library, a simple, classical building built from red marble, had many storeys, but all the lower levels lay below the drifting sand and the dunes were almost up to the roof in places. How long until they came over the top and covered it completely? How long until its magnificence was erased from human memory, as her own home had been destroyed?
She paced back and forth, immersed in her melancholy thoughts, for she loved books and could still remember that nightmare night, as a child, when Vomix had ordered the library of Nifferlin Manor burned.
Maelys took a deep breath, forced both Emberr and the past behind her, and tried to concentrate on the reason they were here. If they couldn’t find true fire before the fifteen days were up, Stilkeen had said the world would be destroyed from the void.
And she believed it, for everyone knew that the void extended forever and was full of beasts of all kinds, each endlessly evolving in a desperate attempt to compete with their savage, intelligent predators. The Histories told that the most vital desire of every intelligent species there was to escape into the physical universe and find a world of its own. Every species yearned for that, and there were few worlds better than Santhenar.
Yggur had calculated that six days had passed since Stilkeen’s proclamation; only nine to go. Time was rapidly running out and, even if they found the true fire, how could they be sure that Stilkeen would keep its word?
‘Maelys?’ Yggur called out, sounding pleased about something.
He and Tulitine were leaning on the rail, looking towards the city of Zile, and Maelys saw many magnificent public buildings, all with colonnades and arches, along broad avenues lined with palms and spreading trees.
‘How come there’s no sand in the city?’ she said.
‘That’s a very good question,’ said Yggur, gazing beyond Zile to where the River Zur formed a green, fertile ribbon meandering into the distance.
‘I thought you knew your Histories,’ said Tulitine, who was more cheerful than she’d been in weeks. ‘There was a prediction made of old, Not until the Sea of Perion once more thunders against the jewelled shores of Katazza Mountain will Zile rise again. And now that the Dry Sea has become the Sea of Perion again, and is nearly full, the climate of Zile is changing back. The people must have started to return years ago, to have scoured the city so clean of sand. See the pennants flying from that building on the hill?’
‘But they haven’t come as far as the Library,’ said Maelys. ‘How do we get in?’
‘There’s a roof door down the far end,’ said Yggur, pointing. ‘I’ve been here many times, though not in the past decade, of course.’
They had just turned that way when a silver head appeared, climbing a set of steps that Maelys had not noticed. It was an old woman, small and thin, with a long, rather pinched face and thick spectacles perched on her bony nose. She wore a shapeless gown that went down to her sandals, and carried a black bamboo cane with a curved handle. Leaning on it at the top of the steps, she squinted at them, then let out a delighted cry.
‘Yggur!’
‘Lilis,’ he beamed, striding towards her with his arms out.
‘Lilis became the Librarian here after the great Nadiril finally died, two centuries ago,’ Yggur explained after the introductions had been made and Lilis was leading the way down the steps. Despite her age, and the cane, she went down quickly and was steady on her feet.
; ‘Do you have Aachim blood, Lilis,’ asked Maelys politely, ‘to have lived so long?’
‘No,’ said Lilis. Her voice was high but strong, not a quavery old woman’s voice at all. ‘The position of Librarian here requires a mastery of the Art and comes with one benefit, long life, for when a document must be found we rely almost entirely on the memories of our librarians, and there is only so much anyone can read in a normal lifetime. I assume you have come here to consult us?’
‘I was not sure that the Library had survived,’ said Yggur. ‘I’ve been out of the way for the past seven years –’
‘Held in thrall to the Numinator,’ said Lilis.
‘How did you know that?’
‘The Library has many sources; it is our business to know such things.’
‘Not even the God-Emperor knew of the Numinator,’ said Maelys.
Lilis paused on a landing. The steps continued down out of sight. ‘Ah, the God-Emperor. He also consults us at times.’
‘Really?’ said Maelys. ‘I’d have thought he’d just take what he wanted.’
Lilis gave a delicate little cough. ‘Zile does not lie within the empire. Surely you knew that?’
‘According to the God-Emperor,’ said Tulitine, ‘the empire covers all the known world, save the island of Faranda where the Aachim dwell.’
‘Sometimes the God-Emperor exaggerates,’ Lilis said diplomatically. ‘In any case, the particular skills of my librarians could not be duplicated with less than a hundred years of training, nor are they readily coerced. He’s not a fool; it’s far easier for him to pay our fees.’
‘But he’s a monster,’ said Maelys. ‘How can you –?’
‘The charter of the Great Library requires that we provide information to all, impartially, as long as they can pay the fee, and it can be high. Even with the few librarians I have left, the cost of maintaining the Library is prodigious.’
‘What if someone poor needs information?’
‘The fee may be waived for the genuinely indigent,’ said Lilis coolly. ‘I was a street waif when I was a child; I can always tell the genuine supplicants from the cheats. But enough chitchat. You’ve come about chthonic fire, of course. You want to know where to find it.’
‘How did you know that?’ cried Maelys, then saw that Yggur was grinning.
‘When you’re selling information,’ said Lilis, who was also smiling, ‘you must always appear to know more than your customers. That’s one of the first principles my master, old Nadiril, taught me when I came to the Library as a waif, just ten years old. Stilkeen’s message came here as well, but if it hadn’t, my sources would have soon told me about it. You’re the first to arrive but you won’t be the last, and I’ll tell everyone the same thing.’
‘Then I would advise you to take strong precautions for your security,’ said Yggur. ‘The worst men and women in the world will be after Stilkeen’s pure fire, and some of them would think nothing of closing your mouth forever – or even burning the Library – to make sure no one else can learn what you have told them.’
Lilis looked shocked, though she recovered quickly. ‘Thank you for the warning,’ she said gravely. ‘The Library, despite its appearance, is not unprotected, but I will take extra precautions.’
‘You should consider sealing it so no one can enter from outside.’
‘You forget yourself, old friend,’ Lilis snapped. ‘The bedrock on which the Great Library was founded, almost three thousand years ago, was the unfettered exchange of information with all comers.’
Yggur bowed. ‘I’m sorry for the presumption. But come now, Lilis, you would not hand over a depraved or obscene volume to a child, and neither would you give a deadly secret to a lunatic. Limits must often be placed on what information you provide.’
‘That is so, of course,’ said Lilis, more calmly. ‘The past cannot be allowed to bind the present.’
Maelys expected to be ushered into a vast room crammed with books and scrolls, but Lilis led the way down a broad corridor, turned off it into a narrower one, down the steps to a narrower yet, and stopped outside a plain door, which she opened.
The room she entered was small and spare, containing but a high bench the length of one wall, covered in manuscripts, a stool, a small hard pallet in a corner and a few shelves, one of which was empty.
‘This was Nadiril’s room, and after I succeeded him I took it for mine. I like it. There’s no clutter and no distractions.’
She indicated the pallet and they sat down on it. Tulitine lay back, letting out a small sigh as she took the weight off her aching bones. Lilis perched bird-like on the stool.
‘Since I knew the question would soon be asked, I made sure I knew the answer,’ she said. ‘Firstly, our catalogues contain nothing about chthonic fire – it is never mentioned. Of course, the catalogues are sadly out of date, but since chthonic fire would have been brought to Santhenar a long time ago, that does not matter. Neither do any of my junior librarians – some older than I am – recall the term, and nor do I. I certainly never heard Nadiril mention it.’
She wrinkled her brow, then went on.
‘Yalkara must know, and I have re-read all we have here about her, though I did not find anything. The Charon were ever secretive and she most of all – Yalkara may not have told anyone else about this white fire, though it is difficult to imagine that the other Charon, at least the most important of them, would not have known.
‘The other places to look would, of course, be the strongholds of the only three Charon to came to Santhenar.’
‘Kandor’s fortress of Katazza,’ said Yggur, ‘Yalkara’s abandoned tower at Havissard, near the ruined Aachim city of Tar Gaarn, and Carcharon, in the mountains above Gothryme, which Rulke made his own for a while.’
‘Quite,’ said Lilis. ‘If the information you seek does not lie there, and I suspect it does not, then either it does not exist, or it is hidden where no one living, save Yalkara herself, knows where it can be found.’
‘Even with a portal to take us there,’ said Yggur, ‘to search any one of those places would require more time than we have.’
‘I agree,’ said Lilis. ‘It might be more productive to ask those who hated the Charon, and have every reason to tell you their secrets.’
‘I’ve heard nothing about the Aachim since I was taken by the Numinator,’ said Yggur. ‘Are they –?’
‘As I mentioned, the God-Emperor’s realm does not extend over them, though there was a degree of … border adjusting, shall we say, after he seized power. There are Aachim at Stassor, their principal city, and of course the great island of Faranda is their domain. And Clan Elienor, where Karan’s Aachim ancestor came from –’
‘Karan Kin-Slayer?’ said Maelys, who had always been curious about her.
‘I knew Karan,’ Lilis said deliberately, and her eyes glinted. ‘I met her as a child; I really liked her, and Llian.’
Yggur had also grown angry when their names had been mentioned, Maelys recalled. Had Karan and Llian betrayed Lilis too? Even if she had, Maelys felt for her, for Karan had been pursued relentlessly by Maigraith, just as Maelys had been.
‘What was she like?’
‘She was small; a little taller than you, I’d say, but her hair was the most brilliant red – the colour of a smoky sunset. She was clever, and good at most things; she did not suffer fools gladly.’
‘And she was a sensitive,’ said Yggur. ‘She felt things far more deeply than normal people.’
‘As I was saying,’ Lilis added, ‘at the end of the war Clan Elienor went to Shazmak.’
‘Do you know if Malien is still alive?’ said Yggur. ‘Of all our allies from the olden days, she’s the one I most want to see.’
‘Did you know her back in the Time of the Mirror?’ said Maelys. She knew that the Aachim were a long-lived species, unlike old humans.
‘I did. There aren’t many of us left from that era now.’
‘I saw Malien some years ago,’ said
Lilis. ‘She dwelt in Shazmak at the time, though I believe she has since returned to Stassor. Malien was looking rather old – a fate that comes to us all, even librarians.’ Lilis smiled. ‘My time is almost up, and I can’t say I’ll be sorry to go. Two hundred years is long enough, even for a Librarian.’
‘What will you do when you retire?’ Maelys said curiously.
‘Perhaps I’ll go on the road and seek my fortune.’ At Maelys’s astonished look, Lilis laughed aloud. ‘I look back on my adventuring days, an orphan child in the company of the mighty, with a certain nostalgia. The Library never changes, and few people come to consult us in these troubled times. Sometimes the days can be a trifle dull.’
She studied each of them in turn. ‘I haven’t been much help, have I?’
‘You’ve told us everything you know,’ said Yggur.
‘But you’re disappointed I can’t tell you more.’
‘I confess it.’
‘What is your second question?’
‘Does the Library mention any way to attack a being?’
‘Anticipating that question, I’ve done some reading already,’ said Lilis. ‘I haven’t uncovered anything so far and, even if the answer is in our archives, it could take months to find. But …’
‘Yes?’ said Yggur.
‘It would depend very much on the nature of the being. I wouldn’t look to attack one with some mighty power or force, like the Profane Tears. I would ask myself what the true nature of the being is, and where, given that nature, its weakness lies. Once you know that, it may be a simple matter to attack it. I will consider the subject further after you’ve gone. And your third question?’
‘I don’t have another question,’ said Yggur.
‘You surprise me,’ said Lilis.
‘May I ask one?’ said Maelys.
‘On Yggur’s account?’
‘I, er, don’t have any money –’
‘On my account,’ said Yggur brusquely.
‘You may ask,’ said Lilis.
‘What will happen if someone finds the true fire and gives it to Stilkeen?’ said Maelys. ‘Will Stilkeen accept it and go away?’